Your flag Your pride Your accent and voice The way you dress The way you greet others Your money
Your hair Your face Your tongue and the language it speaks How you trip over words Of a language which isn’t yours
Assimilate. But not too much We already know your name And your story All by one look All before you’re granted a chance to speak
Our children will stare at the gringa who passes Whose tongue flicks with an anglicized mark And crowds will glare with eyes of disgust And shield our children from the alien before us
But we will also stop you in our streets to speak with you But not because we care what you have to say Rather because we want to practice your language And make it ours So we may criticize you in a way you’ll understand
But you’re here to study And here to learn And we want your money but not you in our schools You take classes with your own kind And speak with your own kind And suffer with your own kind
We try to keep you all contained.
You can try to speak Castellano Or learn how we think But it doesn’t matter what you do Every action is already explained By the fact you’re a foreigner.
Where do you come from? You couldn’t tell she’s American By her flag, her pride, her accent and voice? Your country seems like a different planet Are you sure you came by plane?
Alien. Are you an alien person? But it isn’t a question of your place of origin It is of your humanity. Are you an alien person?
Foreign, Foreign, Foreigner.
Your name is too American Write it like this. Never mind that, it is too hard to say. Here is a new one. You only have one surname. What did you do to disgrace your mother?
Come observe a new culture, never participating. But we will observe you from across the Atlantic. And your semi-barbaric ways Because we know if the choice was ours We’d house the lady And you the tiger.
Come to our country where we may serve you poisoned fruit And send you to our prison-hospitals Where you will stay in your cell until yellow swims around your ankles And you cry loud enough to be an annoyance And when your bill arrives, te haremos confundido por Castellano Never offering you el lujo a entender Never offering ni paz ni amistad.
But you chose to come here You cannot be surprised to you pay thousands to clean your blood off our floors When you chose to spread your enslavement and war. You are all so violent to spill so much blood So barbaric.
Who will believe you if you say you don’t fight? We see the news of you failing to protect your children And how Oedipus permeates your state of mind And the permanence of a confederacy keen on killing Kenyans You walk your streets ready to spill your brother’s blood And the blood of a million foreigners as you have done before
You circumcise your sons the moment they cry And just stop there? Why not cut off the rest So your kind may never reproduce? And your brother may live in awe of you
But we never enslaved nor conquered Nor cut the hands or feet of any right-doer Nor colonized, evangelized, or spoke a wrong word We stayed neutral in war, fighting civil for the civil Our history is filled with the taste of sweet sugar Curated by the hands of people who adored us Violence is all too western And by that we mean American.
You chose to abandon your land To study here And to learn here To hunt for our money and spend it on alcohol So you may drunkenly stumble with your own kind And speak with your own kind And suffer with your own kind And play the most dangerous game
A gamble with your money A gamble with the law A gamble with your freedom All contained in a troublesome roulette
Because here the game is always rigged against you.
You are giants Coarse, crude, and caustic Who infect every perfect thing you touch Turning our fine shores to gravel lots Spitting oil in our seas And turning our precious wine to water All for the sake of bettering your newborn nation Which ***** on the *** of its European predecessors
Wipe your streets with the blood of your children And the blood of your women And the blood of every barbarian who dares to hold a gun in the name of freedom And there will be no one left to sing your anthem
We will eat you and your country alive And burn your body among our forgotten tyranny With the victims of our cultural dictatorship And your country will pay no mind And your death will be not so much as tragedy as a mere statistic.
Because to you it is life and death. But to us it is a bet How long will the gringa last? Before xenophobia eats her alive And her last words fall victim to a false deafness Because this language should not be hers?
Yes, this is a ballad to your loss The coming of a new era When the gringa hangs on her cross With the ashes of white and blue behind her As her blood spills red And she looks up to the stars As her guts spill out Striped with the acid of her nation
And we will watch as she sells her guts to afford her surgeon In that country which pays her no mind In that country which sees her as meat to be hunted In that country which plays the most dangerous game In her country who wins the most dangerous game In her country who saved her life In her country who she calls home In her country who wants her home.
And she will cry waving her bloodied flag Screaming “I’m American!” Because her heart lies in her imperfect land In her imperfect home With her imperfect people And she has an unfathomable love for her flag Stained with the blood of a million foreigners.
A commentary on my personal experience with Spanish xenophobia