by Alisa Valdes
“You did it,” he says flatly. His voice sounds far away, and he’s not looking at me the way he usually does. His eyes are on his guitar case in the corner. His arms dangle at his sides.
“What did I do?” I take his chin in my hand and turn his head toward me. His face moves, but his gaze shifts only to the wall behind me.
“You made number one.” His brow wrinkles sadly. Why would he be sad?
“Gato,” I say. He recoils from my touch. “Gato, look at me.”
He stands and walks to his instrument. He sighs.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why are you acting like this?”
He picks up the guitar case, sets it down, shuffles toward the door, comes back. “I don’t know,” he says.
“What don’t you know?”
Finally, he stops moving and our eyes connect. His are bloodshot. Last night he twisted sleepless most of the night, thrashed and whimpered, tangled on the edges of nightmares he would not speak of in the morning, no matter how many times I asked.
“Us,” he says. His arms cross over his chest as he sighs again. There has never been a problem with “us.” Ever. He slouches and I realize that since I found success, his shoulders have slowly crept forward, his chest collapsing in on his heart. He is not strong enough for this, what is happening to me. It makes him small in a way he does not wish to be small.
“Nothing’s changed, Gato,” I say, trying to sound gentle and nonthreatening. It would be hard for any man, but for a Mexican man it would be hardest of all. I stand and reach for him. He moves away again, this time through the hanging beads painted with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, into the dining room, where he sits at the bright, colorful hand-painted rustic table, next to his cold cup of herbal tea from this morning. I follow him, and repeat myself. I try to rub his shoulders, his subservient geisha. In the mirror with the hammered tin frame I look tall, too tall. I stoop, make myself little. Something, anything. I kiss the top of his head as lovingly as a mother. Part of me hates that I’m doing this. Part of me just wants to be alone with my guitar.
“Nothing’s changed, has it?” I ask.
“Everything’s changed,” he says low, without looking at me. He brushes my hand from his skin as if I were diseased.
My mouth hangs open the way my mother’s hangs open when she sees a price tag she thinks is too steep.
“You’re joking?” I ask.
“No, I’m not.” He is up and pacing, moving away from me again. I follow.
“But the only thing that’s different is the money, Gato. Everything else is the same.”
“Exactly.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Haven’t you heard what they’ve been saying about you?” he asks. He looks at me with anger as he leans on his hands over the table between us.
“Who?”
“The movement. The people in the movement.”
“No,” I say. Adrenaline rushes through me as the weight of what he’s just said hits. My people are talking about me behind my back? “What are they saying?”
“You see? They’re right. You have gone commercial. You’ve forgotten your roots.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
“They’ve been talking about it on the Red Zone and the other radio shows for weeks. You don’t listen anymore. You’re too busy trying to hear your song on the top forty stations.”
“I don’t listen because I’m overwhelmed with work! How could they say that about me? What proof do they have?”
Gato shakes his head. “You did songs in English,” he says.
“And? How is English different from Spanish, really? They’re both European languages. And it’s my first language.”
Gato laughs in disgust. “You used to swear you’d never record in English.”
“But you agreed when I said it would be a compromise! It’s one of the sacrifices I have to make now to reach the biggest audience with our message! You said so yourself. English is the crossover language. It’s a global language.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before all this.”
“All this what?”
“La raza is disappointed in you. You show your belly button all over MTV. They’re saying you’re no better than Christina Aguilera now.”
“What?” Anger floods my body. “I’m nothing like her. You know that!”
“Aren’t you? They’re playing disco remixes of ‘Brother Officer’ at Jack in the Box. God, Amber.”
“Amber?”
“You should have kept that name. It suits you better.”
“I’m Cuicatl. And I have no control over how they edit my videos. That’s all marketing.”
“They’re saying you betrayed Aztlán. Like Shakira. I can’t live with that.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing. You can’t actually think like this about me? Me?” I thump my chest like a gorilla. “You know me better than that!”
“They’re saying you’re lapping up this whole ‘Latina pop princess’ label.”
“You know that’s not true! That’s what reporters call me because they don’t know how to do anything else. That’s not what I call myself.”
“Well, you should educate them.”
“You think I don’t try?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“I tell them the truth, Gato, but they write what they want to. I can’t control what every moron in the world writes about me!”
Gato leaves the room again, this time for our bedroom. I hear him moving things about. When he returns, he has three canvas duffel bags.
“Gato, please,” I say. “What is this really about?”
“I’m going to stay with a friend.” He holds a familiar handmade paper envelope in one hand, with beautiful dried flowers stamped into the thick clothlike fibers.
“Who?”
“A friend.” He looks guilty and stuffs the envelope in his jeans pocket. So that’s what this is about.
“A female friend?”
He says nothing. I remember the young groupie, a beautiful Mexica girl with hair down to her butt who always tries to be the first to bring him water at the danzas. We used to laugh together about her obsession with him, the way she stands at the lip of the stage for all his shows. She sends him gifts, writes love letters. Sends them in thick, handmade paper envelopes that smell of rainwater. I can’t remember her name. I don’t want to know. She worships him. She is not herself a musician. Of course he wants to stay with her now.
