Caste Painting No. 13

Black + Indian = Cambuja (Women’s Sanctuary of Belén, Mexico City, 1684)

Once on a sacristy wall
I came to my casta: my station in life
hung like a station of the cross.
The one portrait

ever made of my family: Father
holding a knife
to my mother’s throat, her head
jerked back, hair snarled
in his fist. I stand by her side,
arms open wide
as if proudly presenting
our race to the world: de Negro é India

sale Cambuja. To look at that portrait
was to learn what was meant
by artistic license: the dirt on our clothes,
the tear in my dress. The three of us painted
in front of a shack
we never once lived in. Even the blood dripping down
my mother’s terrified face
didn’t come till years later—

another man, another knife, another place.

With a handful of coins,
that painter promised my father
he’d only pose us two hours.
Well, he’s posed us forever,
turned my parents to symbols —
_weakness and depravity
_ for everyone to consider,

and me the end product of both.

Black, Indian, Spaniard—
Lie down in somebody’s arms
and you wake
to a series of paintings
sorting everyone out:
las pinturas de castas,
sixteen mixtures of blood.

All the broken colors
that can make up a body—
a body sold as bed, a black
backdrop. All the times that men paid
to lay their hands on my skin
just to see their flesh made
even whiter.