This is part two. In part one I told you about the pause, about Trey's Law, about standing in my dad's childhood room drunk on tequila and asking him if he remembered anything. He said one word: everything. That word followed me for a year until I went back to San Luis Potosí and it turned into a bigger question — who gets to tell your story? I went looking for answers in the wrong place first. I thought: colonization, obviously. So I tried researching the Chichimecas, my ancestors, and ran into the same wall I hit trying to trace my own family lineage — most of what survives was written by the people doing the colonizing, not the people living it. Records burned, floods took them, wars took them. But the people didn't disappear — they adapted. They folded their sun god and moon goddess into Catholic saints. They made Día de los Muertos. They made something new because the old thing wasn't allowed to survive in its original form. That's when Tragedian Cowboy finally made sense to me. I'd been embarrassed by it — mixing poetry, mythology, family trauma, sexual identity into something that felt made up and crazy. Then I read Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands and realized I wasn't inventing anything. People have always found ways to tell stories that don't fit one format. So let me clear something up, because I know what it looks like from the outside — like this podcast is just beef with two exes. It's not. James isn't the story. Nate isn't the story. They're part of it, but this is about something bigger: what happens when a system already primed to disbelieve you meets two people who know exactly how to use that. I talk about the exact way I had to perform my trauma correctly — not too emotional, not too detached, not too fast, not too slow — just to be believed at 17, and how I'm doing the same math again at 28. I connect it to Latino history in this country — the Mexican repatriations of the 1930s, Operation W*****k in '54, U.S. citizens swept up anyway — because it's never actually been about legal status. It's about who gets believed and who gets criminalized. And I say clearly: the person I came forward against was undocumented. James is white. The other men arrested with him are white. All three convicted. Zero days in prison. I also get into Mexico itself — a black cat, a flower, some strange coincidences I can't fully explain and don't really try to. What it actually gave me wasn't a sign. It was rest. And I talk about the difference between feeling safe and feeling free, because those turned out to not be the same thing at all. I'm 28 now. Officially half my life tangled up in this. I'm tired, but I'm not done, and I'm not becoming another missing piece of this story. Next up: episode 11, the full introduction to Project Tragedian Cowboy — the jersey, the running, all of it. Content warning: This episode includes discussions of childhood sexual abuse, trauma, legal proceedings, and family/generational silence.
