 His style has been described as a brave and vulnerable voice that shines light on issues affecting queer immigrant youth in the many disenfranchised community in the U.S. and throughout the world. Please welcome Yossi Marez. Buenas noches. It's nice to be here. So I'm a poet, I'm mainly spoken word so I do a lot of storytelling and I tell a lot of stories about immigrants because I'm a little immigrant and I like to you know tell those narratives and since right now you know immigration is a very hot topic and it so happens that I'm queer too and like that shit's popping and I'm undocumented so people really like that shit like oh my god that's cool and you're right I want to hear it. So I write a lot of stories about that. So yeah this next this first piece is titled Loving in Times of War. I was born in with the heart of a woman. I know that's some bullshit to say but sometimes I feel like this is the truth of my nature. Yo crecí en una casa de puras mujeres. Mi abuelito was the only male figure around but he always kept to himself only speaking when someone was really in trouble. He drank a lot. Maybe that's why for the most part everyone always left him alone. Mi abuela's house has always been a place of refuge. Whenever my tia's got into it with their husbands they would come to mi abuela's house and spend the night. Mi abuela would always open the door and always advise them to work it out because for her a single immigrant woman with kids in this country needed the protection of a man and that's why she always advised them to go back no matter how bad the situation was. She knew about struggle, about being beaten, about being cheated on but her this was survival. To her we were far away from home and the bills were constant enough to keep one slave to labor. Some of my tia's would stay with weeks at a time even though they live literally to be closed because most Mexican families live within radius of each other. It was mostly not work and relied on their husbands for money. They would spend the day around the house. They kept busy. They would clean, cook and do laundry. I never saw any of them simply sitting and watching TV. In fact the TV was never on. They always had the radio on blasts listening to the radio station and calling in to make dedications. This is where my primas learned the bad habit of sending shout outs to their homies. I always remember the louder music and the smell of pincel. They always screamed gordo para te vas a llegar tarde a la escuela. It was seven in the morning and they would be hard scrubbing the linoleum floor. I got ready, went to school, came back and their asses would still be cleaning. The radio would still be playing mopey ass songs that made me drowsy or they remind me of that one summer I was forced to work construction with my stepdad so I could learn to be an alleged man. How I fucking hated waking up at five in the morning all cold and the radio playing Ramona y a las tristes recuerdos too fucking early for that shit. They were clean throughly as they were cleaning their souls. The cleaning gave them peace. They kept them thinking about their failed marriages, about how complete they felt. They scrubbed the windows, the toilet, the bathtub. To them everything felt dirty and that church watched them as they were setting these tears from their own bodies. I think I'd learn how to love from them. Listening to maricela, los buques, los temerarios en bronco. All this music that to me was really Mexican. Songs about longing, about despair, about loves that can never be. Metias would sing these songs con sentimiento, like if there were to be living these same narratives and I always wonder why they felt so alone. Why they always chose to love men that didn't love them back. Why they chose birth children for men that always ran away. I never understood how my theos and all their beauty could fall in love for men that can never step up to the plate. I'm a queer brown boy trying to understand why the women in my family have loved so blindly. Why even now as an alleged male I still follow these same patterns of loving. Only this time I love in a different tune. I spend my days listening to ombre tracks that would have anyone guessing I'm a single black female in the inside. There's something about the way Mary J sings, about the way Batu's next lifetime hits close to home, even how tragic Fantasia is. The cadence in their voices that makes my heart flutter, that reminds me, makes me wish for a certain someone that would make me feel whole, only that I'm more critical now or jaded if we must state the obvious. It seems to me that as we grow up our hearts slowly become chipped to the point that we now love with walls around them. We love in fragments because we are afraid to give everything away, everything we have left, for we have left broken pieces of innocence where every other man that broke their promises starting with our own fathers. My Diaz taught me how to love in silence, how to show your affection for the man you love not in words but in actions, not through servitude but shit that is intentional, like cooking, like folding his clothes, like rubbing his back, shit that is domestic but to them was the only way to strike their affection toward their partner. Now I'm not the type of person that will cook for you. Oh for your clothes. But I've noticed that the way I love is without words, even as a poet. The things I do for people I love are intentional shit like sharing my knowledge, lessons life taught me, books I read, things to build strong spirit. Time and time again I have offered my medicine to men who have not necessarily learned how to appreciate it but for me it felt healing to give. I look at my Diaz and the way they dance, the way they laugh, the way they kiss my deals, the way they do things around the house and I wonder if on one day I could be them. If I could love a man the way they do without any critical analysis, without expectation, simply loving the state of nothingness and the state of struggle. I wonder when I will stop loving men there and not men, when my loving will not be a tool of survival but a