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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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On Going Home
Yvette Saenz
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I just got back from a trip to Alice, Texas, where I visited family for the holidays. I’ve forgotten how to be at home. I think what this means is that my home in Alice, Texas is no longer home.
There are Trump signs everywhere around town, but that’s not the reason why it’s no longer home. It’s something deeper than politics, but politics is also deeper than politics. Politics is indicative of the condition of the human psyche, and politics is much more complex than what it has been reduced to in this era.
But politics is also quite simple. It’s a conflict over ideas about what the world is and should be. Home stays the same, and I’ve changed, and the conflict on all sides, everywhere, increases.
I want to believe in the comforting lie that I’ve grown up, moved on, beyond the place of my birth, beyond the place that defined the first part of my life. The truth is far stranger and more disturbing: as I change, so does Alice, Texas. This place moves the way that glaciers do: slow motion, nearly imperceptible movements that could disrupt the delicate balance of the entire ecosystem. The balance has been disrupted, but in what exact way, I don’t know. Everyone has an answer, and no one has the answer.
Nothing inspires nostalgic reminiscing like absence. Nothing inspires romantic yearning like distance. I've yearned, I've reminisced, I've idealized, but even home is no longer the same after being away for so long. What is there to yearn for, when the home I longed for cannot be found anywhere? It wasn’t even there when I thought it was there.
When I return I feel that same desire to be a child again and re-do it all, live every pain, every happiness, but with the awareness and insight that I have as an adult. With the knowledge that I should savor even the suffering, because it meant something. I could save myself and my family from every bad thing that ever happened to them, with my adult insight. That’s the fantasy that home delivers.
But the reality of returning to Alice frees me from the fantasy that I could’ve done anything to save anyone. Returning home reasserts that I had to save myself first before I could help anyone else.
Many of the people I spoke with in Alice voted for Trump in the last election. I listened and asked questions because that’s my job here, to listen and learn. I can’t teach anyone here anything about life that they don’t already know, or that isn’t fundamentally irrelevant to them and their lives.
And mostly all I know is poetry, and no one needs to know about poetry. In my classroom with 20-something-year-old undergraduates, I am the teacher, but in Alice, the roles are reversed. I become the student, and everyone is my teacher.
When I speak about politics there, I feel like I sound out of touch, so I shut up pretty quickly. In graduate school, I’ve picked up the terrible habit of relying far too much on abstractions. It’s the curse of academia. I don’t consider myself an academic, but I work in a university and I’m a graduate student in the arts, which makes me an academic.
I become self-conscious because my life is so different from the lives of the people who live in Alice. Many of them work in the difficult and dangerous industries that allow this country to function: agriculture, oil, healthcare. I teach poetry and take graduate classes. My life is the definition of frivolity in comparison with their lives. They are nice, kind, productive, likable people who I feel totally comfortable with in most ways. And many of them voted for Trump.
I’m not interested in judgment. I’m interested in understanding because I refuse to become what I always feared: irrevocably changed by escaping home, spoiled by life under the protective guardianship of an academic institution, unable to remember the nature of the struggle outside of the bubble. Alice is changing, too. It’s still a rural, Hispanic community that mainly employs people in the oil field, in healthcare, and in the local school district. Since 1912, Jim Wells County, where Alice is the county seat, voted for a Republican in a presidential election only four times (1956, 1972, 2020, and 2024). Alice was a Democratic stronghold. What happened?
It’s much easier to convey surety when speaking in abstractions. In the world of ideas, how can anything be proven or disproven? It’s just a matter of rhetoric. In writing this, I am in the world of ideas. But people are not ideas. People are living beings, they are real, and we have to listen even if we disagree with them or believe they are wrong. We have to try our best to understand why they believe what they do. And it’s not our job to save anyone. It’s only our task to see and recognize people for who they are. That’s the only way things will change for the better rather than for the worse.
But much more than an academic or a teacher, I’m a poet. Isn’t poetry located in the concrete, hyper-specific moment? I need to give you a snapshot of Alice to hold, but what was most meaningful to me when I was home had nothing to do with politics. It was sitting in the car with my mom as she read my poetry manuscript, and realizing as she read that for the past three years, I’ve been writing these poems for her.
It was my niece asking me whether there are cherry blossoms in China, and my being able to tell her: yes, I’ve seen them. It was holding my nephew's hand as we rode the escalator at the mall in Corpus Christi, because he gets nervous when riding an escalator. I had this fear as a child, too. I remember that all I needed was for someone to hold my hand.
Writing poetry has taught me that, paradoxically, in the realm of the specific and the concrete, nothing is certain. And perhaps certainty about that which we know little is part of the problem. In what I see and experience in real life, not in abstractions, not in the virtual world, I feel my individuality, my separateness from other people, and my closeness with them, my intense uncertainty about where I end and another person begins. I feel the beginnings of an our, an us.
Alice, Texas always reminds me that I am not alone.
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Yvette Saenz is a writer from Alice, Texas. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Social Studies and has worked in AI, marketing, and education. Currently, she is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.
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