i am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be white.
i think it began on the old back porch, sipping horchata in my dad’s large faded t-shirt,
the way the sunset reflected off of his smile,
his soft eyes whispering to my brown summer skin,
“mamita, you are everything.”
and then again on 16th street, while my mother and i ate elotes,
the moment soaked in muffled giggling and freckled spanglish,
she mentioned how happy she was to be there with me.
each time, i felt my skin becoming dimensional cultures.
pride morphing my biege into a glow in the dark hymn of
praising our prosperous potentials to be celestial beings.
it echoed in my heart’s jukebox that i hummed under my breath
as i realized i was in the elephant in the room:
a little brown mexican kid with tan lines they were too proud of and
an accent that came out too often when they were too tired to iron it out
again and again and again.
i remember my abuelita caressing my hands,
smoothing over my scars and cracked nails.
she made me feel like my name was meant to be pronounced correctly,
like every moment i ever felt belittled because of my skin was a mistake,
like all the times our culture had been painted over by
sombrero stereotypes could be shunned,
so i kept her memory in my pocket,
started to wash the foundation that was six shades lighter off of my face, and
what a white person said i wrote “too many stories” about my heritage that “it got boring.”
then, so be it that my brown skin is “boring” to a white person.
they have never experienced the inheritance of brown skin so they wouldn’t know
that brown skin is a garden full of prayers and goosebumps
that brown skin was born in a house creaking with my culture,
stumbled around in search of beauty in magazines and television
only to find it in selena y familia.
brown skin was baptized in a church that only does masses in spanish.
brown skin is a manifestation of origin, fuerza, and belonging.
brown skin was my first definition of divine love, beautified, glorified,
put on the pedestals of my own two eyes
as i sat there with my father and stood there with my mother,
glowing, still crooning our magnificence, all of it brown.