Dad,
In Santa Fe’s old town, we walked through stores decorated with burnt orange flagstone and fake
turquoise, and the city was adorned with a handmade stone church in the distance.
While we were resting in the city square under a young sapling, a man called out to you. He
asked you to respect this place for the bones buried under the cement streets.
He spoke to us and repeated all I knew to be true.
The horror of what they did here, the thousands they killed, all of it they wanted to leave buried
to make it easier to forgive and forget.
I nodded attentively as he spoke.
You did nothing.
As we left the square, you walked in the shadow of a cross, and breaking the tension between us,
you laughed, saying those people just want to feel heard; they just want attention.
Yet you said the scariest part was that the man had your father's voice.
Still, you didn’t listen to it.
You told me where your parents came from. You told me who they are.
You knew that you had the same blood as the man before us.
But the world convinced you it wasn’t good enough. And you only mention it now as a party
trick.
You let your blood from the Conquistadors walk on the same bones as those within you.
Yet you didn’t care.
You have blocked out the fact that you are a byproduct of colonization, the ugly sore living on
the bottom of the tongue of the history of our home. Forgetting, renaming, and redirecting
yourself to be a good American.
And that is what you have become.