It will be Christmas soon. When I was a kid, this meant setting up the nacamiento with family, the taste of pozole, and reading from the Bible.
Our book was written in a language I have now lost: Spanish. I was at the mercy of Catholicism to keep my childhood identity alive, the same religion that was used to inflict harm upon generations and generations of my community.
Colonizers rode into Latin America with a cross and book in hand; the word of God and Spanish were the rapiers that stabbed out our sun-kissed hearts. My ancestors’ native tongue has been butchered and impaled on steel pikes, the treasures of war shining crimson on my disappointed eyes. I’ve never heard a word spoken in Nahuatl, the language I was meant to breathe.
They distorted who we were, replacing our thoughts with their European language. This imposed language was then antagonized and stripped from us, but now their descendants speak this tongue, taunting me for my lack of identity.
Speaking Spanish in school used to be suppressed. It was a warrant for punishment and ostracization. Then ESL Programs (English as a Second Language) were introduced, a simple way to disguise forced assimilation into the dominant culture.
We now have Dual Language programs—that came a few years too late for me, although I doubt they would’ve done much. Second languages have never been an asset on brown tongues. It was something to destroy, until it turned into an exotic commodity that could be gatekept; we suddenly have value because we can be used. They only need kids’ melanated with the sounds of their parents to teach the rest of the children how to mimic these sounds. I’d just be another sack of meat to rot in a seat.
I wonder how many native Spanish speakers actually succeed in our current programs compared to their English speaking counterparts…
I don’t have a Spanish dual language certificate, but I sure know how to navigate systemic inequities, enough to receive a certificate in Bleached English. I speak it quite well actually. I was trained to.
It will be Christmas soon. Snow doesn’t fall here in L.A., but I can still see the pieces of me I lost drifting in the wind.
This invisible snow entombs the cathedral I would go to every year to celebrate the birth of Jesuchristo. We’d go to this castle and I’d look up at ceilings crawling with angels that weren’t the biblically accurate monstrosities I’m fascinated with. The angels I did see were eerily pale and looked human: they must be flawed like me.
A holy book commands my people to flock to a church every December to celebrate the birth of a nation that has killed so many. Catholicism is ingrained throughout Latinx Culture. The use of Christian Nationalism as a tool of control is a defining aspect of the Nation of Bleached Flowers. The irony is that as I resist oppression, I somehow relinquish acceptance into my own community.
So do I become more or less bleached the further I get from the Church?
My parents and I burned the flesh that binded us to Catholicism, but in the process, we were forced to cut the fibers of muscle that connected us to our family, our community, our culture.
It will be Christmas soon, and I can see other brown bodies being severed from their families and community. The ICE came in quite fast this year, freezing the water sooner than we expected. It’s colder than ever, because the streets are no longer warmed by beating hearts selling champorado and tamales. The Salvi Corridor in Vermont, spanning from Venice to Washington, is increasingly silent. Erasure is more normalized than usual.
It will be Christmas soon. The gift I have received is a bleached flower, and it’s taken me hostage. My own Spanish name can’t be said aloud without recalling the history of institutions that have committed mass atrocities. I can’t even say my own name properly because I no longer speak Spanish. This nation is gorging on my Earth-toned culture that has mothered it, while I’m being injected with dandelion seeds and bitter almonds. Maybe that’s where the snow really comes from.
Am I complacent in my own oppression? Do I still bleed the colors of Latin America?
As I write these words on a bus ride home, two teenagers talk about their day. Annoying boys with their stereotypical assumptions, disgruntled family members, and visiting home. I’ve never been outside of California, but at least I’ve left the cities to visit our polluted sea.
They talk about their failing Spanish, the decay of their identity, which likely receives ridicule from their elders.
Little do they know there is a decomposed corpse sitting across from them…
But Spanish may not even be part of their identity. It could be the experiences I will never have, memories of a childhood in a faraway land, and mending food from an elder’s oven.
Shame on me for romanticizing an identity. Perhaps I’m the same as the colonizers who put me here.
I wonder if these kids can hear the thoughts in my head. Sometimes, it can be so loud.
But it will be Christmas soon, so I’ll rely on the raging of nonexistent blizzards outside my barred windows to drown the thoughts away.
