American Chica

by Marie Arana

  Mother was no academic. But her dedication to our cognitive welfare was nothing short of fanatical. She ordered books from the Calvert catalogs and devoured their contents. She looked things up in a fever. She presented them with flair. Not until much later did I realize that the last-ditch aspect of my education was one of the most political lessons I’d ever been given. I had not been brown enough to be welcome in Señorita’s schoolhouse. Mother would not surrender us to a gentrified boarding school. If I couldn’t have a democratic experience, I would be subtracted from a Peruvian context altogether. Mine would be an American indoctrination, in a language I hardly used outside. In the process, I’d learn to see the world through a foreign scrim, feel apart. I’d begin to become the creature of a place I’d never smelled or seen—the product of a cloud-built school, where rootlessness was at the heart of the curriculum, isolation at the edge of the page.

  IF HISTORIES ARE right, Peru has always been a racial powder keg. The Inca lorded it over the Moche, and, when Spain stumbled into Peru, the Spanish lorded it over the Inca. To be an indio under the conquistadors was to be subhuman. An Indian could be made to work—even be made to pay—for the misfortune of being born brown: The indigenous were taxed by the crown, made to pay tributos “for the Queen’s protection,” and the church’s job was to keep meticulous records on who exactly was indigenous. It was crucial to know exactly how Indian a newborn was, or how mixed—mestizo. One’s racial coordinates had economic relevance and, as such, had to be carefully set down. If you were born Spanish, you were exempt from having to pay taxes at all.

  In my search to find out what I could about my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana, the haughty politician who, like Napoleon, crowed that he had no ancestors, I spent days in the mountain city of Ayacucho—cradle of Peruvian communism—searching through church records to find proof that he had been born there, as my family had always claimed. I found no trace of him—the Ayacucho story had been a decoy—but I did learn something about the history of Peruvian racism. It was a closely guarded institution, maintained scrupulously by Catholic priests. A very accommodating padre spent days with me in Ayacucho’s cathedral, taking one volume after another from the shelf lovingly, dusting it off, setting it down. Every birth in that mountain stronghold, dating back to the 1600s, is scrupulously recorded: Miguel Angel Barada nació el 17 de setiembre 1822, and then after that, in flowery script: Español. Or this one: Mercedes Elena Burgos—Mestiza, by which one could generally conclude the child was illegitimate. Or: Jesús Cristo Yupanqui—Indio.

  It could seem, to the uninitiated, like an entry in a hospital log: race noted as biological fact. But other books tell the rest of the story. The indios and the mestizos, unless they could pass themselves off as white, were made to pay for having been born darker. The records on this are just as complete: Miguel Angel Barada, the one with the Spanish blood, becomes a landowner in Huancavelica. Mercedes Elena Burgos, the mestiza, makes a last payment, her tributo to the government, on her deathbed: 74 soles. The priest giving last rites marks it down. Jesús Cristo Yupanqui, the indio, owes the governor 1,320 soles. If the dark didn’t pay, they were enslaved by the state. If their children looked more sturdy than they did, they were taken off in their place.

  Subtract the Spanish crown, take the taxes away, outlaw the slavery, and there are still citizens of the Republic who measure by color. Peru today is a salmagundi of races, infused over the centuries by slave shipments of Asians, Africans, and Caribbeans, but the specter of racism haunts it. Who are the forty families who continue to make up the moneyed oligarchy? Spanish-blooded whites. Who are the seventy percent of the national population who live in extreme poverty? The indigenous.

  It was part of one’s political education.

