In the speech The Place of Indigenous Voice in the 21st Century, Tomson Highway said,

“Every plant on Earth…has a role to play in the long survival of the planet.”

After hearing Highway, I thought of Octavio Paz’s Mexican Mask, and how the mask is almost like the plants not getting enough water to fully develop to help the survival of the planet, it only hinders it. So, when people have to wear the “mask” as a tool to survive the western epistemologies it hurts everyone because so many groups of people will never truly be who they are. As I read Paz’s Mexican Masks I saw so much of my own culture hiding behind these colonized masks to save face for the majority. These masks create the machismo or the hyper-masculine man that is commonly found in both Latinx and African American culture. These masks also ask for women to strive for the “virgin pure” aesthetic but with so many women of color (especially Black women) who have been categorized as hyper-sexual beings it is hard for them to grab hold of these masks. This piece also made me realize that the notion of machismo and “virgin pure” woman are all colonized principles places on minoritarian subjects as a way to strip them of their native customs. It is a form of dehumanization that many still wear the mask for. If more Latinx and African Americans, understood that the lifestyle of the machismo and the “pure virgin” was a colonizer’s tool to strip away more of our freedoms, would they still participate in that culture? Or is it so embedded into us that there is no way out? How can we remove the mask so more cultures and thrive in order to save the planet?