Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s Mother/land
Written by Tonio Flores II
I.
you find a family of mythologies in collusion: in photographs,
immigration documents, plant fibers, used lottery scratch-offs,
in casts of fruits, vegetables, and branches on a dinner table.
Here
is an exodus of ‘nameless and faceless’ figures,
lifetimes, over ten million of them,
waves lapping on foreign shores1
they are an outward archive, commodities for the state,
oil seed for the machine. A promise of surplus and survival
keeps them coming
Geopoetics is a labor of longing
for a place in the sun.
A retrieval of memory
from ruptured terrain.
II.
an ayangile tree is ferried across the sea
Aboard her indentured body are flushes of yellow flowers,
potential seeds. Upon arrival, she lays claim to a patch of land. She
uproots herself, finds any nutrient to inhale, tolerates chance and
probability
Ravenous— she is now invasive. 2
She waits for the speculator, the logger, the settler
to walk like a fragment on scorched earth. As she does.
Pursuing fortune costs your time in life. Your ‘life-time’—
becomes the very material for calculating and extracting value.
The social and life-sustaining capacities once thought external to capitalist logic are now subsumed within its global scheme of extraction, disposal, and accumulation.3
You begin to believe that Manifest Destiny4
belongs to a brown body like yours, too.
III.
Back to the tree’s earth,
she remembers the soil she was sowed in.
In a backyard, among a host of daydreams,
her roots grow cross-border, held together by desires.
On a migrant mother
are barbed seeds,
plural, potent, tenacious–
vessels
to pierce America in the heart.
Upon her return,
her entire ecology
disentangles from disparity
[1] A major wave of migrant workers left the Philippines when the Marcos dictatorship used export labor as the base of an economic recovery (from 1974). To date, about one-tenth of Filipinos live and work outside the country.
[2] Acacia confusa is a leguminous tree native to the Philippines. It was introduced to Hawaii in 1915, with the intention to stabilize soil, but it quickly became an "invasive species" that upset the ecological balance on the island.
[3] Tadiar, N. X. M. (2022). Remaindered Life. Duke University Press.
[4] "Manifest destiny" was a 19th-century belief in the United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America. It was one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism.