by now you’ve noticed she collects things: ink on her arms pulpous paper words in neat boxes dried chiles in mason jars kept behind a secret-wall-door, a specimen gallery. a glug of oil in a cast-iron pan. she lists them for you: chiles de árbol, chile guajillo, onions. the smell makes your eyes water. she promises she’s not making it sou spai-cee, crinkles her eyes at you. roughly-chopped garlic and sesame seeds. once the kitchen is full with it she holds the pan over the blender and you spoon it in. remember to toast the peanuts. she stands over the blender with a bottle of apple cider vinegar. you pass her the small wooden bowl of salt. she says it smells like her abuela’s house and you nod because yes, it feels like it for once, doesn’t it?
Natalia A. Pagán Serrano is a poet from Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. She has an MFA in Poetry from Oregon State University, and her narrative-based work is obsessed with memory, colonialism, identity, and home-ness. She currently resides in Oregon with her fiancé and her cat. Natalia’s poems have been published by Portland Review, Santa Ana River Review, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, and Boricua en la Luna: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Voices.
LOCAL GIRL
LEARNS TO SWIM, PROMPTLY SAVES PUPS—that was the headline on the front page of
the town newspaper the day after Ángelina
Villalobos rescued the Rottweiler puppies drowning in Flint Creek. Her father
had taught her to swim earlier that same week, not at the municipal pool but in
the shaded, slow-moving water under the Flint Creek Bridge. There, no
lifeguards cast shadows, no pool noodles bopped her on the head or warned her
to avoid the deep end where preteens entertained themselves by splashing each
other until they vomited pool water and chips. When she floated on her back,
she saw a roof of light collecting on the trees overhead, the arched beams
melding with the branches to form a cathedral. Her name was soft inside it: Án-gel,mi niña, cuidado, her
father would say, whenever she drifted too close to the rocks. If not for him,
swimming would not have come so naturally to her. It reminded her too much of fighting—against
the water, the minnows, the insistent buzz of dragonflies. For her, the creek
was too alive for comfort. Too sinuous, like the puppies squirming inside the
burlap sack.
What she remembers most about that day is the arc of the sack sailing through the air (the amount of force that must have been in the throw to make the sack land that far from the bridge). One of the puppies died on impact—or perhaps it was already dead, smothered by the soft bellies and frantic paws of its brothers and sisters. Her father kept calling out—Ángelina! Ángelina!—as she scrambled toward the shore, balancing the sack on her belly first with her right hand, then the left, back and forth, as she alternated arms in a backstroke. His head had been turned, his gaze on the tamales he was unwrapping for lunch, when the driver of the speeding SUV hurled the burlap sack out the window. He didn’t understand—not until she dove for the bag. When he reached her on the other shore, Angelina was just loosening the knot, revealing the first frightened nose. Only later did she realize the puppies couldn’t open their eyes because they were too young. Newborns separated from their mother and thrust into the limelight.
When the news broke, strangers from across the state scrambled to adopt these poor pups, whose little eyes opened for the first time at the shelter. In the news segment, the Rottweiler pups were shown wriggling around on a blanket, their limbs so small and their coordination so nascent that when they attempted to play they sometimes toppled over, their wobbly legs tentative on that soft cotton surface. When Angelina went to visit them the day after, she realized for the first time that the pups were in a cage. That the cameraman had lain on the floor and positioned the camera so the chain link fence on three sides of the cage was out of sight and viewers would only see the pale grey wall behind the pups. It had looked like a living room to her or like the stone underside of the Flint Creek Bridge as she floated under it, bathed in shadows. She did not beg her father to adopt one of the puppies, though there were a couple left. One of the little ones was learning how to bark from the bigger dogs at the shelter, but its voice was still too small. Its barks sounded like little coughs. Like the sputtering after as the puppies tried to rid creek water from their lungs, too young to accuse anyone.
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Lightspeed, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, The Masters Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the 2020-2021 prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House.
When we began the folio series—launching, coincidentally, with the Latinx/Latinidad folio in March of 2019—our aim was not just to continue producing spaces to celebrate a rich multitude of voices, but to respond to the often-superficial “diversity” initiatives embedded in the fabric of our institutions, the diversity-as-a-goal instead of as a starting point to further address issues of inequality ranging from programming and access to care and support. Specifically, we wanted to continue to produce spaces in which the editorial process itself could become democratized and open to the public. Anyone—regardless of education or experience—could submit an idea, proposal, or question, from which to develop a call, review submissions, and curate a volume. What we wanted, what we still want, is to address the startling lack of diversity in the literary and publishing community, an ecosystem that often feels like an establishment with a not-so-secret passcode: the metric of white and male and cisgender. During one of our early Zoom calls prior to the launch of this summer-long “live” folio, Ruben enthusiastically spoke of the work undertaken by M. Bartley Seigel, Roxane Gay, and their staff of readers, the debuting of so many luminous writers in this space beginning in 2006, a time well before I could even dream of having work in publication, let alone publishing the work of others. Our conversations provided me with a renewed appreciation of this growing folio series, as well as the privilege to be able to contribute to a reorientation of the publication-as-scarcity model. We want to publish more writing, to celebrate more writers, to open up the possibilities for more kinds of writing: texts that straddle genres or destabilize and re-write generic conventions and hierarchies by their very nature.
