Nestora Salgado1

By Martín Tonalmeyotl
Translated By Whitney DeVos
She was born in the mountains,
assigned a jaguar as her guardian.
She planted, by hand, a valley of flowers for the butterflies
and with their wings clothed herself.

Before taking her first step
she drank from the roots of the linaloe,
that tree whose gentle aroma filled her words
with a rare sweetness before they became wild and free.

She, like many women from here,
may have been born dozens of times.
How many doesn’t matter; it was time enough to grow
into a gaze of a hundred eyes.
It was time enough to spread her wings and return to her trees
almost fallen over,
where her navel took root
in their slender crevices.
She came back and saw her town changed.
Still inhabited but overrun
by dogs and coyotes, hungry,
whose fangs and threats ruled over the people.

She, with her jaguar nahual,
called upon the people to strip those canines bare
to see what was hiding under their long, filthy tails.
The people listened and followed her.
But one day, with the help of white-collar rats,
these animals stole this leader and took her far away
where her people could not defend her, because in such places
to be a good leader is to become a problem.
So she was taken from them and smeared with lies.
They treated her like a dog for defending her people.
They tried to bury her name with political filth—
Mrs. Wallace, Riveros and the others.2
They left her behind bars, citing
an obsolete constitution whose sole beneficiaries are
the sewer rats under San Lázaro.3
In spite of it all, her wings remained intact,
their natural colors not yet lost.
Her words still roar like leaves in the wind,
they move like deer in the shadow of the mountains,
they move like echoes across the rivers of the streets.
Some of them have become
birds, creators of their own songs.
Others are etched into the leather of magic satchels
where ancestral secrets are kept:
like how to be a true bird
and fly, fly and fly toward the infinite.
 
Translated  from the Spanish

Notes:

1 Nestora Salgado García is a human rights activist who organized autonomous community-led safety groups to combat increases in violence, crime, political corruption, and violations of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Olinalá, Guerrero. In 2013, she was arrested on false charges of kidnapping and remained illegally detained for over two years. This poem was composed prior to her release in 2016; two years later, she was elected a senator of Guerrero (2018–).

2 Isabel Miranda de Wallace and others, including other Mexican activists, slandered Salgado as a kidnapper.

3 The Legislative Palace of San Lázaro (located in Mexico City) is the main seat of the legislative branch of the Mexican government

Read the Spanish-language version, “Nestora Salgado,” and the Atzacoaloya Nahuatl-language version, “Nestora Salgado,” both by Martín Tonalmeyotl.

Source: Poetry (September 2022)