 It's called La Missione, 1968. When did I start living this dream? I guess since the beginning, down the street, hanging out tents with a hair net filtering the reception and perceptions of this glue-sniffing world of mine. Dizzy, I ended up surplus, but not knowing how to word it or truly feel it. I was born into it, moving from one apartment to the other, all around the neighborhood. We ended up in the projects in La Missione, where our hearts were, where our nest was, where three blocks away my grandmother ruled, where every neighbor was part of us all, and our mothers were gods. We understood nothing else. We didn't care much and we cared too much. We huddled or ganged up to protect our family, even from those that said, I love you. I grew up thinking I was invading my own space in this world. I couldn't stay still. I was afraid that I was doing something wrong just because I existed here in the city that gave me birth. San Francisco. One of my worst memories was hiding out in Berno Heights in a jungle of Fennel. I saw the city beyond the projects and I dreamt of white families and fathers that came home every day. I knew that my two older brothers were committing whatever crimes 10 and 12-year-olds can. I also knew I had to meet them on Folsom Street before nightfall. We all had to get home together because my mother would whip our asses if one of us was missing. And she would call everybody. It happened once. I was staring out the window on the bus when my family got off except me. I looked for them and they were not there. I looked out the window and didn't recognize the outside. I got off the bus. I knew I could find my way home because I was on Mission Street. Shit, she was going to spank me because I got lost. Two blocks later, though, I met my brothers who were looking for me. They each punched me on my shoulder once and then hugged me and took me home. In La Mission, we were also part of an assaulted black community. We fought and feared so much in those days. The black kids and us doing fist and friendship. Then going to school together. School where white teachers or nuns tore us down but couldn't destroy us because we were brothers and friends living together. And that was important to us. That was enough for us to understand discrimination. I was brown and screaming out loud. I'm black and I'm proud. I would dream of pompadour sprouting from my hairnet. I thought coolness was pimp socks and black pocket switch blades that could knife the white man. Cocky and proud. I was proof of passion becoming the birth of dissent. Passion swaying through the race rage of a nine-year-old sniffing glue and dreaming of justice through violence. I was a little boy and James Brown was the whip of adrenaline that burned fun into my life. Living in the world of Motown and doing the splits on the playground. We were part of a community in need of a constant revolution. In a family in need of a constant revolution with a mother drug down by the sad music that kept her crying, drunk, helpless, trapped and impoverished with five kids in the projects we lived in. There was nine. And already feeling the weight of a nostalgia that I didn't understand. It was a longing coming from the wailing bulletos that flooded my mother's tears that flooded my tears with my mother's sadness. You got to be a soul brother if in your common thread being all of... I'm sorry. You have to be a person of color. You have. You got to be a soul brother if in your neighborhood everybody, including white folks were people of color. The common thread being all of us drowning in the possibility of losing it all daily. I was as much a shadow as the friends that surrounded me. The color of our skin was a source of our desperate pride. We were the children that felt hate, always nervous, fearful and fearless. All at the same time, we were running around pissed off and in love with the hopes that hunted our daydreams. Then any time the door to our home opened we ran outside into our neighborhood full of soul music that favored our dancing and settled us momentarily from the chaos that we perceived as the American dream that assaulted us with its police and the wonders of its TV. He had a white Impala with red seats. He was my mother's greatest love, an unsophisticated pig that had all his furniture covered in plastic, loved to eat by dangling food above his mouth and only peed in the sink. He was the father of my mother's last two crazy kids. That night he had me by the arm and would not let go, yelling at her, if you don't get back into the car, I'm taking him. I was screaming, mommy, mommy, she was dressed up, all of us were. He was giving us a ride from a family party where they both got drunk. I was asleep and woke up to it. She got back in the car, kept the door open and they argued for a couple of minutes. Then he finally let go and we got out. My brothers who had just arrived in our aunt's car heard the fight, got out and started throwing rocks at the Impala as it sped away. We were immediately sent to bed. That night nobody got beat up and we huddled and listened to the sad Latin music and the voices of drunk women until we fell asleep. It was just another day in the mission, our neighborhood, el barrio, our world.