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only be convinced by words in print. The
literatura
.”
    â€œLiterature? Books?”
    â€œWhat you have in your hands right there.”
    â€œAh, yes,” I say, looking down at the seven magical words in Spanish, “
Sí
. I see.”
    â€œI don’t think you do,” she says, and then she’s off.
    Though I feel a bit used, I’m happy to have something real to do this morning, which, I see on the leaflet, is the fifth of May.
El Cinco de Mayo
, a Mexican holiday celebrated here on the streets of San José, California, USA. A day that annually ends with broken store windows and burnt vehicles and a few beaten American citizens and millions of empty Corona bottles and segments on the local news about the beauty of diversity and a historical clip about the legacy of Cesar Chavez and how the city’s first Hispanic mayor, Ron Gonzales, promises to end discrimination at once and us whatever we are still breathing in yoga deep this belief that all is right in our good land where the planet’s inhabitants come at the end of the dream to camp between two identical strip malls made of staples, paste, cardboard, and lots of air.

4
Spring Buds
    S PRING BUDS of the cherry tree ruffle like pink tissue paper in the soft breeze. Clouds even here in this oxygen-deprived valley are white as bone, pillowy, environmental eye candy. On days like this you can understand why a nation would push west to the Pacific coast. The Cesar Chavez chant—“¡Sí,
se puede! Sí, se puede!
“—doesn’t seem to reach the undisturbed heavens, caught in a wind tunnel somewhere above our heads. All around us are signs of our own ephemeral heartbeat.
    â€œÂ¡Sí,
se puede! Sí, se puede!
”
    Hundreds of cops are funneling us into checkpoints like cattle into the chute, waving us through the peril of barricaded intersections, beneath flashing red lights and suspended banners that say VOLUNTARIOS Y TRABAJADORES DE LA COMMUNIDAD , these uniformed men and women of the thick and faint mustaches, plastic toothpicks, and American-flag pins, hiding behind mirrored glasses and badges, then the bemused business owners at the doors of their establishments, unconcerned by a movement that won’t amount to more than a dent in the local GP, tapping their thighs with rolled newspapers,munching on toasted onion bagels, draining bottles of alleged spring water, knowing their windows won’t likely be shattered in this daytime deal of promised sobriety from Hispanic sources who know better than to give any chum to the cable media sharks, a helicopter with FOX News on its belly hovering overhead like some Grecian god chopping up the smoggy pollinated air of this place, a local news van docked at the corner of San Pedro Square and Starbucks, cameras springing out the rooftop, the sliding door, the backside, a mechanically mutated cockroach expanding its wings—and me, walking with a hand under my chin, unable even if I tried with everything in me to be a bonafide testament to the event, absolutely physically unable to join the chant.
    â€œ
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”
    Athena is walking toward my side of the street. She’s cutting across dozens of paisas and Chicanos, striding out, it seems, at a faster pace. I like looking at her in the gentle gleam of silence between us. I’d like to box her up and open her at my leisure, like a poem. Under-arm hair aside, she is a beautiful woman, nearly my height, which in a crowdful of Toltec descendants is as statuesque as Gulliver. Trying or not, we both stand out. She likes it, I don’t.
    I shrink down, walk on.
    â€œ
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”
    I try to get ahead of her so she won’t open her mouth in my presence and ruin the peaceful new image I have of her. I look up at the turquoise jerseys of two San Jose Sharks of the week, Gok and Michalek, the smell of steaks from AP Stumps wafting across my