A Flying Bus
Five days later, we were on a plane headed to Los Angeles. We said our goodbyes to Javi, who had been funny and kind. He kept us safe throughout the trip. Mamá finally allowed him to shake Sindy’s hand. Sindy smiled a weak smile. It didn’t matter where she was at, or who she was greeting or saying goodbye to. She made it seem like her life had just ended. Guatemala was too far for her to return, almost 2,500 miles away.
The plane looked like a flying bus from the inside, full of people speaking in different languages. It seemed like a monstrous beast that took my breath away for a few seconds during takeoff. I giggled nervously, but quietly. I became paranoid. I felt like everyone was watching us. I knew we had entered the country illegally. I knew that Mamá had forged some documents to board the plane. I knew we looked different because of the way we were dressed, the way we spoke, and even the way we smelled.
I was not used to the friendliness and courtesy of the flight attendants. During the trip, I’d learned how to distrust, how to stay quiet, how to not question anything. Mamá had pinched my hand whenever I inquired about any detail of the trip.
On the plane, I refused to talk. I was afraid that I might say something stupid and people would find out that we had come to the US illegally. I didn’t want to be sent back after all the hardship we had endured. Mamá would never forgive me. She had sacrificed so much for us. I’m sure Sindy was praying every day for something to go wrong so that she could return to Guatemala, but Consuelo and I looked forward to starting a new chapter in our lives.
Within twenty minutes of takeoff, one of the flight attendants came around to offer the passengers drinks and snacks.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked me in English. She looked like a doll, with her uniform and pretty face plastered with makeup.
I hadn’t understood a word she said, but I knew what she was offering me. I became mute and looked at Mamá for her approval. I couldn’t even nod.
“Water,” said Mamá.
Mamá handed me a glass of water and a package of salted peanuts. I couldn’t even open them. Mamá did everything for me. I was in awe realizing that a flying bus was up in the air and a stewardess was offering me drinks and snacks. What kind of a world is this? I wondered. I didn’t even know that “water” meant agua in English. Mamá surprised me with her English skills that day.
When the plane landed in Los Angeles, another coyote was waiting for us at the airport. This coyote was short and brown skinned, older looking. He approached us and knew Mamá’s name. He introduced himself as Benito. Benito had a good sense of humor, too, just like Javi. He was very talkative. He made me smile, but Mamá didn’t approve of that either. He walked us to the airport parking lot where he had parked his car. He placed our bags in the back of his red truck. I sat in the front next to Mamá. Consuelo and Sindy sat in the back.
“How did you like the plane?” he asked me, trying to make small talk.
Mamá squeezed my hand, and I knew better than to respond. I simply smiled. Mamá was not a fan of her daughters talking to unknown older men. Benito got the hint and simply drove us straight to an apartment in downtown Los Angeles, playing his loud salsa music.
On the road, I couldn’t believe how enormous Los Angeles was. Skyscrapers and cars everywhere, unfamiliar smells, people dressed funky—just like Guatemala’s capital. I didn’t see Indigenous people wearing colorful cortes or huipiles. Some people were dressed well with a suit and tie, while others wore shorts and sandals. The road was immaculate, clean, and smooth. I didn’t see one pothole. Everything seemed to be even and flat. The car felt like it was gliding in midair.
Benito dropped us off in front of a graffiti-vandalized apartment.
As we stepped out of the car, Mamá immediately grabbed my hand, as if sensing my desire to run through the streets, free, like an animal without reins. With a serious gaze, she handed Benito an envelope with the last payment for the trip. He counted the money and quickly took off in his red truck. He vanished in the distance.
“We have finally reached our destination,” said Mamá, smiling a victorious smile, just like her name, Victoria.
I was too excited to feel or say anything. In one breath I took it all in: the sounds, the traffic, the road, the lights, the smell of smog, the buildings, the sky, the sun.
“Is this the famous North that everyone longs for?” Sindy asked bitterly.
