(Come back alive.) Foreign and familiar, there is sadness in his eyes when he looks in the mirror. There are no gods to save such a beast of burden, such a half human. A hybrid. Nor does he care for their propaganda. (Sometimes the things you see in the shadows are more than just shadows.) Instead, his sadness sighs before him because he knows so little of his ancestors, of the past that cultivated him. He is from somewhere else. (Come back, alive.) He places his fingers on the craters of his face; Searches for footprints left behind by his great and not-so-great grandparents. The Iberian, the Brit, the Italian, who took to the seas for promise of riches in the Americas. The Africans from a continent impaled and gutted by the very same men who searched for El Dorado’s gold. And the Amerindian women whose legs were forced open, because with “savages,” when the holy book did not civilize, every kind of purifying means was justified. His beard bites at his fingers, as if walking on a sheet of nails. He’s careful to not apply too much pressure. He fears what he will discover in his blood if pricked and the scars reopen. Hunched, his Emberá Katío eyes wander across the map of his face, seeking lost tribes. (Come back alive.)

Assimilation under duress is assassination ... a slow-burn incineration ... a long-game genocide. We fold our tongues backwards like gymnasts on balance beams and bend our spines as if on mattresses during Catholic exorcisms ... we code switch to survive on this stolen land now run by glorified, idolized, and eulogized tormentors and thieves ... but in that masking, our necks are on the blade of the Guillotine ... awaiting decapitation ... an erasure of so-called “worthless savage lives” ... another edict of expulsion erected like the Alhambra Decree ... coerced to deny our nuclear Selves and the most remote islands of our hearts. A most senseless post-Columbian colonial beheading. Those of us socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchies of power — from the apex of those inherited class and caste peaks — are gripped then intimidated by the consequential claws of dominant cultures and systems that proclaim that we are not right ... that we are not worthy the way we are ... that we are preferred, accepted, and can only belong if, and only if, we are not us. But it is their fragile and insecure egos that stand in the way of being able to regard us as fully human, if human at all. No matter the extent of our coerced assimilation, it will never be enough until they can see beyond the reflections of their collective narcissism ... until they stop fawning over themselves ... until they treat their sickness ... and disease-ridden they are if they can only stand tall if they force their knees on our necks until we either submit or cannot breathe. Until then, we are an affront to their exaggerated sense of self-importance. Their sense of entitlement requires constant, excessive admiration just like the imaginary friends they worship. They bewitch themselves to think they are gods and goddesses, and when miracles they cannot make, they force themselves on others, like you and me, so they can at least feel like demi-gods. To them, we are useful, only ... and can be of better use to them if we can approximate their supposed eminent image and worship their tenets as well as their t e n t a c l e s. To them, if our “ancestral potions and spells” cannot turn rivers into liquid gold, then they will regard us as mere witches ... burned at the stake for the sake of a 21st-century Crusade ... a continued limpieza de sangre, a blood-letting ... just another social cleansing Inquisition. But we need no therapeutic phlebotomy. We need no expulsion nor exorcism. I am done bending my spi- ne and folding my ton- gue for your comfort. If I can learn your entire language, you can make the effort to pronounce one word: my name. Trust me, it won’t burn.

