Rene Arauz Diaz
December 26, 1958 – October 5, 2018
My country is boundless
O.E.B., “My Country”
It has no limit
No king, no potentate –
Only a race of human beings.
There need be no hunger, nor cold,
No want in my country.
There is room for all the
Children of the world there;
And they can dwell in peace,
And plenty, and happiness,
And joy forever,
In my country.
Rene Arauz was killed at his work in a Delaware poultry plant.
There are those who say, “We are all in this together.” Rene was someone who walked and lived this maxim as his second nature.
In 2003, the community in which he was living was faced with removal by the “land lord” because they sought relief from nitrate-poisoned wells and raw sewage in the streets. It was a mass and retaliatory eviction. Many residents said, “we need help.” Rene said, “let’s work together.”
He became the leader of their manufactured home cooperative, and they won an initial legal victory and the right to stay for an additional year. But this was followed by difficulties in finding and starting a new community in time.
The resident members were displaced but continued to come together in hopes of reuniting permanently. Rene was the force that held them together. They founded a new cooperative: “New Horizons.”
This was a lengthy and arduous process in which there were encouraging successes but no ultimate victory. Another legal victory to allow the new community to go forward was upset by newly enacted environmental laws that made the community economically infeasible.
A few years later, Rene became a citizen of the United States. At the ceremony, the new citizens were asked if anyone amongst them wished to speak for the group. Rene spoke right up and did so. He went to the podium and addressed the gathering, talking about what being a citizen meant to him and about what it did not mean.
A better life, he said, does not mean me stepping over you to get ahead. It means our working together to build a better life.
Rene was a sweet, deeply kind, and formidably persistent proponent of basic human community. He envisioned and embodied the nourishment of a new community, shared for this time we have together, that leavens and sweetens an otherwise hard and bitter daily bread.
May we partake of it still.
I can be a patriotic subject
O.E.B., “My Country,” in Visions of Poesy, Freedom Press, 1994.
Of my country
Without robbing or slaying
One of my brothers.
I need not wrest from others
Land, or riches of any sort…
