Living Beyond Borders

by Margarita Longoria

  Now here he was, sweaty and out of breath, feeding me a ridiculous line of crap.

  “Nando, what the hell, man? I told you not to leave the complex. Mom’ll kill me if she knows you went to the canal again.”

  “Did you hear me? There’s a body there, Oscar. A dead one.”

  “Yeah, sure there is. Why don’t you take a shower or something? You stink.”

  He shut the door and walked over to the sofa. I dog-eared my book and really looked at him. There was fear in his eyes, genuine horror like I hadn’t seen him show since Dad left.

  “Dude,” Fernando said, his voice hoarse, quavering, “I’m not messing with you. We went down to go fishing, me and Speedy. Then we saw them—a guy’s legs, sticking out of the weeds.”

  That final detail convinced me. Trying to stay calm, I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. I rattled off a summary of the situation, and the dispatcher said the Pharr PD would send someone by.

  There was no way I was going to let the cops show up at this government housing complex, full of all sorts of marginalized people and criminals.

  “I’m calling from a pay phone. We’ll meet you at the canal,” I said, hanging up.

  Fernando looked at me, dumbfounded. “You don’t have a car.”

  “Yeah, but Ariel’s mother does. Come on.”

  “We shouldn’t call Mom?” Fernando asked.

  “No. Last thing she needs is more stress. Don’t want her freaking out and leaving work. She’d probably call in sick at the other job too.”

  We need to get out of this place, I didn’t say. And for that we need every dime she can scrape together.

  My little brother just shrugged and went downstairs with me. I’d pretty much been his surrogate dad for the past four years, and though he preferred to act all independent, he tended to follow my lead.

  A single knock was all it took. Ariel opened immediately.

  “Can your mom drive us to the Ridge Road canal? My little brother thinks he saw a dead body. We’re supposed to meet the police there.”

  Gloria Ortega was shocked, but she agreed. Fernando climbed into the passenger seat. Ariel and I got in the back.

  As we drove away, I glanced at the block of Section 8 apartments, the last refuge of the disposed and discarded.

  That’s what we are, I thought as my eyes drifted over the motley assortment of clunkers in the pitted parking lot. Discarded. Left behind.

  My heart was heavy. As if sensing my spiraling emotions, Ariel reached out and took my hand. I both wanted to lace my fingers with his and to pull away; I did neither. I just let him cradle my hand like a baby as Nando guided Gloria down to Ridge Road and up the dirt path that led to the canal.

  “There it is!” my brother finally shouted. The old sedan bumped to a stop, and the four of us got out. The heat of the early autumn made everything hazy, bled color from the vegetation, leaving the meager brush pallid and dead. The hollow whine of cicadas drowned out all other noise—an ominous, predatory rattle. I wiped sweat from my face and followed Nando as he took a few hesitant steps away from the car. Behind me came Ariel and his mother, dead weeds crunching underfoot. For a moment my eyes were overwhelmed by the dusty brightness, but I squinted painfully as my little brother froze up.

  And then I saw it.

  Thrusting out dumbly onto the hard-packed gravel were two lifeless legs: pale, thin, coated with wiry black hair. One foot was covered by a black nylon sock; the other was bare, and I noticed with a strange sort of nausea that the man had not clipped his toenails in some time.

  Gloria gasped, hurrying to pull Fernando back. Ariel came to a stop beside me, his shoulder touching mine.

  Trembling, he gave whispered voice to my thoughts.

  “It’s him. The teacher.”

  A squad car pulled up. I could sense Gloria guiding my brother toward the officer who emerged, calling out to us. She must have spoken to him, but I couldn’t be sure. As if from a great distance, I heard the officer call for an ambulance and backup. The dull hum of the cicadas filled my ears, thrummed in my skull like the low growl of some unseen machinery or massive beast.

  I took another step. Ariel—arm around me, trying to hold me back, but I pulled away. I walked closer to the body until I could see more of him, nearly all of his torso. He was wearing black briefs and a white undershirt. Sickly weeds obscured his arms; his face was covered by the low, knotty branches of some thorny bush.

  This is death. Abrupt. Meaningless. Dumb. A body, discarded, swallowed by the gaping jaws of the world. This is what they do to “folks like us,” Ariel.

  With a superhuman effort, I turned my back on the body.

  Tears were streaming down Ariel’s beautiful face. I wanted to hold him, wanted him to hold me, wanted to collapse into an embrace that would blot out the world so that only he and I remained.

  But we couldn’t, could we? The world was watching, ravenous, ready to devour us.

  There was no hiding from those predatory eyes.

  My heart broke as I pushed past Ariel and stood beside my little brother. I avoided Gloria’s eyes, her questions. In a few minutes the area was swarming with cops and EMTs.

  The first officer to arrive—Acosta—let us sit in the back of his patrol car. Gloria drove her weeping son away.

  Once detectives were on the scene, Officer Acosta took us back to the projects, jotted down Nando’s statement.

  Then he drove away, and that was that.

  Ariel and I didn’t speak again.

