Chusma. It’s a great Spanish word that means rabble, common. Chusma can be a look, or an attitude. It can be bad manners, or inappropriate clothing. My family, lacking in all manner of finances, flung the word around accusatorily and with abandon. We were not chusma. Perhaps we were snobs.

If you were kneaded from the same masa as me / One of us may not make it out of our city alive /

Durante años solo pude escribir / sobre los bosques ahumados de América— / el modo en que el aire te envuelve como una mala noticia. /

Mami didn’t say te amo or lo siento. / Just said vete de mi casa / a week later— / like queerness was a crime, / and your survival, an inconvenience. /

I wait for that generational skill to make itself known. The unfiltered ferocity to unleash itself from deep within me. As my mother would have done.

I remember the day my mother suggested / I find a white man to marry /

El Varayoc fija y pronuncia la mirada, entonces lo ve, pero también la ve. Al sombrero, pero también a ella. Al fin comprende lo que ha intentado decirle el arquitecto. Sabe que será difícil ir hasta allá. Los ve distantes tanto como la luna o como los caracteres del castellano que alguna vez rechazó. A ella la ve aprisionada en un marco cuadrado. A sus pies puede leerse: «Mujer del Varayoc».

Was always stuck inside of some mouth, / or rather an intricate language / or another danza. /