No one responded. We hugged and trembled together as we cried. We walked together into the apartment complex. I had never seen so many apartments next to each other.
“Is this our new home?” I asked.
“No, this is Amado’s best friend’s house. We’re just meeting him here,” responded Mamá.
We stopped in front of a brown, beat-up door. As Mamá knocked, she asked, smiling, “Are you ready to meet him?”
PART III
THE PROMISED LAND
Amado De Jesus Montejo
When Amado opened the door, I was the first person he saw. He knelt down and said in the most sincere tone, “I’m going to be your new dad.” His smile was contagious.
I ran into his arms and knew Mamá approved because she didn’t pinch my hand or pull my hair for hugging a stranger. Amado was no stranger. I knew deep down that he would take good care of us just like he had done with Mamá over the past three years.
He then proceeded to hug Sindy and Consuelo. He hugged Mamá last. I could sense their deep love.
The Luggage
Every day after recess, I had a routine where I would hide under my desk while Mr. Caprallis, my fourth grade teacher, would work with a small group of students, the rest of the class working independently at our desks. César, my classmate, would sometimes join me underneath my desk only to mock me or say yet another cruel joke about how my new humongous backpack looked like a traveling suitcase on wheels.
“Claudia, hurry up! Your plane is leaving! Look, it left you; it’s gone,” he’d say. His laughter would burn all over my body.
It had only been a month since we migrated from Guatemala. Mamá enrolled my sister Consuelo and me at Park Avenue Elementary School, three blocks away from our home. Sindy was eighteen, too old to enroll in high school. Mamá signed her up for night school, where she was supposed to learn English.
I was terrified to attend a school where everyone spoke English. My sisters and I were completely culture shocked. Slowly we were getting used to the Mexican culture in our community.
At school everyone treated us differently. The kids never failed to remind us that we were the newcomers who couldn’t speak one word in English. And according to them, our Spanish was horrendous.
“Your Spanish is weird!” they’d say.
Nobody wanted to sit next to us during nutrition, when we ate breakfast or lunch. Consuelo had different recess and lunch times because she was a sixth grader. I only got to see her before or after school. I usually sat alone, noticing how everyone spoke and dressed. I kept to myself to stay out of trouble.
I convinced myself that in order to fit in we needed to have the latest style of backpacks. I persuaded Mamá to get us the kind that everyone at school had. These were cute little backpacks that had rollers and a retractable handle. Mamá thought it was a great idea. But instead of purchasing an actual school backpack, she bought us luggage. Mamá’s intention was to kill two birds with one stone.
“These are perfect,” she said. “You can use them as school backpacks, and when we travel, they can be used as luggage.”
The next day at school, everyone stared and pointed fingers at us. We looked more like flight attendants than elementary school girls. The other students couldn’t control their laughter. Consuelo and I pretended to be proud of our new backpacks, but deep inside we were dying of embarrassment; our faces flushed red.
“Where are you traveling to this time? Are you going back to Guatemala or Guatepeor?” They laughed. Guatepeor—the worst of Guatemala.
Consuelo and
I said nothing in return and walked quietly to our classrooms. We didn’t have the language to defend ourselves, and we didn’t have the guts to tell Mamá to buy us another backpack.
Little by little we began to adapt to the different subcultures that emerged from the small city of Cudahy. We couldn’t complain; we were the minority in a neighborhood where everyone spoke broken English and Mexican Spanish. According to them, we spoke a different Spanish with an accent that distinguished and separated us from them.
Assimilating wasn’t hard. I started to erase the Guatemalan vos in my conversations. My voice learned the street slang of my classmates. My tongue learned to imitate a forced singsong that focused on and stressed certain syllables. I became an expert in neutralizing my Central American accent to avoid being mocked by my neighbors and classmates.
