Culpable

El Paso. Mississippi. Sicily. Nauru. Toronto. Tucson.

When they tell us to go back to where we came from, to speak their language, to stop taking their jobs, to integrate, to assimilate, to acquiesce, they fail to understand (or perhaps understand all too well) that these discourses have implications, that their rhetoric reinforces racism, that their colonialism is showing. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in creating the situations that drive migration in the first place. As Somali poet Warsan Shire once wrote, “no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark... / you only leave home / when home won’t let you stay.”

We are choosing to release this collaboration project with the acknowledgment that stories are powerful, that they are meant to be shared, that they are meant to cross borders. This particular story was sparked by the atrocity that is the U.S. government’s Operation Streamline, but it is meant for the crossers, the refugees, the survivors, the undocumented, the originals, the water protectors, and those working towards justice on borders both physical and in our minds.

100% of download proceeds will go towards the humanitarian work of No Más Muertes/No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization based in southern Arizona that provides emergency aid and advocacy for undocumented migrants.