Desert Child

I know that my mother was a desert child. I know that she was a child of the sun. I know that she was loved by the Earth.

But my thoughts keep me up at night, because I acknowledge that to you I am just an exotic creature. And that even though I was a flame, you had a need to suffocate me. Didn’t your parents warn you to not play with fire.

The soft whisper of your voice keeps me up. I can sense the interest that stems from your body, while that head of yours is suffering a mental unbalance. Because society crawls under your skin, polluting your mind, making you feel superior. Because even if you can’t remember my people do. They remember when the white man first stepped foot upon my motherland and imprisoned, raped, and exhibited my women, my sisters, my mothers. Because my people had to learn how to love each other, under the trampling feet of a demon.

All in good fun…

Everything beaten to the ground. dehumanized. unappreciated.

Vacant gods who won’t listen to my screeching screams anymore, because I am misplaced, unwanted, and unforgiven.

Under the eyes of the white man our gods were put on trial to be judged, when they were convicted of being unworthy of their place.

The son of an unrecognizable face became a familiar one.

Even if you can’t understand your importance to me, my sister.

Even if I can no longer plead to los dioses above for forgiveness. Even if you can’t understand that your beauty is graceful and natural. Because I know that the sun chose to love you more than anyone else. Because I know that the sky called to your hair to grow dark as night.

Even though I tell her to stop trying to make a pact with a demon.  Because I tell her what wasn’t told to me. I understand in all reality the sense to be loved for the first time when everything you are is seen as a joke, as exotic, and different from the norm. Only because the sun proudly graced you to inherit her confidence to shine.

But it is all shattered right?

In the eyes of the men in this world the bodies of my sister’s that are a beautiful reflection of the mountains in our motherland,are valued more than the sisters from the desert, the rainforest, the savannah.

Because they always forget, as if they suffer from a chronic series of motivated forgetfulness. They fail to see… these men. They fail to see that the latin americas that I know best has been colonized, and ripped apart by years of non extinct slavery.

Variety we got, so when someone forgoes this reality of the variety my people have, when they step on the figure of one of my sisters to praise the other, so when someone comments ‘your body is not latina enough’ i call bullshit.

Who has the right to label my people, not you.

Who has the right to judge my women, not you.

Who has the right to kill my raza, not you.

Who has the right to banish my Gods, not you.

Who has the right to tell me I do not know my people, definitely not you.

 

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