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Poetry Friday: Crossing The Line, 'La Bestia'

Zuma Press/Alamy

‘La Bestia’, or ‘The Beast’, is the colloquial name for the freight trains that run through Mexico from Central America. Thousands of children ride atop them every year, hoping to make it to the U.S. border for asylum. The risks are great: they fall, lose limbs, face abuse by organized crime groups, and possible detention at the border. ‘La Bestia’ is a character in this week’s Poetry Friday segment, an original piece by Robert Neustadt, professor of Spanish and director of Latin American Studies at Northern Arizona University. His poem, ‘Crossing the Line’, focuses on the children who attempt the dangerous journey alone.  

RN: I started at NAU teaching a class where I take students to the border to learn and see with their own eyes what’s happening. We attend hearings in the Tucson federal courthouse, we meet with Border Patrol agents, we tour ICE detention centers, and we also speak with recently deported people, we meet with humanitarians, we hike in the desert and visit places where people have perished. So, it’s a pretty heavy emotional charge. And, since I started teaching that, I have become consumed and obsessed with the issue I think it’s fair to say.

You know, when people talk about the border and they talk about immigration, they always say that it’s about politics. And, of course, it is politics. Everything is political. That said, what gets left out of our political debate about immigration is the human dimension. People are suffering and dying. I feel that we get distracted by the political issues to the point that we fail to notice what we have is a humanitarian crisis.

Credit Reuters
A view from atop 'La Bestia'

This is not about partisan politics. I actually wrote this poem, ‘Crossing the Line’, during the Obama administration, during what they called a ‘surge of unaccompanied migrants’ crossing the border. Central American children were fleeing horrific violence and poverty, and to reach the border they were – and they continue to – ride through Mexico on top of a dangerous freight train called “The Beast”, “La Bestia.” And upon entering the United States, they were kept in cages at Border Patrol holding facilities. The so-called ‘zero tolerance policy’ of our current administration makes this poem more relevant now than ever before.

Crossing the Line, by Robert Neustadt

Little children cross the line.

Thousands,

legions of children,

seeking the love of a mother,

a father, a place to be.

Credit KNAU
NAU professor Robert Neustadt playing guitar at the U.S.-Mexico border

A place where you can eat.

A  place where you can stare at your feet,

or clouds that look like bunnies,

and not have to worry that

they’ll cut your throat,

or rape your sister,

or rape you and

cut your sister.

Thoughts. Thoughts of nine year olds?

Such are the thoughts of little children

riding  the train, with hungry bellies,

cutting lines across thousands of miles,

riding rails on top of box cars.

Miles and miles and, yes, occasionally smiles.

Dreams of mami, feel the wind, it feels like we’re flying.

Rails of worry, wheels of Beast.

Don’t sleep, they’ll throw  you off.

Don’t slip,

la bestia will suck you in and slice off  your legs.

Swim the river, cross the desert,

Find the Migra, find Mamá.

We’re here, we made it,

the United States!

Have we arrived?

New York, is near?

Cages. Children in little cages.

It’s like the zoo with children-as-animals--

sad young polar bears, locked inside refrigerated cages in a desert zoo.

No balloons on strings,

no squeals of laughter, no organ grinder music.

Just kids, never-smiling, inside cages.

This is no American Dream,

rather another segment of an endless nightmare.

Green-clad agents watch,

with guns on their belts, and tasers and clubs,

they guard the little brown children,

who dared

to cross

the crooked

lines

that divide

us

from

them.

Those

who

have

and those

who don’t

have the right

to eat,

to stare at their feet,

to find happy dreams in clouds,

to be.

Thousands of children crossed a line of water and sand.

Do we really want to hold that line?

Incarcerate children like dogs in the Pound?

Do we  really want to cross that line

from human to inhumane,

shifting in shape from human to soulless steel-gutted beasts?

Poetry Friday is produced by KNAU's Gillian Ferris. If you have an idea for a segment, drop her an email at Gillian.Ferris@nau.edu. 

Gillian Ferris was the News Director and Managing Editor for KNAU.