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5% of some poor study said that only
5% of Latino students graduate college fluent in both languages

Does that mean there’s 95% left behind?
95% of a people abolished of a tongue and race?
Does their language and soul just evaporate?
95% create their own identity
with no amenities,
no one to support their singularity
So that they are left to view themselves as an anomaly
And lables of Latino, Hispanic, Chicano, Mexican…
Doesn’t even speak to them.
It seem that whatever doesn’t fit,
Society in haste inoculates,
acculturates,
incarcerates
or obliterates

But turn this tortilla upside down and reverse it:
To be Latino is to be a rainbow of colors
And a myriad of experiences
So what are we not doing to educate ourselves?
Even if the border did move over us
It doesn’t explain how we forgot
the ingenuity of the Toltecs to keep discovering,
the survival of the Aztec to keep conquering
or the diplomacy of the Mexica to identify ourselves
as one cosmic brown race?

Language lost is
power taken and
isolation resting
Because in silence, insincerity can exist
while apathy maliciously awaits

5%
Pass it on and empower this
Inspired by God, endorse it
work within education to change it
grab a sheet of paper and pulse it
because this 5%
cannot exist.

Art work from Mark Pinon