By Emilia Díaz Magaloni
I dream of oceans these days.
Of the prickling smell of seaweed on the Northern California coast. Of that strong salty wind that forcefully invades your lungs, your ears, and your tongue. That smells and tastes of nothing else than the sea.
Of rolling waves of fog that coat redwood forest hills. I dream of staring at that fog on the way to the beach as a little girl, imagining a giant tsunami of steam and air, bound to soon reach and devour me completely. Passing those hills and into a world of gray, ocean thick in the heavy air, a promise of the water and salt just below.
I dream of brackish waves crashing on giant cliffs. Sitting on such cliffs or near tide pools containing the ocean’s hidden treasures: boundless mussels and sea urchins, the occasional hidden starfish. A particularly large wave crashing against those rocks, the spray of the sea sinking its way into my bones.
I dream of running. Past red-dawn cliffs on my left, the raging ocean on my right. Letting bare toes sink into the sand, leaving dipping indentations on the shore. The carcasses of sea crabs, the seaweed piles teeming with buzzing flies, the broken shells, the driftwood polished smooth by the sea, the remnants of black charcoal of some long ago flame.
In my dreams, I collect driftwood and seashells. I trace my hands across their smoothened grooves. I build myself a fortress from those mismatched logs, decorating the front door with pearly white treasures. I build it strong enough to shelter from that restless wind, strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the outside storm.
I. Oceans
What is an ocean? A collection of its waves? Lidia Yukanvatich in her essay “Anatomy of a Wave,” says that waves are not bodies of water but energy. So, an ocean is a collection of energy. An ocean is millions of particles of sentiment, sand, and dust that are eons in the making. An ocean is a million waves. Yukanvatich writes of waves as longing. When we stare out to on-coming tide, we long for it. Yukanvatich writes of longing as memory. So, an ocean is a collection of this longing, of memory, of all things, living and dead.
Sometimes, a dream is also a memory. Of that human impulse to chase the waves along the shore. On a particular icy morning, when I drove with friends to the ocean and into the rolling fog. We screamed at the never-ceasing waves and then jumped into the icy water, letting it sting our skin red raw. And with that plunge was also a challenge–that we too could scream, and struggle and swim, with all things in perpetual motion, living and dead.
These days, I dream of the oceans and live in a city 2,240 meters above the sea. Mexico City has a population of 8,855 million. From January 2021 to June 2023, the monthly average of undocumented Mexican migrants trying to enter the U.S. reached 63,000. As of the end of 2022, over 1.3 million asylum applications and cases remained pending. Each year; the U.S. asylum system manages to resolve only 41,000 applications and 53,000 cases, leaving so many in a perpetual state of uncertainty. While I easily traded the California coast for the Mexican metropolis, so many people wait in this limbic state of purgatory. Do they also dream of waves? Of longing? Of vastness? Of running?
“For you, Her Majesty the Sea… I’d have a thousand questions to ask,” the Zoufris Maracas say in their song “Sa majesté la mer.” I wonder about the human condition of staring at the horizon. Of screaming at a breaking swell. An eternal condition of seeking. Of asking questions without answers.
II. Deserts
In the movie “Io Capitano,” Seydou, a Senegalese teenager, crosses two oceans in a migration journey from his home country of Senegal to the coast of Italy. The first ocean is the journey through the Mediterranean, from Libya to Naples. The other is the desert between Niger and Libya. Seydou and his best friend Moussa cross on foot through waves of undulating sand, stretching for miles against the stark blue sky. There is a moment within this ocean of sand where Seydou witnesses the death of a woman who can no longer make the journey. There is a moment of vivid imagination in which Seydou inverts his reality. The woman’s body begins to lift from the ground. She floats above the undulating waves, her green tunic floating behind her. Seydou leads her, weightless, through the desert, grasping her floating hand.
And here, perhaps, there is a third ocean that Seydou must cross along his journey, the ocean of his longing, of his dreams, of memory. In the final half of the movie, from which it derives its title, Seydou is charged with the captaincy of a rusted, overcrowded ship he must navigate without experience from Africa and Italy. “No one will die,” he demands into the waves. In the end, living the miracle of their survival, he screams, “I am the captain.”
“Sa majesté la mer” continues: “You, Her Majesty the Sea/Before so much absurdity/And in the name of the vast universe/Could you not just once/Sink these billionaires’ yachts/Rather than these little wooden rafts.”
I’ve had several conversations about migration since I moved back to my “home” country. There is a lot of rightful confusion about my inverse journey. The conversation goes like this: I get asked where I’m from. I say I am from California, but my family is from Mexico. Having grown up my whole life in the U.S., I decided to return to reconnect with a culture I’d always been told was mine but never truly felt my own. Then they will say, everyone here is trying to leave, and you chose to come back?
There is a lot I could say about that. That the life that my parents were able to create in the U.S. for me has allowed me to return to Mexico under very different circumstances. That there is immense privilege in this ability to choose.
Mostly, I don’t say any of these things. Instead, I keep listening to the story of migration. When I bring up the United States here, mostly everyone has a story.
A family member who lives in New York. A whole side of the family has been living in Austin, Tejas, for years. An uncle that they’ve never met but talk to on the phone. Two sisters who she tells me, with tears in her eyes, she hasn’t seen in over 23 years. A stint working in the kitchens of Ohio or Minneapolis or some other midwestern city I’ve never been to. Two years spent first in Denver, then in Utah, Salt Lake City. Then Oregon, the first time they saw snow.
