Let My People Flow

By Joe Cruz

Yo soy Chicano, Mexican-American that is. They sometimes call me Tejano, Mexicano, Tex-Mex, Mojado, Beaner, Frijolero. But I call myself a descendant of that union between Mayan, Aztec, Spanish, and African. I am trilingual in Espanol, English, and Barrio Slang - Que onda vato, pues dale ese, andale carnal, Que pasa cabron, no te agouties mijo.

My life began at the end of my parents’ lives. I made sense of this split between my parents the way I did my citizenship, I was Mexico’s son and the United States’ illegitimate gay bastard child. My existence is resistance, but it is a blue one. One of melancholy, darkness, blindness, and fear. Not being from here nor there, I had always looked for love, in a sort of perpetual blue state, feeling left unwanted. Little did I know I was floating in an ocean of blue healing and loving waters. Unlike the waters of the river my mother crossed to get here. While it wasn’t the river Jordan, el rio grande could be taken as a metaphor. Her back wet, skin brown, head high, and spirit strong, she continued to flow.

Rosa y Javier got here through a type of “overground railroad” we call it la bestia; the beast. This train is only a small part of the bigoted, racist, militarized apparatus my people face to make it to the promised land.

Language also exists in that apparatus of white supremacy. It exists in the memories of when I would tell my abuelo, “pa speak English”. It’s our language of survival. But in rejecting my nation, I fed into this larger hallucination that told me with great sound and fury that this nose was too broad, these lips were too fat, these ears were too round and this skin was too brown.

Now my elders see me as el guero, the blanquito, el Malinche, Arnold Benedict the infamous traitor as I call it, because I have left their embrace for the false hope of success. You see, I didn’t luckily make it out the Barrio to be with you all tonight, i made it here tonight and i stand here proudly with y’all because of the Barrio. I am my grandmothers tortilla recipes, my mother’s labor pains, my father’s alcoholism, my grandpas bipolar disorder, and my people’s intro-woven generational exodus but most of all,

I am home.