Having an American passport is like having your heart ripped out while being unable to go to the doctor.

My Mexican hands are still brown in Europe.

I just did Portugal, Italy, Hungary and now Greece in three months.

Hopefully they won’t take my heart and soul by this age of thirty.

I tell SFSU Professor Alejandro Murguía to drive me to downtown San Francisco. In the span of a twenty-five minute drive he tells about the last twenty-five years of his life and how he ended up with Allen Ginsberg in Nicaragua.

My life is going to have some drama. Alejandro tells me I need to write the story of Latin American diaspora.

My story started off just as challenging as a kid in the slums of Venezuela, if not more so; since there was not a contrived effort in 1998 for social democracy.

Gringos will circle around you at the university and stare at you. First you end up paying child support, then they will emasculate you. Then you will end up high on soma (capitalism).

Must it be that the Third World threw its wedding rings into a river? Is this important? Who was getting married? These categories to put it simply. There is a reason that you cannot confuse luxury with pain. You know when to speak which language. Can you produce a free man? Here is the dilemma–you no longer have a machete when tequila-induced sleep makes you handless. The music is out of town. You know beautiful turquoise water splashes across the beliefs. You know how to have foreplay with your Latina lover in San Francisco–just tell her white people love you. Don’t read pedagogy of the oppressed around her. Send her photos of you smiling in Florence, Italy.

As I lie in bed in Budapest, Hungary; I realize that all my generation of people have is a show on Netflix called Gentefied. A show about Mexicans marginalized and drunk and depressed and making money (sometimes).

Does it sound like a contradiction?

Let’s start with the current context. Do you see why feminism never won in Mexico? The Soviet Union should have taken over Mexico; or Ricardo Flores Magón should have; either way. Palm trees, guns and a country to the north of you that kicks you while you sleep. Something must be moved, fast like an earthquake. Without realizing you believe the same things. If the United States wasn’t there, we would be forced to dialogue with earthquakes and have sex with the natural resources called beauty. Treat me the same way you treat your newborn, which is to say not our (Central American) children in cages in Texas.

I kiss a woman in San Francisco; she asks me to make money. That she can love me when I start to love (money).

My therapist tells me to “leave San Francisco.” I tell her I have attachment issues and I was born here.

I kiss a woman in Paris; she doesn’t think I deserve poverty.

In San Francisco, she throws my possessions in a suitcase out of her house; but it should work the other way around; the poor should take over the rich people’s property.

People can be angry with you in Europe but at least they don’t oppress you.

Oppression in San Francisco requires you to look the other way when you see yourself on the verge of domination.

It’s only a matter of time before we are deported back down the Gini coefficient.