La Madre Patria /Motherland
Courtesy © of En Pie de Lucha Performance

**Por *Una Sombra Brillante***

Nosotros,
Los alienígenos,
Los fantasmas de carne,
Somos aquellos que estamos sin estar.
De quienes muchos temen y de quienes pocos conocen.
Nosotros, aquellos que no podemos dejar huella porque sería rastreada y nos robarían lo poco que nos queda de libertad.
Somos la lucha de nuestros ancestros, y la pesadilla de nuestros agresores.
Somos sin ser, porque nuestra identidad ha sido borrada en piezas y nuestro corazón partido en dos.
Para muchos somos el reflejo de la ignorancia, sin saber que tal vez nuestra inteligencia supera la de ellos.
Somos luz, pero vivimos en la obscuridad.

We,
The aliens,
The ghosts of our flesh,
We are the ones who live without presence.
We are the ones whom many fear and whom
few wish to know.
We are the ones who cannot leave a trace because we might be hunted down, and they
would steal what little we have left of our freedom.
We are the struggle of our ancestors, the nightmare of our aggressors.
We are without being, because our identity has been erased into shadows and our heart
has been fractured in two.
For many we are the reflection of ignorance, without their knowing that perhaps our
intelligence surpasses their own.
We are the light, but we live in darkness.

Translated by Ana Maria Fores Tamayo and originally appearing here on her blog Adjunct Justice.*

Left: “A world in which many worlds converge”, La familia es para siempre. Courtesy © of *Una**Sombra Brillante. Right: “*Sister Shadows.” Courtesy @ of Unknown

**About the Author:**

Una Sombra brillante, like so many other undocumented students, cannot come out of the shadows as long as we have the laws we do in this country.

Thus, I present to you her shadowed biography…

“No tienes ninguna idea de lo que esto significa para mí. Cuando tienes tanto que decir y tienes que callar… lastima 😔 MlL gracias por hacer algo tan bello por mi y por todos aquellos que viven igual… En esto, sale mi voz, pero también salen las lágrimas de todas nosotras, nosotros…

You have no idea what this means to me. When we have so much to say yet we are forever silenced … it aches 😔 Thank you a thousand times for doing something so beautiful for me, and for all those who live in these same shadows… With this piece, my voice is illuminated, but moreover, so are the rest of our collective tears …”