Wetback

"Mommy, who is that man on the corner
there, with the sign?"
"That's just a Mexican, honey.
Don't look --
I mean, don't stare."

Brown and compact,
black slicked back
hair thick and dirty,
with a sign:
"Trabajador."

Tan and only half a man
if you ask most of us,
but he wouldn't understand anyway.
He only knows six words in English;
"wetback" is one of them, but "subhuman"
is out of his reach so far.

He crossed three borders
and one river at night,
slipped past banditos and dirty cops,
rode on top of a train
with cans of sardines in each pocket and
some pesos sewn into his waistband.

He got caught once,
by white men at the border;
not cops but
citizens protecting their country.
They pushed his head into manure
and told him to eat it,
because that was the only
American meal he'd ever taste.
He didn't understand;
knew "shit" but not "meal" and only
that he would be back in Honduras soon.

That was last time,
after the Mexicans robbed him
and used words he did understand,
like "mierda" and "mojado"
to send him back to Tegucigalpa,
because American politics turned up the heat
on Mexico's immigration policy
and they are not his brothers anymore.
He escaped the Mexicans and made it to Arizona,
where the white men caught him,
called him a Mexican --
the white man's word for brown men --
and fed him feces.

This time, though, he made it over the river
naked, clothes in a garbage bag on a rope,
floating behind him in the river that stood between him,
those white men,
and the only way to feed his children
back in his country of no jobs and
no food and
whole families that eat less than nothing for years
to pay for journeys like this.

This time, he slipped past the banditos
and the vigilantes,
and he finally feels like a man
even though he knows we don't see a man,

just a wetback.