from a history of colonization

Deep in the overgrown countryside, vegetation and time have swallowed the walls, wood, and bricks of the old mansions of Spanish settlers. My grandmother told me if one dug through the soil, a family’s treasures could be found. In what was once a family’s kitchen, on what was once their stove, lay the broken remains of their plates and bowls. Many lives have been broken on an island that’s seen violence from its early days. The nomadic Taíno people were broken. The families of enslaved people taken from Africa were broken. Violence, time and a certain inescapable justice that returns like a boomerang eventually shattered the Spanish settler families. Since 1959, pain has accumulated and lays waiting in the great caiman.

Patricia Laya in Chapinero District, Bogotá