If you’ve ever looked at an old penny, or the Statue of Liberty, and wondered about the bluish-green substance coating its surface, you’re familiar with copper carbonate. The cerulean compound is produced by oxidation — a chemical byproduct of the interaction between metal, moisture and air over time.
Roberto Tejada wasn’t thinking of money or monuments when he titled his new poetry collection Carbonate of Copper. But the metaphor feels apt for a book about the U.S.-Mexico border — another area where notions of American prosperity, fortune and refuge are tarnished and transformed.
Carbonate of Copper
By Roberto Tejada
144 pages, paperback: $17.95
Fordham University Press, 2025.
Tejada’s book, out this month from Fordham University Press, draws readers’ attention to the long history of repression in the Borderlands and the parallel lineage of solidarity between migrants and residents there. Tejada, a poet and translator at the University of Houston, hears this tension in the hard “C” sounds of the book’s title: “That plosive play of consonants, to my ear, signifies struggle,” he said.
In Carbonate of Copper, Tejada’s dreamlike poems wind along the course of the Rio Grande, pausing to contemplate the humanitarian and ecological crises that haunt the landscape from Brownsville and Matamoros to West Texas. Along with the plants and animals of the Rio Grande Valley and the Chihuahuan Desert, Tejada conjures the voices of people entangled in immigration and border enforcement schemes, reckoning with questions of citizenship and surveillance.
Tejada recently spoke with High Country News about the contradictions of life in the Borderlands, the lessons of a less-militarized past, and the place that poetry and hope have in our current political moment. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: In the book, you’re highlighting two opposing forces at work on the border — as you put it, “the infrastructure of militarized surveillance” and “the aspiration towards justice and mercy.” These are concepts that show up in both the lives of migrants and Borderlands residents in very different ways. I’m curious about what particular images or experiences were on your mind as you thought about them.
Roberto Tejada: One can’t help but see the physical, militarized landscape when one visits any part of the border — the amplified hardware of the Border Patrol, the surveillance towers that are taking photographs and image data 24/7. In the years that I was spending time there, I also had the opportunity to visit the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, and understand the ways in which even the landscape itself has been weaponized as a death machine. Migrants crossing that particularly hostile landscape, if they are separated at any moment, will not survive. And so one of the tactics has been to go at night with floodlights, helicopters, and disperse the migrants. And, of course, that is almost a guarantee of death. The South Texas Human Rights Center is bringing awareness to the important question of migrant death — trying to connect families with their beloved and deceased.
The various speakers in the poems are also attending to this experience I had of going to Reynosa and being welcomed as a guest in the encampments of migrants and asylum seekers — before the new administration, which has completely closed down any possibility of asylum seeking.
For me, it’s important that the voices in the poems witness all the menace and vulnerabilities of living in the contemporary environment. But also that there be this possibility of hope — this openness to being an agent of change in this very particular landscape that is so contested and politically charged at the moment. The indictment of the militarized surveillance landscape is there in the book, I hope. But to only have that side of the story is to deprive very real individuals of some kind of sovereignty and agency.
HCN: You’ve lived in a variety of places along the border, but many of these poems are focused in particular on the Rio Grande Valley. How did that landscape inform your thinking about the border more generally?
RT: Having grown up in Los Angeles and having lived in San Diego, where I taught at UC San Diego for many years, it’s a very different kind of border experience. And what makes it different are these layered histories of Texas in particular. One can’t deny the presence of the Texas Rangers, right? (Members of the often-celebrated state police force committed widespread atrocities against the Mexican-American residents of South Texas during the Mexican Revolution.) And there are cases of segregation that still existed up until the ’60s, where Mexicans were not allowed to enter certain restaurants, or went to schools where students were separated and not allowed to speak Spanish. Those layers of racism and oppression are in the physical space itself. Everyone can feel it. But it’s also where Texas begins, that blurring and fusion between Texas and Mexico and their politically shared histories, with the Rio Grande or the Rio Bravo being the very concrete physical landscape that is the dividing line.
HCN: Although maybe not so concrete these days, right? The river is barely a trickle in some places now. Speaking of change over time: One section of the book, “Sign for Bridge,” is composed of a series of archival photos taken along the border in the 1930s and ’40s by photographers like Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee. Some of them are street scenes; others show agricultural tools, signs at the border, an open road. Can you talk about your decision to include these photos alongside your poems?
RT: I am often exploring the Library of Congress and the Farm Security Administration archive. I began to delve into that archive and saw that Arthur Rothstein, Lange and Lee had these incredible images that they were taking of that time … to raise consciousness about migrant experience and rural difficulties in places like the Rio Grande Valley, so that they could become understood and given a kind of visibility in places like Washington. It’s incredible to me; I mean, on the one hand, there are these white photographers who are from other urban experiences, trying to understand the experience of migrants, which might give us some kind of pause. But on the other hand, it’s really the only archive we have of that moment. What I was interested in was this isolated space of the Rio Grande Valley, of being farmworkers, of going to the local cinema, patrons at a hamburger stand. That everyday life is something that we often forget in the larger brush strokes of history, right?
I call it this section a fable, because I wanted to know: Can we use the past to tell us something about a possible future? Can we bring into the present a reminder of a different way the border was, prior to its hyper-militarization? I wanted it to be a kind of portal, not only to the past but maybe a portal that will take us somewhere that we have yet to imagine.
HCN: What do you hope that these poems contribute to the national conversation that we’re having now about the border?
RT: Poetry, as the most intimate and yet powerful way in which we can express and condense both feeling and thought, seems to me absent from the ways we have sociologized discussions about the border and this particular relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. I’m interested in the ways in which we can humanize (that conversation) through the imagination and a commitment to accounts that aren’t necessarily ones that we can summarize in expository language. There has to be something of the unknown and the mysterious. The true mystery of another person, of somebody that we’re face to face with, seems to me one way in which we can begin to situate ourselves — to bracket the world in such a way that we can go to the important political and historical and ecological work that’s being written about the border, but maybe with a certain kind of openness to voices that aren’t necessarily present in the abstractions of numbers and journalistic accounts.
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