SandScript 2021

I am raped by white culture
and grow up thinking
that I am La Malinche
not the mother
who helped birth our people
but the traitor
who thinks her own culture
not worthy
of being studied
made to feel like it is my own fault
I take French lessons because Spanish
reminds me of summers
in Nogales
and how small I felt
inside my father’s big house
on top of a hill
with a thousand stairs to reach it
from up there I am reminded
that I belong to
the other side
of the border
I am white (passing)
until I exist
in white spaces
then
I am other
beaner
brown
ese
I am called wetback
because so many who look like me
float across a river
searching for the dreams
that white men sold them
for pesos by the hour
and while their backs are wet
with water
that brings life
the men here have hands
that are soaked
in blood
blood of the past
blood of the present
blood of the future
the same border that is only
200 years old
and cuts deep into the histories
of ancestors that I don’t know of
because it is like an open wound
festering and bleeding
over soils that are not even tended
by the hands that claimed it
as their own
For my ancestors
this is the promised land
Aztlán
but all we are given are
broken promises
from conquistadors
that say we are
illegal
alien
on land that they claim
to have discovered
92