Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We the Barbarians

Here are the headlines about immigration for the benefit of the border patrol and the nativists to consider: We want to be here less than you want us here, even though here was ours before it was yours. We don’t want to be like you. We want to get back before we resemble you too much to go home. You have no idea of the “the weariness we feel at the monuments of another history.” But we’re much tougher than you are.

You make drugs illegal, the price goes up and the trade gets really attractive to bad guys, here and there. You make people illegal, the same thing happens. Everybody pays except the thugs. They make more money the more illegal you make the trade. It’s called capitalism. You invented it, but we’re better at it than you are.

You don’t speak our language. But we understand yours. So we can keep secrets; but you can’t. Not that we don’t already know everything we need to know about you: “Everything’s so stiff here, it’s all numbered and people look you in the eye but they don’t say anything when they do.” It’s fortunate for you that we are more honest than you are.

We are sometimes afraid when we are hungry or tired or caught in a difficult situation. But you are afraid all the time. You “live in fear of the lights going out, as if every day wasn’t already made of lightning and blackouts. You need us. You want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to work you need to change color and number. But it’s already happening.” We are an healthier colour than you.

We know what you think of us:

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”

Perhaps. But we also know things about life you don’t. We are comfortable even in Hell. You are uncomfortable even in Paradise. We have the sort of courage you know nothing about. We are your future.

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