“You can take a man out of Mexico,” I say, “but I guess you can’t take Mexico out of the man.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Is your ego really this fragile, Gato? You need to run to a little girl who worships you because I can’t be that for you anymore? You never thought I’d be first, did you?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“That’s exactly what this is about,” I say.
I’m tired. The pain is so deep I drown in it, feel nothing for the time being. It will hit later, as the silence closes in.
“It’s about you turning your back on the movement,” he says.
“Go,” I say. “If you believe I’m a sellout no better than Christina ‘show-my-new-titties’ Aguilera, then go. If you can’t see what I’m trying to do here, my God. I thought you loved me. I thought you knew me. You don’t. Get out. I don’t need you.”
“Fine,” he says.
“It would have come for you, too,” I say as he opens the front door.
“What would?”
“A record deal, all this.”
He stares me down, cold. “It still will. Only I won’t go commercial.”
“My record is hardly commercial.”
“That’s why it’s number one? No one gets to number one by making art. Everyone in the movement knows that. I know that. You know that.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say. “I haven’t chan
ged a thing.”
“That’s not how we see it,” he says, feeling a right to speak for the entire rock en Español community.
“Then I suggest you all have a massive inferiority complex,” I say. “That’s why you’d rather praise a bunch of pendejos who can barely play a I-IV-V-I over a tired ska loop than me! You can’t stand for one of your own to actually make it! Especially not a woman!”
“You’re not one of ours anymore, Amber.”
“Cuicatl.”
“Amber.” He says the name as an insult.
He steps across the threshold and shuts the door.
I collapse on the Haitian floor pillows, lie in the encroaching silence, and stare at the Billboard magazine splayed across the floor and feel guilty. The drummer brought the Billboards, and a collection of other press featuring articles on me. Seventeen, YM, Latina. The Washington Post. The New York Times calls me “a Latina Zack de la Rocha-meets-Eminem—in Cancún.”
I flip through them all, read the made-up quotes that are nothing more than approximations of things I said, written in ways I would never say them by people too lazy to take thorough notes or use a tape recorder. If you didn’t know me and didn’t listen to my work, you’d think it was true, that I was a conflicted, angry “Latina Alanis,” or a “Latina Joplin,” or a “Latina Courtney Love.” The U.S. media write as if a “Latina” anything can’t possibly be good enough to just be herself, an artist with no ethnic qualifier, no white (or black) mainstream comparison. Of course the moshers in the movement think I’ve turned my back on them. The woman in these articles is nothing like me. So this is how history gets made. Reporters do self-therapy with people like me as their backdrop and the world as their witness, and the words, however false, stick permanently, available for harvest by countless generations of historians to come. None of us knows the truth of what came before us, ever, or even of what happens now. It’s all filtered through reporters and historians. I feel sick. Furious. In other words, I feel inspired to write.
But first, I want to know if La Raza really think I’ve turned my back on them. I go to the kitchen and call Curly on his cell phone. I tell him what happened with Gato, what Gato said.
“It’s not true,” Curly assures me.
“He says everyone is talking bad about me.”
“They’re not.” He sounds uncomfortable.
“What is it, Curly? What aren’t you telling me?”
He lets out a whistle.
“Spit it out,” I say.
“I didn’t want to tell you this before,” he says. “But the fact is if there’s anyone we’re talking bad about, it’s Gato.”
“Gato? Why?”
Another sigh. “Cuicatl. Be strong.”
“Why?”
“Ever since you stopped coming to the danzas he’s been spending a lot of time before and after the ceremonies talking to Teicuih, that young girl from Diamond Bar.”
“How much time?”
“A lot. They come together. They leave together.”
Gato has been telling me our friend Leroy takes him and picks him up. One night, he called to say he’d stay at Leroy’s house because he was too tired from dancing to bring him home.
“You okay?” Curly asks.
Am I? I don’t know. I can’t tell. “Yes,” I say.
Curly hesitates, then begins to speak again. “You know how Gato wanted me to give him his name?”
“Yes.” Gato has been after Curly for a naming ceremony for years.
“I had the name. I just told him I didn’t, because I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Really?”
“Gato’s name is Yoltzin. Do you know what that means?”
“Small heart?” I ask.
“That’s right.”
“I never saw him that way.”
“I know.”
He’s right. I suddenly know that. I still feel like I’ve been punched. “Yes,” I say. “Okay.”
“I’ll get Moyolehauni and the kids together now, and we’ll come to your house and stay with you tonight,” he says. “We’ll make dinner for you.”
“Sure.”
“You should have family around at a time like this.”
“Okay.”
I look around my beautiful new home. Do I miss Gato? I do. Will I? Yes. But I’ll live. There’s so much else going on. I can’t believe how quickly my life has changed. First the money. Then recognition. And now I’ve lost the man I love. You hear about people finding overnight success? It happens. I mean, it’s not exactly overnight, because I’ve been playing music nearly all my life, and I’ve paid a lot of dues in the years, but I never imagined all of this.
