RECLAMATION IS MY INHERITANCE.
Once from Mexico y Español
And before that from the indigenous land y Nahuatl
So I work to piece it back together.
Undoing shame heaped onto us over generations.
Decolonization guides me to this:
to everywhere and nowhere.
Colonialism is the language I learned and now
Because reclamation is my inheritance.
This altar is a holy act of etching lines along a map.
To trace tracks left by grandparents, great grandparents, ancianos, antepasados.
I feed them. The ones who drank pulque and bled into the fire.
I welcome the ones who knew that Jade was as sacred and precious as gold.
The ones who knew to bless the animals and crops because they were also holy.
I call them in and I thank them.
They who knew the mountain was anointed and the caves generative.
This is the “old way” - the path that’s mine to follow, ours to tread.
I do not wish to mystify nor romanticize (I say to my academic audience)
But it’s mystical—I whisper to my altar.
It is love, romantically weaving among stones and sky and temple and I can’t catch my breath because...
The ancient is here with me.
And I with them and theirs with ours and tomorrow is already blessed
If I wait with eyes open there are smoke signals.
Bread crumbs of pan dulce.
And the smells of copalli
Today is one of the days of tracing
the remnants of colonized beings stashed away under masks of “culture”
The sacred survives in the secrets.
My anger bubbles up to my throat at the attempt to erase again.
You cannot have this too.
”Our culture is not your costume. Our culture is not your commodity. Our culture is not yours.”
The old path that never ages.
The divine essences that never left.
So we welcome them and tell the tourists to stay away.
Because we will not be erased again.
gamechangershow
izzy806
