...We continue walking north and east. A few blocks and we are at the Blackwell School. Now a mostly inactive landmark, the school was historically where students of color in the area gained their education. Small and isolated as it is, Marfa experienced the same racial segregation in public education as did the rest of the country in the last century. Now it is a quasi-museum, and in large letters across the east facing exterior wall we see a quote in black florid script: “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.” Beneath that a name: Gloria E. Anzaldúa. You know enough Spanish to understand the idea. Addressing the walker, the author tells us there are no bridges, but that we make them in our moving. And who is Anzaldúa? I inform you there are conferences built around her work that take place in San Antonio. There is a society dedicated to the study of her work and legacies as a theorist, artist and an altogether new kind of protean being, the “new mestiza,” to use her term. Furthermore, she is a Tejana, from the border near the Gulf of Mexico. You wonder why you have never heard of her and why her words are writ large on a Marfa institution. I explain that you do not know for the same reasons I grew up not knowing your work, despite our proximity, that is, because of the “colonial difference.” This is a term I take from Walter Mignolo and the Modernity/Coloniality Collective, a group that has been in conversation for some years now developing a body of work committed to understanding our current global conditions as marked at every level by what they call the coloniality of race, gender, nature and power. Decoloniality observes that people still live lives affected by the religious and scientific formations of race and human/non-human distinctions deployed during the fifteenth century explorations of the new world and the Renaissance as part of the inception of a universalized system of capitalism. The “colonial difference” is how I understand that we are in different fields of vision and knowing even when we stand together in the same physical space. But perhaps this is too heavy for our pleasant walk through Marfa, and I recommend a couple of books you might check out. You’re an avid reader. I have seen your library, and am particularly jealous of your collection of books on indigenous North Americans...