Viva Palestina Libre.

my week in Mexico City

Hi, it's been a few weeks!

I returned recently from Mexico City. My husband and I set off in January to celebrate our birthdays (in December and February) and to travel together for the first time in forever, which is now possible because we no longer have a needy senior dog keeping one of us close to home at all times. It is bittersweet that the loss of our dear Prudence set us free in a way we didn’t know we were missing.

Anyhow, I’d picked Mexico City for the food, the art, and the culture. It delivered on all accounts. But if you’ve been around my newsletter any time at all, you know this won’t be a travelogue or trip report. As a writer and artist, as someone who choses travel as a means to learn more about the world and my own interior landscape, I have to point to what wandering teaches me.

Wandering is teaching me about collective liberation. And I couldn’t get Gaza off my mind.

It wasn’t just that vacation during genocide at times felt irresponsible and privileged, and the reality that capitalism has taught me to believe there’s never enough to be a whole person, just a useful one.

It wasn’t just that as I checked my data usage on my eSIM, I kept an eye on the one I donated to someone in Gaza just to make sure they were still alive.

It wasn’t just seeing the La Piedra del Sol, the ancient Aztec Stone of the Sun, which reminded me there are cultures that survive and there are cultures that live in museums.

It wasn’t just that I saw Frida Kahlo’s last painting which reads VIVA LA VIDA (LONG LIVE LIFE) and the watermelon she painted only reminds me of resistance now, that forbidden fruit in red, green, and black.

It wasn’t just that I booked a dinner at Masala y Maíz, and on the cover of the menu were the words ¡Viva Palestina Libre! and End The Apartheid! End The Genocide! Ceasefire Now!

It wasn’t just the music in the Ragnar Kjartansson exhibit at the Museo Tamayo that was so melancholic it could make an infant cry, but the I STAND WITH PALESTINE and FREE PALESTINE stickers pasted around the exhibit, a part of the installation about origin stories.

It wasn’t just watching genocide persist on the internet, far, far away every night as I tried to fall asleep. And it wasn’t just because the day Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza left Gaza, I wept. Part of my solidarity has been getting to know him and elevating his voice, and I always wake to see if the storytellers are still with us or evacuating with a soul and body. Motaz, Bisan, Plestia, Hind. I checked on them before bed to the sound of Mexican vendors rolling down the road, calling on their speakers for us to buy their tamales or bring out our old household wares. “Se compran colchones, tambores refrigeradores, estufas, lavadoras…” in a sing-song melody that’s still stuck in my head. Each night, a more terrible update. The ICJ ruling. Then UNRWA defunded. Another junk show after the next. The West still buying Israel’s shit. I can’t imagine it getting worse and then it does.

It wasn’t just the woman behind me in line at the panaderia who complimented my keffiyeh. It’s the least I can do to be visibly supportive, wearing these patterns and colors in reverence and solidarity, but she said it was brave. She would know – she’s from Lebanon where the occupation of Palestine is always spilling over.

It wasn’t just the hours of conversation on the living room floor with people from around the world: Spain, Colombia, and elsewhere in Mexico. And there’s me – a Texas girl who learned about San Jacinto and Tenochtitlan before I knew there was a Palestine. But I see the strings that connect them now.

It wasn’t just because on the full moon in the temazcal (an ancient indigenous herbal sweat lodge ritual), the guide placed hot stones he called abuleas in the earth and blessed them one by one, speaking to them as if sentient. For the war, he said. For the hate, he said. For the grieving mothers, he said. Palestine, Palestine, Palestine. I whispered again and again. Even when I am in the temazcal, I am with Gaza.

I was welcomed in as an outsider. Show me your art, your food, your culture. I want to know how you struggle. How you resist. How you heal. The same message can be found in the beating hearts and broken soils from Mexico to the Middle East. See the faces of freedom fighters in Gaza in the old portraits of Zapatistas. See Palestinian poets in Cafe Habana, where thinkers and writers gathered in a coffee shop to start a revolution. They’re connected.

Your struggle is our struggle.
Your indigeneity is our indigeneity.
Your liberation is our liberation.

So while I went to Mexico City to see Frida’s art and eat tacos, I found much more. It made for me another connection from this colonized land to that one. From Turtle Island – which you now may know as North America, as Mexico – to Palestine, which you now may know as Israel. I was reminded that while colonization continues to happen, it’s not inevitable. And it’s certainly not our collective future.

There are spiritual, artistic, cultural, and political resources that indigenous people have always drawn from each other. There are abuelas and sittis who pass down decolonial practices that emancipate the world. It’s their wisdom that gives me hope. I carry that hope as I try to enjoy exploring and wandering because it is how I endure and we endure. I’m not an expert, I’m just paying attention. I will stand in line for a concha and my flat white, and I will continue to witness, and I will continue to speak hope. Palestine, until you are free.

There have been millions of Palestinians displaced and hundreds of thousands of people killed by Israel in the past 75 years of terror and oppression. There have been at least 28,000 Palestinian men, women, and children killed by Israel in the last 128 days. And right now, Israel is invading and bombing Rafah, the final “safe zone” where Gazans were told to flee to. Nearly 1.5 million people displaced from northern and central Gaza have taken refuge in Rafah and are currently sheltering in tents, schools, bombed houses, mosques, in the streets, and the sole medical clinic in the city, which isn't even a hospital. Rafah is the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip – only the Sinai in Egypt is beyond that. It is now the most densely populated area in the world, and it is being brutalized and massacred by the Israeli military.

Where else should they go? What else should they have to endure?

As the world moves on from Gaza because we think we are tired and we think we are helpless, we have to remember it is going to take all of us to demand a permanent ceasefire to end the U.S.-backed genocide, to restore humanitarian aid, to dismantle apartheid and the military occupation of Palestine, and return home the recent and longtime Palestinian refugees that have been forcibly displaced for generations so they can reclaim the land and justice they are rightfully owed.

This is the work required of those of us who do not, have not, will not know being colonized and cannot relate to Palestine through shared experience. We witness. We learn. We stand alongside. We protest. We write. We demand justice. We do not give up or turn away.

For you and for me, this is requiring an endurance for which we are not trained. We prefer our entertainments. What is peacemaking, if not our life’s most worthy on-the-job training? What is our life for, if not for doing love?

Ways to take action.

• Join the Let’s Talk Palestine broadcast channel on Instagram for the latest news from Gaza and greater Palestine, and updates on global acts of resistance.

• Email Congress to demand a permanent ceasefire. This is a quick and easy action you can take every day to contribute to the voices calling for a permanent, peaceful resolution.

Until then,