The scorching sun forged belonging

I grew up in an small village; my family was somewhat poor, my parents tried to make ends meet with the help of my grandparents (mother side), but I never knew true scarcity, like yeah I wore cheap clothes and I can remember being mocked about it a couple times, but nothing besides that and having the constant remembrance of my parents coming to pick me up from gramps' when it was dark night.

Still, those years before the greenhouse were happy ones; I went for long walks with granny and her friends or spent my afternoons watching Inspector Gadget with Miguel, my first friend ever whom I later lost the contact with due to... well.. reasons. I remember my grandfather making me toys from metal cords and my father building me a basketball basket, and the overjoyed I felt when I worked at 8 year old a whole day picking peppers at the family greenhouse picking peppers to get myself a memory card for the PS2  I got for Christmas.

Those were simpler times, I was able to go outside without supervision, I went to pick snails with granny to eat them later on rainy days and wild grown vegetables, I had a full community of elders that looked after me, that knew me and the people that came before me. I belonged, and if it wasn't perfect, it was everything I needed.

As time passed by, that was totally destroyed; mass immigration and boomer greed made my little haven a hole for drug dealers and negros. No one knows anyone anymore except for the few elders that remain, those who build something mesmerizing with their whole bodies and souls only to be obliterated in a matter of 20 years. 

The pride for the land has died, the cult to the ancestors has been replaced with social media posing; our style, food, culture, music, and even furniture, has become foreign.  We have killed millenia of heritage for capitalist greed.

My fatherland, the desert, isn't beauty in the ordinary sense; the sun is unforgiving, it rarely rains, it made my people stubborn and rude, but kindhearted. It made us work from scarcity, from necessity, to eat lizards and cacti even. We didn't have anything, and we build it with everything we got. Our traditions and culture may not be fantastic nor fancy, but they are ours, they are impregnated with the souls and the anima of our people.

I cannot stand that all the effort after the civil war that my grandparents put to go from cotton pickers to small land owners has gone to waste, that now I feel insecure and even foreign in my own neighborhood, that the mountains that once rise as the stone guardians of a plain between the desert and the sea, now are just witnesses of the plastic sea and a replacement.

 My fatherland is dying, and people tell me to just go elsewhere, that the people that are in charge won't do anything about it and the fellow citizens that remain are comfortable in their homes without caring about the beauty of their land or the future of their descendants.

This has nothing to do with my spiritual journey, or maybe it's everything.

The desert gave and now we have taken away. I yearn, for all the blood that has been poured, the countless sacrifices that have been made since the ancient phoenicians to the 20th century spaniards, are going to waste.

I am a proud son of the scorching sun, the scarcity and the sea, and no matter where I go that will never change.

I hope, from the deepest part of my spirit and every remnant of my soul, that the situation changes, that once again my people arise under the mythical creature we call Indalo.