Living Beyond Borders

by Margarita Longoria

  I hope I can remember all this. “But, Papi,” I said, “what if I forget?”

  “Ay, Dolores. You worry too much,” he said with a chuckle. “You’ll be fine.”

  But I couldn’t stop worrying. Later that night, as I snuggled under the thin quilt in the bed I shared with my sister, Oralia, I kept rehearsing Papi’s words. I don’t know, my name is Dolores; I don’t know, my name is Dolores; I don’t know . . .

  Sitting in the classroom for the first time, staring into Mrs. Collins’s eyes, I remembered Papi’s words. I leaned forward and whispered to her. “I don’t know. My name is Dolores.” I searched her face for some indication that I had given the right answer. There was none.

  Maybe I didn’t say it right. “I don’t know. My name is Dolores,” I repeated quite loudly. The teacher looked confused. She asked me something again.

  My jaw tensed. I curled my toes inside my shoes in frustration. “I don’t know. My name is Dolores,” I said meekly for the last time.

  Muffled sounds filled the classroom and swept like a gentle wave coming in from the sea. At first, just a murmur. Then the sound grew louder and louder. The girls whispered and giggled. The boys pointed and sneered. Struggling to hold back tears, I slumped farther down in my chair. My face felt hot, like it had the time I got too close to the woodstove while Mami was cooking.

  “Shhhh,” the teacher said to the students. The class got quiet. She turned back to me and asked something again. This time I just shrugged and lowered my eyes so she couldn’t see my tears.

  * * *

  ~

  Weeks passed. I still hadn’t made any friends, but I found out the red-haired girl with the freckles was Lucy. The one with the blonde curls was her friend Cassie. They always played jump rope at recess. I sat on a bench and watched.

  The boys snickered when the teacher called on me and I’d stumble over my words. The more they laughed, the madder I got. I’d show them I wasn’t dumb. I paid attention to how the teacher formed her words. I repeated them silently in my head. I wrote and rewrote each word that was on the board in my tablet. I studied its meaning and spelling.

  But sometimes things didn’t make sense. Like when the teacher called a manzana an apple and a plátano a banana. I couldn’t believe words could sound so different in English and Spanish and mean the same thing. Every time I learned a new word in English, my excitement mounted.

  One day Mrs. Collins announced that we were having our class picture taken the following week. “Dress in your best Sunday clothes,” she said.

  Mami was as excited as I was. The night before the picture taking, she washed and dried my thick black hair with a towel.

  “Your first school picture,” she said, curling my hair for the next day. “You have to look good.” She hummed as she took long strands of my hair, rolled them in curlicues, and plastered them against my skull with bobby pins. She starched and ironed a yellow polka-dot dress bought at the church rummage sale. She hung it carefully on a nail on the wall.

  “We don’t want it to wrinkle.”

  She took out the same white silk bow I had worn the first day of school and placed it on the kitchen table.

  “So we don’t forget to pin it on tomorrow,” she said.

  The next morning, Mami unrolled my long black curls. They cascaded like a waterfall down my shoulders. She pinned the bow on top of my head. I felt like a princess. I flipped my curls from side to side just to show off.

  When I got to school, I was glad I had dressed up. Some girls wore dresses with flower prints. Others wore pleated skirts and white cotton blouses with dainty buttons. Many wore bows in their hair. Most of the boys wore white shirts and dark pants.

  Right before lunch, Mrs. Collins said, “All right, everyone. Time to go outside and get our picture taken.”

  We lined up by rows in front of the steps of the three-room schoolhouse. The taller ones stood in the back. The teacher sat in the front row, looking very pretty in her pink-flowered dress.

  “Don’t forget to smile for the camera when I tell you,” the photographer said as he adjusted his tripod and looked through his camera.

  I was short and in the front row, standing between Arnold and Jerry, the two shortest boys in the class. I smiled my biggest smile. Suddenly something happened. The photographer called Mrs. Collins over. They talked for a minute. They both looked at me. Goose bumps went up and down my body. I started fidgeting. Had I done something wrong?

  I was stunned when Mrs. Collins took me firmly by the arm and led me to the side, away from the group, away from the camera’s view.

  “You wait here, dear,” she said, pointing to a bench nearby. She rushed back and sat in the front row with her students. “Go ahead.” She smiled. “We’re ready.”

  The photographer nodded. Within a few minutes, it was over. We all hurried inside. Everyone took their seats and got their lunches. I couldn’t eat mine. My stomach hurt like the time I ate too much candy and threw up.

  The rest of the day was a blur. I stared at the railroad tracks across the road, thinking about the picture. I must have done something wrong. Was my dress not pretty enough? Was my bow on crooked? I looked at my worn shoes with the tips that looked like canoes. They were hand-me-downs from my cousin Consuelo. That was it! The kids were always making fun of my shoes. It must have been the ugly shoes. I tried to hide them, pushing my feet farther under my desk.

  When I got home, I told Mami what had happened. Her smile disappeared. She helped me out of my dress, hung it carefully on the nail, but not before I saw tears running down her cheeks.