The money was incredible enough. In one week, Gato and I went from living in the small apartment above the watch repair shop on Silverlake Boulevard to having our own little house in Venice, three blocks from the ocean, with a basement big enough for both of our bands to rehearse at the same time. It’s ordinary, the house, but it was expensive, compared to what we were used to. About a month after I bought it, I realized I could have bought something much bigger. I just wasn’t used to spending money and wasn’t even sure I should.
The other big change was the way my parents treat me, especially after I went loca and bought them a week in Vegas, at that hotel that looks like Venice, Italy. They just about died. That wasn’t something they ever expected me to do, and they didn’t expect me to pay off my dad’s truck, either, or buy him a new mountain bike. I surprised him with that. They don’t look at me like I’m crazy anymore. They are polite to Gato, and ask about him. What can I tell them now? “Sorry, Mom and Dad, Gato decided I was a sellout”? They wouldn’t know what a sellout was. Why would anyone question success?
How can he think that about me? How can he? Fucker. Who needs his phony ass?
The last time I saw my family in Oceanside, I couldn’t believe what I saw on the coffee table, next to the remote and the flier my mom got from the Home Shopping Network. A book on the history of the Mexica Movement. How strange that they should be the ones to ask the questions about Mexica history now, and Gato should be the one to reject me. Is it true? Have they all been talking about me the way he says? Are they that petty?
We didn’t splurge, me and Gato, for ourselves. I paid Frank his fifteen percent, even though he didn’t ask for it, because he earned it. I asked him to be my full-time manager and agent. He agreed. We have a good relationship. We donated some money to Olin’s Mexica Movement group out in Boyle Heights so that they can hire someone to do some serious copyediting of those press releases he sends everywhere. He’s a good man, and he means well, but he needs to be more professional. The Mexica have to be more polished and persuasive in how they present the movement to the media. As it is now, too many people think we’re crazy. We? Do I have a right to use that word? They supposedly don’t claim me anymore, now that I’ve been invited to perform at the MTV Awards. I think of all the times I put down women like Shakira and Jennifer Lopez—was I being no better than the people who bash me now? Or Christina Aguilera. I just insulted her and I don’t know anything about her other than what the media say. I was hating someone I had never met and didn’t know. But they’ll see. The people in the movement will see. I’ll elevate their philosophy to mainstream consciousness.
Then they will see.
Aztlán is rising. Through me.
With the money we are going to make, we’ll produce our own version of The Road to El Dorado, and this time we will tell the truth. This time, the Indian women won’t be whores who flirt with the rapacious Spaniards. This time, the Indian priest won’t be a bucktoothed savage in need of “enlightenment” and rescue. This time, the world will know what the Spaniards did to us. This time, we will speak for the twenty-three million of my people who were slaughtered by the Spaniards; this time, the voices of the ninety-five percent of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America who were slaughtered like animals by the Europeans, will be heard. Our holocaust wil
l rise out of every note I play on every stage and I will tell their stories.
Cuicatl will speak.
I feel songs germinating in my head. All this emotion. I start to hum, sing a few lyrics, roll over and stare at the ceiling. I sing as loud as I can. No one is here to hear me. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe I’ll do better alone, not having to worry about the delicate ego of a man like Gato. I won’t fall apart the way Lauren does. I won’t cling beyond reason like Sara. I won’t waste my life pining for something I can’t find, the way Usnavys does. I will remain here, in this space where the words and melodies find me. I will make music. Nothing changed in my heart when the money came. I need the strength to stand alone. It was men who sold women in the Aztec past, wasn’t it? There are nearly five hundred male names in the sixteenth-century Aztec censuses, and less than fifty for women. Men had great names, descriptive of life’s possibilities. Women got named by where they appeared in relation to their siblings—first, second—or names that meant things like “small woman.” I feel lighter somehow, like I can finally breathe.
I’m happy with the way my album turned out. It slices the way I want it to slice. It rocks. You don’t realize how much it costs to do an album right. I could have used even more money, a lot more money, but that will come for the next record.
The record label came through on their promises. They’ve been working my project in the media in the U.S. and Latin America—I hate calling it that—and Europe. I’ve been doing interviews for the past two months, and now they’re all starting to hit. I was actually invited to play on the Live with Regis and Kelly show, and did that last week, too. Next week I’m doing the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.
I’m going to be on the road most of the rest of the next twelve months, and I want the show to be tight. I won’t have the time or energy to miss Gato. I’ll put the feelings of loss in a song or two and be done with it.
The English version of my first single (at first I didn’t want to record in English, but Gato talked me into it, saying it would be the best way for me to get the word out) is getting play on KISS FM in Los Angeles and all the other big FM stations. They’re playing my song on MTV, and kids are starting to call in and request it on TRL. I made the video a while back. I can’t believe how much the finished version focuses on my stomach muscles and my body, and my tits and eyes, but that’s okay. At first I was pissed off, but Gato calmed me down and reminded me that everything is compromise, this is the price I pay now for complete control later, this is the price I pay to get the world to hear the warrior cry of my people. Ironic.
