This Country Wants To Live In The

I Mean In The Community That I Grew Up In, You Know, A Very, You Know, Mixed, Almost Entirely African Diaspora Community, One Of The Things That We Were Not Ever Supposed To Say Was How Much Self-hatred And Colorism Determined And Guided What We Would Call Our Desire. In Other Words, What We Would Consider Beautiful.

Mexico City Is The Center Of Art And Culture And Politics And Has Been And Continues To Be For Latin America In A Way That I Think Really Called To Me As An Artistic Person, As Someone That Was Interested In The Politics Of Latin America, You Know. God, Every Single Famous Person In Latin American History And Art And Politics Seems To Have Found Their Way To Mexico City.

For A Long Time, I Let My Mother Say What She Wanted About Me, And What Was Worse, For A Long Time I Believed Her.

Beli At Thirteen Believed In Love Like A Seventy-year-old Widow Who's Been Abandoned By Family, Husband, Children And Fortune Believes In God.

Used To Be In The Old Days, Only The Pulp Writers Wrote Like Machines. Now Everybody Is Expected To Be Literary John Henrys. So In That Context Someone Like Me Is An Anomaly.