From Sophie Cruz’s crayon-scrawled letter to the pope, to Jesus “Chuy” Huerta’s memory—his vigil march forged by injustice and tear gas—to the unsung women of color on this campus that sin ningua queja hold it down, to my primos luchando para estudiar en este país, to the newly born “anchor babies,” to the undocumented workers still unpaid to renovate the Marriot hotel downtown, to my Black herman@s still without sanctuary, to the obituaries and pantheons littering my tongue, yo dedico estas palabras a tí…
Code-switching is as natural for me as a heartbeat, so let me first be perfectly clear: this university sterilizes my difference for the sake taste of (white) consumption. I parenthesize whiteness because such is the grammar of privilege, how it bleeds into every syntax of life. As James Baldwin, a month after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, described our grooming: one goes through “a kind of mill.” Slowly eroding any critical sense of self, I, after four years of its caustic sanitizing, am left to pick up traces of myself. All that’s left is a “safe” sameness, one constantly hailed to approve of how “authentic” Mexican food is, to sit at countless diversity panels, always performing a pre-packaged Other. From the moment I set foot on this campus, I am tempted to surrender everything I recognize as home for the false idol that is outperforming whiteness.
I’m not represented but re-presented.
Porque aquí, as a “cultural” leader, I am reduced to the Chipotle politics of organizing salsa dance lessons, to serve as a paisa Rosetta Stone, an “articulate” brown token waged in the Sisyphean summit to be legible under your rubric of “inclusivity” and “equity,” a progressive droll rapidly dissolving within my everyday experience. In this ivory plantation, I am janitor to colorblind mess halls. For when white supremacy grew drunk under its own upbringing, vomited racist chants, wore my beautiful heritage as cheap polyester at parties and “accidentally” hung nooses, I mopped up the mess, forced to make sense of the senseless. Immediately, the university grew concerned for its safety. But when I cried, I am the problem, a gag reflex stirring our beloved melting pot, a blemish on otherwise pristine classrooms, at best a teaching moment for the colorblind (more accurately, the socially deaf). This latest episode laid down the final mortar pressed against my lungs, forcing me to exhale: this system, in its 400 years of existence, never evolved a place for me.
Under this racist optic, our cultural spaces serve primarily not as pride but as survival.
For what does community mean when its people identify with admissions checkboxes more than the spaces we tediously seek to create? What does community mean when half its student body is hidden at best and, at worst, deployed as institutional mechanism to trivialize our protest?
Y más bien, how is it that my people can build these walls, clean the dormitories, serve the food, literally set the stage, but the space itself is limited “because of construction?” Why is it that I, as someone here for four years, who barely came out of high school, am burdened to do your job of recruiting Latino students, but when I turn back and say, what’s in it for me, you say, “Oh I’m sorry, there’s just no room?” (Inevitably someone will cry out, but what about the Bryan Center office space, to which I’d reply, oh, you mean the janitor’s closet in between two toilets? Oh si, un mundo de diferencia)
There is a house in ruins, and we are its children on display. Lamentablemente, our people are treated like moving furniture, sentenced to build, set up and clean up spaces that rarely include us. As I doze off and on into self-care, I find mi pueblo shuffling garbage cans as I leave from Perkins at 4 a.m., only to re-appear greeting me at McDonalds, hollering, “Qué pasó licenicado!?” (What’s up lawyer?). Y me pregunto constántemente, como una mosca perforando el ruido blanco de la complacencia, quién soy yo? The perennial question emerges, how does the racial-ethnic body survive in captivity? What is its life-source when dissected from its social body?
Herein lies my mytho-historical consciousness, soaring across continents: from floating islands, to neglected barrios and ghettoes, to the amputations of academia. If Langston Hughes’ spoke of ancient, dusky rivers, I speak of El Rio Grande, of my father’s sweat, christening the border fence—that coyote ritual baptizing entry. He is an unlicensed doctor, each I.V. drop cleanses the barbed wire politics lodged inside my throat. He is a historian sin doctorado, for his heroism never appears in textbooks, at best smuggling footnotes in his huaraches, in costales de frijol. In the midst of clandestine racism, of slave ship inscriptions re-appearing in Yik Yak posts, I drink from these policed well-springs—to keep my sanity, to sanctify mi lucha: my mother persignándome before I leave for school, my father quitando su chaleqo coming from a graveyard shift, my tío’s stereo speakers drowning the whole block with grainy norteñas, the percussionist slabs of my abuelita tortillando oral traditions over passed-down stone grinders. All are poetics of a people, unos que retumban el corazón, as it slowly dies in these sanitized walls. Its music softly plays against a mosaic of memory, one that struggles to remember, as well as forget.
It is only with an undying love for la causa, to see our humanity in the charred churches of Birmingham, the neatly stacked rows of white crosses pilfering the Juarez Desert, it is only by entrenching ourselves in the endless theatres of human immiseration, that Sam Cooke’s change finally gon’ come. And so, my words are nothing more than a boundless affirmation of love for my people, as they come in all shades of anger.
It is only con un espíritu inquieto, a restless spirit, that we’ll stop embalming our bodies for racial taxidermists, a self-congratulatory, liberal gaze that pats its back at the expense of our bentones. Given the ceaseless invalidation of our reality, hay que tomar refugio en otra: that if there is a place for us at the table, it is because we carved it out, through the carpentry of protracted struggle.
Antonio López is a Trinity senior.
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