Book Review of “The Half That Runs” by Luz Schweig
By Rey M. Rodríguez
Luz Schweig’s debut poetry book, The Half That Runs, reminds us during these moments of pain, betrayal, and hardship, especially those felt by the Latino community stemming from ICE raids, children being ripped from their parents, mass detentions and deportations, sometimes including U.S. citizens, and so many other indignities, that all of this cruelty has happened before, and that like before, we will prevail.
Schweig already made an extraordinary contribution to Xicana literature and, by extension, U.S. literature with her latest anthology, Somos Xicanas (Riots of Roses 2024). In it, she uplifts over eighty Xicana writers and poets who profoundly transform anyone who picks up this important book. As a result of this monumental effort, everyone was waiting to hear from Schweig herself.
The wait was well worth it.
Starting off with the first poem, “Like Mole Poblano,” we hear her comforting and lyrical voice in the first line, “If we are light / then we are light like cuautli: / ascending past rainclouds.” She defines “cuautli” as an “eagle concept” which represents, among other things, bravery, the sun, and what it means to be a warrior. And it is this type of language that we need at the moment. We need to see ourselves as light that is infinite, so that we know that this moment will pass and that we will ascend past these rainclouds.
She continues in the next stanza, honoring dark skin by suggesting that if we are dark, then we represent what is most mysterious and unexplored about our cosmos. And that this darkness is beautiful and layered with folded identities stemming back from the Nahua Nations and Aztlán. The history of this darkness is vast and ingenious, just like how campesinos “feed cornfields with black soot taken from under comales.”
Everything that white nationalists want to portray as somehow deficient or less than human, Schweig reminds us of our beauty, and “if we are mixed/ then we are mixed like mole poblano.” This process of mixing tends to spill seeds. I read this stanza to mean that Latinos are spread throughout the country. No attempts to remove us will succeed. Indeed, they will fail. There are too many of us.
In her last stanza, she discusses buried kernels. She suggests that we are “dormant maize in Tonantzintli’s bed.” And if we are lost, then much like a seed that is buried in the ground for planting, then we are all “preparing to rise, rise, rise.” Again, this language is what we all need in this moment of great despair and seemingly lack of hope. Her words encourage us to throw off these negative trappings and remember our ability to persevere in the darkest of times.
The book is filled with similar poems that cultivate hope, but the one that I found to be the most impactful was the title poem, “The Half That Runs.” Picking up the book, I was so intrigued as to why Schweig had entitled her collection in this way. The answer astounded me.
My reading of the poem is of a family that is crossing a border and facing danger. In the second stanza, she writes, “No one can find us in this canyon, I keep soft sage/leaves in my pocket. When afraid, inhale.”
Her father tells her that the shifting Rio Grande cuts them in half. Indeed, they landed on both sides of the Chamizal, stolen ancestral lands between the present-day El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Much like a chicken, after the butcher cuts off its head, one part is thrown into a basket and the other runs. Her father tells her, “We are the half that runs.”
I thought that was such an apt description of what it means now to be Latino in the United States. We are certainly not felt like we belong, especially when parents are having to devise plans for who is to take care of their U.S. citizen children if they are detained by ICE while they head to work or others have to carry a passport with them at all times because otherwise they may be shipped to some uncertain country in Africa or elsewhere, even if they are citizens.
But despite this terror, Schweig gives us animo and the spirit to move on. She writes,
“I don’t know the road off Black Mountain.
But I know where the biggest cacti grow, how to move
like a tumbleweed, light a fire with sticks and stones—
dry grasses from the sunny side of the hill. Patience.
We do need patience now and the reminder that we know how to maneuver during these perilous times. We know how to make fire. Now is the moment to begin to light those dry grasses so that we will survive and begin to build the world that we want to live in for ourselves and our children’s children.
Schweig’s book is all of this and more because it animates what is best in us to go on living. It does not offer specific answers, nor does it seek to resolve tensions. Instead, offers a respite and reminds us to take a deep breath. For readers drawn to poetry that interrogates identity, displacement, and the power of language to uplift, Schweig’s collection offers us powerful comfort and leaves us with an enduring resonance to resist and live fully.
