“Me llamo Alina Duarte y soy una periodista xochimilca, feminista, socialista, antiimperialista, anticapitalista y antifascista. Claramente no nací así, me hice, en defensa propia y de las y los míos.

No recuerdo cuándo fue la primera vez que enuncié todos esos adjetivos juntos por primera vez, pero estoy orgullosa de hacerlo hoy en día y diariamente trabajar en ser lo más congruente posible con cada una de esas palabras que son mi motor.”

“La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, two of Latin America’s most infamous street gangs, originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s and were exported to Central America via the U.S. deportation machine. The gangs’ origins coincide with the start of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), whose primary actors were the Marxist-Leninist guerilla group known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the heavily U.S.-supported, repressive military government of El Salvador. Waves of Salvadorans were forcibly displaced from their communities throughout the course of the war, many fled to Los Angeles to escape violence, poverty, and instability.”

“Guatemala suffered a 36-year U.S.-supported Civil War (1960-1996), in which 200,000 people died, 83% of these victims were indigenous, and 1.5 million were displaced. The Guatemalan military, which collaborated closely with the U.S. military and government, was responsible for 93% percent of these deaths. The remnants of the war in Guatemala continue to be characterized by structural racism and violence, impunity, corruption, and poverty which has continued to force people to flee. During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Guatemalans were displaced to cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and Miami.”

For many Central Americans, Westlake became their first home after having to cross multiple international borders due to U.S.-fueled wars and genocide, military-controlled governments, natural disasters, and economic upheavals in their countries of origin. Families were separated and driven from their homes, including indigenous peoples in Guatemala who continue to be forcibly displaced from their lands to make way for large-scale farming, mining, and hydroelectric projects.

“Another thread, and the one that I feel most acutely: U.S. cultural imperialism has robbed us both of our cultural identities. The visceral awareness of lacking, the presence of absence (a phrase borrowed from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish) which transcends time and space, spans across peoples who have had their lands, communities, bodies, and spirits stolen, commodified, and repackaged back to them disfigured in the rhetoric of diversity, humanitarianism, and progress.”