  * * *

  ~

  Only a few weeks later, Linda Pompa became my “beard.” She was a rocker girl at PSJA High School. One of her teeth was rimmed in gold, she loved Joan Jett, and she had been trying to get me to go out with her since Diana had dumped me in front of the auditorium last school year. I asked her to be my girlfriend, started walking her to class. Made out with her behind the choir room.

  Ariel watched from afar, eyes red with weeping, until one day he didn’t anymore.

  I came home to find that he and his mother had moved away. Back to California, I supposed, or maybe another small town beyond the clutches of his abusive father.

  I broke up with Linda immediately. My heart wasn’t hers.

  * * *

  ~

  For months afterward I couldn’t sleep. I would close my eyes and see those legs, that dusty, weed-entangled torso.

  Every night, the body would shudder and sit up.

  I wish I could tell you that it was a zombie, hungering for my flesh . . .

  But it had the face of my beloved, eyes full of tears.

  Beautiful flesh covered in gaping wounds.

  Lying there in my mind, discarded and decaying.

  I was trapped in the weeds of my cowardice, watching his features fade from my memory into silent oblivion.

  To keep the undead shell of that love alive, I slowly fed it my soul.

  * * *

  ~

  Late one night, a week before graduation, the phone rang. I could hear Robert Smith crooning “Torture” in the background.

  “Ariel?” I asked.

  There was a sob.

  “Don’t hang up, please,” I begged, my chest aching. “I . . . I’m so sorry.”

  He cleared his throat. “You hurt me, Oscar. Bad.”

  Clenching my free hand into a fist, I nodded though he couldn’t see me. “I was afraid to risk your life. Afraid to risk mine. As much as I wish I could, I can’t be you. I’m not brave enough. Not strong enough.”

  Ariel sighed. “One day, Oscar. One day you’ll find the strength. The world will change, sweet boy. Hang in there.”

  The line went dead. I hit *69 to call him back, but I got a busy signal.

  Ariel had left my life forever.

  But his words echoed in my heart. The nightmares end
ed. Not quite two years later, at UT Pan American, surrounded by other queer kids, I gathered the courage to be who I am.

  And I fell in love with a boy again.

  IS HALF MEXICAN-AMERICAN, MEXICAN ENOUGH?

  by ALEX TEMBLADOR

  No hablo español.

  For a long time, these three words were my least favorite words in any language.

  They didn’t just mean “I can’t speak Spanish.” They meant “I can’t understand you. I can’t speak the language that my ancestors and your ancestors spoke.”

  It felt like a forever apology, one that never ends, for once you begin saying it, the result never changes—no matter the minor in Spanish you worked hard to get, or how often you listen to the Duolingo podcast, or even if you turn on the Spanish subtitles on Netflix.

  Instead of “I can’t speak Spanish,” I felt like I was saying, “Sorry, I’m not Mexican-American enough.”

  I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, an eight-hour drive from the border city of Laredo, Texas, where my Mexican-American father was born. His mother and father met at the Laredo base, but after marrying, my grandfather was transferred to the base in Wichita Falls, where my father and his three siblings grew up in a poor white neighborhood far from the area of town where the Latinos lived.

  My grandfather didn’t grow up in California speaking Spanish. While his parents spoke the language, they only spoke it with other adults and behind closed doors. Most everyone in their neighborhood spoke English. On his side of the family, I’m between fourth- and fifth-generation American, depending on what parentage you trace.

  My grandmother, a second- or third-generation American, grew up in a community dominated by Mexican and Mexican-American cultures in Laredo, Texas, speaking both Spanish and English. Her father was a WWII prisoner of war, proud of his military service and his country, America. And so, upon the move to Wichita Falls and my grandmother’s entry into the military world, she made a choice not to teach her children Spanish, allowing them to dive fully into a white American culture of bologna sandwiches, football, and popular music.

  My father married my mother, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian woman from Wichita Falls, and soon after, I was born. While my father had a full Mexican-American daughter from a previous marriage, I was his first Mixed child, both Mexican-American and white, and a few years later my brother would also be born with this identity.

  I grew up Mixed American, which is to say that I grew up straddling two cultures: white American and Mexican-American. On my Mexican side, we had tamales at Christmas, played lotería at family gatherings, and danced the cumbia at weddings. On my white side, my mother made biscuits and gravy every Sunday and we gathered often for American sporting events like baseball and football.

  This Mixed childhood was wonderful, and most of the time I lived blissfully in the middle ground of my cultures, except for the occasional trips we took to Laredo, Texas. It was there that I had some inkling that I was different from my Mexican-American cousins, aunts, and uncles. But the trips were quick, so I never took the time to understand what I felt.

  It wasn’t until I went to college that I ever took interest in my Mexican-American identity.

  The University of Louisiana at Monroe sits in northeast Louisiana, and when I attended ten years ago, I could probably count the number of Latino students on my fingers and toes. The community has diversified since then, but during my three years at the university, it had nowhere near the diversity that I’d experienced in Texas, or even on visits to New Orleans.

  The week before my freshman year started, a Black man born and raised in Louisiana asked my boyfriend at the time (who was also Black, but from my hometown in Texas), “Oh, you’re dating a white girl?”

