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A Piece of the Cosmic Race

Omar Mejia

I am a product of two worlds.

One of triumph and one of despair.

The stump of my identity has long since been chopped away.

And while I may not know whose hand swung the axe,

I do know that, what they now seek

Is to rip the roots of my culture from the soil of my soul.

Who am I?

I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.

I’ve been caught on a balancing beam in which both sides of myself look to outweigh the other.

Ultimately the struggle between the two caused me to fall.

Now I scramble to pick of the pieces of who I am.

Or at least who I believe to be.

The Spanish—my people—came to the New World.

Their eyes saw the Indigenous—my people.

And from there, my people conquered my people.

I was both tyrant and slave.

I was both the rapist and the raped.

Soy Mestizo.

The oppressor and the oppressed made the blood that composes I.

In the end, the blood of the oppressed defined who I am in the eyes of America.

At the same time, the oppressor’s conquest has separated me from those of my kin.

My native tongue is English,

The language of the White colonizers.

The same colonizers who murdered the culture out of the Indigenous tribes up North.

Yet I am ridiculed by my people, even those many shades browner than me,

For not speaking Spanish,

The language of the White colonizers.

The same colonizers who raped the culture out of the Indigenous folk down South.

I am my history, and my history is I. We are one of the same.

My history is the Mestizo mix of New Spain. I am a race of two races.

My history is the fall of New Spain. I am the independence of Mexico.

My history is the border dispute of Texas. I am the Mexican-American War.

My history is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I am Mexico’s loss of over half its land.

It's one thing to rip someone from their home.

It’s another thing to rip someone’s home from them,

Leaving them physically in the same spot

Yet with the agony of being an other to the land they know best.

You don’t kill a people by merely murdering them.

You kill a people by alienating them from their culture, their togetherness, their home, their hope.

I roam the Mexican remnants of modern-day America seeking guidance.

Los Pachucos were meant to be my people’s self-actualization,

Our step into the light of a newly crafted identity.

We knew we were neither American nor Mexican.

Ni de aquí, ni de allá.

We were something in between.

Somos Chicano.

We had no wings to fly from the ghetto,

No cape to blast off into the air.

So we compromised with the heavy flaps of our zoot suits.

Although our cultura weighed us down.

It was better to dance with our despair than let it crowd the stage.

The incapability of a Mestizo to be seen as American thrives to this day.

No matter how culturally Americanized,

A Chicano’s brown skin and Spanish last name forever banish him as just another Mexican.

And in the face of Mexicans, a Chicano is shunned all the same,

For Mexican-ness,

No matter how maintained abroad,

Could never make up for a Chicano’s birthplace being of the gringos.

Chicanos have been shunned away by both sides of the border.

Pachuquismo was a defiance our disownment.

Our attempt to balance on the border.

White servicemen rioted across Southern California,

Beating us to a pulp,

Physically tearing our garments,

Our culture,

Off our bodies.

Those same White servicemen who, in the Second World War, fought for democracy abroad,

did not recognize my people as worthy of America

The same land they stole from my ancestors.

Twice.

First from the Indigenous.

Second from the Mexicans.

It took over five years for Zoot Suits to birth in Southern California.

It took only five days for the Anglos to purge it out the state.

Soy Chicano,

The product of a generation of Mexicans involuntarily Americanized.

I am as much a political ideology as I am an ethnicity.

My heritage is that of a cultural revolution.

And still,

I must recognize the harsh present.

The struggle for the identity of my in-between people fell from the public eye.

An agent for social change must not merely fight for justice.

An agent for social change must also educate the youth why they should fight too.

Movements grow and they shine,

But without maintenance, people will regress.

Even the Chicano Movement faded into obscurity.

I’ve reborn so many times I sometimes feel I’ve lost my essence.

American or Mexican, White or Brown.

Still, I’ll persist.

My hair slicked back with tres flores,

My pants sharply creased,

Virgin Mary on my neck,

My custom cruisin’.

I could take off and fly away with how these hydraulics got me touchin’ the sky.

It’s only when I hit the ground,

When my low low crashes back to Earth,

And the streets of Whittier escape my sight,

Do I remember I’m the last of my kind.

I am a product of two worlds.

One of triumph and one of despair.

The stump of my identity has long since been chopped away.

