The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama

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Mexico as Mexico, 1914

Mexican soldiers of the Revolución play their shades
through Hollywood cameras—gray, charcoal, ash, slate—

for The Life of General Villa, except the bullets are real
and there’s nothing special about effects.

Battles set during daylight mean you can see
when a man falls, the orchestra moves on without him.

In one recovered reel, a rag threads through
the shrapnel hole in someone’s leg.

In others, the backstory filmed in California
where a young Villa rears a trick horse

spinning the way it will in Birth of a Nation.
The rest melts to silver drops.

But you’re asking for one quarter of my blood,
and for a footfall on the southern border—

before my father was born and my grandfather too,
before his father worked in the shipyards and in the orchards—

and for someone who looks like me but isn’t.
You must rewind to this place to know

it was post The Outlaw’s Revenge,
post the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, 1916

when the original footage was recast
as hero-turned-bandit.

And somewhere between here and Satevó,
my ancestors escape the way steam rises from fire.

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