Latinx

Creature Feature

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By Richie Narvaez

My cousin came from Puerto Rico and killed our dog.

That summer of 1972, our dog Barbie had been acting bizarre. My sister had named the dog after her doll. She had curly white hair (the dog, not my sister) with those brown-red streaks under her eyes that some dogs get. I was seven, and Barbie was my best friend.

She used to wake me every morning by licking my face. She sat by me whenever I watched TV and listened whenever I wanted to talk about comic books.

But Barbie hadn’t been waking me anymore. She no longer ran to me when I called. She wouldn’t eat. She growled for no reason.

Every night Barbie ran from room to room in our Brooklyn apartment. I would wake in the middle of the night, and I could hear her in the darkness. Her long nails clicked on the floor as she went back and forth, from the bedrooms to the kitchen and back.

My sister Evie tried picking her up, to hold her to calm her down, but Barbie whimpered and wiggled until Evie had to let her go. Then she ran off again, back and forth, never stopping. We were scared. Our brother Rafael didn’t care because he didn’t like the dog because he didn’t like her name. So it was just my sister and I who had a conference to decide what to do.

We knew the dog needed a doctor, but we knew doctors cost money. So we went to ask Mami.

Evie said, “Something’s wrong with Barbie. She needs a doctor.”

Mami was making breakfast for us at the stove, fried eggs, platanos, fried Spam. She was smoking a cigarette. She said, “Ask your father.”

But it was never easy to ask anything from Papi. He didn’t live with us, and he only came by in the afternoons to do the numbers, so he was busy. But once in a while he would play with us, and that summer he and I were building an Aurora monster model set together.

Although he did more of the building. He said I would make a mess and that he didn’t want me to sniff too much glue. He laughed when he said that. I didn’t know why.

We were making the glow-in-the-dark Phantom of the Opera where Lon Chaney rips off his mask and grins. I wiggled each model piece off the plastic grid and handed them to Papi when he asked for them.

Papi had just finished gluing the mask into the Phantom’s hand when Barbie ran into the room and then ran back out.

Fearing my father’s reaction, I said, “I think Barbie needs a veterinarian.” Which I said slowly, to make sure the word came out right.

Papi laughed to himself again. I didn’t know why.

* * *

That same summer our cousin Abdon, from Mami’s side, came to stay with us. He was from back in Ponce, and he had a wife and baby girl back there. He came to the city to find work.

Abdon was thin as Jesus and had hair on his chin like a goat. He mostly spoke fast Spanish that was hard for us to understand because we mostly spoke English in the house.

But I liked that he could crush beer cans in one hand and that he taught me how to play Geography. He and I would sit in the living room with a world atlas that Mami had bought from a neighbor for ten dollars. Abdon opened to a page and said, “Portugal.” Then he slid the atlas to me. He smoked a cigarette and drank beer while I searched.

“Portugal!” I said, pointing.

“Awright. You good,” said Abdon, and he looked at me with his eyes that were green as boogers. Then he said, “Ecuador.”

I liked learning and was always good in school because Mami said being good in school, learning math, learning history, learning to speak English correct, was the only was to succeed in this country, the only way to get rich.

So I liked Abdon and I thought he liked my sister, my brother, and me. But one morning I heard him and Mami talking in the kitchen. He said, “Estos no tienen respeto.”

“Si,” my mother said. To my mother, you were no good if you didn’t have respect — for priests no matter how much they smelled, for the landlord who banged on the pipes, even for old people who wanted to eat you like that old man who walked down our street and screamed that he would eat us. It didn’t matter. You had to have respect!

“Edgar, he’s the freshest one,” Abdon said.

“Si,” I heard Mami say. “Mr. Ants in His Pants.”

They called me that because I had broken Mami’s plaster panther and her plaster horse and her plaster shepherd. I was always breaking something. My hair was always a mess, Mami said, and she always had to tuck my shirt back in. Every time I went down the stairs, it was at a run.

We had a small black and white TV. When I wasn’t reading, I watched it, Sesame Street and Electric Company at the start of the day, then game show after game show, then cartoons, the 4:30 Movie, and Eyewitness News, then reruns and sitcoms and cop shows until it was time to go to sleep.

One night Abdon told us we should be in bed. “Awright, kids, to sleep now,” he said in his thick accent, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

It was only 9. Mami allowed us to stay up to 11.

“Sleep,” Abdon said, towering over us. But we ignored him and kept our eyes on the TV.

That was when the belt came out.

We were no strangers to the distinct sound of a buckle, although my mother preferred using chancletas.

Abdon pulled me up first by my little left arm so that he could get at the back at my legs. Smack! It was sharp and hard and it hurt like a hit from God.

“Ai!” I yelled.

