Daisy Atterbury

Writing along the US-Mexico Border, Roberto Tejada Conducts Blue Reckonings

After the bright blue of malachite and azurite was first crushed into pigment, it traveled. A color pulled from rock, carried across oceans and brushed into the layered surfaces of Renaissance paintings, the mineral marked an early phase of globalization, its desirability dictated by systems of power and trade. Carbonate of copper left its trace, its blue and the practices surrounding its extraction tinting the histories it touched.

In his latest book of poetry, Carbonate of Copper, Roberto Tejada composes with an attention to a particular material residue, writing from the landscapes and displacements of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Smudged into these colonial histories is a trace attention to the dynamics of sex, erotic possibility and possession. Written in Texas across the border cities of Brownsville, McAllen, and also Marfa, Carbonate of Copper moves through a geography of surveillance and forced migration. The collection invokes cities across the border in Mexico: Matamoros and Reynosa, where crossings between policed national borders are both a necessity and a risk. The region is one in which those who seek asylum are caught in a limbo of bureaucracy and militarized containment.

“Hangman,” the book’s opening poem, sets the tone with its invocation of an erotics of injury and healing: “intended to banish / my lesion and thrum…” It is a striking introduction, one that holds both wound and rhythm, as if language itself is a pulse beating beneath a surface of harm. This tension between harm and desire, between the body as a site of control and as a site of pleasure, courses through Carbonate of Copper. In “Swerve,” Tejada traces the erotic through touch, its opening lines an unfolding: “so the brittle surface of a fingertip estranges a ridge / of my inner hand / I make ripple for traffic.” The body is under excavation, a conduit for uncovering sensation that refuses easy knowing. The poem’s images twist and flare—“swerving like this to resemble a spell of water / or the umlaut flit of cattle egret olive-sparrow”—its language enacting the same tension between permeability and estrangement it describes.

Deeply invested in language as a medium and a force of transformation, Tejada uses language to animate social and material realities, recognizing language as a change agent, a vehicle both capable of shaping perception and subject to alteration itself. Words in Carbonate of Copper function as material, as copper’s blue, circulating and shifting in meaning, accruing meaning over time.

Carbonate’s commitment to language-as-object reflects an objectivist ethos tracing its lineage back to George Oppen, whom Tejada cites as inspiration for the book’s title. Like Oppen, Tejada is deeply invested in how matter and meaning intersect, and even how color and texture can structure thought. In the book’s Postscript, Tejada describes Carbonate as occupying time in the key of “petrified unrest,” citing Walter Benjamin—suggesting the calcifying of states of precarity and political instability as conditions of the present. The Postscript goes on to reference Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen’s autobiography, first published in 1978 alongside George Oppen’s last book of poems. In her autobiography, Mary recounts a dream of George’s about rust in copper, a material that, in the dream, tethers the poet to his father. For Tejada, an interest in carbonate of copper is an interest in the substance itself, but also in political and economic circumstances that provoke the material’s extraction and dissemination across borders. The change function of copper, a substance that activates in its decay the mechanisms of the aesthetic and the commodity, resonates throughout the collection.

The commodity changes, and it freely moves across borders, boundaries and nations. As Tejada later explores, labor doesn’t. Except in secret. Except under duress.

The Oppens’ own relationship to the U.S.-Mexico border is a Cold War history that charges Tejada’s work with a tense reminder of the effects of McCarthyism on US intellectual life. To read Carbonate of Copper at the onset of the new Trump Era is to harken back to a mid-Century period in U.S. politics that feels uncannily present. Branded enemies of the state, the Oppens were forced to flee the FBI at the onset of the Red Scare, relocating to Mexico. FBI files on both poets document the consequences of Depression-era activism and involvement in leftist political organizations and affiliates. When federal agents came to the Oppens’ home in 1950, questioning them about their organizing and relief work, the poets were forced to flee, eventually crossing into Mexico to live as political refugees. They would spend the next decade in Mexico City under constant surveillance.

