P. Staff left me wanting a next episode. Maybe these writings are it.

The room was dark like a theater. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The first thing I looked for was the barbed wire that I read about before I came. When I found it, there was a piece of clothing hanging from it. Small round tables with battery powered tea lights scattered the room. It felt intimate and disorienting at the same time, like stepping into someone's dream that you recognize as your own.

The film was layered with abstract collages of still and moving images, multiple voices speaking at once before the main narrator took hold. The first few minutes referenced Heinrich von Kleist's original 1810 play about a Prussian prince condemned to death for following his instincts on the battlefield rather than his orders. But the film quickly moved into something more present and more urgent: interviews with Trans artists and activists speaking about their lives, their bodies, and the systems that try to contain them. In one of them, a Trans woman talked about her time in law school and what a law actually is and who it actually serves.

I had spent the two days before seeing The Prince of Homburg exhibit in deep conversation about colonization as a facade, how it relates to being Mexican Indigenous, to also being part Sephardic Jewish and an anti-Zionist, and the lies that hold entire systems of power together. I walked into that dark room already primed. I left inspired and went home and started writing.

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The next night I learned what fincas were.

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When Spain abolished slavery, Mexico continued it under a different name. On the isolated fincas of Chiapas, this became una esclavitud simulada (a simulated slavery). The chains were generational debt instead of iron, but the people were just as bound. Private militias and the national army prohibited free movement on our ancestral lands until the 1930s. 

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The body that refuses to be bound has always been a threat.

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In Chiapas, my Tía remembers a Tzotzil man, who had never left his ancestral territory, taking a trip to the capital city, Tuxtla-Gutierrez. He was curious. He wore little clothing and only spoke Tzotzil. Most of Chiapas is a tropical rainforest and wearing little clothing is normal to stand the humid heat. He was arrested immediately for the crime of being "wild" in the city. Not wild in behaviour but for being Indigenous, both in appearance and in traditional living. Wild because he lived outside of the colonial way of living. The colonial system cannot tolerate someone who reminds them that it is all fake. Because the Spanish had left well over a hundred years before, and the Mexican government took up their mantle of colonialism.

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You can live in reality as you drown in fictional facades.

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This man was locked in a hotel room by himself for seven days with armed guards stationed outside the door. He had walked to Tuxtla the way my family has always traveled — on foot. Where he was from, people don't leave their ancestral territory very often. Indoor colonial living is a hard concept when you have never left your ancestral territory, when the land you come from has no walls. My Dad slept outside until he was 16. When he first came to the US, he slept in my step-grandfather's barn with the chickens in the hay because sleeping in the house was a big transition for him.

The police who arrested this man didn't speak his language. He didn't know why he couldn't leave. He didn't know why everyone else got to walk around and exist. He sat at his window and watched the city move without him. My Tía saw it in his eyes after a couple of days. She was 12 years old and felt so bad for him. She saw him get violently arrested and that's why she went to talk to him through the two story window of the hotel. Every day he fell deeper and deeper into depression. He spoke no Spanish, only the same dialect of Tzotzil as my family. The police viewed her as harmless so she was able to keep him company before and after work. Both of them are Tzotzil, but from different villages. The men who arrested him were colonized Indigenous descendants who accepted that the fictional facade of colonialism was their reality. They upheld the lie in their own minds that their ancestral way of living was a crime. He was considered wild because he was Tzotzil. His crime in the city was not being colonial… he had not accepted the lie.

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I want to be as wild as him.

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I want to be wild in my own right, honoring all my lineages, and healing my inner child who just wants to wear dresses and play with makeup. I hope every Trans person has the courage and the resources to be wild in their own flawless, gorgeous, pretty, handsome, and fabulous selves. Trans visibility from my Indigenous perspective is publicly seeing humans exist outside of the fictional facade of Western Colonialism.

Trans people have always existed but the fictional reality of European colonialism has not.

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So what are the people enforcing and practicing colonialism protecting? We live under a colonial occupation that steals land and resources, then creates laws to criminalize stealing so that we can't take back what was stolen. Are these laws there to protect us, or to protect the oppressors and their crimes? Who is actually safe from thievery, retaliation, and oppression? Is the safety they promise a facade too?

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Am I safe because I'm caged, or am I safe because I am free?

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The laws of occupation are a facade. We are told we have freedom, yet they are enforced by the threat of gun violence and imprisonment. This behavior is consistent throughout the centuries of colonial occupation that spans continents and generations. England, Spain, Germany, France, the Dutch, and Portugal are some of the main colonizers of North and South America, yet they themselves have their own historical experiences of colonial occupations. By 1492 Europe had experienced many generations of colonizations so this violent behavior was already normalized for them. But the many histories of colonization extend to all continents in various forms across time. Matriarchal societies were replaced with patriarchal normativity, goddesses with a male god, and tribal communities with individualistic capitalism. Yet in spite of this the colonized have resisted and persevered. One key to survival is never forgetting who you really are and where your ancestors come from. 

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Before colonization there was something else.

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Trans people are not the disruption. Western colonialism disrupted humanity many generations ago. Trans people are living proof that anyone can exist outside of it.

To every Trans person, every Two-Spirit, every Non-Binary, and every Gender Non-Conforming person: the horrors that get thrown at you are not normal within many Indigenous cultures and histories. You are beautiful. You are worthy of all love. Your sacred Trans body existing, resting, being wildly and fully itself, that is resistance. That is the revolution.

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Put your oxygen mask on first, and then remember to help others.

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The Zapatista Movement created an autonomous zone, built schools and hospitals, and created a pathway for Indigenous Chiapanecos to finally have a political voice. This however is not a perfect utopia. My Tío by marriage, a Tzotzil-mestizo, worked the lettuce fields in Salinas, California and sent the little money he made back to Chiapas to buy land and build a house for his brothers and their family. The Zapatistas stole that land and seized the house at gunpoint. His family hasn't been able to return since. His story is not unique. Liberation movements can replicate the very violence they rise against.

And yet, since 1994 my people have continued to build. Progress grows from the ground of traditional culture, not in spite of it. Every day we keep evolving because we build toward the greater good of our families and our land. It's a reminder that no revolution is perfect. All of us are imperfect and capable of harm. All of us are also valuable and capable of building a better future for the coming generations. When I see Trans communities not working together — functioning in isolation, scarcity, and interpersonal conflicts influencing decisions to disperse resources. I’m reminded of my Tío and his family. It causes me to dream of the possibilities of a better future that divest from these colonial systems. It matters how we treat ourselves, our communities, and the adjacent communities surrounding us.

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Caring for yourself and caring for others is resistance. 

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My mother once told me that “we have survived on this continent for over 500 years from the same type of crazy men in charge, and we are still here. And our people will still be here long after them.” The same goes for Trans people. There are Trans kids in small town America who are isolated in a sea of religious fundamentalism, surrounded by the colonial lie. They are looking out their windows asking why everyone else gets to walk around and exist. They are wondering if they will ever be free as they weigh out the consequences of rejecting the facade that they do not exist. That they were born evil. One day they will find a path to find rest in their own bodies in the deepest part of their soul. Finding rest and leaving the door open for others to find rest is working towards safety. 

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Find your rest, and then help others find theirs too.

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