We should remind ourselves that the work of representation so often has to be imagined before it can be concretized. I often remind myself that Latinx scholars are not visible in the academy—by the time I finished my coursework for the PhD, I encountered exactly one Latinx writer on the syllabi handed to me every fall, every spring, throughout four years of graduate school—but also: we’ve been made invisible: among all represented groups, we have the lowest undergraduate and graduate program enrollment. Ruben Quesada has here assembled a celebration that doubles as a testament: to our history—and moreover—to our future, to where we are going, which so often is a response to where we have been. To remark upon and remake our own colonized past, our own history of racialization and acculturation, and to make beauty out of that traversal, in so many forms, through bodies of experience that, in so many ways, transcend the cartographic purview of empire, the spatio-temporal landscape of nation. What is the Latinx experience but an experience of displacement that dissolves all boundaries, and yet the power of harnessing such a fracture, to turn the wound into a mark of healing, compassion, and renewal?
Here we find persons of the Latin American diaspora navigating the complex issues of everyday experience in a world that claims to be “postcolonial,” not the least of which involve negotiating colonial languages, origin stories, unreturnable exile, migratory flows, assimilation practices, and the perils of all categorical constructions, particularly ones that flatten differences among members of such a vast community, a people that, as José Martí once proclaimed, come from everywhere … and are going everywhere.
It’s this last bit that has been an especial light as the people of the Americas and beyond continue to grapple with the “novel” Coronavirus, and the virus of white supremacy that has long shaped our culture and institutions. Among the myriad content that Ruben has here shepherded to publication, readers will find newly-published poets alongside celebrated novelists, and celebrated novelists-turned-newly-published poets; stories about sorrow and joy and resilience and strength. We are only at the halfway point; this introduction wants to herald, to set in motion or divulge, but it also wants to reflect upon. It is my hope that throughout this past month, and in the month to follow, readers can take this celebration of Latinx literature as a starting point, to imagine a radically different canon, a radically different discipline from which we continue to produce knowledge and literature, an alternative Latinx imaginary that moves beyond the representations of our community that have so often been produced by people outside of it. This is a starting point, which is a celebration, and a celebration, which is, in many ways, unlocatable on any map. And still—we are here.
prince royce says to a former or potential lover or someone he’s in love with te regalo el mar/ no tiene final/ so maybe it’s okay to promise/ a gift that’s impossible to give/ fuck it/ let me know if you grow/ exhausted of the earth/ & i’ll find you/ a planet/ or build you/ your own/ & if you ever wanna try/ your hand at flying/ let me know/ & i’ll put gravity on pause/ & if you feel like the days never end/ or feel/ like they keep/ on racing by/ let me know/ i’ll turn time/ into something concrete/ & i’ll put it in your hands/ & you can make it go faster/ or slower/ or stop it altogether/ if you want
Alejandro Pérez is a student at Columbia University in New York. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Boulevard, DIAGRAM, The Missouri Review, Passages North, and Spanish-language magazines in Venezuela, Chile, and Spain. He is currently a staff reader for the poetry team at Ploughshares.
On a good day, my mother says I am black and my father snap quicker than a whip He swear he got enough self hatred to dull the genetics He swear he married a white passing woman He swear he already dug up every slave who ever died on my island
and reburned the bodies. All that is left now is his skin but this too, can be cleansed. Even blood can be erased so long as it is bleached enough times.
On a bad day, my mother is the whip which snaps with my father’s wrist Columbus is a colonizer and a saviour. Without him, where would we be? I say Black and alive
They say Black and mean as good as dead. Or, on special days my mother holds a funeral. She cries for her black husband. Her black son. She knows they have not died but this is inevitable. She carries the proof in her skin.
How our people were black enough to turn to ash How our magic couldn’t stop a sea of ghosts looking for another body to take She feeds me yuca as if to say she is sorry That nothing else survived the pillaging.
That even this, too, is white. When African slaves were brought to Puerto Rico Tainos fell in love with them. Had children with them So both our kin had a chance of surviving genocide Tainos went extinct
My parents do not want me loving my blackness They are afraid of history repeating itself. They would rather I live in whiteness Than be black and not live at all I want to tell them
That maybe whiteness is death That my island has always been possessed and still finds a way to dance. to sing. to live. That we have been doused in bleach
and woken up to repaint our history again. and again. That blackness is the only reason we have this history. these bodies. these heartbeats. I want to say we are black and mean
we are still alive
Khalin Vasquez is a queer/trans Boriqua poet from Brooklyn. Khalin was a 2017 Youth Poet Ambassador for New York City, and has performed at the Library of Congress, the Apollo Theatre, Lincoln Center, and others. They were published in Lincoln Center’s 2015 Poetlinc Anthology and are the recipient of the Andrew and Eleanor McGlinchee Prize for playwriting. Their work is currently available or is forthcoming on Slamfind, EOAGH, PANK, and Nylon Magazine.
