Yes, distrust labels; yet, I’ll call myself a Nuyorican. Began to get complicated when my first role models as a young adolescent were not Latino or white: They were Martin and Malcolm. After Martin Luther King was stabbed near the heart by a deranged woman, surgeons told him had he sneezed, he was a goner. Nothing they could have done to save him. Glad people are finally listening to the speeches and philosophy of his last two years of life (the radical revolutionary) and not the whitewashed accounts stamped for government approval.
Dear Martin: I’m Also Glad You Didn’t Sneeze
Little black girl clutching her schoolbooks to her chest
walks through a gauntlet of racial slurs and angry faces,
simply to walk inside her school, as the first black girl.
Say this little girl did not have the courage of a hundred
masked white men toting AK 47s and Confederate Flags.
Palanté, Siempré Palanté
Peacé,
Andrés