It is almost dusk, and I have wandered into a forgotten neighborhood. I see a face, dark, indigenous- then turn away. I see another man walk past me, thin, self-possessed. As I watch his graceful strut that is at once studied and natural, I think he might have become a dancer- but he was born in a barrio, born too Mexican and too poor and I don’t want to think about the complicated history of the world. Across the street, an old man, his back bent from years of work, emerges from the comforting anonymity of the city. He reminds me of my grandfather who is dead. No amount of thinking will bring him back to life.

A man walking towards me, stops, lights a cigarette. Our eyes meet for an instant, and a moment of knowledge passes between us: I know you, I know everything about you, and 
this moment become a moment of suspicion and this moment of suspicion becomes a moment of hatred. I know you. I know everything about you. Our eyes are little more than weapons. We have convinced each other that nothing can exist between us except war. I have been taught that he and I have nothing in common. But I knew him once. He looks just like my brother. I have had to forget him in order to survive. And so we live in different countries.

I keep moving down the street. I watch another dark man walking in front of me- he carries his ancestors in his eyes, on his face, in his proud walk. He disappears down the street, disappears into the crowd, back into the city. He is invisible again. He cannot hurt me.

But then the photographs here and the words of this poem intervene. The camera and the rhythms of thelanguage stop the world from moving. I turn the page, and there are the men I saw on the street, forever frozen, forever confronting-forever accusing me. I have learned to think of them as enemies, objects of fear, of archaic masculinity. But now, as I stare into their eyes, they become as familiar to me as my boyhood. I begin to see their poverty, begin to remember my own. I begin to wonder about the houses they live in, the barrios that gave them life, the women who love them, the mothers who lost them to the seductions of the street. I begin to understand their wounds, and I find myself growing angry at those outside the picture, those who’ve forced them into segregated neighborhoods, forced them into fighting a war they did not choose to fight, forced them to become warriors when they would have chosen more peaceful vocations. I begin to see that they are hunted and wounded and hated and I wonder how they bear such burdens. It is not so difficult to see their hearts, and I begin to imagine the rooms where they spend their days, the children they dream of having, the ordinary peace they yearn for.

I cannot turn away from this book- and I thank God for this small and miraculous intervention. These men, there are thousands of them. There are millions. As I stare at these brave and arrogant and beautiful men, I make a silent promise to myself that the next
time I walk down a street, I will stop one of them and ask him to

tell me the word for brother in a language
the world has made me forget.