pigs and people

we have been here for thirty years. i mean in this apartment. thirty years. that means now my mom has been in the bronx longer than she lived in ecuador. in the past thirty years the green textured walls and giant checkerboard floors and muggy hallways have witnessed so many violent deaths that sometimes i think it's desensitized. or maybe i just feel desensitized. or i pretend. last week i came home for dinner with my folks and the block was surrounded by cop TRUCKS. hundreds of pigs in riot gear up and down the street and avenue. riot gear, huge automatic guns. mothers waiting to find out whether or not their kids had been shot or would come out in cuffs. rage.

sometimes all i have is rage and panic. i got fucked with. seems the police like to mess with tiny little brown slightly andro fags. have you ever had a gun held to your chest? this was not my first time, and it was enraging. i play real mellow. really collected. i want to bust out, i want to scream and scream and make some silence and stillness happen. it doesn't. i leave alive. i leave.

it's hard to move on because we are so highly patrolled and militarized here. i think twice about talking. about anything. about working. about going outside. i force myself out of it. i have a giant panic episode. then i go about my business. as usual? i realized i can't let fear stop me from living and surviving. i'm not all about talking about this need for change ideologically anymore. it's too real for me. it's too real for my communities. so many poor folks of color in this city/country/world.

on that note- i've been really jealous lately. jealous of the movement. i cannot afford to be part of the movement. that pisses me off to no end. can you believe it?! i am brown, poor, queer, i need to/ want to be at the forefront. i can't. i am child of immigrants/can't go home 'cause i won't be able to afford that for another couple of years. it's been a lot more than a couple of years. i am not considered part of solidarity building because i can't make months-long pilgrimages to learn about struggles in latin-america. raw. that's raw because what that really means is that i can't see my family. it means i know what's going on, i know about imperialism, i experience it in the rifting of my family, the struggles in my communities here, in immigration patterns, in starving aunts and uncles, in the way i learn to measure success, in the ways we build solidarity here [i.e. how i love you/you love me, i hate you/you hate me], how we acknowledge it. this is not considered part of the movement. maybe if i got some more credentials? or stopped making art and trying to make ends meet? maybe....