And while I may not know whose hand swung the axe,

I do know that, what they now seek

Is to rip the roots of my culture from the soil of my soul.

Who am I?

I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.

I’ve been caught on a balancing beam in which both sides of myself look to outweigh the other.

Ultimately the struggle between the two caused me to fall.

Now I scramble to pick of the pieces of who I am.

Or at least who I believe to be.

The Spanish—my people—came to the New World.

Their eyes saw the Indigenous—my people.

And from there, my people conquered my people.

I was both tyrant and slave.

I was both the rapist and the raped.

Soy Mestizo.

The oppressor and the oppressed made the blood that composes I.

In the end, the blood of the oppressed defined who I am in the eyes of America.

At the same time, the oppressor’s conquest has separated me from those of my kin.

My native tongue is English,

The language of the White colonizers.

The same colonizers who murdered the culture out of the Indigenous tribes up North.

Yet I am ridiculed by my people, even those many shades browner than me,

For not speaking Spanish,

The language of the White colonizers.

The same colonizers who raped the culture out of the Indigenous folk down South.

I am my history, and my history is I. We are one of the same.

My history is the Mestizo mix of New Spain. I am a race of two races.

My history is the fall of New Spain. I am the independence of Mexico.

My history is the border dispute of Texas. I am the Mexican-American War.

My history is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I am Mexico’s loss of over half its land.

It's one thing to rip someone from their home.

It’s another thing to rip someone’s home from them,

Leaving them physically in the same spot

Yet with the agony of being an other to the land they know best.

You don’t kill a people by merely murdering them.

You kill a people by alienating them from their culture, their togetherness, their home, their hope.

I roam the Mexican remnants of modern-day America seeking guidance.

Los Pachucos were meant to be my people’s self-actualization,

Our step into the light of a newly crafted identity.

We knew we were neither American nor Mexican.

Ni de aquí, ni de allá.

We were something in between.

Somos Chicano.

We had no wings to fly from the ghetto,

No cape to blast off into the air.

So we compromised with the heavy flaps of our zoot suits.

Although our cultura weighed us down.

It was better to dance with our despair than let it crowd the stage.

The incapability of a Mestizo to be seen as American thrives to this day.

No matter how culturally Americanized,

A Chicano’s brown skin and Spanish last name forever banish him as just another Mexican.

And in the face of Mexicans, a Chicano is shunned all the same,

For Mexican-ness,

No matter how maintained abroad,

Could never make up for a Chicano’s birthplace being of the gringos.

Chicanos have been shunned away by both sides of the border.

Pachuquismo was a defiance our disownment.

Our attempt to balance on the border.

White servicemen rioted across Southern California,

Beating us to a pulp,

Physically tearing our garments,

Our culture,

Off our bodies.

Those same White servicemen who, in the Second World War, fought for democracy abroad,

did not recognize my people as worthy of America

The same land they stole from my ancestors.

Twice.

First from the Indigenous.

Second from the Mexicans.

It took over five years for Zoot Suits to birth in Southern California.

It took only five days for the Anglos to purge it out the state.

Soy Chicano,

The product of a generation of Mexicans involuntarily Americanized.

I am as much a political ideology as I am an ethnicity.

My heritage is that of a cultural revolution.

And still,

I must recognize the harsh present.

The struggle for the identity of my in-between people fell from the public eye.

An agent for social change must not merely fight for justice.

An agent for social change must also educate the youth why they should fight too.

Movements grow and they shine,

But without maintenance, people will regress.

Even the Chicano Movement faded into obscurity.

I’ve reborn so many times I sometimes feel I’ve lost my essence.

American or Mexican, White or Brown.

Still, I’ll persist.

My hair slicked back with tres flores,

My pants sharply creased,

Virgin Mary on my neck,

My custom cruisin’.

I could take off and fly away with how these hydraulics got me touchin’ the sky.

It’s only when I hit the ground,

When my low low crashes back to Earth,

And the streets of Whittier escape my sight,

Do I remember I’m the last of my kind.

Omar Mejia is a first-generation college student, freshman double major in Journalism and Non-Governmental Organizations & Social Change. Omar is from Oakland, California. After having his life transformed through civic engagement in his sophomore year of high school, he began community organizing in the local, state, and national communities. Omar is committed to keeping a foot in the community as he positions himself for a career as a political journalist. Omar has previously been published in the USC Palaver Arts Magazine.