  I had, at a tender stage of my life, some experience in the huts of the poor. One day, my ama pushed me toward a chacra on the outskirts of Cartavio, on our way home from a quick trip to the bodega china. “Psst! Marisita!” she said. “Don’t tell your mother and father. I want a little blessing from my sister. We won’t be long, I promise!” I found myself stepping over a threshold of sticks onto the dirt floor of a one-room shack. It was fusty, humid, dark, and as my eyes adjusted, I could see that the walls were made of mud. Bits of straw jutted from them. I sat on the edge of the sagging cot with a hand-hewn cross above it and blinked at the scene around me. Two girls with long, tangled hair came out of the dark; they were giggling, their hands in front of their mouths. The older one wore a cotton shift with stains along the belly; the young one had nothing on at all. They studied me awhile and then approached me carefully, holding their hands out to touch my face. I marveled at their chatter. It was the first I’d heard Quechua, a language I didn’t understand. They patted my knees after that, smoothed my dress, pinched my cheeks, gave me a strip of wet sugarcane from a bucket in the corner. When I thanked them they laughed merrily, and then they squatted like stones, watching me suck on the cool, sweet stem.

  On another occasion, I tagged along after my friend Margarita and her mother, the Lattos’ cook, following the two all the way home before the mother discovered me stepping into their chacra behind them. The woman clapped her hands in dismay when she saw me, grabbed me by the wrist, and ran me home.

  “Mother, can Margarita come to my birthday party? I like her very, very much.”

  “Well, darling, yes. Of course, she can come. But if she comes, none of the mothers of the other little girls will allow them to attend.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just because, Mareezie. That’s how it is.”

  “I don’t want the other girls, Mother. I want her.”

  “That’s fine, dear. You’ll get fewer presents, of course.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And Claudia won’t make a big cake.”

  “I hate big cakes.”

  “And the two of you can sit in the kitchen.”

  “I love sitting in there.”

  “As you wish, Mareezie.”

  Looking back at that exact point in my childhood, it’s clear to me that I may have known that I was divided, but I didn’t know there were more classifications than two. I had believed Peru to be seamless, that Antonio was a man like any other in my family, that the starkest difference I would ever encounter was between my father and my mother. As birthdays progressed, I saw that Peru has its sediments, too, and that its lines are drawn in color. “I’m indio with a little bit sambo,” someone will say on the telephone, if you’re planning to meet him somewhere for the first time, so that you’ll be sure to recognize him. Or a Peruvian will call a friend with distinctly Asian features Chino. “Oye, Chino! Ven p’acá!” We call each other morenita, cafecita, cholita: there’s a name for every shade of Peruvian skin. I’m reminded of my pre-political innocence now when I go to Latino conferences in this country, when an application asks me if I’m Hispanic, when I see the children of Spanish-blooded oligarchs line up alongside migrant workers to get a piece of affirmative action, as if all of us from south of the border are alike. “You know where I’m coming from, chacha,” says my chicana friend to me, “because you’re a person of color.” Oye, isn’t one hermana like any other?

  Happy birthday, my dear.

  MY MOST PROFOUND political education—the one that taught me about the limitations of my own power—awaited me in my grandfather’s house in Lima. It began when Juan Díaz, my father’s errand boy, pedaled up one day, propped his bicycle against the front fence, leaned in, and sang out for Antonio to let him pass.

  “What’s inside, Señor Juan?” George and I panted after him, pointing to the fat envelope under his arm.

  “Your tickets to the United States,” he said importantly, and strode down the garden path.

  “United States?” George and I looked at each other. “Who’s going there?”

  Everyone, as it turned out. But me.

  It was time for my father to meet my mother’s family. My parents had been married for eight years now
, had three children, and my American grandparents were inviting them to come. The plan was for our little family—minus me—to visit them in Wyoming, drop Vicki and George off, then Mother and Papi could go on the honeymoon they’d never had. To bring me, an active four-year-old, into the itinerary would be more than they could handle. “She’s too much,” I heard my father say. “Too much,” my mother agreed.

  On the appointed day, I was taken from my sunny garden—from Flavio, from Antonio, from Claudia, from the loco, from all the living dead of Cartavio—and deposited, with a brown leather suitcase and a blue toy telephone, in the cathedral chill of my grandparents’ salon.