Smack! Smack! Smack!

“That . . . what . . . you . . . get,” he said, a smack between each word.

My brother was faster than I was and caught only one in the back of his legs.

I wriggled free from Abdon and ran crying, “Mami, mami,” and “It’s not fair,” all the way to my bunk bed.

In the bunk below, my brother cried and then stopped, but when he heard me cry, he started again.

Later, my mother came in to say goodnight and kissed me on the forehead and said, “You see. Abdon is a man. You have to listen and respect him.” Then she told me to say my prayers.

* * *

The next weekmy brother and my sister Evie and me were in the bedroom my brother and I shared. We were on the floor, with all our monster models on the floor in front of us.

Barbie used to sit and watch us play, but she was walking around the apartment now, never stopping.

Fever said that his favorite model was Godzilla because he put it together all by himself.

“The hand keeps falling off, but I like it when the spikes in the back glow in the dark,” he said. But he felt bad that he lost the little glow-in-the-dark fire piece that was supposed to come out of Godzilla’s mouth.

He pointed to the Wolfman model and said, “Who can tell me who this is?”

“Me,” I said. “The Wolfman’s real name is Larry Talbot and he became a werewolf because he was bitten by a werewolf and he changes into a monster and he can only be killed with a silver bullet and they shoot him in the end.”

“Very good,” said Fever. Then he pointed to the Mummy and said, “And this monster?”

“The Mummy,” said Evie, “is from Egypt.” She could put her model together herself, but she liked to have Papi do it. “He drinks tea made from the leaves and then he comes alive. Then it goes out and likes to choke people until they die.”

Fever pointed to the Creature of the Black Lagoon and said, “What is the name of this creature?”

We busted out laughing, Rafael shaking his head, Evie saying she was going to pee herself, me barely being able to breathe. I fell back on the floor and that was when I saw our cousin Abdon turning away from the doorway. He had been watching us. He probably thought we were crazy.

* * *

I was on the living room floor, drawing on old notebook paper. My father and my cousin Abdon were drinking Rheingold and watching the Mets on TV. Barbie was going back and forth, from the kitchen to the living room, her nails scratching on the floor.

“In Puerto Rico, is hard to get good work,” said Abdon, crushing a beer can in his hand. “In New York, is harder.”

“No, it’s not,” Papi said. “Depends where you look.”

Then Papi told Abdon about all the jobs he had had since he came to New York: dishwasher, waiter, bartender, factory worker, carpenter, plumber, janitor, encyclopedia salesman, delivery man, garage mechanic, short order cook, electrician, gravedigger, house painter, numbers runner, roofer, construction worker, driver, and even a dentist —for himself, he said, pointing out the space in the side of his own mouth where he had taken out a tooth with pliers.

But Abdon said that was just my father, that no one would give him, Abdon, a job.

After another beer, Papi told Abdon he could help him do a roof in Bushwick. Abdon asked him what would he have to do. Papi said it was just a lot of lifting and walking.

The next day, Papi picked up Abdon early in the morning. My sister Evie and I were wide awake and excited to see Papi at a different time a day.

“Go back to sleep,” Papi said.

Abdon came out of the bathroom, looking sleepy.

“You ready?” Papi said to him.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Abdon.

After they left, Evie and I somehow ended up fighting over a Yoo-hoo. She gave me a charleyhorse, and I cried to Mami, who yelled at her.

In the afternoon, I was eating crackers when Papi and Abdon came back.

Right away Abdon went to lie down on the couch, where he slept at nights.

In the kitchen, Papi started getting his numbers papers together. Mami asked him how did everything go.

“You can’t ask a lemon tree to give you oranges,” Papi said.

“Que paso?” she said.

“He lifted more beers than anything,” Papi said.

* * *

I was alone in the bedroom playing with my action figures. I had an Aquaman whose head wouldn’t go back on because the rubber band inside his body broke. It was a hot day and no breeze was coming through the open windows. I was tired, cranky, hungry. All of a sudden Abdon came in and started yelling at me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told him to leave me alone.

“Que!” he said.

I heard the clinking metal sound.

That is when I said he should do a four-letter word to himself.

He got me with the belt once across the back before I was gone. I was small and slippery. This was my only advantage in all the fights I had with my brother. I got past Abdon, through the short hallway between the bedroom and living room, and ran into the bathroom before Abdon could get me.

It was a tiny bathroom, with a claw-foot tub, a toilet with the tank above it, and no sink. On the door was a little latch that went into a little ring. I held onto the door knob and pulled it to me with all my strength.

Abdon banged on the door and it shook. There was a glass in the front of the door that had been painted over a hundred times. I was worried he would smash through it, but I knew, I hoped, I prayed he wouldn’t do that. Would he?

