When I got to Zuccotti Park, I noticed again the presence of the large, sturdy army tents that made their first appearance yesterday. I think I saw at least three of them today. I also noticed a long rack of jackets hanging under a sheltering tarp–the free clothing store, I imagined. And a burgeoning compost exhibit, with a few raggedy plants in pots keeping the resident engineered trees and generic bedding flowers company. Facing Broadway, a good-looking young man in a purple shirt–dark-skinned, maybe Latino–was being filmed making a speech with a small audience around him. He was a really good speaker. He laid it all out in personal terms, using plenty of repetition and eloquent phrasing of the generally unarticulated obvious. “A corporation is not your friend. A corporation will not love you. A corporation will not provide for you. A corporation will not give us the things that we need. America’s potential for expansive growth is at an end and the corporations know this. They’ve already sold you a house, a sedan, an SUV, a laptop, an iPhone, a microwave oven. There’s nothing more they can sell you so they’re looking to the developing nations, to China, India, where that economic growth potential still exists. I look all over this city and I see people gritting their teeth. I see people’s faces all tense with effort and mistrust. I come down here and I see people smiling. I see people relaxed. You come down here and you feel good, because this is a place where you feel your humanity. You feel your freedom. You feel like nobody can tell you what to do or who to be.” He could have been a preacher–maybe he was a preacher. At one point he directly addressed the powers that be: “We’re calling you down from your high place of spiritual wickedness.” As he was winding up, somebody asked him how long he was going to be there and he said, “I missed my plane to Florida last week and some people think I should have been on it but I say no, I belong right here.”

After he left, I took advantage of the empty spot on the pavement and began reading poems from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera  (Second Edition, Aunt Lute, 1999).  I started with “A Sea of Cabbages,” about field work. “Speak from your diaphragm!” barked a bossy older black woman who was trying to listen over the din of everything else that was going on around us–I already knew she was bossy because, liking my sign, she had instructed me to stand right next to the eloquent speaker so that she could get a picture of the two of us. “That’s better,” she said, as I succeeded in projecting a little more forcefully, at least for a few lines. As I went on, I thought what a shame it was that more people weren’t listening to the stories Gloria tells, stories that go to the core of what OWS is all about. To “El sonavabitche,” in which the speaker finds the courage to demand the wages owed to a group of undocumented Mexican field workers by a midwestern farmer who has been in the habit of working them unmercifully, then cheating them out of their pay. To “sus plumas el viento,” about a woman field worker in south Texas who wants to fly away, wants to “string words and images together,” who “sees the obsidian wind/cut tassels of blood/from the hummingbird’s throat” (140). To “Corner of 50th St. and Fifth Av.” with its horrifying image of casual, sexualized police violence against a “PR about 30,/maricón, a voice in the crowd shouts” (167). I finished with her long, strange poem about St. Teresa of Avila, “Holy Relics.” It’s a poem that the magazine I once co-edited, Conditions, published many years ago–maybe in ’79  or ’80. It tells of the fate of St. Teresa’s body after her death–how it was venerated but also torn to pieces by greedy and opportunistic religious folk. When I first read it, I found its almost deadpan literalism both odd and unnerving. Now I see how steadfast Gloria was–I almost want to say “brave,” but that is an adjective I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with applying to creative work–in her insistence on the body at a literal level that makes abjection a real possibility, yet is the only possible route to wholeness.

This emphasis in Gloria’s work speaks directly to the form of Occupy Wall Street; as JoAnn Wypijewski tells us in her valuable piece in the November 14 issue of The Nation (“The Body Acoustic”), “Not since ACT UP has the body been so central to a U.S. resistance movement….as a material fact, living in the streets, even collectively, is not utopian; it is a light set upon a lampstand in dystopia.”

Preparing to leave Zuccotti Park a little before 5 p.m., I noticed a stir of excitement. As so often in the past, a crowd was headed our way. I stayed to welcome in the black- and Latino-led march that had started in Washington Heights in the morning, taking most of the day to cover the 11-mile route down to Zuccotti Park in a bid to assert the central place of people of color within “the 99%.”