  Despite a thin, athletically built white mother who has blonde hair and blue eyes, I am a woman with dark brown hair, large thighs, full breasts, and tan skin with undertones of red in the summer and yellow in the winter. I had never been mistaken as “a white girl” before, and no one beyond Monroe, Louisiana, has ever labeled me as such (I’ve been mistaken for everything from Native American to various Latino identities, Middle Eastern, East Asian, various Mixed race combinations, and occasionally Pacific Islander or Black. “What are you?” is a commonly posed question).

  My boyfriend and I looked at each other, confused, because where we came from there were large Mexican-American and Mixed populations, and I was visually recognized in our hometown as such. Neither one of us knew how to respond immediately, but eventually my boyfriend said, “She’s Mexican, dude.”

  During my three years of college, I faced similar experiences among the Black populations who saw me as white, since I wasn’t Black. The white populations saw me as “brownish,” though they understood enough to know I wasn’t Black but wasn’t fully white, either, and generally treated me as such. I didn’t fit in with the locals, and I missed the sight of Mexicans and Latinos and the availability of Mexican food and cultural experiences that I was used to in Texas.

  At the time, discussions about race and identity weren’t common in the news or society, much less on campus or in the conservative city of Monroe. As the years passed and my understanding of race and identity increased, I came to understand that the perspective of my racial and ethnic identity by Louisianans—both Black and white—was perhaps a result of colorism born of the state’s fraught history with slavery. Race was determined by the ruling class—white citizens—who used things like the paper bag test to determine who was Black and who was not. Nothing existed in the middle ground—much less the brownness of Latinos, who weren’t predominantly present in the state and did not require their own rules of segregation or classifications, as occurred in Texas. Such perspectives remained long after rules like the paper bag test were abolished.

  During my undergraduate studies, I felt untethered, floating through a community where my identity didn’t have its own space (beyond the one Mexican restaurant, whose notoriety in the city was a place to go drink on Cinco de Mayo). I craved my Mexican-American heritage in a way that I hadn’t before, and I was determined to connect myself with it so that no matter where I went in the world—whether there were Latino populations or not—I wouldn’t float off again.

  When I left Louisiana in 2011 and moved to Oklahoma City for graduate school, a place with a far larger Latino population, I was eager to learn more about my Mexican-American heritage, integrate myself into the community in a way I never had before, claim this part of myself, and figure out what exactly it meant to be “Mexican-American.”

  My cultural exploration took many forms, such as the writing of my first novel, Secrets of the Casa Rosada, which follows a sixteen-year-old exploring her Mexican-American identity in Laredo, Texas. Just as my main character, Martha, comes to learn, discovering my Mexican-American side was not as easy as I would have liked.

  Among the Mexican and Latino friends that I made in Oklahoma City, I felt out of place, like a visitor passing through. I didn’t understand some of their cultural references or everything they said in Spanish. Anxiety and fear of embarrassment arose inside me when I went to all-Latino bars and dance clubs and tried bachata for the first time. I was grateful to be invited to barbacoa cookouts in backyards but felt like an idiot for not really knowing what barbacoa was or how it was cooked, even though I’d eaten it many times before.

  I was shocked to learn about colorism within the community, and the politics and social nuances between Mexicans and other Latino peoples, and for the first time, I gained insight into the experiences of Latino immigrants, gender roles in Latino households, and so much more. I was trying to become closer to my heritage, but the more I learned, the more I struggled, suddenly realizing how much privilege and opportunity I’d been afforded in my life being only half Mexican-American.

  Though I was always curious and grateful for those Latinos who openly welcomed my exploration of identity, secretly,
hot shame filled me inside, reminding me that I had taken so long to learn all these things.

  My shame worsened at times with occasional statements like “You can’t speak Spanish? Then you’re not Mexican.”

  Despite all the exploration into my identity—whether it was the fictional and historical books I read by Mexican-American authors, the new foods I tried and made at home, the family history I looked into, or the dances and cultural celebrations I took part in—none of it seemed to be enough because I did not know Spanish.

  This is where I began to hate the phrase No hablo español.

  Although I had argued that “One’s ability to speak a language does not determine their cultural background,” something inside me wondered if I was wrong.

  I took those feelings of shame with me when I visited Mexico and other Latin American countries or met individuals who wished to speak to me in Spanish. Even now, over six years, two more moves, and one book published, no matter how “good” of a Mexican-American I try to be, that nagging little Spanish-speaking shame bubble likes to raise its head every once in a while, and I can’t seem to pop it out of existence.

  In early 2019, I was on a panel at TeenBookCon in Houston and a Mexican-American teen said, “I’m Mexican-American. I’m proud to be Mexican and I’m proud to be American, but sometimes I don’t feel like [people] see that.” I could relate.

  The hyphenated experience of being Mexican-American is wrought with so much confusion, especially among Mexicans who are second- or third-generation Americans. Even as their parents instill Mexican history and culture in them, immersing themselves in their American heritage is inevitable. It creates this identity where they feel too American for the Mexicans and too Mexican for the Americans. As the character of Abraham Quintanilla, the father of famed Tejano singer Selena, said in the film, “We gotta prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are, and we gotta prove to the Americans how American we are.”