Identity

What will I say to my daughter

Who will feel even more of a fraud than me?

Because daddy is white and mamá might as well be.

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know my culture.

I’m just a pretender.

Skin like the moon so I never could really call myself brown.

Spanish I learned mostly in school instead of from life.

Trips to my grandfather’s country where I never visited his home,

Just hotels on white sand shores.

Private school education and how I avoided my people

Because for sure they would see that I was just faking.

A good passing accent that’s probably just overcompensation.

The knowledge that I know I lack

Always just out of reach.

How can my daughter feel connected to a motherland

That her mother doesn’t know?

It’s so easy to fall into the same pattern of assimilation

My family built out of necessity

And it’s so hard to shake the feeling that I need it too.

Proudly Latina but without the look or language or understanding?

I am a shell of a person.

There’s no substance to me.

My words are hollow.

But I have to learn or at least learn to hide it,

Because my daughter does not deserve my damage.

what the future brings

Sometimes my thoughts come to me poetically

...

I’ve got my sights on the world and the way it could be

Visions of the future and what is owed to me.

Memories of ancestors and what they deserved.

How hard they fought to have me give up?

“This is enough because it’s all they asked for.”

But didn’t they plant seeds all around us and didn’t they say “Mira como crecen”?

They started dreaming and found a way to survive

But they told us survival is not the destination.

I was handed a snowball to roll down a mountain,

Safety to demand that the world acknowledge all the ones that paved the road for me

And how I will take it to the edge of the map and keep going past where their eyes could see.

I can’t be calmed or be settled when the blood of fighters flows through me,

When I embody a language and culture and soul that took everything imposed on us

And made it more beautiful by making it our own.

We will live equally or we will not stop climbing.

And soon our sheer number will silence your voices.

We were taught by our mothers and fathers to come and stand tall and

We will teach our children to conquer.

For so long all your ancestors have known is defend,

Hold the line, maintain the status quo.

But years of hard labor and emotional torment have toughened our skin and focused our minds.

My mother’s children will continue the fight that her father started and

My children’s children will know a life so far removed from the struggle

That they’ll roll their eyes at stories of how it once was.

Your history is written or don’t you hear what they say now

About those who dared to own people or erase entire cultures?

Your children will whisper “What were they thinking? I don’t understand.”

Until years down the line your family is rectifying your toxic impact

With contempt and disgust in their bones.

A line has been drawn in the sand and the choice needs to be made.

Stand with your ancestors and ooze with their hate or

Be heroes to your future descendants with my blood in their veins.