Once I knew who I was;
I was myself moving through the world
like thoughts stirring within a body.
México, you were my body then:
your sun and moon,
my eyes;
your streets of earth and tile,
my legs;
the generosity of your people,
my arms;
my heart,
your indigenous ways engraved
in unassuming faces of clay
and volcanic stone.
And long after I left
to become nothing more
than another figure
in the profit margin
of U.S. companies,
I believed I still knew
who I was,
though all I thought I had
I didn’t have at all,
not a home,
not a people,
for I am neither Mexican nor gringo,
nor European nor indio,
nor African nor Asian
nor anything less
than the sum of these parts.
I am Northamerican.
Nations war and embrace each other inside me.
I am heady jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythm,
Funkadelic and Chopin,
Pre-Columbian and Renaissance,
an exile, a dreamer,
a refugee.
I am the ingenuity that bore pyramids and temples,
the strength that forged railroads and cities,
the dead that served as collateral
for cheap harvests, textiles, steel and coal.
I am the restlessness of the barrios,
the wisdom of those intimate with the land;
I am stories recounted
from fire pit to sagging porch
on sweet, lazy summer nights;
blood of dragon and sundancer,
elder, warrior and starched collar,
fisherman, healer,
high heels and agile feet;
spray paint, motorcycle jacket
and soft bare breasts;
rituals of sage and routine appointment books,
the child renewed in the hearts of lovers.
My intellect was shaped by thoughts borne of many languages.
My rage incited by those who would silence them.
Mine are the eyes of a hungry woman
with no roof under which to cry;
the hardened stare of an eight-year-old
in a scholastic holding cell.
I am Northamerican,
for home is wherever we’ve chosen
to draw the battle line.
And I won’t stop fighting,
not even come the day
I can say I’m Northamerican
with the pride of a woman
who has with her own hands
built her first house,
and know that by this triumph
I’ve earned the right
to reclaim
as my country
the people of the world.