Straight up cambios

  Tupac Shakur mentions in rap lyrics that he sees no changes, straight up racist faces, and for a long time I agreed.  Now, with faith, I gotta say, I see straight up changes.  I can't say I lived a thug life. I can't say I have shared in the darkest struggles that humanity or poverty seems to provide.  I don't remember my barrios ever being hazardous, poor, or scary.  As I look back on my barrios from the outskirts, from a different cultural group, I notice that they are perceived as dangerous, poor, and, when the sun goes down, scary.  People are violent in the barrios where I came from, not so much to be bad asses, but to not be seen as weak.  I look on my barrios now and see a whole lotta changes.  I also hold the admission that history hints at plenty of things that appear to lack change.

  I know there are struggles unique to regions, ethnicities, and cultures that can get overwhelmingly discouraging, but what seems to be common is a desperate yearning for worth.  How desirable am I, are you, are we?  What can I gain without giving, aka "efficient"?  Wealthy, healthy, and obedient seem to be the preferred cultures.  These qualities have the highest rank in the realm of worth.  The perception that defines these quality's criteria are biased and even prejudice.  It has become apparent to me that race is a scapegoat, because when I stare into the abyss of discrimination, I see through spiritual eyes, and see that the root of it all is worried peoples trying to keep, find, or validate their worth.

  I think we have a hard time, sanctioning sadness, and it spans across cultures, because it depreciates desirability for most, causing a shrinkage in worth.  Grief seems to carry a stigma of illness.  I think the perception of sadness as a weakness causes people to avoid, fear, and suppress sadness.  I think we fear the lack of productivity and action that can come from being sad.  It makes sense to me that America prides itself on being fit, enduring, capable, and powerful, because there is so much cultural sadness that has been suppressed, avoided, and ignored.  I have found that dignity and integrity, aspects of a person's identity, are cultivated in sadness and cannot be fooled by appearances, but unfortunately the ego is easily fooled.

  There are too many cultures bringing their tired, sick, and huddled masses and aren't or haven't dealt with the grief of saying good bye to the rejecting, displacing, punishing, or deteriorating places that they left behind, or worse were taken from.  Likewise they are not able to have enough time and space to integrate a pride for both their losing culture and their newly adopted Culture's attitudes.  This grief is spread over generations.  Every lineage has a generation struggling with identity, the conquistador, colonist, refugee, slave, pioneer, immigrant, and the transient.

   I did at one time buy into Shakur's perspective that seemed to reflect no changes.  I bought into the idea that things won't change, until I couldn't ignore how they have.  I have my own perspectives that include the noticeable changes.  I look at New Mexico's prisons and see it filling with cholo's faces. I see that discrimination changes too.  Young boys once, over time and their development, rarely afforded an opportunity to taste America's graces, but often expected to know how to reach out with simple willpower.  These vatos locos, raised by parents who stem from a family tree rooted in a legacy of Spanish treasure hunters, then peregrinos, eventually becoming displaced villagers.  People who once upon a time were conquerors, now sit in concrete pens, conquered.  A culture caught by pioneering Americans resting in simplicity, and now dazzled by America's dream while bitterly denying the pain of not really being desired in its reality.

  I cannot yet describe being pulled by an ever growing number of identities, the least of them being American.  I am stuck between countries that never belonged to my ancestors, and yet I am tied to a land that feels like a mother.  I am critical of a country that a majority of people admire.  I am resistant among people hypocritically holding a mindset that understands Christianity but who thrive on lifestyles more fitting of something like capitalistianity.  I struggle with both myself.  I see changes, some fitting my idea of just and often confused by those changes that seem unfair.  I see the dignity in my parent's dilemmas and how they have changed and arrived at their identities.  All this has helped me change my idea of success.

I see that the worth my un-primped barrios carry, because mi jente, my people, are succumbing to the monetary and economic gravity of property values, putting price tags on eloquent bosque views, and corrales around pedestals revealing Sandia sunsets, selling out, figuratively and literally.  Many are continuing to suffer from the disease I like to call worth, including me.

  I am not the same, so I see changes.  The way I look has changed.  The way I see has changed.  The way I love has changed.  The perceptions that matter to me have changed.  I have changed the way I live.  At the same time I still have to live with how so much doesn't seem to change.