Remember
Courage and resilience from our family, friends, or community’s history can be a source of strength.
The words and emotions have been overwhelming. The hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the racism that have always existed have found their newest personification in the president, his sycophants, and masked secret police.
It shouldn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t make this moment feel any less painful. How can we live through any more days or years like this? It has been hard to write or think about anything else, to give form to the rage and heartbreak.
He aims to drown out our words with the constant clanging of war, parades, tariffs, threats, and fear. It seems to be part of the plan — smother our words with a torrent of noise and lies. He, a false messiah, cheered on by blind, cowardly prophets, has made crooked the paths of many lives.
How do we respond? I don’t have the answer, but I do find that memory can be a place of resilience.
Remember.
The words of Viktor Frankl’s seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, keep coming back to me, though I only read it once. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, emphasized time and time again how valuable memories can be, not in a nostalgic sense of pining for better days. No, memories remind us where we’ve been and how the strength and growth from difficult moments cannot be taken away. The defeats cannot be removed either. We bear those scars, but they should not define us or the future.
Frankl carried within his heart the memory of his wife and his profound, life-saving, life-giving love for her. It was often the memory of her that kept him going through the punishment and starvation of concentration camps, that kept him writing, often on scraps of paper in those gray barracks. And because of that love, he found hope with other prisoners. They shared food, tended to the sick, organized plays, and remembered scripture—shields against the destruction of their souls.
They cannot take away our memories, our words, stories, or history. We must come together. Tener un reencuentro—a reencounter with who we are and where we come from, in an act of affirmation and resistencia. On March 1, 2025, the president issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States—a policy with the obvious intention of diminishing the value of other languages. It is more than a symbolic gesture. It’s aimed at doing with languages what he wants to do with many communities—erase them.
And that’s why we must write down our stories. Gather and speak about who we are and who we were—in Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, Náhuatl, Maya, Lakota, and other languages. And in English, too. Escribir. Recordar. Resistir. Write, remember, and remind others of the strength that comes from community and the sharing of our stories. Silence won’t save us.
I don’t know where this road will end or if we’ll see each other at the end of it, but I know where we’ve been. And in that, I find hope.