My name belongs to picket fences

and white bread sandwiches,

the crust carefully cut.

But not my face,

with its angular nose,

and not my skin, or obsidian hair.

Le pertenecen a él. Yo le pertenezco.

We three are paradoxes–combinations of

colonizer and the colonized.

Juan Carlos Tobar is my father,

or at least he was for a summer of pay-with-cash lunches.

He showered me with gifts and praise and bagels on the way to work,

before remembering that he was that absentee Latino father.

a simple recipe: equal parts charisma and machismo,

deeply arched eyebrows and tight black curls

A subtle echo of an Afro-Latino heritage

If you ask him, he is pure Spaniard

transplanted into sun-soaked and blood stained El Salvador,

something akin to royalty, or at least a conquistador.

Juan Carlos Tobar is of the land.

He is brown, he is white: mestizo.

He is from those who stole, raped, and killed

and those who were erased and taken.

.

Kristie Ann Williamson is my mother.

She told me that we are descended from Queen Elizabeth,

but she never told me stories about Pine Ridge Reservation–

the second poorest native reservation in the country.

If what she tells me is true, a fraction of her majesty is

Oglala Sioux, hungry and running

across the somewhere plains.

She has my obsidian hair and high wide cheekbones,

and hazel eyes from her white, Vietnam-vet father

who was handsome before he assimilated

too deeply his wife’s native culture:

alcoholism, diabetes, and neglect.

Kristie Ann Williamson is quick to claim colonial royalty

and freckles and tea sets and gilded copies of A Tale of Two Cities,

but her grandfather’s name was Standing Bear.

And her grandmother was taken

to make the sign of the cross,

and have her hair cut.

Equal parts colonizer and colonized.

And me. I listen to them wave their fractured

whiteness, a surrendering flag.

A colorist ode to Eurocentrism.

As if that sliver of identity will erase

their indigenous features and blood.

That their drop of whiteness might dilute the “other.”

I am both of them, but truly know neither.

Given away like my great-grandmother.

Raised among picket fences.

and quiet farms, with my white-bread-sandwich name.