The Mexican is sometimes hard to recognize in seventh-generation Tejanos like me, who in many ways are more American than Mexican, immensely proud of our heritage and culture even as we struggle to speak its language, to embody its distinct ways of knowing the world around us. Like descendants of other colonized peoples, twenty-first century Tejanos and Tejanas are contradictory, volatile, stunning mosaics of psychocultural tensions.

I think of Frida Kahlo’s painting of the wounded deer, her expressionless face on the animal’s bloody body. Every arrow that strikes her body is like a century of violence plunged deep into her being. Blood drips out, tracing delicately the contour of her form. She moves nowhere, toward nothingness, while electrical storms move toward her. Perhaps she considers diving into the deep blue ocean, into pure madness. Her strength of life is fading fast, but her face remains calm even as her body dies: only the animal in her cares. I often feel like the stag follows me, creaking the floorboards in my shadow’s wake. When I turn around to catch her eyes her face disappears and becomes a mirror…