The Right to Remain Violets - Poemas

The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley's contrasts of wealth and dispossession. Inventive and emotionally resonant, the collection spans sonnets, sestinas, hip-hop, and prayer, insisting that language can both indict and heal. López brings his experiences as an award-winning poet, scholar, and former mayor of East Palo Alto to each poem. At once elegy and refusal, The Right to Remain Violets speaks to readers of documentary poetics, social justice literature, and those who believe in the radical importance of protecting childhood in an America reckoning with itself.