Let Them Eat Cake

Since the protests began, my neck has been hurting. I have always felt the presence of my Native Muisca ancestors in my body. I know their stories of the past partly through the pain and the joy that I experience in the present. This week as I raise my voice in song to pray, I feel their joy move within me as my lungs push oxygen through my whole body. As I moved through my yoga practice, I felt their rage at the brutality and murder that our black relatives are facing because it mirrors so closely the brutality and murder that they faced in their life times. As I rub my neck, I feel the throbbing pain of terror as I tasted their deaths in my mouth and the deaths of my black relations.

I am so grateful for all my black relatives who are raising their voices and their fists at this moment. Their struggle for freedom allows all of us to be more free. It opens a window in time for a conversation in the US that is desperately needed here. Who gets to be truly free? How? When? What actions do we need to take as a society to ensure this? This conversation is not free however. It comes at a great cost of black life. Of native land and life. Of human dignity. It begs an answer to the question, why are only some of us free now? 

During the French revolution, a story went around that the French Queen, Marie-Antoinette, cared so little for the suffering of her people that when they didn’t have any bread to eat, she said ‘let them eat cake.’ This story of insensitive monarchs repeats through different European countries around that time, so hard to say if it was true or not. But the recipe for cake amongst them remains the same: a mixture of grass and mud. Black Lives Matter activists have asked us all to examine our anti-blackness and root out racism in all its forms in our non-black communities. As a Native Raised Latinx person, I keep coming back to the recipe for cake that I was raised with. It is not much improved from mud and grass.

My cake has several layers, all stacked one on top of the other. There is the Colombian/Latinx (racial) layer, the Jewish (religious) layer, the Canadian (national) layer, and so on. All stacked on top of the base layer which is the Native one: being Muisca. In a free society, I’d be able to be native with nothing trying to squeeze me out of existence. But just like the French in 1789, we don’t live in a free society. Our oppressive society in 2020 imbues each layer with power over the other layers giving them more weight. All of the top layers combine their weight in an effort to squish the bottom layer out of existence. The cake version of the attempted genocide of native peoples. It doesn’t taste much better than mud and grass either.

As I wrote about in a previous blog post, my family tends to exist in the Colombian/Latinx layer of the cake most of the time. My Spanish is passable, but lots of my Canadian raised cousins don’t speak any. Although only one generation removed from Colombia, very few of us want to go back to our ancestral land, and feel separate from most other Native/Indigenous Colombians. We say things like Canada has given us lots of opportunity and we are grateful for it. Lots of Latinx people do. We are very well trained in denial. It is our specialty and where racism takes root in our culture because it is the largest source of our communal trauma. The Latinx way is to forget. To pretend that hundreds of years of brutal slavery, colonization and genocide never happened to our ancestors. To maintain that Indigenous peoples have nothing to do with modern nation states in Central and South America. To say that the native ways of life were simply lost along the way by simple historical accident. To speak Spanish instead of our native languages. To be proud of being divided into small countries where our ancestors were once united under large empires. 

By pretending we get to skip over the communal trauma of being the descendants of people who were murdered for their ways of life and their land. In Muisca tradition, leadership is passed from uncle to nephew in a ceremony that took place on Lake Guatavita. (There are many stories of water being sacred amongst our people and being related to creation itself.) Community elders would get onto a raft and sail to the middle of the lake ornamented in gold plated jewelry. When the sun hit the middle of the lake at noon, they would throw this jewelry into the lake as an offering to the Gods. When the Spanish witnessed this, it drove them mad with greed and fueled myths of entire cities made of gold. Today, everything in Bogota is fueled by the myth of El Dorado. There is the El Dorado airport, hotel, and main boulevard. Not to mention the Gold Museum whose centerpiece is a golden statue of Muisca people on a raft depicting this leadership ceremony. 

Colombian statehood has tried to reduce Native peoples in our country to an old story that fuels the tourism industry. That is the only place for native peoples in a capitalist country. Before this, the role of native peoples was to produce local handicrafts to stimulate a local economy. Before that, it was to extract gold from the Colombian soil and send it to Spain and the Vatican. Before we were forced into these roles, the Muisca fought bravely against the conquistadors and lost. It is approximated that within 50 years of their arrival, the conquistadors killed 2.5 out of 4 million Muisca people, the largest native group in Colombia at the time. After they used their armies to murder the men and rape the women, they used Catholicism to kill Muisca spirituality and our ways of life. The miracle is that they did not succeed. There are still over 102 native tribes in Colombia today who organize for their rights and maintain their traditional ways of living. The tragedy is that they did succeed in convincing us all to forget who we are. To embrace their ways of life. This is the place where racism has taken root in our communities. Where we cannot bear to face the rape, enslavement and genocide of our ancestors. So we reduce it to a time of ‘before’. 

Afro-Colombians live in the North West parts of Colombia that border the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. This makes sense historically because it is where they were forced to board ships out of Africa and brought to Colombia as enslaved people. What is interesting about Afro-Colombians is that the story of their blackness is very different to the US story. They have in large ways maintained their connections to their Native African tribes and still speak their Native African languages. Their common experience with their US cousins are the ways that they are racially brutalized by the Colombian state. 

This dark place is where racism and genocide combine to create a very oppressive and layered cake. The gift of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it creates  the space for all of us to have communal conversations about who we really are. By remembering that underneath all of those oppressive layers of cake that I am Muisca, I say no to the Latinx way of forgetting and assimilation and the racism that stems from that. In my cake, the Latinx layer is the one that is directly above the native layer. It is where racism is born and manifests out of Latinx people. But it is also below the Spanish, US or Canadian layers, where racism is forced onto Latinx people. Putting Colombian/Latinx history together in this way is why I have become very serious about doing the work of coming home to my native identity. I am so grateful to all the elders and teachers who have helped show me the way here. Seeing identity as stacked layers, instead of side by side, has made it easier for me to untangle these dynamics and start to walk this path towards freedom.

This is one of the deepest wishes of my heart. To see my people throw off the racial layer of Latinidad and come home to our true native selves. To walk this path together as we eliminate the places within ourselves and our land where anti-blackness and racism take root and grow so that we can live freely, love freely, and laugh freely on our own land as sovereign peoples. To fulfill the dreams of our native ancestors of a time to come where balance and harmony are restored to our land, our peoples, and our planet.