  “THERE ARE MEXICANS IN TEXAS?”

  How Family Stories Shaped Me

  by TRINIDAD GONZALES

  I was getting lunch at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC, when a worker at the café told me, “Go back to where you came from.” My response of “Texas” prompted a befuddled “There are Mexicans in Texas?”

  I smirked. “Yes, there are Mexicans in Texas.” I left without offering a history lesson and returned to eat my lunch at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage housed in the same building.

  Sitting in my cubicle, I listened to the chitchat between my two advisors, Olivia Cadaval and Cynthia Vidaurri. Olivia, originally from Mexico City, and Cynthia, from Robstown, Texas, guided me through the world of DC and the Smithsonian. I was living away from the comfort and familiarity of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas for the first time, and both ladies helped me navigate the polite, bureaucratic world of racism that liberal institutions such as the Smithsonian can harbor. The Center for Folklife would become one of my havens, regardless of how far I was from home and all its traditions.

  My father was always the one both sides of my family requested to barbecue, and through those countless barbecues, I learned the art. From an early age I studied how to know when mesquite was ready to be burned (too green, stinky meat), and how to build a fire with the principle of patience and wind. Brasas, embers, for cooking take time to make. Barbecue in South Texas represents familial and community bonding. As I age, the smell and crackle of burning mesquite invokes in me a nostalgic, safe space—sometimes happy and sometimes sad.

  During the hours of building a fire, seasoning the meat, and slow cooking, my father—the family historian—told me stories about our family. These stories were meant to remind me of where and from what gente, people, I came from. My family traces its ancestry to the Spanish colonization of the area that began in 1749 and includes Apache lineage. The Spanish settlers were ranchers, and my ancestors on both sides of my family were vaqueros, cowboys. My ancestors’ stories, along with my father’s and mother’s stories, shaped me in ways I did not understand at the time. But these stories would help me navigate the rude racism of the street later in life.

  * * *

  ~

  During the summer of 1976, we cele
brated the Bicentennial in the All-American City of Edinburg, Texas. A celebration that united us as Americans. My father bought a wood-carved bald eagle that hung in our living room. The eagle held a draping United States flag through its beak and claws as if it were in flight, and hung from a plank that had 1776 branded on it. We had just moved into our home on Garza Street, and I was going to attend the newest elementary school in town, Freddy Gonzalez. I was excited because the school was named for Alfredo Cantu “Freddy” Gonzalez, who had received the Medal of Honor for his heroic deeds during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. Coming from a military family, it was hard not to know about Freddy Gonzalez as a local and national hero. But he was not the only one from Edinburg to die during the war; fourteen others lost their lives serving as well, and my father reminded me that was one of the highest percentages of casualties for a community our size.

  By 1970 there were only a little over seventeen thousand people living in my hometown. I was a proud Mexican American kid, and I thought that all Americans were essentially like me, with some differences in the foods we ate, our looks, language, and names. To me, Edinburg was small-town America with apple pie and fajitas, George Jones and Country Roland Band. It was Tex-Mex, but all-American.

  One of my first memories attending Freddy Gonzalez was being told that an older white teacher did not like Mexicans and that she would pinch you if you spoke Spanish. While the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s helped end the official practice of punishing students for speaking Spanish, individual teachers would continue it. I remember when my friend said something to me in Spanish on the walkway outside of class and this teacher reached down to pinch him. I can still see his facial reaction of pain. Childhood trauma remains with us like ghosts. We either tame it or allow it to haunt us. Sometimes I guess it is both. This was the first time I sensed we were different. The first time I ever experienced such a feeling.

  * * *

  ~

  A story told several times by my dad was about his experience in the army while stationed in Germany. It was the early 1960s, and he made both Black and white friends. One day, while walking with his friends in the mess hall, a white soldier told him, “Go back where you came from, wetback.” My father’s friends wanted to start a fight, but my dad held them back with his arm and said, “No. He is right. I am a wetback.” He then turned to the racist soldier and said, “Here in Europe, I am a wetback, but when we return to the United States, you are the wetback because I am Indian.” The racist soldier did not know how to respond, and my dad’s friends laughed. I did not grow up raised as a Native American, but my father made sure I never forgot that besides being Mexican, we had Lipan Apache heritage as well.

  * * *

  ~

  The stories my mother told me centered on her migrant farmworker experiences during the late 1940s and 1950s. She talked about picking cotton and how her father ran crews north following the seasonal picking circuit in Texas. One of the stories she liked to tell was when my aunt Piedad, who at the time was in her early teens, went into a segregated restaurant in Robstown and asked for ice cream. My aunt was light skinned and passed as white, so the waitress served her. When my mom and my aunt Minerva walked in and started talking to Piedad, the waitress asked who her friends were. Piedad responded that they were her younger sisters and wanted ice cream too. My mother would imitate the surprised look the waitress made because my mom and Minerva were dark skinned and could not pass as white. The embarrassed waitress served them ice cream as well, but they all had to sit away from the other customers. My mom would always laugh when she told this story because the waitress felt compelled to serve little Mexican girls. She felt like they pulled a fast one in segregated Texas during the early 1950s.

