Juan

My white name.

One by one, we were pulled,

Goaded into big houses,

And the doors were locked shut.

My brother, just a baby, cries.

The woman who calls me Juan

Tells Maria to shut her kid up.

My mother is not named Maria.

We look at two sticks,

Crossed with a man in the center,

pinned by nails in his hands.

Forlorn, with twigs on his head,

The women call him my savior,

But I have just been captured.

At times, I feel like him.

They call it escuela

And make us read the ink

That blots our papers.

We do our English names.

My sister is Teresa,

My brother is Carlos.

I am Juan, but I do not feel like Juan.

My mother works hard,

So hard blisters erupt on her hands

And her body never moves without cracking.

If my father were here,

He'd say not to protest,

But he died trying to protect us.

He failed, and now we all suffer.

The village has cone down with something.

My mother coughs blood,

My brothers' noses run incessantly.

Shaman tries to heal them

But receives lashes to his back

And a white man takes over

They die a few weeks apart.

Now, alone with Teresa,

I begin to hate my new role

The mask I put on every day.

But the whites are pleased.

To them, I make good progress.

To them, I am a success.

They ship me off to a place called Espana.

Espana is dirty with filthy white people.

The land is gray and hard.

The sky is black with soot.

They do not appreciate their animals;

They raise and eat them for fun

And play games with their buffalo

I cannot respect them and never will.

Yet, I am paraded for the people

Who sit in their seats

Wearing crowns of gold like the savior.

They nod and smile at me

The way my brother and I smiled at a kill.

I am just flesh to them.

I cannot wait to go home.

But, I've never returned.

I was a good man so they married me.

I was a good husband so she swelled.

My children are nothing like me.

They wear Spanish clothes

And they speak in the tongue of my captors.

One day, I will bring them home.

One day, they will breathe my clean air.

One day, they will eat the sweet fruit

And take the rite of passage into adulthood.

One day, they will see their grandmother

Who the whites threw in a shoddy ditch

And told us that is the way.

One day, I will re-educate them.