BY KIM VILCAPOMA ARANDA

Editor’s Note: Eye on Sun Valley had multiple requests to reprint the powerful poetic speech that Kim Vilcapoma Aranda, a Flourish Foundation Compassionate Leaders program coordinator, delivered at Saturday’s No Kings Rally in Hailey:

Let’s talk about the word illegal.

Let’s talk about the word erased.

Betty Cocker, a cocker spaniel belonging to Jay and Patti Doerr, showed up at the rally warning, “I bite kings and tyranny.”

Let’s talk about how this system treats the land as property,

not as mother.

How it fences off rivers, paves over roots,

strips the soil for profit—

The line stretched all the way back to Hop Porter Park, even as rallygoers began crossing Main Street and lining both sides of Bullion Street to a cacophony of motorists honking their support.

and then tells the original people they don’t belong.

Let’s talk about how white supremacy severs relationship—

between people and place,

between memory and mountain,

Protest signs ran the gamut from addressing ICE to Saving Public Lands.

between body and the earth that made it.

Because I come from disappearing trailer parks.

The baby blue ones near St. Luke’s,

where red poppies bloomed like our stubborn joy.

Pat Smith attached a toilet plunger featuring the President’s orange hair to his walker.

Where we rode bikes through the tunnel,

testing how far south we could go,

how far north,

how far from being called guinea pig-eater in elementary school—

like it was something dirty.

Those trailers are gone now.

No notice. No explanation.

Like we were never there.

But we were.

We are.

Because we come from Huanca warriors—from the Mantaro Valley—we never signed off on conquest.

We come from Túpac Amaru II, who shouted in 1780:

“I will return, and I will be millions.”

And we did.

We come from Arguedas’s Quechua—not dead but breathing.

Not artifact, but instrument.

We come from Eduardo Galeano’s memory, where the gods of the Andes, once outlawed,

returned in 1560:

“They traveled on long wings from who knows where,

entered the bodies of their children from Ayacucho to Oruro,

and inside those bodies they began to dance.”

They were whipped for dancing.

Hanged for dancing.

But they danced anyway—announcing the end of all humiliation.

In Quechua, the word ñaupa means “was,”

but it also means “will be.”

That’s what this is.

Not just memory.

Future.

I remember my aunt in Shoshone,

waking before dawn to clean houses in Sun Valley—

for people who never learned her name.

Then one day, she chose to celebrate.

We blasted Santiago, huaylas, zapateo—

yelped and whistled and stomped the ground

like the Andes could hear us.

Too loud, they said.

Too brown.

Too joyful.

So the cops came.

Then they came again.

The second time, they raised a taser at my cousin.

And I ran in front of him, crying:

“Please don’t kill him.

We’re just dancing.

We’re just singing.

We are just remembering we are alive.”

Because here, even joy is suspicious.

Even memory is policed.

Even celebration is too powerful for the systems that try to flatten us.

Let me be clear:

We are the descendants of rebellion.

And we were never just visiting.

So no—

we won’t lower the music.

We won’t take off the polleras.

We won’t stop spinning the wool.

We won’t stop speaking Quechua—not while our grandmothers are still alive to teach us.

I remember Middlebury College,

walking up to a group of volleyball girls,

nervous, trying to find help.

“Do you know where the financial aid office is?” I asked.

They blinked.

Wide-eyed.

Confused.

Like I’d asked for something foreign—

something they’d never needed,

and never imagined someone else might.

That’s how the architecture of privilege works.

It doesn’t always build cages.

Sometimes it just builds ignorance.

Sometimes it smiles and says nothing.

Sometimes it forgets us on purpose.

But I remember my grandmother, Lucasa,

with a stick in one hand and a potato in the other,

teaching me how to spin wool

the way her mother did, and hers before that.

Wool, hair, grief, story—

all tangled together

into something strong enough to be passed on.

Something that says:

We were here.

We still are.

And when Senator Alex Padilla was tackled at a Homeland Security press conference—

just for asking a question—

they slammed him to the ground.

Handcuffed him.

Dismissed him.

He said:

“If this is how they treat a senator,

imagine what they’re doing

to cooks, farmworkers, day laborers.”

We don’t have to imagine.

We know.

Because it’s happening right here.

In Blaine County.

In Sun Valley.

In every trailer you’ve erased.

In every brown child made to feel like a shadow.

In every grandmother pushed to the edge of town.

And it’s not just here.

This logic of borders,

this obsession with control,

this violent instinct to erase—

it’s happening in Palestine, too.

Where children are bombed and labeled collateral,

where hospitals are turned to rubble,

where grieving is a crime,

and where survival itself becomes rebellion.

We recognize that violence.

We recognize the silence that surrounds it.

We recognize that lie:

“You are not from here,

so you must not matter.”

But we are from here.

And from the Andes.

And from memory.

And from resistance.

We are not visitors.

We are witnesses.

We are what survives and what rises.

So when we say No Kings,

we don’t say it as a slogan.

We say it as an indictment—

of every empire built on forgetting,

on silence,

on stolen ground.

We say it as a prophecy—

because we come from people who could see through fire

and still plant seeds.

We say it as a promise—

to those not yet born.

Because as Octavia Butler said:

“The only lasting truth is Change.

God is Change.”

And we are changing the world—

with our voices,

with our rage,

with our dancing,

with wool spun from potatoes and prayers,

with memories too loud for your silence,

with stories too alive for your systems.

This isn’t just protest—

this is planting.

This is the first page of a parable.

And we are writing it with our hands.

Together.

Braided in grief, in joy, in defiance.

Because:

All that you touch, you change.

All that you change, changes you.

So no—

we don’t need kings.

We need each other.

We need futures.

We need soil.

We need language.

We need prophecy.

We need to remember who we are.

And this?

This is ours.

¡Wañuytaqa, kachkaniraqmi!

Even in death, we are still here.