“¿Dónde chingaos está? He was supposed to be here hours ago.”
All
afternoon she stalks the house, hooded eyes scanning every room for some
invisible threat. Days like these I make damn sure to stay out of her way.
I eavesdropped on the negotiations that had dragged on for a couple weeks. Final terms were agreed upon just last night while I bled in my bedroom. Bill would pick me up the next morning, Saturday, at ten. I would stay the night with him in Santa Cruz and be home by five p.m. Sunday, in time for dinner.
The
non-negotiables, Mom said, you good-for-nothing gabacho: There will be no alcohol, no visits with buddies, no
leaving your fourteen year-old son in the van while you’re in some bar, no
dropping him off with acquaintances or dumping him alone at the apartment while
you ‘take care of errands.’
To
sum up, there would be absolutely no reason for concern about Bill’s conduct or
my safety or Mom would be sure to use every resource at her disposal to make
things right. And did he remember that she’s a social worker who could bring
down on him the full weight of the system to protect her son and make his life
a living hell?
It’s past noon. My half-sister Cami spent the night at a friend’s house to make sure she was gone when Bill showed up. Sitting and sweating in the kitchen, I force myself to not mess with my ear. It throbs like someone’s blasting blood into it with a bicycle pump.
“Qué pensabas when you decided to do that? You really want to look like one of those thug pandilleros your sister has chasing after her?” My mother shakes her head at me from the living room. “Serve you right if your ear fell off, pendejo,” she says and turns to gaze out the front window.
•
• •
“You can do this,” I
whispered, rocking on the edge of the bed.
The ice cube rested on my thigh, a dark water stain spreading across my jeans as it melted. Between my index finger and thumb, I tugged on my half-frozen earlobe. In the other hand, my mother’s sewing needle. I brought the business end up to eye-level. The needle’s tip glinted in the light from the bare bulb above my head.
“Si se puede, motherfucker.” I closed my eyes and pushed.
• • •
Screw Cami for being
right. If I had really thought it through, I wouldn’t have pierced my ear until
after Bill’s visit.
Mom steps back from the window, chin high. “Ahí ‘stá.” She holds me with her eyes and thrusts a hand into her purse. “Sale, pues, it’s been a little bit since the last time, but you know how this goes. I’m giving you fifty dollars. Come home with fifty dollars. If you don’t come home with fifty dollars, it’s because you spent it to come home.”
She
pauses to search my face for understanding and heaves a sigh. “Just come home.”
•
• •
Give me a fight in the
cafeteria with Roberto, Manuel, or DeAndre. Any. Fucking. Day. This was worse
than getting my nose broken and reset.
When
the needle was about halfway through, I collapsed onto my bed. I think I let
out a whimper.
“‘Ey!
What’s going on in there?” my mom called out from the other side of the door.
“Yuck,
Mom. Don’t ask,” I heard Cami say. “Let him have his privacy. At least the
hormonal little pig thought to close the door.”
“I
am NOT jerking off, Cami!” I yelped. A warm rivulet crept down my neck. “But
you’ll be happy to know there’s some blood all up in here.”
“¡Guácala,
sinvergüenza!” Mom yelled from the other side of the door. Several heavy steps
and a bang from farther down the hall. No one slammed doors like my mom.
I
cursed and gave it one last push. The needle exited my earlobe with a moist pop
and jabbed into my neck. “Ay, SHIIIT!” I screamed.
“Fucking
PERVERT!” Cami bellowed out in the hallway.
I
lay on my bed and listened to my mom argue with someone over the phone in her
bedroom. Bill, I thought. I wondered if he was still coming for me tomorrow.
A
half-hour later I stumbled out of my bedroom, sweaty and triumphant. After the
needle, fitting the ruby stud I’d bought at the mall was a piece of cake. Every
inch from the top of my head to my shoulder was an electrical storm of pain,
but it was worth it. I smiled to myself as I sauntered to the kitchen for more
ice. I’m gonna look so chingón at
school on Monday if I can get this swelling down.
At
the kitchen table, Cami sat holding a bottle of Pepsi to the side of her face.
Her mouth curled into an evil grin. “I hope you had your fun.”
I
leaned into the freezer and turned my head to glare at her, the cold mist
soothing my ruined ear. “You seriously think that’s how I sound when I’m
wrestling the priest?” I said, grabbing an ice tray.
Cami’s
expression was exactly what I’d hoped for. “Wrestling
the pr—?Shiiiiit, Dani, you are
going straight to hell.”
I
dropped the ice tray hard onto the counter and fished out a cube. My head
exploded with new pain when it touched my ear. Only the smugness of grossing
out Cami kept me from fainting.
“I
hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into, dumbass,” Cami said and took a
sip from her bottle.
“What,
you mean how awesome I look?” My earlobe howled, but no way I was letting it
show in front of Cami.
She
shook her head and stood up slowly. “You’re so cool now we’re gonna have to
call you culero. Look, I’m spending
the night at Leticia’s so I don’t have to see your Caucasian-ass dad when he
comes to get you tomorrow, but good luck explaining that chingadera in your ear.”
