Mamita Mala : One Bad Mami

Poemas

This page will feature different poems by la Mala depending on her mood or what she’s working on.

Last year I was blessed enough to go to Detroit to share space with some amazing amigahermanas. Out of that space the Speak! cd was born.

The cd is a gathering of radical women of color voices and experiences. One of my pieces on the cd (I have two), was done as per the request of the lovely bfp, and relates to a real experience I had in an online space for “radical” parents that didn’t seen to have enough space for radical mamis of color. The experience, besides inspiring a poem and birthing the concept of “mami’hood”, had a profound impact on the kind of work I want to do as an activist and centered my identity as mami.

Slip

Copyright 2002 by Maegan “la Mala” Ortiz
Originally Published in 2002 at HipMama.com

You let that word slip,
Fall from your lips
A little too easily
For my comfort

You let the letters slip,
Flow from your fingertips
A little too quickly
For my taste,
For my race.

You defended it
Just a little too quick
Saying it was just a test
To see if the PC revolution
Had flipped
Enough
To make it ok for a white chic
To say
It.

And personally
I don’t really give a shit
That you expected
The magic computer racism filter to flip
It
Into spice.
Just the fact
That
That
Word
Has
Slipped
Into your unconscious
Racist
Word
List
Has me
Pissed.

Shit.
Even though you didn’t say it to my face,
Even though it was in typescript,
It had me heated
Miffed
Feeling like a direct personal
Hit
Right in the
Pit
Of my stomach
a
hit
strong enough to send me back to adolescence in Corona
summer days of venturing outside to get Italian ice
in the Italian part of the hood
only to get chased
and have bottles thrown at my feet
as the Italian boy I had a crush on yelled
that word that
slipped
through your
lips,
from your
fingertips.

That
Hit
Reminded me of 19 year old Manny Mayi
And how he
Slipped
On his own blood and
Spit
As 10 white boys and men beat him with bats and
Sticks
And opened a fire extinguisher into his mouth
Laughing
Telling him to pray
( insert here word you let
slip
from your
lips,
through your fingertips).

And with my brown baby on my hip
And all these memories running through my head
you have the nerve to ask me not to be pissed,
To read it as an exercise in academic semantics?
Well fuck you,
Shit.

Until my brothers and sisters and children
Stopped getting their asses
Kicked
By pigs and other
Racists
Until I don’t have to struggle twice as hard
Only to get half of what you get
I will continue to be
Pissed.
You cannot
Slip
By without being called what you are
Straight up
Racist.

Love,
The Spic