The U.S.-Mexico border is 2,000 miles long. And the 389 miles of Arizona’s arid southern border with Mexico cuts through 100,000 square miles of sparse desert. Since 1999, over 3,000 undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America have died in this desert. I think of the grooves that human migration has made on this earth. Thinking of it like the spidering tendrils of a bloodstream, teeming out from a central heart. Trails of human footprints trodden again and again; until they become rivers of memory upon the very earth. If a wave is energy, what do their waves carry as they force their way through this dry, cracked ground, through oceans of water, of sand, of both? What sediments do our waves carry, when they crash upon foreign shores?
In another movie about displacement, “Yo ya no estoy aquí,” Ulises is a 17-year-old teenager who is forced to migrate from his home in Monterey, Mexico, to New York. As we piece together why Ulises was forced to leave Mexico, scenes of him and his friends dancing Kolombias (A subculture born out of dancing Cumbia music at slower speed) are juxtaposed to the pervasive gang violence in his neighborhood, which is, if not always visible, always suffocatingly present. The movie goes back and forth between two realities-Ulises alienation in the United States to his life in Monterey. When he is far away, listening to Kolombias is Ulises’ way to dream, to liberate himself within a world he feels completely foreign to and trapped in. At the end of the movie, Ulises is deported back to Mexico. He comes home to the funeral of his friend, to the increase in violence in his neighborhood, to his probable death. In the last scenes of the movie, Ulises dances Kolombias on a roof overlooking his city, his music drowning out an assault by cop cars that invade his community in the distance. In the end, the music gives out. The sirens are deafening.
“Ya no estoy aquí” “I’m no longer here.” When I think of this title I think of Ulises saying it to me. It’s a title that means so many things. “I’m no longer here,” Ulises alienation, his invisibility in New York. “I’m no longer here, his absence from his community and his friends who look for him online and call out to him their local radio. “I’m no longer here” Ulises as a victim of the drug war in Mexico, of the thousands of people who get deported or are not granted asylum in the United States only to face probable death in their home countries. Cartel violence not classified within “credible fear.” “I’m no longer here,” Ulises fading into a dream, within the music he listens to that sounds like a heartbeat. He is no longer here. He is on a roof with everyone he loves, dancing to the music that makes him feel free.
III. Oceans
I dream of oceans these days. I think of the human condition of missing home. Maybe we scream at the ocean because we dream it will bring something back to us. Because in its waves of memory, all things are contained, living and dead. Maybe we gaze at the distant horizon, wishing the same.
Not all oceans are the same. I live in a city 2,240 meters above the sea, but I can visit home often. My home ocean is free. She’s daring and wild. Her waves are strong and can carry me far and wide. I wish all oceans were like that. I dream of a world where they are.
In my dreams, it is sunset, the cliffs glow with the orange rays of the setting sun. Sapphire blue sky against red-dawn cliffs. The light refracts on the restless waves. There is a deep chill, my hair flies freely, and the ocean breeze dampens my cheeks and my nose. The ocean is inside of me now. From my frozen feet to the sound of waves in my ears. I sink into it like the sun sinking into the darkening shore.
IV. The Wave (An Epilogue)
To my best friend Alma,
I’m having that conversation with you again. We are on some cliff overlooking the tumbling waves. Light on water, turning the tops of breaking swells solid gold. “I always feel the smallest when I am staring at the sea,” you say to me. You talk to me about waves, about our human instinct to taunt them. You talk to me about time, how it isn’t a straight line but an ebb and flow, also like the waves. Some moments stretch out to an eternity, and others fade too quickly, like the waves retreating back from the shore, that rush of cold water under your cold feet. I think about that moment of being trapped in a swell. A tunnel of white water forming around me. I can’t breathe and I can’t think. My entire world is composed of that instant of salt and sand. We stare out at the ocean again. “I am glad there are things in the world I can’t understand.” I say to you. I wonder if we can exist in this moment forever. But like everything in life, it fades like the waves.
I live in a city 2,240 meters above the sea and 2,000 miles away from you. Recently, I’ve fallen in love. In this city, which is 2,240 meters above the sea, someone I love wrote me a letter in their favorite book: “To conversations that stop time.” Two thousand miles away, you wrote a letter to someone you loved about wishing you could stop time but finding it as untamable as the sea. You wrote about existing within pockets of time, wishing they would last forever. I realize I’ve since lived moments like the ones you talk about. Moments of lying next to this person and feeling like I’m inside that swell. Time is eternal here. It’s in the outline of their shadowed body by moonlight. It is the way their hair falls across their forehead. It is also over in an instant.
“Estoy de paso por lo eterno. En cada instante, lo infinito, en cada grano, el universo.” “I’m a step from eternity. In each instant, infinity, in each grain, the universe.” These are Rafael Lechowski words when he speaks on the concept of migration. Of leaving home. Migration stretches our conception of space. And time stretches our conception of memory. “I stop being from here, to being from everywhere.” In my own migration, I am here 2,240 meters above the sea in the arms of someone I love, and I am also with you on that cliff, the ocean close enough to touch. I am here, and I am there, constantly and eternally. I am no longer here. I am no longer there. I am everywhere.
Emilia Díaz Magaloni is a Mexican-American writer who grew up in California and now resides in Mexico City. She earned her B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University, with a minor in Creative Writing, and her work exists at the intersection of art and human rights. When not writing, she is deeply engaged in addressing the climate crisis within her community, driven by an awareness of the impending catastrophic impacts of climate migration. Emilia’s writing explores themes of longing—for Mexico, the United States, and perhaps an imagined space between the two. A 2021 participant in Stanford’s prestigious Levinthal Tutorials, she continues to develop her craft while balancing her commitment to climate advocacy and telling stories of migration.