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 through East LA and Boyle Heights on Whittier Blvd. the land I grew up on had to have been used as a rest stop or even a burial ground. I never found discarded toys but one afternoon mom and I dug up a tiny stone bead from the side of the house. It appeared to be made with crude tools and was cracked. I’ll never forget it. Surely a piece of history. Our history. A history of a people who are still being used and abused by religion and politics. We paved the roads. We nurtured the land. We face persecution and prejudice on a daily basis all because our blood is indigenous to this land. Photo: Los Angeles Times.

Invaded bloodline not spirit or soul.

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 untouched 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 the evidence of colonizer infiltrated DNA. The fair skin which turns red in the sun as if a form of punishment for spending time with Kinich Ahau, eyes of blue/green/hazel and gray causing a permanent squint as if hoping to avoid their reflection in the mirror, hair unruly as cinnabar dyed yarn tangled on a Mayan loom, nose pinched and turned upward as if avoiding an air of indigenous familiarity. Of these unfortunate ones there are many who have used such features to blend in to a society fixated on the lack of melanin tainted skin. They denounce the very idea that their features are but a fluke in the timeline of their ancestral existence and are met with a shocking reminder of who they are as they give birth to brown babies with jet black hair.

It has taken over half a century for me to understand why I have never been comfortable in my own skin. As a child how could I possibly know the reason for my tears as I looked in horror at my reflection in the mirror or photos of myself was linked to what the DNA lottery pulled up when I was created. How was I able to understand that the sorrow I felt deep in my heart as far back as I can remember was caused by residual trauma when ovum and sperm collided in a violent battle for dominance way back when the link to indigenous DNA was broken. My whole existence has been one of rebellion and resistance as I denounced the dominate traits of invasion to my bloodline.