Un mundo esperando despertar
This is a love letter.
It is written for the brown girls and boys I’ve met—and those I’ve yet to meet. It’s an invitation to journey together through the uncertainty that awaits us, committing to each other to learn, un-learn, and remember.
The late Eduardo Galeano once wrote,
“Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart”
This is my attempt to remember—to pass my story through my heart and offer it to yours.
I wasn’t always able to see things this clearly. As a kid, I was distracted by spinning rims (though now I laugh at how ridiculous they look) and flashy cars that passed me by while I was crammed inside an RTD bus. Like most first-gen kids, all I wanted was money—to have all the shiny things billboards and commercials told me would make me “somebody.” Sometimes, they even tempted us with things we actually needed.
While those sparkly dreams kept me going, they also kept me running in place, chasing material vanities not meant for me, driving a wedge between my essence and me. I thought I was running toward freedom, but I was only running deeper towards systems designed to exploit people like us.
Eventually, I was able to see. Not all at once—change rarely works that way. It was a slow awakening, shaped by the stories I was brave enough to hear, the questions I dared to ask, and the truths that refused to stay hidden. It was my mother who sewed and constructed expensive garments we could never afford that reminded me that our hands held power beyond what the world suggested we had. It was my father who chased the harvest in the fields, his back bent but his spirit unbroken. And it was my inner child, that little brown girl who saw herself in her parents that whispered, “Tell me it gets better.”
This is a love letter to those moments.
It’s a love letter to the paths that led me here, to the brown children I’ve met in our barrios and spaces, and to the parts of myself I’ve had to shed and reclaim along the way. It’s an acknowledgment that while this work starts with me, it’s never meant to end there.
This is an invitation to dream—to imagine a world where we move beyond survival, where we reclaim joy as resistance, and where we understand that we are already whole and worthy, even as we strive to create something better.
Together, we can unlearn and reject the lies we were told y recordar the truths our ancestors lived. We can build the world that is waiting to be awakened.
Assignment #1: A Private Journey to Begin
Let’s start small. This is a journey inward before it’s a journey outward. Before we can imagine a collective awakening, we must begin with ourselves. I invite you to take a moment—today, tomorrow, whenever you feel ready—and reflect on your story, your path, and the moments that have shaped you.
Grab a piece of paper, a journal, or even the back of an old receipt. Write a love letter to yourself, to the parts of you that were once hidden or forgotten. What do you need to remember, to pass through your heart? What truths have you carried, and what lies do you wish to unlearn?
This is not heart-work for anyone else to see. It’s a seed planted in private, a remembering through the heart, a first step toward awakening.
- Till we get there