I
froze, the ice cube slipped from my fingers and skittered across the kitchen
floor. Cami bore into me with those huge brown eyes. “Bill’s coming tomorrow,”
I whispered.
“Yup,”
she nodded. “And you know how he feels about maricas.”
Queers?
“Wh—what?”
I stammered.
“For
what it’s worth,” Cami said, gently fingering the ruby stud, “I thinkit looks muy sexy.”
•
• •
I open the front door
right when Bill flicks a cigarette butt into the pot of geraniums my mom keeps
on the steps. He stands a safe distance off the porch, his red beard a little
grayer than the last time I saw him.
“Hey,”
he says.
“Hey,”
I answer. My face goes hot which makes my ear tingle.
“Where’s
your mother?”
“Asleep,”
I lie.
Bill
nods and looks me up and down. “You ready?”
I
up-nod him, like I would some random dude on the street. It feels weird and the
frown on his face tells me he senses it, too. I grab my Converse bag and shut
the door behind me. There are no words exchanged when I pass him on the way to
the van, but I can feel his eyes.
“You’ve
gotten big,” he says from behind.
His van, a white Ford Econoline, is exactly the same as last time I sat in it. The odor of unfiltered Camels and canned shoestring potatoes fills the cab. The engine shroud between the seats doubles as his mobile desk where he keeps his notebooks, pens, extra packs of cigarettes, a stolen Denny’s ashtray, and a hand-written copy of a poem the paper says was written by some dude named Robert Burns.
We cam na here to view your warks, In hopes to be mair wise, But only, lest we gang to hell, it may be nae surprise.
Every
time I sit in this van, I pick up the powder blue notebook paper and read that
poem and try to connect it to Bill, to this man I understand is my father. What
is it about those verses that resonates with him? Does it have anything to do
with me? Every time I return the poem to its place behind the ashtray, I have
more questions than answers.
Bill climbs into the driver’s seat and I sit quietly waiting for him to start the engine. If it’s anything like the last couple of visits, I’ll read the Burns poem for a few minutes and probably he won’t try to small talk until we get to 280 South.
We
keep not moving and I start to get nervous.
“Hey,”
Bill says.
I
look up from the poem.
“What’s
that?” he points and flicks my left ear with his middle finger. It’s hard and
cigarette-stained and it feels like he clubbed me across the side of the face.
“Nothing,”
I grunt. Pain lances down my neck. Don’t let it show, dude.
“Looks
like an earring.”
I
nod and look back down at the poem written on wrinkled notebook paper and
marked with dried coffee rings. Bill blows out a long smoky hiss through his
nose. The air in the cab grows thick and I tell myself that I’m big enough now.
Maybe I can’t take him, but I can at least make it out of the van in one piece.
“What
does that mean?” he says slowly.
“What
does what mean?”
“That,”
he says, jabbing his finger at my ear. “What’s it mean?”
“It
doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an earring.”
“That’s
not a Mexican kid thing, is it?”
“A
what?” This time I look him in the eyes. They’re my eyes, only they’re icy
blue. I might even admit that they were handsome if they weren’t his.
“Never
mind,” he says. “The only guys I know who have earrings are hippies or faggots,
and you don’t dress like a hippy.”
“How
do I dress?”
“Like
some kid from the East Side.”
All
I can think to do is stare at him. The van’s perfectly silent, like we’re each
waiting for the other to do something important.
“I
should go back inside,” I say. We sit in the quiet cab.
“If
you say so,” Bill shrugs.
I
wait for him to change his mind, to give me some sign that he wants me to stay.
To explain to me this fucking poem in my hands. Nothing.
Carefully,
I slip my fingers to the top of the page and pull. The Burns poem tears neatly
in two. I square the halves and tear them again, and again, until the powder
blue page is little more than confetti. The pieces fall onto the seat as I
climb from the van.
The
deadbolt at the front door clicks loudly and I listen to the van’s exhaust note
fade down the street.
In
the kitchen, I sit at the table and hold an ice cube to my ear. I let the tears
come, but it’s okay this time because I’m alone and no one can see. The price
you pay for cool, I tell myself.
In
my pocket is a wad of bills. If I cry hard enough, maybe, just maybe, Mom will
let me keep the fifty dollars.
Tomas Baiza was born and raised in San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho, where he is currently studying creative writing at Boise State University. Tomas’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Parhelion, Writers In The Attic, Obelus, In Parentheses, Meniscus, Rigorous, The Meadow, Peatsmoke, PANK, and elsewhere.
Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet, translator, educator, and author of two books of poetry, Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018) and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). He is currently based out of Washington, DC, where he is an associate editor of poetry for Barrelhouse. Read more of his work and translations at Lucianmattison.com
I was caught in a recent text
interaction with my parents where we disagreed about what color emoji
accurately reflected my skin color. They questioned my use of the medium brown
skin tone when communicating with them. “This
is more like your skin color,” they replied in our group chain sending over an
emoji of a girl in the skin tone second to the right of whitest. My initial reaction was to send back a medium
brown thumbs down. Instead, I typed back something like, “I don’t idealize
whiteness” from my bed in my pale neighborhood. I sulked for the rest of the
afternoon, offended that my own parents would dare to question my brownness.
