Colonized Motherfucker

Viejo,
Orlando,
Orlando Senior
Orlando padre
That makes me Papo
You're a colonized motherfucker. Of course I'll never give you this letter, but I've got to get this off my chest.

I'm sorry that when the City Police came looking for me at your house it gave you the fright of your life and you caught a fucking heart attack. There's nothing I can do about that. I wish I could undo it. But I can't wish to undo being a revolucionario, mete mano, come candela. All those nights you never came home working for the Hijos de Maria, where do you think I was? On the street launching the only career there was. It was only el movimiento saved me from being a criminal. I'm telling you straight.

Today walking the dog I walked by your old house. The two women painted the dark brown siding I helped you put up; now it's a baby shit brown.

What can I say to you? You married a gringa after my Mother died. You got inducted into her world. You think they'd ever welcome you as one of them? She was slumming when she married you. You were a trophy husband, a toyelder; old but childlike because you are colonized.

I had to fight to get born out of the permanent childisness of being colonized. I was going after my own mind when I was hanging with my crew. I started to find my mind the first time I got my hands on an issue of Redencion, the afternoon I found my way to my first Partido de la Felicidad rally, down the street from where we lived in Northcity, right on one of the rubble mounds left by the landlord arson that made us lose our first apartment, and that the Partido's mobilizations and Redencion's exposes stopped.

I should have compassion for you because by the time you came across Redencion and the Partido you were too old, your mind too rigid, too much of a colonized motherfucker, to take any of it in.

You thought you were lucky the gringa married you. You couldn't see she was ugly, inside and outside, because you were too blinded by the honor of her deigning to go out with you, and then to actually marry you. She was a school teacher while yo were merely a maintenance man.

She changed how you dressed. She got your drinking and your smoking under control. You were were handsome toyelder.

I never knew she did't know about Machi's money, the money you were putting away every paycheck for his education. You were too colonized to tell her you were saving for your grandson. Turns out she thought she bought you. Turns out her daughter egged her on.

And you have no fight in you. You gave whatever fight you had to the Empire's army. You've got that shrapnel in your legs you used to show me when I was a boy, by way of courage.

But on behalf of your grandson you couldn't take your gringa wife on. She had already won. You're a colonized motherfucker and permanently defeated.

You chose your wife over your son. Over your grandson. Maybe any man would.

I got myself a pitbull lawyer and you said, "I don't blame you."

I blame you.

If you think this will fade into a tarpit of denial, you're wrong.

I'm an orphan now.