Legalize My Mother

Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants is a call to action in the form of an altar - a collection that includes prose poems, portrait poems, fragments, lyric poems, and chants. Legalize My Mother explores in-betweenness, the violence of whiteness, shame, Indigeneity, motherhood, queerness, divine femininity, self-determination, healing, and prayer. It is not divided into sections but works as a continuous narrative that moves through times of violence, sensuality, and healing.

Legalize My Mother is the tenacious search for the mother creature. Deranged at times, half-eaten, but always curious and full of wonder, relentlessly expanding. Filling the body, tearing the body apart. It is generative.

How does a mother's touch offer your life more depth or swift access to the spiritual? How does your mother's touch of care complicate your life? How do we, as first-generation Mexican-American daughters, preserve the magic and medicine of our mothers, while facing and healing from the nuances of intergenerational trauma? This collection celebrates a kind of divine sexuality arising from a hyper-sensual feminine presence of being. As a Latina/indigenous woman, as a mother, artist, lover, activist beating back on the onslaught of American racism and misogyny, the poet turns to sensuality as a connective tissue; the love within the fight.

Using the aesthetic of an altar, Herrera organizes each piece ceremoniously, an experience motivated by texture and sensuality. This has materialized in unexpected ways, the placement of a single line on the page; a slightly damaged feather alongside a figure of a red-mouthed jaguar. Fierce and creature-like or abrupt like a decaying tooth, a hardened umbilical cord, a severed dreadlock. Each piece represents stages of growth, the altar is a metaphor for the personal work necessary to know ourselves outside of the distress of oppression. It reads sharp like a machete and nurtures like the medicine of yerbas.