We Are Mangroves

Notes on Grief, Ensemble, and Refusing to Disappear

We are being asked to hold too much right now. This week they shot a man on his way to work. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Twenty-six. A father, a three year old waiting for him to come home. ICE put four bullets through his windshield in Biddeford, Maine, and called it public safety.

He had papers. It does not matter that he had papers. That is the vulgarity, falsely sorting us into the deserving and the disposable by what document we can produce. They are killing us with papers and without, citizens and not. No form ever made a life worth more, or a killing worth less. Last week it was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. At least nine shot dead by immigration agents this year, and more dying quietly inside detention where no one is filming. After every one, the government hands us a story the witnesses and the video do not tell.

And it is not only the border.

Nolan Wells, eighteen, a college freshman, a wide receiver, went to an island for the Fourth of July with three white friends. They came back. He did not. They pulled his body from the water and the sheriff said he chose to stay. Black kids keep turning up dead beside white people who walk away clean. They keep turning up hanging in a country that knows exactly what that means. And every time, the paperwork says nothing happened. That is the design. Not the failure of the system, the function of it.

They need each death to look like nothing, and they need us to take it one at a time, alone, quiet. Quiet is how a killing becomes an accident. Quiet is how a name becomes a case number becomes air. A single body in the water. A single tree in the salt.

Let’s pause for a moment on the salt water: It kills almost everything that tries to root in it. Almost.

The mangrove grows exactly where nothing is supposed to grow. It breathes through its own roots in water built to drown it. And it does not do this alone. Mangroves braid their roots into each other under the surface until you cannot tell where one tree stops and the next begins, and that braid, that refusal to stand as a single trunk, is the only reason any of them hold. Together they become the thing that breaks the storm before it reaches the land. You cannot pull one out. That is the whole design. No one goes under alone.

That braid, in our world, is what Ensemble is and can be. It is the oldest technology we have, carried for generations by the people this country keeps trying to disappear. Ensemble holds how to decide together, how to hold conflict without breaking, how to share what little there is so that nobody drowns by themselves. The show, the disruption, the artistic outcome aren’t the only fabric of Ensemble practice. For me the center is always about the surviving and making meaning together. The Network of Ensemble Theaters exists to keep that braid alive and to grow it, root into root, company into company, city into city, until the whole shoreline holds. That is what a table is. It is where the roots find each other.

A few weeks ago I sat at a long one in Thámien, so called San Jose, with makers who had passed each other for years and never had the time to really sit down together and explore. Baktun 12. Artist Ink. Teatro Alebrijes. Teatro Visión. We broke bread together. We told the truth about what is killing us and what is keeping us. We learned each other's faces on purpose. Maybe in the darkest sense I’m hoping there is always someone left who knows the sound of your name and your visions and dreams. In a season built to disappear us one by one, sitting down together and refusing to let each other vanish is the most defiant thing I know how to do. What’s yours?

So. Here is the call this week, and none of it is a solo work. Let’s not be too busy to grieve, and grieve in a room with others. Let’s mourn out loud. Find the muscle memory to fight the way a forest fights, all of us or none of us. Remember, because remembering is the one weapon they have never learned how to take from us. Grief is best held as a chorus. So is rage. So is joy.

And this is where the art comes in, and I will not soften it even a little. Art is not the pretty thing we do just to move a narrative. It is how we open portals. It is how we learn ourselves. It is how we build our archive and how we stretch our understanding and capacities for care. Art making is a sacred pathway. It is how a people carry their dead without dropping them. It is how we hold beauty in one hand on the same day the other hand holds a casket, and refuse to call that a contradiction. The making is not separate from the surviving. The making is the surviving, lit from the inside. We are lightbearers.

Hear me, please. You. Are. A Lightbearer. That is not a soft word. It means we carry the fire through the dark stretch so the ones coming up behind us can see the path and feel it calling them.

In October, I hope we gather as a whole forest in the Bay, out loud, all of us at once. But that is not why I am writing you today, but it is an image I am holding while walking through this moment. I am writing because the water is rising, and I need you to remember what we are.

We are mangroves.

We hold the shore by holding each other.

We carry the light through the salt. And we are not going quietly.

In fact, we are going nowhere but toward the just future we've been dreaming together.

In the practice of us,
Alex