  But there’s another story my mother never told me, about her speaking Spanish to her friend as they waited in line at Luby’s, when a Winter Texan, a Midwestern/Northern retiree who resided in the LRGV during the winter, told my mother to speak English. She turned to the Winter Texan and said in English that she could speak whatever language she wanted and to mind his own business.

  My mother didn’t tell me this story herself. She was talking to her friends and sisters during merienda, afternoon coffee and sweet bread. I was listening to the adults talk as I ate my empanada or marranito. By this point, I was aware of racists’ views concerning Mexican Americans and speaking Spanish. But this was no longer just a feeling of being different. It was a feeling of knowing that we were viewed as different and that some people did not see us as American. This fact was clear by fifth grade, and growing up meant just dealing with it. Scholars would later call this “adoption grit.” But for racial minorities, it was called learning to live in America.

  * * *

  ~

  By the time I worked at the Smithsonian in 1999, things were beginning to change. Or so I thought. I was the first Latino co-op student-employee, a position created by the Secretary of the Smithsonian as part of the institution’s response to its lack of Latinx representation in its exhibits, collections, curators, and staff. In 1994 the Smithsonian Institution Task Force on Latino Issues produced “Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Latinos.” The report states, “The Smithsonian Institution, the largest museum complex in the world, displays a pattern of willful neglect towards the estimated 25 million Latinos in the US.” The report further states, “Many Smithsonian officials project the impression that Latino history and culture are somehow not a legitimate part of the American experience. It is difficult for the Task Force to understand how such a consistent pattern of Latino exclusion from the work of the Smithsonian could have occurred by chance.”

  As part of the co-op position, the University of Texas–Pan American, now UT Rio Grande Valley, paid me to do fieldwork for the Center for Folklife’s El Río program. I interviewed possible participants for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I translated and transcribed the interviews to help develop the program and for future scholars to read. The Center for Folklife produces the annual festival during the two weeks leading up to the July Fourth celebration at the National Mall. The festival highlights a state and/or region of the United States, as well as a foreign nation. It is a living museum where culture bearers share their community’s history and traditions with audience members through cooking sessions (called foodways), music events, and set programing on stages to discuss topics or issues. It was an inclusive experience like no other I had encountered before and one that I would find elusive at times in DC and the rest of the Smithsonian.

  * * *

  ~

  The first week I lived in DC, Cynthia allowed me to stay with her while I looked for an apartment. In DC it is common for people to share a house where individuals pay rent for a room and split the utility costs. Before smartphones, apps, and Craigslist, people advertised looking for roommates through classified ads in newspapers and magazines. The first day I stayed at Cynthia’s house, I sat in her living room, making calls and leaving messages inquiring about renting a room. It was an exciting time, as I anticipated meeting new people and living in the national capital while working at the Smithsonian Museum, our nation’s museum.

  After three or four days of calling, I never received a response. I began to grow desperate. It was becoming clear that someone named Gonzales was not going to get a callback in DC, and I needed to move out because I did not want Cynthia to think I was taking advantage of her hospitality. Cynthia lived in Columbia Heights, next to Mount Pleasant, the Latinx part of DC. I decided to walk to nearby apartment complexes, vertical buildings—not sprawling units like in Texas—to try my luck in finding a place. As I wandered, I came across the Woodner Apartments and stepped into the lobby. The mix of people from around the world and the multiple languages spoken—English, Spanish, and Somali, to list just a few—was a welcome chorus to the silence that I had initially received from DC. I was immediately welcomed.

  The W
oodner Apartments became my refuge, like it had been for working-class African Americans during the 1970s and, later, immigrants from around the world. Over two thousand people live in the Woodner on a regular basis. While the Center for Folklife was a racially and ethnically diverse space within the Smithsonian, the reality was that the rest of the Smithsonian staff, curators, and management was not diverse in 1999. The National Museum of the American Indian (2004) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) did not exist at the time. Returning to the Woodner after work brought me to a world of sound and smells that filled a void.

  Dinnertime became my favorite part of the day. As I made my way through the lobby and up the elevator, then walked the hallways to my efficiency, I would take in the smells of spices people used to cook dishes from their native Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world and the United States. My addition to those smells was cooking charro beans, and arroz con pollo with a heavy hand of comino. The smells of cooking reminded me that I was part of the world that had migrated to DC. America was more than the silence I had initially received; America was a home the world came to to live better lives, and that America is us.

  * * *

  ~

  The power to represent people and their communities that rests with the Smithsonian is impressive because people view its exhibits and programing as authoritative. In 2018 alone more than twenty-eight million people walked through Smithsonian museums and institutions. Taking care to make sure exhibits and programming follow scholarly standards and respect is important because people look to the institution to tell our nation’s history and explain the diverse cultures that compose the United States. At the Center for Folklife, such standards and respect were followed. But in 1999, that was not the case for the temporary exhibit Santo Pinholé: A Saint for Photography at the National Museum of American History.