When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest

Poet-activist Jimmy Baca immerses the reader in an epic narrative poem, imagining the experience of motherhood in the context of immigration, family separation, and ICE raids on the Southern border.

Jimmy Santiago Baca makes the immigration crisis painfully personal in this new interpretation of the Epic Poem. While it may feel safest to take a step back when the government calls to build that wall, Baca steps forward into the lives of those who suffer profoundly at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. In language we can all understand, Baca sends us on a journey with Sophia, an El Salvadorian mother searching for a better life. She takes step after painful step up a mountain of obstacles, carrying with her the burden of all that has come before- past her husband’s murder, through her searing grief, to the wrenching separation from her young son at the border, then rape and abuse at the hands of American officials; always onward, exhaustively. I keep walking/carrying you in my thoughts, she wills her boy, so far away, to know she is coming.;;When I Walk Through That Door, I Am is a call for our attention, for our compassion, for our energy in pursuit of democracy and of justice. Jimmy Santiago Baca shines this light on America’s downtrodden, and asks us to walk through their pain with them. They don’t see/democracy’s body/on the barbwire, he writes. Through this book we do.