Sioux Falls poet embraces dual identity
I am a privileged white woman in the middle of America, where I walk safely to my car at night, fit in most everywhere, and usually get the job. I also live with you in a progressive community, where we push boundaries and put up a fight at city council meetings and honk when we see a fellow Rainbow Buffalo pass us by on Minnesota Avenue. What could be wrong here? I fool myself when I see a little less oppression where I live and think we’ve met equality in my country. Yet I still couldn’t possibly walk comfortably in a minority’s shoes when he is ridiculed at the grocery store or attacked in a park. I wonder, could I rip the tape off my mouth and defend myself as much as they have to? Would I cry in private because it’s become too exhausting to teach the ceasing of hate?
Here we have Angelica Mercado-Ford, a small and ferocious Mexican American activist in Sioux Falls who does not cry. Her family has had to hide in their home only to open their doors and choke on injustice another day, but her throat is clear. Mercado-Ford is ten years younger than me and yet is teaching me that the greater group of people who suppress a lesser group of people are also the only ones who can save them.
So she comes to America for partnership in making sense of her dual identity, only to thwart the discrimination her family warned her about. But she still mustered one step farther than her ancestors, and she is running.
My supple tongue speaks for two, she says in her poem “Tongues” as she strives today to honor both her parents’ sacrifices and broach her own isolating experience. When Mercado-Ford moved to Sioux Falls eight years ago, it was through art and poetry that she urged her community to better understand the life of an immigrant: a “journey toward becoming,” she says. It was in her writing that she raised her fists.
“There was something in me that needed to come out,” she says, “and I didn’t know about it until it did come out.”
In America, migrant dreams are flightless birds.
In America, you, the migrant, cannot dream, lest you are dead.
This is what happens, you see?
When the world becomes devoid of empathy,
Filling in blanks with new names of the murdered,
Of the lost,
Of the forgotten.
To the ones in power: We demand action.
Words mean nothing
When Claudia cannot read, cannot see, cannot live.
When motherless children have dreams
Of light-up sneakers,
And survival.
Ejected from courtrooms,
For their profane silence
When their mouths have yet to hatch the word ‘mama.’
– an excerpt from Mercado-Ford’s poem, “Freedom is a Fleeting Thing”
Mercado-Ford wrote her first book of poetry in 2019, an effort that still finds itself in the hands of seekers nationwide. Before publishing, she was invited to host an art installation featuring her work at the Washington Pavilion, which was the first bilingual exhibit for the venue. Mercado-Ford was also the first Latino woman to host a solo show.
“I featured poems in Spanish and in English so my parents could experience an art exhibit in their language for the first time,” she says. “It was so successful that they extended the show for a whole month. The community showed up.”
Her book is titled “Todo Revoluciona”: In it, her subtlety reminds us that, despite how much we may resist, everything changes, ideas transform, and humans evolve. We are not silent – as some people need us to be in order to participate in their own convention. Mercado-Ford speaks over this. She uses her fear to fuel her fury as her family watches on in worry and in frustration. Before she fought the world around her, she also fought inside her own childhood to deter conformity, and her book reflects as much.
I have tasted autonomy,
and I know
I will never go hungry again.
– an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona”
It’s valiant that Mercado-Ford would not give up on her mission, even without the initial support of her family, but the demand to do so began early in her upbringing in small-town Fremont, Nebraska, where she and her family emigrated from Mexico. But even a resting place that could fulfill the “whole immigrant dream” was poisoned with its own anti-immigrant rhetoric. So they fought for their rights without hiding their homeland – her father in “cowboy boots, the kind that make him look hombre” – and Mercado-Ford brought that unabating retaliation to here in Sioux Falls, where she implores her community now to overcome the same “dissolution and disappointment” she faced growing up. She knew contempt at home and then everywhere else, and she wanted less of it.
“I’m proud that my family’s cultural traditions were very strong and alive, but I feel like I created Angelica here. I didn’t know who I was before this,” Mercado-Ford says. “I knew I needed to get out of there for my own survival. People were not accepting, I felt isolated, and my escape was education.
“I needed to take my power back.”
Her family comes to the art shows and commends her beautiful work and has grown as she grew, too, but breaking those family expectations was at first taxing, and she admits she felt defeated. It was so much pressure to put on one person, forcing conversations at the family dining room table.
“We talked about what it means to be a queer, Mexican woman in America,” Mercado-Ford says. “We also started conversations about my mom’s role as a woman in the household. She never thought about anything more than what role was assigned to her, but she’s not just a mother and a wife.
“My mother always told me, ‘People will treat you the way they perceive you,’ and we always kept up with that. But I said to my parents, ‘I’m doing this to better myself.’ ”
Her family wanted her to be more brown, and her America wanted her to be more white, but it’s ok to live in the in-between and not be like everyone else, she says. We are all “in the gray,” and that doesn’t make one person less than another.
“There have been tough times where I put in so much of me, and it feels like no one sees,” Mercado-Ford says. She writes in her book, In my chest, a storm is brewing, but you will only see the sun. “But I read this quote once, ‘I don’t want to die on a day I went unseen,’ and it always resonated with me because I just want to leave a footprint that I was here.”
Today, Mercado-Ford teaches at Washington High School as the head debate coach, where she reminds her students that “any little thing they build upon can mean hope and liberation.” This optimism floods into an entire community who’s listening to her, too.
“Growing up as a new American, I could not imagine a path toward ‘greatness’ … without a profession deemed serious or noble by my family and peer groups,” says Ngoc Thach, a Vietnamese American entrepreneur and marketing executive in Sioux Falls. “I never felt like I was enough, but (Angelica) acted as a beacon of truth and hope at a time when I couldn’t spare any for myself.
“She is a voice of peace and power.”
Mercado-Ford says “confidently” that she does not face adversity in Sioux Falls the way she once did. Here her advocacy is not ignored, it multiplies. She came here to “feel seen” but stays here to discipline us, enough to mature our meager marches into a sprint until our queer Latino poet in the Midwest is no longer fighting alone.
I am immune from her ache, but I am not unable. Together with the roar of Mercado-Ford and the voices she is giving us, we become the safe space.
One day a new dawn will come and I will meet my people face to face and we will both know home and we will not worry about crossing over to the other side. – an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona”