This history and the now-present contexts of exile, migration, and of the border as both an escape and a site of militarized enforcement inform Roberto Tejada’s poetics. The work attunes to current sociopolitical configurations with an eye to past repressive regimes. Carbonate clocks a present political landscape that comprises “a world / in withdrawal / from any tenuous / basis in fact / none in logic.” The logic of the border is, as the poet observes, an illogic. Tejada observes that the forced relocation of peoples at the border reflects the “staggering menace of illiberal rule,” a theme that emerges in a collection that refuses to live in ideological fictions. Tejada’s poems insist on material—on the vivid and the real.

Structurally, Carbonate of Copper is divided into numbered sections that take their titles from specific places: Desierto de Chihuahua; Orphan Hill, Presidio County; Milestone Obelisk; Sign for Bridge; Bicentennial Boulevard; Puente Brownsville-Matamoros. These locations mark an itinerary through the present-day U.S.-Mexico borderlands, mapping a shifting affective terrain constructed against a backdrop of cartographic rigidities. Tejada writes, “These pages are beholden to seasons in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and to my place as a guest among visitors and migrants in Reynosa, Tamaulipas; to those who shared their stories of affliction, faith, radiance, and dignity.” The dynamics thus elevated in Carbonate are those of speakers and guests, witnesses and lovers, notably relational and emotive, against what we, as readers, know to be an ICE-dominated regime in which “the border” functions as an ideological prison gate against relation.

That’s not to say relationality is simple. Coupling, in Tejada’s work, functions as a kind of erotic “custody”. “Time to Wake Michael,” an intimate, charged poem, lingers in the space between intimacy and entrapment: “long view short / breath wrong / sign tethered / unwinding into / place distended edge frayed,” the poem reads. The poem moves toward a vision of shared captivity, where the past is held within the present: “this custody / makes possible / a past the solitary / penitude of twin / time home / in slow descent / the company we keep.” The borders here are also contested. Possession yields possibility. The lines unspool breathlessly, arriving at the declaration: “I / am the clinic / of this radius / with my mouth / and cheek,” a physicality that enacts domination and playful exploration, a new cartographic ethos that charts possibility. Here, love is yes, confinement, but also a fragile kind of shared time, a way to sit in relationality even as togetherness perpetuates its own unrest.

Carbonate of Copper recalls some of the preoccupations of Tejada’s earlier collection, Mirrors for Gold, written during a period in which the poet lived in Mexico City. Mirrors examines the intersection of personal and historical intimacy, tracing the contours of desire alongside the violent legacies of conquest in the Americas. In a 2009 interview with Dale Smith, Tejada reflects on how a relationship between self and other can be understood through the shifting dynamics of colonial encounters, citing power dynamics shaped by fear, fantasy, and possession. Mirrors for Gold moves through an early eroticism, one that is palpable in poems like 'Genesis: The Resilient Colors,' where color is not merely a pigment but an emanation—light suffused in bodily presence: “a will from which the colors rose resilient / sparks of orange over the waves of trickled… / this tongue in blue translucent embers.” If Mirrors for Gold lingers in the sensuous interplay of bodies and light, Carbonate of Copper drops down into the minerals and sediments, attended to as commodities, which trace social and political upheaval negotiated at the level of the forms of intimacy on display in erotic negotiation, a nuanced view of power.

Azurite, a basic copper carbonate mineral, traces its name back to the Persian lazhward, meaning blue, which passed through Latin to become azure. Egyptian civilizations used azurite as a pigment as early as the Fourth Dynasty, but the mineral only became widespread in the Middle Ages after it was recovered following the lost knowledge of manufacturing Egyptian blue. Azurite colored tempera paintings, darkening over centuries. Later, synthetic alternatives like blue verditer and Prussian blue replaced the copper carbonate as pigment. Tejada’s Carbonate of Copper is a materialist work of witnessing, in a sense, a tracing of concreteness in history, but its witnesses are embedded enactors of their own disruptions. Carbonate propels its force away from jarring political vitriol and its commensurate media pitches and towards realities of migration, where the border is a site of negotiation. These poems do not offer closure—they pulse, they thrum, they insist on complex, and sometimes violent, relationality in the ongoing histories that sediment these borderlands’ regional swaths.