Angelitos Negros

In the film, both parents are Mexicans as white as
a Gitano’s bolero sung by an indigena accompanied by the Moor’s guitar
bleached                  by this American continent’s celluloid in 1948
when in America the world’s colors were polarized into           black & blanco.

In the film, Pedro Infante plays Jose Carlos      and sings
 Angelitos Negros in a chapel, the film’s title song,
asking the painter of the church’s art to paint a picture with black angels
who look like Jose Carlos’s dark-skinned daughter,       a child his wife refuses to accept.

          ¿Pintor, si pintas con amor, porque desprecias su color
si sabes que en el cielo       también los quiere Dios?

Tonight I sing the same song for my morenos absent from these cathedral walls:

O painter, painting with a foreign brush to the rumba of its old bolero.
Listen to our angel’s chorus of inocentes morenos muertos.

We morenos in the barrio create a gumbo quilombo, our little taste of heaven
with matches and propane and coal stones under a pot of cabra y culebras.
We morenos are brown turned black,             burnt by fire fired from guardia guns
looking to make us                congos      for a legisladore’s              chanchudos.

Listen to los pelaos in the favelas kicking
around the soccer ball               de pie a pie de pie a pie de pie a pie cabeza cabeza
gol!
forced out of their homes        by a world class stadium           they can never afford to get into,
forced into a life in the prison              of their streets.
They too deserve to be painted, pintor, in your fresco Adoration scenes.

                               ¿Pintor, si pintas con amor, porque desprecias su color?

Eartha Kitt sings Pintame Angelitos Negros,
the same Andrés Eloy Blanco poem Infante               set to song
on thrift store vinyl                               playing in homemade YouTube clips.
Kitt raises her voice high enough
to swallow morning        if it does not give her a sky
with dark-skinned angels in its clouds tonight.

Then dusk falls over the continent built on
shadows, shackles, and shame.

Broken-winged Blackbird        three shades of jade, just fly into dark matter in outer space.
Perhaps up there is a better painter, better god for us all           to obey.

by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
from Split This Rock