Conflicting Changes - Part 3

Part 2

The darker aspects of my culture are simply expressions of communal pain.  Without diving into excuses or reasons for class structures in My America.  My America being the  America in my head.  I have to see how inferior or maybe less desirable my peoples are.  I had to accept early on that beans and chili were considered poor foods. I had to accept that drug dealers weren't safe, tattoos were shame filled, and when you couldn't afford rod iron for windows a piece of wood would keep robbers out.  I sadly write that the community I was raised in beat the shit out of itself.

I have to come to terms with the self hatred.  In this context the self is our neighborhoods, our homes, and our streets.  To say it in another way we would rob ourselves.  This isn't absolute and it was a proportion that does NOT reflect the common home in my barrios.  And it is a measurable toxicity.  Looking back it seems really risky for people in my communities to invest in anything nice.  It meant taking the risk that it would eventually be stolen.  The dark markets were significant.  We often had things stolen.  

For my sanity I have to remind myself and you the reader that this toxicity does not define us or give validity to stereotypes.  It gives fodder for the convenient ways My America rationalizes its laws to alienate me.  It uses this toxicity to build a case against trusting me.  It leverages this toxicity to paint a fearful picture of who I possibly can be.  And it is not who I entirely am.  It is who I am when I am wounded, desperate, and surviving. 

I am numb when I think about how far behind I was intellectually.  My intelligence by My American standard was measured by how many "A's" I could put on the little card I took home to my mother.  I did not realize that what was important to discover wouldn't be integrated into my barrios. Despite being near nuclear minds and physicists with leading ideas, we were valued more for our barren land and maybe expendable lives.  I wasn't asked to experiment or adventure into sophisticated concepts or technologies.  I wasn't invited to use my imagination to the extents that other classes of people were.  I was taught to compete and at its worst, fight.  I was not being taught to learn, instead I was being groomed by the vocation monster.  The vocation monster was the human resource machine that My America created to enrich itself.  The vocation monster continues to feed on Latin lives, seeing the people with my skin tone and in my barrios mostly as labor. We simply are Consumable.

And the conflicting darkness in this is believing that I wasn't designed to excel and lead.  My barrios were filled with laborers who might have let their curiosity dry out.  The fatigue of the mundane and remedial drove my communities to be subservient.  The darker side of the Hispanic is in its alignment with an Anglo authority that still to this day resents sharing authority with Latinos.  This submissiveness leads towards a self policing of the toxic kind. The darker side of the my barrios is the division between the Hispanic and the Chicano.  We divided ourselves and added a handicap to our self protection from the disease of colonization.  Like scar tissue, on our brown faces.

Part 4