My parents are partially right. I’m
likely a shade in between the second and third emoji skin tones but the options
my smartphone offers me are too few and inaccurate to capture the nuances of
pigment. What disturbed me most about my parents’ comment is that it stood in
stark contrast to how I remembered my childhood self. It bothered me to be told that my perception
of myself was wrong. Their comment embedded itself under my skin as I
questioned whether I view myself as darker than I am.
#
I first learned I was brown in
elementary school. Always a fast learner, I grasped this was not a good thing.
In the library, a classmate spun a globe and asked me while pointing to the
orange L-shaped country the United States sat atop, “Where on here are you
from?” I blushed, unable to answer. I didn’t want to confirm that I was from
any place other than where he was from and I didn’t know enough about my
background to even proudly declare a mythical place of origin. At 10, I had
never been to Mexico and couldn’t name one relative, dead or alive, who lived
there. Another much younger student with a face of a cherub looked me in my eye
wanting to know if I was the housekeeper of the school. I smiled and said
nothing while praying under my breath, ‘Forgive her father for she knows not what
she says.’ And yet another peer told me before our 8th grade graduation
that he would be able to recognize me at our reunion because I would be the one
with a gaggle of children. These assumptions were all born from their
perception of me as Mexican. As a middle-class monolingual Chicana generations
removed from my home country, I was unsure of where I fit, one foot in the
margins, the other in the mainstream. My classmates seemed to know more about
who I was supposed to be than me, forcing me to reckon with my identity.
#
I’ve been surrounded by white people
for most of my life. This was by design, our family like good Americans,
believed that the schools, neighborhoods, and institutions where white people
were en masse would afford me the best the world had to offer, opportunity by
osmosis. During my school age years, I dove, or was plunged rather, into a new
level of whiteness when I was admitted to a prep school in an upper class
suburb adjacent to Los Angeles, the city my Mexican-American family had called
home since the 1920s. When I entered the classroom for the first time, I
discovered I was one of a few students of color. Like crumbs, we were sprinkled
throughout the school, an attempt to mirror the city’s diversity in a building
in a part of a city that was not built for us. Here, my head was submerged as
if I was being baptized. I held my breath and when I came up for air, I looked
at myself with a new set of eyes. My former color-blind self had drowned and in
its place I emerged with skin covered in slimy self consciousness.
The moment I walked into this school
I had entered the Garden of Eden. A serpent slithered around me as it whispered
in my ear a litany of the ways in which I wasn’t good enough. My classmates
around me insisted on pointing out to me I was something other than white so I
became consumed by what I lacked, whiteness. The forbidden fruit offered to me
held the promise of acceptance and I ate from it. In an instant, I grew
ashamed. First, of not being white,
then of wanting to be white, and
later of being too white. A trilogy
of shame would follow me from here forth.
#
I found a journal from my pre-teen years
with a prompt that asked me what I would change about myself. I confessed in a
blue ballpoint pen my desire for lighter skin, bigger boobs, and invisible arm
hair.
Later as a teenager, I was often
presented with questions in Spanish I could never answer. A woman approached me
on the street to ask if she was in the right place. I wanted to tell her none
of us were. She showed me the address of the office where her appointment
was. I was tongue tied again. My memory possesses only a few phrases I
picked up from Spanish class or family members who only speak the language with
droplets of words, slang, and phrases. Tonta is one of those words. This means
dummy. Like a tonta I stared back at the woman and mumbled an apology for
appearing to be something I was not. “Lo siento,” I offered in her language.
#
Prep school blue bloods weren’t the
only ones who made me wish for whiteness. Within many Latinx families, we
aspire for it as a way to earn enough penance to release us from our
miscegenated purgatory. After all, the darkest amongst our ancestors were killed,
pillaged, captured, plundered, and called stupid or ugly. The racial caste
system in colonial Latin America condemned Indian blood as impure and Black
ancestry as a stain. This memory haunts the subconscious of our grandparents,
parents, aunts and uncles, even ourselves as we bestow upon each other
skin-colored nicknames, negra, guero, moreno, indio, and compete with each
other in a contest of who has the fairest features.
#
When I left for college, I was suffering from white people fatigue. I wanted nothing more than to immerse myself with other brown people. I buried my white girl tendencies. The Dave Matthews Band and Natalie Merchant CDs became plastic skeletons in my closet. Instead, I chose to highlight my knowledge of hip hop and r&b, and even picked up a newfound musical interest in rock en espanol. I learned the chorus to songs by Maná and Juanes but couldn’t tell you what their lyrics meant if you asked me. Thankfully, no one did. After living in Stanford’s ethnic theme dorms for two years and spending the rest of my time frequenting the university spaces where students of color studied, danced, ate, organized, and sometimes slept, I graduated successfully with honors and without any white friends. On graduation day I draped a multi-colored serape stole over my graduation gown, a symbol to myself that I had assuaged my assimilated guilt. Or had I?