  “Anytime you want to speak to us, just pick up this phone,” said my father, pulling my hands from around my mother’s knees and placing them on the plaything. “Don’t worry if you don’t hear us. The important thing is that your mother and I will be able to hear you and everything you want us to know.” With that meager assurance, my parents took my sister and brother and headed for the door.

  On his way out, Papi kissed my grandmother and whispered loudly in her ear. “She’s not been to church,” I heard him say with a nod in my direction. “She’s not even been baptized. Why don’t you see if you can’t do it while we’re away. Maybe you can teach her some manners, too.” Then they were gone.

  So, that was it. This was where I was to be civilized. This was where I would be hosed down, pounded out, ironed flat, until I became the tidy little prig they could take on grand tours to paradise. Baptism? I hunched my shoulders and squinted around. We’d see about that.

  In the three months I was in that house, my father’s lively younger brothers were seldom present. Tío Pedro, the handsome one, was in the navy, off on sea adventures. Tío Víctor, an architecture student at the university, was coming and going from Tingo Maria, cutting a road through the jungle. Tía Rosa, the pretty, almond-eyed sister, had just been married to a dashing, mustachioed German.

  I was put in the daytime care of twenty-four-year-old Tía Chaba, the one with the face of Cleopatra, the wit of Cantinflas, and the brain of the Biblioteca Nacional. I was put in the bed of my Tía Eloísa, whose nature was sweet and whose skin was as matte and white as a geisha’s.

  Tía Chaba was as entertaining as she was beautiful. She told jokes, did tricks, had strong ideas about art and literature, and liked a lively argument. She had a wild laugh, a way of making me pay attention to her by screwing her face into a terrifying mask, like a high-haired harridan in a Peking opera. Her brain was a slick machine, and she liked people to know it. When she wasn’t explaining the world to some visitor in the sala, she was reading a book a day, recording each one in her notebook, with critical notes on the side.

  Tía Eloísa, a few years older, was pretty, too, but in a quieter way. She was a measured lady, with elaborate rituals. When she let me into her bed at night, she folded the blanket back carefully, so that I would sleep on it, not on the sheet; she didn’t want our bodies to touch. Her eyes, which were the color of bright jade, were like tiny jewels, slanted slightly at the corners, making her look Japanese. Her movements were gentle, deliberate, and she turned her neck slowly, as if her face were Venetian glass. Her voice came from somewhere deep in her chest, and it was surprisingly masculine; one word of hers could shush me to a whisper. “So that your grandfather can read,” she’d say, or “write” or “study” or any number of occupations that required me to keep my noise levels low. I was told that Tía Eloísa had stopped going to school when she was seven, because she had refused to come out from under her bed. There were no truancy laws to make a girl go. But she had been taught diligently by her aunts, given strict orders to copy out the classics, memorize poetry, do lessons from textbooks. She was well-read, curious, and could give her little sister Chaba—who had torn through parochial schools and outsmarted every nun—a good run at the dinner table. But she was shy with men, reclusive, happiest within the walls of her father’s house.

  Abuelita was a thoroughly social Limeña. She loved a good party, liked to dress up in her velvets and satins and wend her way across the capital to a socialite’s wedding or tea with her cousins, the Ponces. Uninclined to do this alone—and married, as she was, to my grandfather, a virtual hermit and the antithesis of the bon vivants she was raising her children to be—Abuelita would go in the company of her daughters. They would clack down the stairs and out the front door in their high heels, with French silk whispering around them, veil-hung toques above their well-carmined smiles, leaving me in a trail of perfume.

  Had I been a different, better child—had I been Vicki, for instance—I might have learned something from this clever and urbane household. Had I been George, I would have charmed my way into the little pots of sweet manjar blanco that sat on my grandmother’s shelves. But I was small-minded and vain, more interested in Napoleonic wars of independence than in any genteel opportunities this place had to offer. With good reason, the house came to view me as harshly as I viewed it.

