These photographs don’t capture the sensual: the sound of 200 vaquera/x/o’s laughing, 800 metal shoes scraping asphalt, the vibrations generated off gold instruments filled by poisoned lungs, 200 hats/sombreros/baseball caps turning into a bed of multicolored un-uniformed flowers, bone-dry screeching screen doors opening to reveal the diaspora to the diaspora——all of it, forcing a wedge into the US context. In La Gran Cabalgata, we were in-between plains, a center that accepted no center, where time is not circular, in which I am who I am, and was, and will be.

200 bodies of flesh and fur flowing down asphalt rivers, in the foreground: a violent, colonial, racist context. The bridge we took began in the South and ended in the North—when we stood at the top, when the bend bled into us—we saw the edge of the world.

The final photograph is two moments burned onto one another by the sun that stung the back of the horses neck. Stare harder and see the Cabalgata turn cement into water, the tree line hugging dirt covered faces, and all of us slowly floating towards our fate: we will all return to the mouth of the river.

There, the banda plays until we die, horses are buried with their vaquera/x/o’s, we drink under the shade until our stomachs balloon, and the dirt underneath our nails holds all of our laughs.