#
At some undetermined age after I
graduated from college, I became unrecognizable. Until then, most everyone I
met assumed I was Mexican. No one could place me anymore. I try to pinpoint the
moment it happened or what about me had changed. Had I become Instagram
filtered in the flesh? Had my designer dress up clothes turned me into a
chameleon, my class status now more prominent?
The inescapable ‘where are you from’
question, however, still finds a way to track me down, a benign reminder that I
am not from here even though I am. As a non-Black Latinx who identifies as
mestiza, my skin privilege makes me ethnically ambiguous. I am now mistaken for
Persian or Middle Eastern by strangers. Their faces shift to disappointment or
shock when they discover I am “just” Mexican. They find this unbelievable. I
don’t know how to interpret their reactions or whether I should be flattered.
#
Of all the neighborhoods to choose
to live in Los Angeles, I chose one that is 75 percent white. Like an addict, I
just can’t stay away from that white stuff even after all these years. The
other day I sat in a cafe unbothered to be one of a few brown people there. I
caught myself feeling numb to the whiteness surrounding me. A small part of me
wanted a pat on the back for learning to play the part, getting the role I had
been auditioning for my whole life. The other part of me found my reflection in
the glass. When did I begin to find comfort in my discomfort? When had I become
immune to being a token, immune to myself? Had I finally paid off my debt of
brownness by becoming acceptable to white people?
Or even worse, were my childhood
memories figments of my imagination? Had I imagined being brown or had I
actually faded, my Chicana awakening only a phase?
Was I just fooling myself? Was it
only a matter of time before the egg shell of my façade cracked? I needed
reminding.
My reminder arrived during the days
of reckoning following George Floyd’s murder. Long-standing demands to confront
the death toll at the hands of anti-Blackness gained attention in all corners
of the country, even unexpected ones. What were once foreign sounds in my
sheltered West Hollywood neighborhood became a nightly soundtrack of sirens and
helicopters. I joined the crowds calling
for justice. My heart swelled both hungry and hopeful for change, a feeling I
hadn’t felt since the years when protests were as crucial as college parties. I
rolled my eyes at the white people around me to express my holier than thou
attitude towards their newfound outrage.
The national guard parked itself in front of the CVS where I pick up my
prescriptions. Their tanks were intended to signal protection but only provoked
fear. They served as a warning that none of us are safe from white supremacy,
even those of us like me who cling to our otherness and degrees in race studies
as a way to avoid the ways in which we might be complicit.
I recall if part of the reason my
parents’ text conversation stung so much is because it forced me to confront
the white adjacency I worked so hard to reject after those many years of
striving for it. I’ve devoted so much time reconciling my brownness relative to
whiteness but being non-white is not the same as being Black. I can carry
around my colonized wounds and still be complicit in colonization, including my
very own. I must not injure myself and others. My brownness alone does not
absolve me; my demons still need exorcising.
Dayna Cobarrubias is a third generation Angelena whose writing explores the role race, ethnicity, and class play for Latinx diasporic communities when they are upwardly mobile and generations removed from the immigrant experience. Themes of racial and cultural ambivalence, authenticity, and assimilation permeate her work. She is an alumna of Voices of Our Nation (VONA) Summer Workshop, Tin House Summer Workshop, and a graduate of Stanford University. Dayna is currently completing her first novel.
Itzel Basualdo is an interdisciplinary artist from Miami, Florida. Born in the U.S. to an Argentine father and Mexican mother, she often writes about the complexities and conundrums of existing between languages, accents, and cultures. Her work has appeared in The Acentos Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ginger Magazine, among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019 and is a recipient of the 2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship Award. Itzel has forthcoming exhibitions at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum and NSU Museum of Art.
I was at the end of my
fourth-grade year when I learned I was black and what that meant.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t know I was black. That was obvious — dark
skin that popped against my white classmates’ skin during dodge ball, kinky
hair chemically beat into submission, the questioning stares from teachers
during roll call after their weak attempts to say my name correctly.
I knew I was Black. But I didn’t know what that meant. Not really.
My Black comes from Cuba, as sweet as the sugar cane my ancestors
harvested. My Black touched the shores of West Africa before touching the sands
of the Caribbean. And Papá didn’t say much more about being black other than we
were, I am, black and with it, there are things he couldn’t quite explain.
The route home on the hot, sticky bus ride was the same every day of every year so I knew it better than anyone. On that day, when the school bus rounded the corner, passing the white house with the blue trim, I knew the next stop would be mine. By that time, there would only be a handful of us kids still left on the bus. A couple of girls, like a set of bookends, would sit in the front. They looked a grade or two younger than me, their blinding Lisa Frank bookbags still on their backs. A couple of third-grade girls, blonde and well dressed, were sprinkled in the middle, sitting with their backs against the side of the bus wilting against the crosswind. And then toward the back was me, hair like a cotton ball against the Houston humidity. That afternoon was hot and sticky, summer a couple of degrees away. The air from open windows didn’t make the school bus any less of a hot box and green vinyl seats glued themselves to the back of our thighs as our sweat-soaked t-shirts clung to our backs.