But one night during dinner, I accidently said orale to Consuelo, which means “okay” in Mexican Spanish. Mamá opened her eyes wide, slapped me in front of everyone, and with a broken voice scolded me: “Don’t you ever speak like that in my presence. You are from Guatemala—not from México.”
I sat there silently. Burning tears rolled down my cheeks. I didn’t know what to think of myself anymore.
The next day, César’s jokes about my backpack continued. “Claudia, hurry up!Your plane left you. It’s gone.” He’d laugh.
Eventually, I learned to neutralize all my accents. I made sure I didn’t sound Mexican or Guatemalan. I didn’t want to be from here nor there.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
“Accents are beautiful,” said Ms. Maldonado to all of us. We were sitting around her kidney-shaped table reading words she’d handwritten with a purple marker on index cards.
There were four of us: Consuelo and I, and two other siblings, Maria and Yvette. My sister and Yvette were sixth graders and Maria and I were fourth graders. The four of us were the new kids from Guatemala and Nicaragua; everyone knew this at Park Avenue Elementary School. The teachers, the office ladies, and the students knew us well. We stood out like sunflowers on a canvas of red poppy fields.
Ms. Maldonado was my sister’s sixth grade teacher. She stayed after school to help us learn English three days a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. She was from Puerto Rico, and I loved how she rolled her r’s in English and Spanish.
That particular Wednesday, I wasn’t in the mood to participate in our usual warm-up routine, which consisted of reading words out loud from Ms. Maldonado’s vocabulary word box. One of us would flash the vocabulary cards and the rest of us would read them.
“Claudia, why aren’t you reading the words? Do you need help?” Ms. Maldonado asked.
“No, I just don’t like the way I speak,” I said. I looked at the clock hoping it was already 3:30 p.m. It was only 2:30.
“What do you mean? You don’t like your voice or the way you enunciate the words when you speak?”
“I don’t know how to speak good,” I said, my vision becoming blurry. “César said that I speak funny! That I don’t know how to speak English or Spanish the right way. That I suck at both.”
“It’s our Central American accent,” Maria corrected me.
“What accent, I don’t have an accent! I don’t even say vos to him when I speak to him in Spanish. I only say vos instead of you to family members.”
“Be patient, Claudia. We don’t sound like them because we’re still learning English,” said Yvette.
Ms. Maldonado observed how the four of us discussed why we sounded so different from everyone else in school. It didn’t matter if we spoke in Spanish or in English; we sounded different whether we liked it or not.
After a few minutes, Ms. Maldonado said, “Listen to me, ñoñas. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed my Boricuan accent? I’m going to have this accent until the day I die. This is me—don’t you like me for who I am?” I never forgot her raspy voice and Puerto Rican lyrical tone.
We laughed for a few minutes until I finally asked, “What does ñoñas mean? I hope it’s not like ñoño from El Chavo del Ocho.”
We laughed even more. We had all grown up watching this Mexican comedy sitcom that had reached all of Latin America in the seventies and eighties. Noño was a chubby child character played by an adult in El Chavo del Ocho. We were having so much fun discussing El Chavo del Ocho that we didn’t even notice that it was 3:30 p.m. Time to go home.
The next day was like any other school day except for one silly event that happened during recess. All my friends were acting weird. They made a circle around me and danced and sang the K-I-S-S-I-N-G song.
Claudia and Johnny
sitting in a tree:
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes baby
in a baby carriage!
I was clueless. I had never heard this song in my life. Back in Guatemala, I was used to chanting songs to games such as “El Toro Toronjil,” “El Matateroterola,” or “Campanita de Oro.” I didn’t understand what this K-I-S-S-I-N-G song was all about.
My classmates laughed and continued to dance around me until Marisa got inside the circle with me and said, “Johnny likes you and wants to go around with you.”
“Go around where?” I asked more confused than ever.
“Johnny wants to be your boyfriend,” she explained in Spanish.