Where the neighbor’s pet monkey can still be found in the tree picking mangoes… where the parrot whistles at beautiful women… on the hill, where the playground now rests, we used to throw rocks at the cars and buses passing by. We took refuge behind a wall and fence separating them from us. This is how we learned of every car manufacturer in Colombia, Byron and me. Renaults were our favorites, mostly because both our families had one—you know, the old ones, first models—and because we thought they were Colombian cars. (We did not know they were French.) Each one was worth five points because we thought it was homegrown. Foreign cars were only one point but could be worth five if the rocks caused the foreign car to swerve or crash or malfunction or even get the driver to stop on the side and look for the maldito throwing them. If he flicked us off, well, that was worth ten points no matter the car’s nationality. But this did not happen too often, and though we made it part of our point system, and though we told one another we were aiming for the windshield on the driver’s side, we often just aimed for the roofs or trunks to startle the passengers instead of trying to hurt them. We were very accurate and even thought we should move to Venezuela or the Dominican Republic, where béisbol was more popular than fútbol, but decided against it not because we were only seven and were under the whims of our parents, but because we did not want to betray our homeland. And so, one day, we decided against throwing rocks at Renaults. We thought ourselves defenders of Colombia… guerrillas hiding in the jungles… and it was our responsibility to run out all imperialists from our country. They were taking our jobs, our resources, marrying our sisters, taking them from our homes, and leaving them with babies and divorces (even though they were not recognized by the Church). Then, another day, I think it was the day when everyone in our Vista Alegre neighborhood found out I had a crush on Catalina (she was a year older and, unfortunately, had the same name as my sister), and they teased me for it … and it was that day that Byron told me that some branches from our family trees, too, were once foreigners from Spain, hence our surnames, and that these conquistadores took the land from indigenous nations—our erased and forgotten great-grandparents—and that these settler colonialists kidnapped, took hostage, and enslaved people from Africa—our erased and forgotten great-grandparents, also—en el nombre de España, Dios, y El Dorado. This forced us to stop throwing rocks and question our manifesto. We no longer knew who was responsible, who was to blame, who to fight for, who to fight against. We felt badly … ashamed … wanted to remove our skins … wanted to paint ourselves darker, tan a bit more so we would not feel European … so we would feel more West African … so we would feel more Tairona, more Muisca, more Emberá, or any of the tribes from the Aburrá Valley. We changed our surnames that day. I became alias ‘jeɗako’ and Byron ‘ɓeda’and stopped chasing girls around Vista Alegre who would not disengage from their Spanish names, but it became difficult (not gonna lie) to find a girlfriend, so we made it okay to chase girls named Cristina, Marilín, and Isabel, only—our new constitution was constantly being amended—and we were no longer guerrillas but revolutionaries. We wanted to bring things back to the way things were. We drank mate de coca like our indigenous ancestors. We decided not to use the wheel or even create any art that would appeal to Europeans, like the Kogi tribe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Santa Marta. We even tried to communicate telepathically with one another—again, like the Kogi—and stopped writing things down. We failed our courses that Autumn, and simply told stories about our souls and how I used to be a brave warrior who lost his life fighting off Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada y Rivera and his men as they searched for El Dorado… and ‘ɓeda’ said he could have sworn he was a woman whose husband died in battle… and we pretended that we used to have been married and that I was that husband… and we put our arms around each other reminiscing of the good old days before the conquistadores came… but our fathers… our fathers called us maricas and homos and forbade us to put our arms around one another again. It was that year that my parents decided to take my sister and me away. To the North. The other Ámerica. For years, I thought it was because our fathers did not want us to be gay together, ‘ɓeda’ and me, but now I know it was because they did not want us to throw any more rocks at cars and buses. I have not been back home since, but I still throw rocks every now and again… and that monkey, I am told still picks mangoes… and the parrot from Vista Alegre still whistles at Catalina… and ‘ɓeda’ writes to me to tell me that 30 years on, he still has not found another friend, like me, who would change their surname for him… and I have never looked at my skin in the same way again. Now, I now rarely look into broken mirrors—they remind me too much of my ancestors, and I wish to remain dismembered. A phantom limb, untethered.

