Not that my father would ever tell me,
not the man who instructs the driver
to look for someone white like him
when he sends an employee to pick me up

at a hotel lobby and, in a way, he’s right.
We don’t live the ways of the Quechua;
we don’t know for a fact that we’re Black,
though the first thing his father-in-law said

upon seeing him was Schwartze. The way
other Quiteños say I look mona or coastal,
another way to say black, black, black.
So what does it mean that my mother told me

that she, Chilean white woman, received
an invitation on heavy cream stock
to the Quito Tenis, and that my father—professor,
economista—would never be good enough?

What does it mean to be a woman in a country
that speaks your language, that covets and spits
upon your whiteness. You think you’re so much
better than we are. So do we.