I broke one of the circle chains and escaped to the bathroom, blushing. It felt like someone had opened a door directly to the sun and a solar flare had burned my flesh to the bone. I ran to the girls’ bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, to make sure my face wasn’t bleeding. It felt so hot. I splashed my face with water to cool off as the bell rang. I smoothed my hair before heading back to class.
Johnny was the cutest boy in my class, and he sat across from me. Marisa sat in the same group of tables with us, but next to him. César sat next to me. I automatically became mute to avoid César mocking my accent. I didn’t want Johnny to hear any funny words coming out of my mouth. Johnny was the only kid in the class who couldn’t speak Spanish. He looked like all of us and his last name was Aguayo, but he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. Everyone was okay with that, and no one made fun of him when he tried to speak to me in Spanish. He sounded cute, but I never laughed because deep inside I loved the way he sounded. He had a gringo accent, and I was okay with it just like everyone else.
During class, Johnny kept smiling at me, trying to make eye contact. I purposely avoided his brown eyes. César was having a bad day. I stayed quiet. Marisa kept writing notes to me in Spanish. She would pass them to César and César would give them to me, bitterly.
“Johnny wants to meet you after school,” said the note.
I responded with a simple NO in capital letters and gave the note back to César. César crumpled the note and passed it to Marisa. When the bell rang to go home, I ran to Ms. Maldonado’s class to meet my sister. I hoped that Johnny wouldn’t follow me there. He didn’t.
The next day, Marisa made sure Johnny and I became boyfriend and girlfriend. Since we couldn’t communicate in English or Spanish, we never sat together during nutrition or lunch, never walked together or held hands, never allowed our lips to make the shape of a kiss.
One thing we enjoyed doing together during recess was playing kickball. Johnny and I were always on opposite teams and usually chosen to be team captains because we were the best athletes in our class.
When we played sports, I didn’t have to torture myself speaking and hiding my accent. My agility and speed did all the talking for me. Everyone respected me on the playground, but in the classroom, it was another story. I was a silent tomboy.
Our relationship only lasted two weeks. Johnny moved away to another city, to another school. I was relieved to see him go. We had a farewell party for him in our classroom. Since I didn’t even bother to talk to him during the party, he offered one last gesture of puppy love that has stayed with me until this day.
He came to my house after
school. My family and I lived in some blue apartments on Clara Street, a few blocks away from Park Avenue Elementary School. Johnny was best friends with Waldino, my neighbor, who was also a fourth grader at Park Ave. Johnny went to Waldino’s house hoping to see me one last time. He made Waldino knock on my door and ask for me. Mamá didn’t think much of it because Waldino and I played together in front of the apartments.
When I came out, Waldino smiled at me and said, “Come to my house. There’s someone there who wants to see you.”
“Who?” I asked.
Johnny waited patiently in Waldino’s kitchen. When he saw me, he got up and walked toward me. Waldino acted as our interpreter.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said, blushing. “I wanted to give you this at school, but you didn’t give me the chance. I hope you like it.”
No words in English or Spanish came out of my mouth. Johnny pulled out a gold ring from his jeans’ pocket and placed it in the palm of my hand. I held it tight, trembling. I didn’t even say thank you. I walked away sweating, thinking, How in the world am I going to explain this ring to Mamá?
I went straight to my room to devise a plan. Mamá was outside in the patio hanging clothes to dry. A few minutes later, I knew exactly what to do. I went to the patio and walked past her. While I pretended to smell the freshness of the wet clothes hanging on the clothesline, I tossed the ring on a patch of moist soil that sat against the brick wall. I grabbed some socks to hang and started chatting with Mamá.
“What’s for dinner tonight, Mamá?” I asked.
“Chicken soup,” she responded.
“Oh, my favorite!” I lied.
A few minutes later, I walked toward the ring and exclaimed, “Look what I found, Mamá!” I made sure I smeared enough mud on the ring so that she would assume it had been buried there for a while.
Knitting the Fog Page 9
