even through her stage fright. “Well, we’re here, all of us are here to say that we’re tired of the police raids, we’re tired of our young Latino men and women being harassed, we’re tired of the migra.” His voice rose even more to match the ascending volume of the audience, the people calling out, “Yes!” as if this were some sort of evangelical service.
“And this case, this case our friend Araceli has against her, this is the worst. She has done absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing!” He was spitting into the microphone now. “And if they can lock up Araceli Ramirez and take away her freedom for nothing, then they can do it to any of us. Now we’re saying we’re not going to tolerate this. We’re not going to allow our Latino men and women to be railroaded!” Nearly everyone rose to their feet, a few were shouting words Araceli couldn’t make out, they wanted to hear more, but Glass seemed to have run out of steam. He turned to Araceli, who was standing at his shoulder, and looked at her: it was her turn.
She whispered into his ear, “No sé qué decir.” Out in the audience, a hundred people were standing before their folding chairs, their eyes locked on her.
“Just tell them you hope there is justice,” he said.
Glass put his hand at her back and nudged her toward the microphone. She brought her lips close to it and spoke softly. “Quiero justicia.” The sound of her voice, turned to metal, bounced off the walls. “No hice nada.” She stopped, wondering what to say next, suddenly at a loss for words, as if she’d picked up a text of her speech and found all the pages blank. Is that all I have to say? “No hice nada,” she repeated, feeling parrotlike. “Soy inocente.” They expected a waterfall of words, and suddenly she didn’t want to disappoint them, but her sense of urgency only muzzled her more. “No sé qué más decir,” she said, and the words came out with a nervous near-giggle that she would remember as the sound of her failure. One of the shaved heads in the back started clapping, all alone. And then it was as if he’d opened a faucet, because everyone joined in and the applause became a wave of sound, growing denser as it approached the stage and crashed at her feet. Now she thought of what more she could say: she would thank the people who paid her bail, and Glass for coming to get her out of jail, she would say that she agreed with everything Glass had said. But now that she had the words, she couldn’t speak them, because the applause kept on going, it had a momentum of its own, people were making a point of keeping it going, to show it would not die. All the clappers looked at her with what seemed to her an overwrought pride, as if she’d just had a medal pinned to her chest. There was a young, thin man in the first row, wearing a loose-fitting leather belt of chrome pyramid studs, and jeans fashionably ripped at the knees, and she had time to think that she liked his style. When she studied him closer, she saw he was crying. He would fit in in Mexico City, except for the fact that he’s clapping and crying at the same time—in my city, we are either happy or morose but rarely both at the same time. Maybe if she started clapping too, they would stop. Glass put his hand on her back again and she understood: she stepped away from the microphone and followed him down from the stage, where everyone reached out to shake her hand.
If Giovanni Lozano hadn’t been crying and laughing when Araceli spotted him, she would have taken more time to admire his outfit, and the familiar, punk-inspiring stylings whose fashionability endured in Mexico City as much as Los Angeles. On his black denim blazer he wore a NO HUMAN is ILLEGAL button next to another of Joey Ramone, and he walked to his car in his ripped jeans with a studded leather belt and the leaning, I-don’t-give-a-shit gait of an oversexed musician. He tossed his raven bangs back before stepping in and listening to the engine of his old Dodge turn over with a clank and shuffle that sounded like the prologue to a folk song. As the engine revved and warmed up, he resisted the