conscious choice of my making. My Diaz have taught me so much, mainly how to walk away and come back to the middle for understanding. It is to them that I owe my voice and for them that I seek a love that's pure innocent. We have love through genocide, wars through migration and even death. It is this love that has given us the hope to keep on living. So I write a lot of poems about my family. I grew up in East Side San Jose and if you've ever been to East Side San Jose, there's a lot of Mexicans. So I grew up with a lot of Mexicans and this was pretty tight. Mexicans are nice. And I grew up with my grandma and if you grew up with your grandparents you kind of know that they tell you the same story and over and over and over again. So my grandparents, I feel like they're really powerful storytellers because after you repeat the same story you got to master it. And so my abuelita is definitely a huge influence in my work and it so happens that I'm a little queer too. So I grew up in the hood being queer. So I have all these stories of people calling me a fag and all that stuff, but now they like me so it's cute. So this next poem is titled Acts of Resistance and I wrote it because as activists and people in the Bay, we're all progressive in ship. And so we're always committing acts of resistance against the white supremacist system that keeps us oppressed as people of color and stuff like that. So I felt like, what is the biggest act of resistance we can commit as queer people of color who have been conditioned to believe that we are not human, especially as undocumented people because they tell us that we don't belong here, right? And I felt like the biggest act of resistance that we can commit as somebody that's queer, somebody that's dispossessed or disenfranchised is love yourself and make love to one another. Make love to one another, right? So this poem is titled Acts of Resistance. This is not fucking. Not to be confused with love making this is resistance. Your hand pressed upon my chest, the way your lids feel on mine, this can never be anything but that. Some say we were not born to be interconnected like this and to think people have died for us to feel so complete, you on top of me saying, this feels right and it does. Never for a moment that I would think I would find myself in this predicament, whispering your name as if I was in deep prayer. So in the blessings I envision, I see your hands caressing the parts of my body I have grown to be ashamed of. You make me feel me in its totality because every time we're interconnected like this I feel stronger like somehow through this fucking love making color whatever I am home. So I opened the doors on my body to you. No longer afraid over the ghost that haunt me, the ones that came inside and left me empty, took the innocence I saw for acceptance, you bring warmth. After the heated bodies I'm surprised we're still here holding my hand telling me I should not feel dirty because rituals like this do not involve bloodshed. This is resistance because brown boys are not supposed to love like this. We're not supposed to fuck like this. We're supposed to take break into women's bodies and leave them homeless. We're supposed to inflict our power on the bodies of those they have nothing but love to give. This is resistance. You and I whispering in the middle of the night laying side by side your arm as my pillow. Your stories is all I want to hear. This is not fucking. This is resistance. Brown boys are not supposed to love. We're simply born to fuck each other up. So now that we're getting ready to do this again, I want you to hold me. But this time pretend that we're committing this act of resistance. We're regaining everything that was taken away from us. Our dignity, our pride, our love for one another, do me with justice. My mother always told me that going against authority will kill me. And if it does, there's no other way that I want to die. But with you by my side, both of us shouting, fuck the police. This is front line resistance. Yeah. And then I'm just going to do one short poem. This time, I always do it in the beginning. I don't know why I decided to do it in the end. And it's title, Lo Que Soy. And Lo Que Soy translates to what I am. And I feel like a lot of times, people want to be nice. And they want to know where you're from. But there's a lot of the implies when you ask somebody, oh, what are you? Where are you from? Because it makes you think that you're not from here. And I've been here since I was three years old. So I feel like I'm more American in a way, the culture. But I'm still not American because I don't got papers. But when people imply like, oh, so where are you from? I'm like, oh, I'm from East Side San Jose. And they'll be like, no, but where are you really from? From East Side San Jose. Because even though I'm from Mexico, I have no memories. I don't remember anything about Mexico. And also when they tell you, oh, so what are you? You're some alien and shit. So I wrote this piece, and it means what I am. This is my nature, the tooth in my heart, the breath in my lungs, yo soy the one you fear, the one that got away, sol único que se te fue, the one that grew from your hate and still manages to love you, yo soy el hijo que nunca será padre, el nieto que nunca será husband, I am the near and the far of earth and sky, el sol y la luna, so everything that is in between, entre el hombre y la mujer soy el ser, que por la ignorancia no quiere reconocer, I am the one you define with hate, the one that doesn't fit your labels but manages to reclaim his name, yo soy dualidad y aunque digas que esta es la misma canción, el mismo pinche, poema, te repito que nosotros seguimos hablando de compasión, yo soy de fuego y tierra, de mares que liberan de muertes silenciosas, yo soy la muerte que me deseas, I'm of destruction and reparations of freedom in cages, I'm the bird that still sings praises y con todas mis fuerzas te digo que tu odio me libera porque más que joto enjaulado, yo soy el poder de la conciencia. Thank you so much for having me. You see my rays, that was awesome. Thank you for being here.