"Migrations" By Dorian Merina: The Voyage Of Goods Or Of People

When I first read the title I imagined that the poem would refer to a whole different thing having to do more with the migration of people rather than goods. This poem begins by Merina saying: "On the boats come the goods that cross the waters. Like veins and blood rushing, the goods cross the waters." In this maxim I could identify four main things which were the boats, the goods, the waters, and the blood. If I started to think about goods then it would make sense because the goods will cross the water in the boats, but the blood didn't make sense in this scenario. When Merina starts saying a very long list full of products and objects in other words the goods I thought that the blood would be the people required to get this goods from one place to the other. Even though it now made sense I still wasn't satisfied with the title which is "Migrations" and if the author had intended this poem to be centered about goods, then the title would have probably been changed to exportations or importations.

As the poem goes on Merina starts to talk about different races like the mulato, negro, and indio. When he said these races something ringed in my head immediately relating that to the ethnic races that were created in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Many of the new ethnic races were created by the combination of Spaniards and indio or Spaniards and negro. The migration Merina could be talking about is people after all. The goods are the culture the people are bringing to the new place they reach, the water is the barrier between the different countries or the different races, the boats are the means of transportation used to cross the waters, and the blood is the effort and the sweat that the people use when they migrate. In the world today there are many cases where the migrations of people have changed the culture. For example the Latin American influences in the southern parts of the US have definitely shaped their culture. The food you find today in places like California, New Mexico, and Florida have been greatly shaped by these migrations. The cultures that these immigrants are taking to the new countries are the goods and the blood that is rushing is the immigrants going in the boats and crossing the waters.