The bus stopped right in front of my house. But that didn’t matter.
Sitting behind me, loud as day, was the reason I wanted to leap from the moving
bus most days.
The group of white boys had spent the bus ride calling me everything but
a child of God. My hair, my skin, my clothes, my voice were all up for
ridicule. Usually, I ignored it, pretended I couldn’t hear them, and then read
my book or disappeared into my inner thoughts. He-Man and She-Ra would be on by
the time I ran into my house so I concentrated on that. Mamá y Papá would be
there. My baby sister would be too, home early from kindergarten. The house
would smell like ropa vieja or picadillo con papa or arroz con frijoles negros
and I would be home, speaking my Spanish and being who I was.
“Hey, you. What kind of black are you?” one of them asked. His face was red from the heat. He was from my grade but in another classroom. I recognized him from the hallways and during recess. He was one who liked making fun of the girls. He especially liked the girls who cried in front of him.
Another white boy, who was in my class, had answered when he saw I was
ignoring him. “She speaks that Mexican.” His voice like a dart, designed to
hurt.
I kept ignoring them as they snickered, mocking me in their fake Spanish. The boy in my grade looked over the seat to make commentaries about my reactions. “She’s about to cry. Are you gonna cry in Mexican?” I made my face cement, his laugh burning on the inside of my ear. I wanted to become She-Ra, Princess of Power, and kick them. Hard. I wanted them to stop making fun of me, but I knew anything I’d say they would be used as timber for their fire.
“But
she’s one of those Negros. Look at her hair. She is darker than those Mexicans.
I don’t believe you speak Mexican, girl. Talk. Say something.”
As the bus inched closer to my stop, I popped up and sat closer to the
bus driver, using the inertia from the moving bus to propel me forward. The
cackle from the back of the bus rattled me.
I didn’t understand then what was happening, why these boys were being
mean to me in this way. Why they called me Mexico and Negro. Why was my hair
and my color a source of teasing? This wasn’t the first time it happened and it
wasn’t the last. When I’d tell an adult, something our teachers and other
adults told us to do when we felt threatened, I was always told to ignore them
or to suck it up. Or boys will be boys. Or maybe I shouldn’t speak Spanish. Or
if I straighten my hair. Or if I wear clothes like the other girls. If I looked
and acted more like other girls who
look like me, you know, black, I would blend in more because at least the black
kids would play with me.
When the bus finally stopped in front of my house, I ran to my front
door, past my parents, and through to the backdoor. My tears were coals. My
parents yelled for me to come back, asking what was wrong. I didn’t want to
answer them. I didn’t want anything but one thing. I climbed to the top of my
swing set, the platform right before you slide down, and I dropped to my knees.
I prayed that day, in between heavy sobs and screams. I prayed for God to make me white because no one makes fun of white people. No one was taunting them because they were black and spoke Spanish. Those boys weren’t the only ones who made me feel like this. Other students, teachers, and other adults were experts at the microaggression. Outside of school,
anyone, even any
regular person in the supermarket made sport of making black people feel
uncomfortable in their own skin. I saw it. I felt it. But it was worse when
they heard me speak or saw my mother’s caramel Guatemalan skin. They’d ask her
who’s child was she taking care of. The look on their faces when they realized
I was her child let me know that I’d be explaining my blackness and my
Latinaness for the rest of my life.
Why did God make me Black? Why didn’t he make me white? Or at least the
same Black as the other Black girls in my grade. It was years before I received
my answer.
***
Thirty years later, a Langston Hughes poem taught me the answers to the
questions I asked when I was 8 years old.
“I Look at the World” is deceivingly simple when I first read it as a 38-year-old woman in 2016. I was overwhelmed by its simplicity and by the news dominating the headlines at the time. The death of black brothers and sisters flooded my timeline for years – Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile. #Oscarssowhite was gaining momentum. Then-President Barack Obama, a black president in his second term, declared a federal emergency in Flint, MI after the water became contaminated and stayed that way. And after six months and a move back to Houston, I was recovering from a suicide attempt in the safety of the same home I ran to that day, surrounded by memories and ghosts of the old neighborhood – the bus rides, the questions, the labels of not really being black enough or Latina enough. I was combating shame, guilt, rage, extreme sadness, and darkness. Sometimes one right after another.
Hughes gave me permission to feel that anger but only if I could use it
like She-Ra, a superpower that transformed me.
From beyond the grave, Hughes told me about myself:
“I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face And this is what I see: This fenced-off narrow space Assigned to me.”
When I read Hughes use the word Black, I stopped reading and blinked until I was sure I was reading correctly. He didn’t say African American or Negro, an American term which he used in poems such as “Let America Be America Again.” He wrote Black. For the first time in a long time, I was included in a conversation about existence in my own country that had eluded me. However, the experience of being Black in the world hadn’t. In Brazil, Nayara Justino lost her Globeleza Carnival Queen crown for being too dark. In Mexico, 1.38 million of its citizens were counted as being of African descent. Slowly, very slowly, the world around me — long time acquaintances, coworkers, former classmates I ran into at the Wal-Mart– was beginning to consider that Black not only came in different shades but in different cultures and languages.
