Site Scene in L.A.

From June 2018 Last week while riding the upper deck of MegaBus through San Jose I glanced out the window and noticed an Historic Camino Real sign and bell staring me in the face. It got me thinking about how, as a child, my mother taught me about El Camino Real and how it was the path taken to build the California Missions. The same missions I was made to construct for school projects, the same missions as the miniature models on display at Knott’s Berry Farm. What she didn’t inform me of  was how “los indios” were robbed of their religion and were used as slave labor for the cause of spreading Spanish religious beliefs amongst the natives. The thought that children may have lost toys along the way or that there may be bones of the buried fascinated me. I would do excavations in the backyard in hopes of finding treasures left behind from the Mexican Indians that travelled the 600-mile route with the Jesuits and Franciscan missionaries. Because El Camino Real runs throug...

I have known many in my community who were born with strong indigenous features handed down by our ancestors. Their evenly bronze painted skin wrapped around muscle toned from a long line of a people who climbed mountains and pyramids with ease, hair black and straight glistening in the sun like the tail of an Appaloosa roaming freely on indigenous land, prominent warrior Mayan nose with eyes brown and deep as mother earth herself. Of these whose DNA has remained virtually un touched for centuries there are many who denounce such features and do not understand how very fortunate they are to have been gifted such looks. They spend their lives trying to fit in with circles of friends who, like themselves, wish to be distanced their history (regardless their ethnicity) – even going so far as to changing the pronunciation of their name or marrying into a non-ethnic surname all the while denying the very community from which they hailed. I have also known those who were handed down t...