Late Summer

Decolonizing myself? What does that even mean?

I’m going to Sevilla in 2 days. Someone asked me this morning what I was more excited about. I surprised myself with the words that came out of my mouth. The Archivo de Indias, I said.

I thought I was more excited about getting undivided attention from my husband for 9 full days. Celebrating our 9 year wedding anniversary. Looking effortless wearing the outfits I have been carefully curating, sketching, and photographing for weeks. And just in case I run into Amy Smilovic at Charlotte International Airport, impressing her with the crisp button-down counteracting the unironic sportiness of the Lululemon leggings that I’m wearing on our 3 stop flight. But the Archivo de Indias? yes, it was an option in our very loose itinerary but definitely not at the top of my head.

Immediately, this passage from Octavio Paz’ The Labyrinth of Solitude emerges delicately to the surface of my memory.

I am not attempting to justify colonial society. In the strictest sense, no society can be justified while one or another form of oppression subsists in it. I want to understand it as a living and therefore contradictory whole. In the same way, I refuse to regard the human sacrifices of the Aztecs as an isolated expression of cruelty without relation to the rest of that civilization. Their tearing-out of hearts and their monumental pyramids, their sculpture and their ritual cannibalism, their poetry and their “war of flowers,” their theocracy and their great myths, are all an indissoluble one. To deny this would be as infantile as to deny Gothic art or Provenzal poetry in the name of the medieval serfs, or to deny Aeschylus because there were slaves in Athens. History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality —if only for an instant —by means of creation.

I want to think the Cano necklace with the Pre-Columbian figure that I plan on wearing throughout my trip is a quiet act of rebellion against the civilization that committed one of the most horrendous genocides in history, against my Indigenous ancestors I have no connection with.

Cano necklace.

I want to think that being 50% Spanish according to ancestry.com does not really matter.

I want to think that how I look, how I identify, whether I am Indigenous, Black, Spanish, White, Hispanic, Mestiza, Latin, Latina, or Latinx, also does not matter.

Except it does. Because when I show up at the airport with my good looking white husband and the blue covered passport, I will not be asked uncomfortable questions like the ones I am asked when I travel by myself with my brown Colombian passport. May all be in the name of national security.

Borders are quite a concept

Tibi shirt, Aime Leon Dore hat, Zara shorts, Loewe bag, Brook sneakers.

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