But while that stanza in Hughes’ poem reflected my Blackness back to me, it also referenced a prison I knew too well, the “fenced-off narrow space.” To the world, I was just another Black girl that needed to stay in her lane or be put there if I dared to put a toe out of it.
Or…on a good day…my walls were prescribed. To perform someone else’s
idea of being Black. No speaking Spanish, no references to anything from home,
no salsa music, no merengue dancing. Practice your slang, your African American
words, so that it sounds natural. Learn when to laugh, how to laugh, at things
that don’t make sense right away. Don’t ask what things are. Accept. Accept.
Accept.
When another Black person called me sister, I didn’t understand what they meant by that. For me un hermana is a relation. The first time someone referenced Teddy Pendergrass or Franky Beverly to me, I nodded as if I knew who they were but I knew if I said Beny More they would know not who that was so I kept my mouth shut. I don’t know how to play Spades, the game on the island was dominos.
At every turn, my Blackness was an undefinable strange thing. I was an
odd person. An other and it started early, way before my bus ride home.
Because being Black in America was one thing, but being Afro-Latina in
Black America while living in America was something else.
***
Papá and I used to talk about everything. He told me about life in Cuba before the revolution and in Spain after he exiled in the early 1960s. What he told me about the world was that being black was different everywhere he went.
In Cuba, being Black
was being someone’s servant. In Spain, it was like being the most exotic fruit.
In America, being Black was being invisible and discounted.
But being Black, Latina, and a
woman in America was the worst.
“You will struggle,” he said. “You’re smart, too. They are not going to
like that. They will not respect that.”
“Who,” I asked, my 8-year-old brain tried to process this advice.
He had brought me in from the outside. He had let me cry. He had let me
be angry. He had calmed Mamá, the warrior, down. And then Papá talked about
Blackness.
“Everyone. Blacks and whites here.” His face was a straight line. “They
will want you to stay in your place.”
That’s when the anger began to boil.
***
That anger returned, steaming hot, when Sandra Bland’s death was ruled a suicide in July 2016.
Hughes wrote about the “walls oppression builds” and by the time Sandra
was buried, those walls scraped the sky’s underbelly.
My Black grew deeper. My Afro-Latina grew deeper. For the first time, I
saw them as one in the same. Because Sandra Bland lived her best Black life and
it mattered every single day. My Black life does too. And when that life is on
the opposite side of oppression, there’s no difference between Sandra and me.
“I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind –
And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind. Then let us hurry, comrades, The road to find.”
Hughes gives me permission to be Black, all the way Black. I don’t have
to perform someone else’s idea of Blackness with him.
“Are you mixed with something?”
“I can tell you’re not black
because of your nose.”
“I saw your Mama. Why is she white and you’re not?”
“How did you learn to speak Spanish?”
These questions have followed me around since kindergarten, since the
white boys on the bus. These questions became more aggressive in middle school,
said with sandpaper and gasoline. By the time of high school, they were Molotov
cocktails and landmines.
Now, they are grenades.
***
That day in fourth grade, on top of my swing set, under the Houston sun,
I baked. I turned an entire shade darker. I couldn’t be white even if I prayed
for it.
Through the years, even right up to his death, Papá, when my Blackness
was questioned or ridiculed or if I ever wished to be something else, he’d set
me right.
“Tu,” he said, “eres una negra bonita.” I was a beautiful black girl.
“You have to say that,” I said in
Spanish. “You’re my dad.”
“You’re my daughter, of course
you’re beautiful. I’m not an ugly black man!”
We laughed. Papá patted his cheek, proud of himself and his looks. A grin
softened the blow from earlier. He continued.
“People will be jealous because you are beautiful, and smart, and
talented. This life,” he said, “will be difficult for you”
“Por que, Papá?”
“It is always difficult for
those who are different and proud of it.”
My dad died in 2003 and I’ve learned more about my Blackness since then.
My blackness means anger but it means joy too. My Blackness is magical because
my ancestors were hella magical. My Blackness eats pork roasted with garlic
gloves, mojo, and Adobo. But my Black also doesn’t mind a rib or two. My Black
is part of a tapestry, interwoven in centuries of overcoming and achieving. My
Black dances a guaguanco and rumba and salsa so good you would swear the
ancestors had taken over. My Black speaks in many tongues.
Being Black in America is all this, plus more and every day I’m learning what that means. So I’m doing what Hughes advised, racing toward “the road to find.”
Icess Fernandez Rojas is a writer and educator who lives in Houston. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program. Her work has been published in Rabble Lit, Minerva Rising Literary Journal, NBCNews.com, HuffPost and the Guardian and the Feminine Collective‘s anthology Notes from Humanity. She is a recipient of the Owl of Minerva Award, a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation alum, and a Kimbilio Fellow. Follow her on Twitter: @Icess and at her website: http://icessfernandez.com.
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