Luisa's Records In a small Colombian town, during the first week of La Violencia, women sang with their hearts, while men sang for power. Simón’s mother sang as she played the piano in their living room. Luisa was the first feminine voice he had ever heard. Simón would sneak in wearing socks instead of shoes, as she played with her eyes closed, and he would dance. His socks: worn down on the balls of his feet. He would stretch to the roof to be taller than he really was, as if a puppeteer pulled the strings from above and Simón was a marionette. Mother and son would listen to Billie and Ella records and drown them out with their own voices. The two would pretend they were on a smoke-filled stage in Chicago, Little Havana, or Cartagena—he on the piano and she in a red dress in front of the microphone. Senator Francisco, Simón’s father, never approved. Instead, the senator would shut himself away in his study and listen to his radio, which reported on the country’s first unplanned national revolution sparked by spontaneous combustion. Simón did not like the sounds of his father’s music, so he stuck with his Luisa, instead. Then, one night, as mother and child sang along to “Mack the Knife,” Simón’s voice cracked. By the end of the song he began to cry. Luisa took him into her arms as gently as she would place the needle on the record and did not bother to ask what was wrong. She simply knew her boy was afraid of losing his heart if he could no longer sing like a woman. He did not want to sing like his father. * * * Luisa’s Books Puberty drafted Simón amidst the backdrop of a bellicose era, which seemed to awaken his father’s already inherent vicious cruelty. In its most contained form, the senator would scold Simón for reading at the dinner table. Francisco’s cousin—a doctor trained in ancient indigenous medicinal ways—told him one could go blind if one read during meals. Though a logical man—an assumption deduced by visitors once forced into submission during friendly games of chess—, Simón always knew when his father took leaps of faith. Once the senator’s unfounded assertions were questioned, he would never provide a response, but, rather, punish Simón through the multi-colored layers of his temper. The blood vessels in Francisco’s left eye would grow like the veins in a worker’s hands and forearms while deep inside the Zipaquirá mines that ferreted through the intestines of the Andean foothills. Francisco’s right eye would sit yellow, holding its breath, counting to ten. Then, the senator’s face would pull away the curtain of his lips to reveal an angry army of twenty-seven soldiers, deprived of cigarettes and sex, waiting to release the red anaconda hiding behind the calcified cage. Through the senator’s lost front tooth, Simón could see the thirst and hunger of the beast—already eating itself for survival’s sake. Regardless of which resentful wave would strike during dinner hour, the result was the same: an anger that would break down levies built by the religious relics of Simón’s disappeared mother; an anger that would flood the house with battles between black caiman and untrained gladiator. The sweat during the ordeal would wash Francisco’s coal-covered face, bathing Simón in dusty tears of coerced remorse and repentance. Such was life in most households where the father resented both the child’s and his own birth. The accumulated dirty dishes and unwashed floors were a constant reminder of a wasted life of shortcomings—defects that left charcoal shadows and broken mirrors wherever the senator walked. Francisco’s vulnerable failings were exemplified by the disappearance of his wife, which he believed was orchestrated by local guerrillas who called for political representation, a fairer distribution of wealth, land, the country’s resources, and for the armed forces and paramilitaries to stop the extrajudicial killings of the country’s campesinos. “They’ll get my land over my dead body!” Francisco transferred his feelings of vengeance to the neighborhood parrot, whose beheading by machete the senator ordered for daily reminding him of the truth: that those to blame for his wife’s absence were still at large. “Help. Luisa. Help. Luisa. Help Luisa! Help Luisa!” He honored her in a way only men of his ilk can express love: with the weapon of war. Simón would lock himself in the bathroom by moving his mother’s bookcase in front of the door so Francisco’s barbaric flood could not reach him with its claws. It was then Simón wondered, if he missed Luisa more so because he loved her, or because he was never abused when she was around. The senator scolded Simón for reading. The act reminded Francisco of her. Simón would hide in the bathtub, and he would fill it with books and records where he would dive in looking for his mother.

This is I, questioning existence, twenty-two years, fifty-nine days, and twenty-one hours on the road… hitchhiking back to my birth. Walking backwards into the future facing the past, reading back the words of my autobiography, looking for any clue that may lead me to the womb of my conception… the land that birthed me: Colombia. I retrace my steps and here I am, back to Chapter 1, on the mountain tops of Andes, a day away from meeting my mother. For tomorrow I enter the town of my birth, or at least that is what I am told, for I do not remember being born, but I do remember being alive. If all I have is memory, then how do I know I truly exist? For my existence is then taken from the collective thoughts and words of others. I rely on them for my existence… for my worth. Tomorrow I enter the town of my birth, and when I get there my pilgrimage will not end, but finally commence. I hope I am recognized, for I know I must have changed some in the process of aging, or at least that is what I am told… For when I grow old and gray I never want to be that guy who sits in his rocking chair, on his porch, smoking cigars, trying to fog up reality, regretting his past because he didn’t care enough to try and find… his essence. So when I finally enter the town of my birth, I will at least know that I tried. When I finally enter the town of my birth, I will be that guy standing at the edge of the mountain top of Medellín – the town I am told saw me before I was able to see it – and it will see me again, but this time I will be regarding it, hoping that in its old age it will remember me. And there I’ll be, hollering to my mother for the first time words I’ve wanted to say, words I’ve wished to say, and words that I have needed to say since I can remember: “Beginning, oh sweet, mothering beginning, I never thought I would meet you... again.”