  “Write my full name,” I commanded Eloísa, snitching fine parchment from my grandfather’s desk. She scrolled out all the contours of my magnificent appellation—Marie Elverine Arana Campbell—with a curlicued flourish beneath.

  “What’s that?” I said, thwacking the last word with a spoon.

  “That,” said Eloísa, “is your mother’s maiden name. Campbell. The name of your grandfather in North America. Someday you will learn to write it—as all Spanish ladies do—after the name of your father.”

  “Mmm,” I mumbled distractedly, and went off to practice saying Campbell out loud.

  “Mother,” I whispered into the blue telephone that night so that no one in the house would hear, “are you listening? I learned how to say your name.”

  One day, Tía Chaba was called on by an art student she had met through friends. The young man was shown into the drawing room and received by my beaming grandmother, as was the custom. Hearing his voice, I clambered down the narrow stairs to have a good look at his face. What I saw delighted me: a wide open forehead with eyes as clear as amber.

  “Aha,” the guest said, and I pranced up to kiss him, as I had been taught to do. It was love at first sight, a tumbling, rushing love, warmed by the red in his hair and the lavender scent of his neck. I reached up and wormed my way into his lap.

  Tía Chaba ceased to exist. I could hear her gab on, as if she were chewing the hem of a distant curtain. I was happy to sit in her suitor’s arms, still as a heap of stone.

  “I’m not a Peruvian,” I said finally, in as large a voice as I could muster.

  “What’s that?” he said, rewarding me with his face. My aunt’s chatter came to a sudden stop.

  “I said: I am not a Peruvian.”

  “Marisi,” my grandmother said sternly, “what nonsense is that? What have you been taught up there in Cartavio? Of course you are a Peruvian. You’re as Peruvian as can be. Haven’t I always said that of all my three grandchildren, you’re the one with the Cisneros face?”

  “I’m not like them,” I whispered coyly, and shrugged toward my bewildered grandmother and aunt. “I’m not.” Then, with a twisted little smile I was sure would punt me leagues ahead of Tía Chaba in his heart, I added, “I’m an American. Un yanqui. My name is Campbell.”

  “I see,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “How very interesting.”

  I took that cue to scramble out of his lap and snatch my blue machine from behind my aunt’s chair. “Here is my telephone to the United States. Watch.” I spoke into the mouthpiece, switching to English for grander effect. “Hello, Georgie? Hello, hello! How are you? Don’t forget to bring me some … cream cheese!” It was the nectar my mother thirsted for: the Philadelphia kind.

  “Ah,” the painter said tenderly. “How cosmopolitan you are.”

  “Marisi,” my tía said in a sprightly voice, her black eyes as tipped as a cat’s, “why don’t you tell Diego what American city you’re from, now that he knows you’re a yanqui?”

 
; I opened my mouth and stalled, trying to spin cities out of my brain. I couldn’t think of one.

  “Qué graciosa, la Marisi,” my grandmother sang out. How cute she is. It was the signal that my show had come to a crashing finish. I was about to be sent from the room. I lost all decorum and begged the man to take me home with him.

  The women laughed in high little cachinnations, the kind with a razor’s edge.

  “Well, why don’t you at the very least walk me to the gate?” the amber-eyed man said, concluding that his visit was over, too. We walked down the steps together. But there, the most remarkable thing happened. The gate swung open and Don Pepe’s gray Chevrolet shot past, whizzing down Calle San Martin so quickly that I barely caught a glimpse of my mother’s gold head as it sped out of view.

  I made a dash for it. The painter lunged after me, and we both clattered down the street like city hounds after spoor. But he soon overtook me, lugged me back to the black iron gate, and handed me to my aunt. Perspiration was running down his face. “Here is Miss Campbell,” he said ceremoniously in English, wheezing and swabbing himself with a handkerchief rank with turpentine. “She thought she saw her mother.” Then, parenthetically, in Spanish, “As sad a gordita as I’ve ever known.”

  That was the day my war began.