By Ayendy Bonifacio
Blanqueamiento
Blanqueamiento is the white supremacist social practice of “remedying” Blackness and correcting the complexity of race mixing. It promotes a logic that deems it possible for a people, and ultimately a nation, to aspire to whiteness, that is, to “improve” upon one’s race if one had white or white-ish offspring.
On the roadside, we stop
for an economy of skins
that hang on a rope:
orejitas, tripas, chicharrón
filing away flies in the char.
The fat is
in the fogón.
It pulses with
the embers,
coal and ash.
It reminds me that
a continent christened us
to dilute the pigment.
That some bleach
by marriage,
others by fire.
That there was a box
for every animal Noah
brought in the Ark.
The skin is crispy
and briny in my mouth.
Poem About Coffee
*
A campo song picks clean
a cascade of blushing cherries.
Papá says he will work until the end.
He presses calloused fingers on the evening sky.
Some are soft like pupils. Others have raisined to
lifeless pill bugs. He drops them in the saco.
*
The skin must first be peeled
and the seed roasted before the
pilon can drum it to fine grain.
Papá was right; the coffee burned to ash,
the flame and smoke in Papá’s lungs.
*
The dry wind tumbles
a dawn chorus over
speeding traffic, as
my empty cup of coffee
cools specks of nutmeg.
The Race Box
White: []
[Fogón-coals pulse in our house. / The ash is in the walls.
We have almost nothing, an ancestor said, but we are Spanish. / We came here to escape war or hunger or death. / Your green eyes are from a woman with a name like Julía or María. / Don’t let the sun take that from you.
In El Malecón, Caribbean palms face the sea. He carries an umbrella. / The sun is high. / He opens it. / His skin opens. / He gives the order. “Cut them all down.”
A Blood Moon sways over the Massacre River.]
Black: []
[Our flesh was an open secret, a survival that promised erasure. / They catalogued our skins: / Tía was india, Tío caramelo, Mamá was morenita, / Papá, our negrito lindo.
Papá didn’t speak like the others. / In his throat a candle lit his tongue. / When light came out, he said, “In this house, we don’t say two words: Trujillo y Aytiano.” / His cheeks glowed with what he took to the grave.
Dark and humid,
for days, their Colins cut
through stalks of high cane.
Ayendy Bonifacio’s writing explores memory, language, grief, race, and the colonial legacies of Hispaniola and the diaspora. He is the author of Dique Dominican: A Memoir (2017) and To the River, We Are Migrants: Poems/Poemas (2020), as well as the forthcoming novel, Bless Me, Papi (2026). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). Bonifacio is an assistant professor of English at the University of Toledo in Ohio, where he lives with his partner and daughter