Which One of These Is Not Like the Other?
No one in my family disputes that my grandmother Ana Rosa Gallego Romero (one of the three women I am named after) was an Indigenous woman. The story goes that her and my grandfather saw some empty land on a hillside in Boyaca, tore down a lot of trees, and started a tobacco farm. The town of Mira Flores grew around that farm after they got there. Because they were Liberals living in the Conservative countryside, my grandfather moved them to Bogota when my mother was a 2 year old in 1953 to protect them. He wasn’t wrong to be worried. Being Liberal or Conservative weren't simply political parties at that time, they were different sides in a bloody and long civil war that meant the difference between life and death. La Violencia, indeed.
What stands out to me in this story is the way it begins. As if my grandmother popped out of the womb fully formed and ready to marry, farm, and have children with my grandfather. She came from nowhere and no one. That is the story that interests me the most because it is the crux of intergenerational trauma and heart break in my family and in my people. We all started out as our Native selves, and at some point our ancestors were forced to make choices about how to survive now that the conquistadors had murdered millions of our people, stolen our land, and enslaved so many of our people to extract gold for the Spanish crown and the Vatican. We will only survive if we flee some said. We can go to the mountains and shelter together there. No, others said. We need to live in the settler encampment, eat their food, learn their songs. They will only let us live if we become like them. Big fights ensued. Strong feelings like rage, terror, and sorrow erupted. My people were left angry, heartbroken, and torn apart. Each convinced they were right. Each determined never to speak to the other again, even if it was only half a day’s walk between the mountains and the settler encampment.
How to recover from such a heartbreak hundreds of years later? I am grateful for my teacher, Jennileen Joseph, who helped me to uncover this story, and for my friend Kat Macias for helping me to walk through it. Because of their friendship and love, I can find the place inside me where my heart is torn into pieces if I let myself go there. I am a child of the settlement who wants to go home to my people in the mountain. To just have some space in this world to live as myself. No more, no less.
On my first day of preschool, my teacher pointed to my nose and asked me “what’s this?” I said “nariz”, the Spanish word for nose. When she picked me up from school that day my mother got a talking to: we needed to stop speaking Spanish at home. It would impede my ability to learn English, my white Jewish teachers explained to my mother, as if that was true or valid. It was 1988, I was the only Native Raised Latinx kid in my class at the Talmud Torah elementary school in Vancouver, Canada, and my mother was very committed to keeping me enrolled in that school. She knew that it was the key to my acceptance in the Vancouver Jewish community. Something she was denied because of her race and native identity but was determined that I would have. My mother was and still is convinced that financial security and assimilation into the white Jewish community will protect her from being hurt the way that she was as a child.
It is my experience that within every white person there is a sleeping viper. Born of war, abuse, and terror. This viper is passed down from generation to generation, sometimes with enforced indoctrination, others without intention whatsoever. The viper is usually its most awake when white people want something that they know isn’t theirs. Whether it be the land of the native peoples of this continent, the unpaid labor of black people or the exploited labor of immigrants and anyone else. The viper coils itself tighter and tighter as the want grows inside. Perhaps if it strikes first, the terror it feels inside will go away. Release becomes more important than the knowing of a wrong being committed. But when it bites, it is disappointed. The viper doesn’t feel better, the terror only increases because now it is joined by guilt and shame. So it keeps on striking, again and again, not caring who is infected with its venom. It must be rid of this guilt, shame, and fear.
In the white Jewish community, the sleeping viper is fed by the shadow of the Holocaust and hundreds of years of anti-semitism. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and having been raised in this community, I get it. I was on the board of my Jewish community organization through my 20s, sang in the chorus, went to lots of meetings and in 2014 became the first Indigenous Jew/Jew of Color to ever lead the organization since its inception in 1904 (which is still true today.) This is a community where people know me and I know them. We love each other very much. But I also know that the viper is alive and well in every single one of my friends there.
It wakes up when they want to feel safe, a very human and universal desire that all humans are entitled to. But even when the viper isn’t fully awake, it is still silently patrolling the borders of what can and cannot be said, how we can and cannot act together, what we can and cannot feel. I could feel it starting to coil whenever I started to talk about my Native Raised Latinx family or upbringing so I stopped talking about it. I could feel it start to coil if I said things like I shouldn’t be the only Indigenous Jew/Jew of color here. There are many of us in the Jewish community, not just white Jews. We need to be organized and brought together. Our Executive Director at the time shut me down completely. She just couldn’t think about it with all the other things on her plate. Other times, the viper strikes with its silence. When we sold our building, not once did anyone say hey, maybe we should deed the property to the native peoples whose land we are on or at least donate some of the profits from its sale. I was too afraid to raise the issue. There was so much money at stake and I could feel the viper coiling and patrolling, ready to strike. I’d been bitten enough and I had none of my people with me to back me up. This was also before Standing Rock and before the trend of even doing land acknowledgements to open progressive events. I have yet to see any American Jewish community deed their property to native peoples or use their financial power to make reparations to descendants of enslaved black people in the US.
What I do love about the white Jewish community is that they are teachable. They have come a long way since then because the Black Lives Matter movement has awakened another desire in them besides the need to be safe: their compassion, their integrity, and their strong desire to repair the world. The viper is still there but now it has an opponent: the heart. Really that is all I need in the end: for the heart to be bigger, stronger, and more resilient than the viper. For the friends and community members who love me dearly to notice when the viper is patrolling, coiling, or striking. To take a step back and notice how much I and all oppressed peoples are diminished by that (including themselves). This is the magic of human relationships, for what use is love if we don’t use its powers to move mountains for people? To reflect and choose a different way. A path where the love inside of them shines forth to guide them, where the love is more important than the desire to be right, or safe. To stop feeding the viper until it withers away and dies, and eventually arrive at a graveyard where all those old fears can be laid to rest. There is a Jewish teaching that if a funeral process and a wedding party were ever to meet, that the wedding party must go first. We know how to prioritize life, love, and human relationships above all else, even mourning. I pray for us all to be so full of love for each other that there is no room for any vipers to come between us, or even exist at all. Let all of our days be a wedding as we celebrate our love for each, and the diversity of our Jewish peoples. A sweet new year indeed.