Transplant

A Poem by Meta Sarmiento

To the white boy who called me a “fuckin transplant”
And told me to go back to wherever I came from:

Can you name the tribe you descend from?
Or did your family move here for the Gold Rush too?
Are they related to the Natives? Or did they just point and gawk
on the wagon ride over?

Hey, maybe ya don’t know! Maybe you think bloodlines
only go back a few decades! In the Island I come from
we trace how deep roots go,
ask if they kept the jungle thick or broke ground for hotel chains.
When we say respect the locals
we mean the ones who’ve been here for thousands of years!
The ones who carved a future out of wood,
called it a canoe, a sakman, a balangay!
The ones who turned the sky into a map.

Despite man’s need to dissect everything
the Ocean remains one large body.
Get it through your landlocked head,
I come from that.
There’s a sea in my veins
but why are you more salty than me?!

You mad bro? Say I took your job cause my employer wants ethnic diversity?
You forgot about my Master’s degree son!
My 3.8 in college! My ability to craft a sentence
even if English is my second language.

It’s kinda funny ain’t it?
Ask a white boy what American culture looks like
and he’ll preach about diversity! He’ll point
to all the artifacts that belong to people of color.

How you gon’ take pride in the melting pot
and ignore who brings the flavor?
How you want all this soul but deny
all this body?
You pledge allegiance to the land of the brave
but cower when courage comes from a different culture?
I get it! You afraid of an educated jungle boy!

I was swingin a machete
before I picked up a pair of safety scissors.
You don’t want it with this island savage.
I suggest you back the fuck up!
Learn a thing or two about bloodshed
and how enough forgetting
turns history white!

Ask your family
what rush gold brought!
And how invaders used it to steal land
and lineage.

Before you say I don’t have a right to be here?
Ask yourself how you arrived in the first place.
I come from an Ocean people. Movement is in my blood.
I know what it’s like to crash into the unfamiliar
and build it into a home. That’s what waves do. That’s what the shore is.

But I guess
the city will always fear a flood,
will demand I apologize for the tides in me.
If migration and surviving bloodshed have taught me anything
it’s that these days
claiming you’re
a Native?
only means you’ve been a transplant
longer than me.

Meta Sarmiento is a Guam-born Filipino living in Aurora, CO. A rapper, poet, speaker, and educator with over a decade of experience. He has worked with, taught, and performed for a culturally and socio-economically diverse set of students & audiences, both locally and globally. A winner of the 2024 Denver Fashion Week Spring Entertainer Challenge. Ranked #10 on Top Local Acts of 2023 by Indie 102.3, a featured performer and moderator for the United Arab Emirates #RoadtoCOP28 launch in 2023, and Dignified Storytelling's feature at World Expo 2020. Meta is a recipient of the 2020 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award from Denver Asian American Pacific Islander Commission; Finalist for the 2019 North Street Book Prize; Top Finisher at 2018 WRLD UNDERGROUND MC TOURNAMENT; and a Winner of 2015 Spoken Word for the World, where he was flown to Paris, France to perform at COP21 during the United Nations Climate Negotiations. He is the author of the poetry book Jungle Rules and Other Poems, and Tie Your Shoes Kid. Meta has released several hip-hop albums: Seasonal Depression, Jungle Rules, METAMOB, Nobody Knew, and This Road.