 Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. You know who you are. Keep your hands and languages where we can see them, and state your nationality loudly please so that we all can hear it. Can you spell where your parents are from using only American letters? Can you regurgitate your original birth certificate with the raised seal? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. If you cannot do this, then please tell us what was your mother's maiden name before the colonizers baptized her. Do you know the current location of any of the remains of your ancestors that we beheaded, specifically the heads? Have you ever left flowers or explosives anywhere along the border where a brown man or woman was lynched? How many family members do you have in your pocket right now? Do you have anything in your blood that you would like to declare? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. Are you able to provide us with any of your family members, specifically children, as collateral in case you decide to leave the state? Can you lay your trauma on the table please and keep it separate from any tear that your familia may have packed for you? Were any of your bags packed by any ghosts that are not related to you? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. Are you a monolinguist or a bilingualist? If you're a monolinguist, keep your tongue where we can see it. If you're a bilingualist, answer the following questions clearly. Have you ever used your second language in an act of violence? Have you ever used your second language to help someone understand something that we did not want them to understand? Does speaking English hurt when you swallow? Do you consider Spanish a colonized tongue even on Sundays? Please provide an address for two locations within the borders of these disunited states where you have lived and where the majority of the swear words were spoken in English. Would you consider shortening or even changing your history so that it's easier for Americans to pronounce it? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. Have you ever driven anywhere with the bones of a conquistador in your trunk? You have. Are you able to provide us with a photo of one of your ancestors in the process of committing a foreign act? Do you dream in English more than three times a week? Do you have any other languages stashed under your tongue? Does your mispronouncing of English words follow immediate and sincere shame? Have you ever worked as a stereotype before? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. Are there any bones out there not related to you that will speak up on your behalf? Can you provide us with receipts for every time that you have been called wetback, spic, beanier, illegal? Do you see these comments more as insults or more as acts of patriotism? Have you ever been vaccinated in case someone bleeds on you in a foreign language? Can you translate the lines of the national anthem? Can you avoid reading in between the lines of the Pledge of Allegiance? Are you able to sincerely cry at some point on the 4th of July? Brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. How long did it take your father or mother to walk here? Do you know if they smoked any miracles while they walked? Do you know if they brought any other people with them? Do you need an interpreter for anything that I have just said? Would you like to talk to someone who you cannot relate at all to about any of these questions? And finally, brown skin citizens of estos estados jodidos. Let me ask you, would you consider your survival here an act of aggression against the safety of this dis-United States borders? Or put another way, is the fact that you and your brown culture not dead yet despite everything that we have done to you so far, something that should concern us? Keep your language in your hands where we can see them and wait here while we evaluate your answers. So, a lot of times as a Chicanx person, my memorias, our memorias, our history is hidden from us. You know, like when you think about a lot of the descriptions of what we call the European invasion, some people call it the conquest. When you think about that, a lot of the descriptions are from the people who conquer this, right? So we're getting this history but it's still a colonized history. So a lot of times what we do is we look inside ourselves for our history and it's there. I had a Lakota brother on mushrooms, I was the one on mushrooms on him. But one time he described it to me and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he described it as a medicine of the mole, you know, which basically means no matter how deep your cultura is in the ground, it still comes up, you know, when we look inside ourselves. So this is what I find coming up when I think about Tenochtitlan, which if any of you don't know is the Mexica city that the Aztecas built in the middle of the lake, that the conquistadors came and dot-com'd and did their thing to, you know. So this is called Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. Mexica city seen with my own culturas ojos. Inside of us you still illuminate under this quinto sol. Inside of us you still shimmer with la luz de la luna across time and space, across an increíble distancia. Over 500 years later you are still inside each of us. Remembered by being passed along through our ancestors' memodias and dream recollections and not by the lying, guilty history written on crumbling papel by the colonizers. Tenochtitlan and Technicolor shimmers of azul y rojo on your walls. Dream tones, god colors, plumas of copal rising all the way down their space and back down deep into the fifth direction. Inside of us you still exist, unconquered, majestic. We remember you before the crucified billboards, before the baptisms and beheadings, before the Franciscan friars and their secret psychedelic or midnight mass that they would never let the Mexica attend. We remember you and we wander through you holding giant bouquets of amarillo and naranjada colored flores and we hold them up to give the sagrado Espíritus a place to rest in the past, present and future. Tenochtitlan and Technicolor, you are here before the white devils appeared and started immediately to mispronounce our reality, started calling themselves angels, gods, saviors, bringers of culture. We knew what we were saying when we called them devils. We said devils and we meant it, Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. Before the comets flew across the cielo, weeping fuego for you, before Lake Teshcoco bubbled and boiled warnings, before the ash-gray hair on with a mirror on its head was caught and reflected what was to come, warning us that you, beloved city, was going to be evicted from your own self. Foundation gone. Thirty days' notice to vacate this reality. An eviction notice from a Catholic European god, an absentee landlord of the highest order, Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. Even though we are baptized not to, we still remember you. We still remember your temples to Huitzliopochtli. We can remember looking upon Kotlakyu before she was Tonatsin, before she was Mary, before she was who she really was, Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. We will always remember you before the diseases that killed us quicker than any angry, crucified god or mispronounced prophecy ever would. We will always mourn and yearn to see you, Sacred City. The pain we cause today is from wounds that we received, that bled on your stones, wounds that reverberate into the past, present and future. Nowadays, we create you every day. We do this because we have to. We feel your colores with our eyes closed. We see your pyramids and temples rise up out from inside of us. Your buildings silhouette splash onto our view of 24th Street. It shapes today's Quintosol horoscopes of what will become of us. Tenochtitlan and Technicolor. Aquí, in occupied Aslan, on certain days, I have woken from mis sueños, looked out the window, and there you were just across the water. But then just like that, you disappear. And I found myself looking at the skyline of San Francisco. The Polaroid pictures that the conquistadors took blocked the view, the genocidal greeting cards and colonized holiday decorations blocked the view. White man's electricity blocks the view. The knock-knock jokes that the missionaries first told us blocked the view. They actually believed that they could hide their lust for gold and call it God-approved progress. And that a few drops of well-placed holy water would be all that it would take to forget about you. Beautiful city. But no matter how much they have spun us around, we will always find and create you. You were a geographic location, but you're also a Mexica state of mind. A metropolis that housed our gods, our truths, our science. How could we ever forget that? How could we forget that your ruins, your ruins were not even respectfully left to crumble? But instead they were left above ground like the violated dead to be used for the beginnings of New Spain. And that name still brings pain and terremotos to el monstruo, as they refer to you today. El monstruo. You rumble. You shudder in your new concrete form. You still ache to be what you were, what you are inside of us, and what we remember you to be. Your stones are in our corazones forever. De no chitlan en tecnic color. Gracias.