Modern-day Colonization

I want to come back home, where the Abercrombie & Fitch model
stands in place of the old Cesar Chavez mural
and advertises brown erasure.

I’ll come home, like a postmodern (whatever that means)
Aztec prince dressed in boat shoes with no boat, wearing
rolled up slim-tight khakis, rocking a steam pressed French-tuck.

I’ll come home from infiltrating white spaces, learning mores, like
the ability to ignore the cries of caged children at the borderlands between
three worlds, so I can practice being a better corporate token, and have a clear
mind to argue the importance of maintaining white allies in our spaces, like
when teaching Faulkner and O’Connor to uplift people of color
in academia.

I’ll come home with a blueprint—setup a dozen
Starbucks next to some Target centers and setup another Starbucks
within a two-mile radius of the original one, commencing
the betterment of my community.

I’ll come home with the master’s tools and use diversity to
invite all the white gays I know and argue their
queerness dismisses their whiteness and their presence
in-fact regenerates our community.

I’ll come home one day and realize that my brown people
are no longer residing in the community I shared with them
before I left for my individualist pursuit.
I’ll have to kindly use my voter’s right power to
ask the mayor to setup a section-8 solution, and
when the mayor says no, I’ll submit and rejoice in the
colonizer’s hoppy beer.

By Miguel Angel Soto

Biography:

Miguel Angel Soto is a queer brown boy, who explores political identities, intellectual and emotional intelligence through his writings. He’s an editor for Jet Fuel Review, a literary journal based out of Lewis University in Romeoville, IL. He also loosely blogs under the guise xicanxlibre1596.wordpress.com.