“Abres la puerta,” he said.

“No, fuck off!”

“Open the door.”

“Fuck off!”

My brother and sister had been in the living room when I ran past. I knew they were watching. I also knew my mother was in the kitchen.

Thinking now about what happened next, I feel bad. But knowing what happened later, it’s hard to regret it. I was a small boy against a drunk, raging man. I used the only power I had.

“Open the door!” he said.

“Opeen da doh!” I said, imitating his thick accent.

I heard Fever and Evie start giggling. I heard Mami out there. From the way she laughed, I could tell she had a cigarette in her mouth.

A hamper sat in the corner on the edge of the tub. Above it was a little square tunnel that went up into darkness. When I asked my mother how could Santa Claus visit us when we didn’t have a fireplace, she said he came down that tunnel.

I started imitating Abdon more, talking about going to “Chay Stadium” and saying “Otro cerveza. Otro cerveza.” 

Abdon banged the door again, but with less force.

“Malcria’o,” he said. “I gonna get you.”

I stayed in there for another hour, doing impressions of Abdon and Jerry Lewis and Abbott and Costello and Bugs Bunny.

When I came out, I looked — Abdon was not around. Fever and Evie looked tired from laughing. Mami asked me if I wanted something to eat.

* * *

I had just finished fighting with my brother for no reason. He had given me a charleyhorse, and I cried to Mami, who yelled at him.

So I was watching TV alone, on the floor, in the dark. Suddenly I turned — and there was Barbie. She was curled up behind me, still and quiet as a sleeping puppy, with a wet, wet nose. Like she had never been sick at all, like she was all better.

I was scared to move because then she would move and maybe she would change back. I stayed still for as long as I could.

After a while I had to pee. I got up as slowly as I could, and Barbie stayed where she was, calm and still.

But when I got back she was gone from her spot. She had started running back and forth through the apartment, faster and faster.

All through the night, despite the summer heat, I stayed under the covers.

The next day, when Papi came in the afternoon, he drank beer and listened to the Mets on the radio.

It was Evie’s turn to talk to him. She said, “Papi. Can you please bring Barbie to the doctor, please?”

Abdon was there, too, and he and Papi started speaking in fast Spanish. Finally, Papi said he would bring the dog to the doctor the next day, but that night Abdon would put the dog in the bathroom so it wouldn’t scare us.

Evie and I were happy. Our dog was going to be okay!

That night Abdon put Barbie in the bathroom like Papi said he would. Then he came to our room, where Fever and I had bunk beds. He stayed in the doorway, and I could not see his face because it was in the dark. He told us, “Pray for God to make the dog better.”

I began saying the Lord’s Prayer. If my brother ever prayed for anything, it was a new baseball glove.

When I got up the next morning Barbie was not around. Maybe Papi wasn’t back from the doctor yet. Abdon was not around.

My mother was in the kitchen, washing clothes in the sink, listening to the radio station that played the old music she loved.

“Where’s Barbie?” I said.

“She die,” said Mami, without turning from the sink. “Pobre perrito.”

“What? Oh no,” I said.

Mami pointed with her mouth to the back window. There, right outside the window on the roof of the apartment below, was something in a clear plastic garbage bag. Barbie’s teeth stuck out from her black lips. Her head was twisted almost all the way around.

My mother told me, “Abdon say she hit her head on the tub and die.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t cry. I knew I should be, but I didn’t and I didn’t know why. I said, “What . . . what are we going to do with her? Can we bury her?” I was thinking about funerals and how much they cost and if they had them for pets and could we afford it.

“Abdon will take her to the river,” Mami said. “C’mon, eat some breakfast.”

A month later, just before school started, Abdon’s wife and baby came from Puerto Rico and they moved to an apartment in Brownsville.

That fall my sister asked Papi and Mami for another dog, and one day Papi brought Evie another poodle mix. She named it Barbie.

Richie Narvaez is author of the award-winning collection Roachkiller and Other Stories and the gentrification thriller Hipster Death Rattle. His latest novel is the historical YA mystery Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco.

chile cacahuate

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By Natalia A. Pagán Serrano

for Morgan Corona

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.

A Girl Learns to Swim

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By Ruth Joffre

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.

Toward a Celebration of Multitude: We Are Here

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BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

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.

The First Lesson I Learned From Bachata Is That It’s Sometimes Okay to Make Promises You’ll Never Be Able to Keep

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By Alejandro Pérez

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.

Bl(ack)eached

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By Khalin Vasquez

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.

Stud

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By Tomas Baiza

“¿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.

Reckoning With Brown

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By Dayna Cobarrubias

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.

When I Was Sixteen I Was in Love With Jesus

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By Itzel Basualdo

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.