The World is Palestine! (Issue #3)

By Hugo Benavides

"Yo soy Joaquín, perdido en un mundo de confusión…" Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Yo soy Joaquín (1967)

Ever since I was twelve years old and an immigrant child living in New York City, I believed there was an invisible triangle in the world. Its lines ran from my homeland, Latin America, to Palestine, then to Ireland, and then back to Latin America. As I came of age, this symbolic triangle of struggle grew clearer and larger, as it shaped several other battles that became part of my identity as a Latinx in the United States, and someone having Andean Indigenous roots.

The epic poem, Yo soy Joaquín by “Corky” Gonzalez, my book knowledge of the North American “Trail of Tears,” and Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, were at the core of what I now experience as a store of ancestral wisdom with which I navigated first my life and later my professional identity. The continuing two-and-a-half-year-long genocide in Gaza more than ever foregrounds Palestine as an anchor point in all our triangulations of a failed imperialist modernity. Angela Davis was right: “Palestine is the center of the world.”

This issue of Cul-de-sac is an oblique attempt to register without false language our collective, catastrophic failure to acknowledge that centrality and what it may yet cost: “not less than everything.”