American Campesino

15 Poemas Para Una Pandemia

by Ruben Rangel

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chicano poet and radical community & working class organizer, Rubén Rangel, delivers compact and crystalline poems written in the midst of the global pandemic as everyone was being forced to retreat and shelter-in-place. Well, almost everyone. The title poem, “American Campesino,” in four lines exposes an unsustainable system that lauds farmworkers as indispensable while shamelessly gambling with their health and lives.

Rangel offers ambidextrous poems: An open hand of solidarity for the campesinos and other workers and a fist of multi-colored power raised against capitalism and its machinations of divide, exploit and cancel.

American Campesino is an curandera canto with an orchestra of Chicano and working class words to our community. Rangel says out loud as a collective invitation from the farmworkers:

if we could wish,

we would gather up

all the bad luck

of this universe–

leaving only buena suerte

y gratitud

for you

You are invited to read, organize and make this wish come true with this new and powerful collection of poems with migrant roots and dreams of revolution.