Perhaps, because I am Mixed, I’m in a unique place where I can understand these feelings better than most.
I will always be Mexican-American and white American. My identity is doubly hyphenated. As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt more at home in my Mixed identity because I’ve accepted that I exist in the in-between, in two places at once. Perhaps that is what being Mexican-American is too.
Throughout the years I’ve wondered: does being half Mexican-American make me Mexican enough?
Ironically, my question is answered each time a person of Mexican heritage speaks to me in Spanish.
Mexican-Americans see me and feel that I am like them. They want to connect with me in a beautiful language that feels like home. They want to speak to me about their fears, their hopes, their interests, or just to ask for directions. They ignore my nervousness when I reply shakily in Spanish and are patient enough to allow me to stumble over the first few sentences, or change language tactics completely when I reply, “Lo siento, no entiendo.”
They don’t care if I’m half white because I’m half Mexican-American. Just like other Mexican-Americans, I’m angry when Latinos are targets of violence or discrimination. Just like other Mexican-Americans, I rejoice when I see a book published that showcases the Mexican-American identity, get too competitive during games of lotería, have serious opinions about the best menudo and tacos in town, and feel the need to move, clap, and dance when I hear a Mexican corrido.
As I grow older, I myself have started to experience some subtle and not-so-subtle forms of bias and discrimination because of my Mexican-American heritage—something I don’t recall experiencing as a kid or even as a young adult, changing my perspective considerably as I enter my thirties.
Having said all this, I, too, love the diversity of American music, sports, art, history, food, cities, and culture. I can move between the two cultures just as easily as I can my own personal racial and ethnic heritage—even if it comes with some uncomfortable moments at times. Because of this, I now identify as Mixed Latinx, or “Mixed,” with the added explanation of “half Mexican, half white.”
No hablo español aren’t my three least favorite words anymore. And even though my first instinct is to say them and free myself of the embarrassment of fumbling through the Spanish language, I don’t.
Sitting in my discomfort as I push past my nervousness is part of what it means for me to be Mexican-American.
So that’s what I do.
SUNFLOWER
by AIDA SALAZAR
I’m in the barbershop when I hear it. It’s so familiar, it hurts. So I do the only thing I can. I pull out my phone, and I let it all go.
Analicia cheated on me last week, so I broke up with her. See, I never meant to be a sixth-grade boyfriend, especially in the first days of middle school. I mean, who does that anyway? No one, I mean, no one in sixth grade even has a clue which way homeroom is or who their friend group should or should not be, or which bathroom is the most private to drop a deuce in when nature calls. All this is to say that it wasn’t entirely my fault. We met before I even got to middle school, when I least expected it. Like playing piano, timing is everything.
I was seriously minding my business, just being a fifth grader in outdoor school and acting like a goof on the playground near the lake. Panzas and I were doing our best Miles Morales imitations, timing each other to see who would make it across the monkey bars fastest, when I felt it. The pull of watching eyes. Sounds creepy, I know, but it was less skin-crawly and more, I don’t know, magnetic. So obviously, I turned my sweaty head and there she was—a girl with dark brown hair and honey hazel skin and cheeks so bright and round, they looked like peaches—just staring. She smiled at me, and I froze right in my tracks. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was me who she meant to smile at, but in case it was, I wasn’t going to move. I mean, I couldn’t. I even stopped clocking Panzas, who huffed as he bounced off the monkey bars and came barreling toward me asking, “Lalo, dude, what’s my time?” But I didn’t answer him because I was straight frozen. Like freeze-tag frozen. If it hadn’t been for Panzas looking at how spaced out I was and shoving me so hard that I fell back and landed in the sand, I probably would have still been there, completely helado.
She was sitting by the swing set, holding a pencil and an oversized sketchbook on her lap. My mind went racing through all the possibilities. Was she drawing me? Was I annoying her and was this actually a stink eye? Or was she just looking beyond me at the green murky lake water that was basically a huge toilet for all the ducks and geese that crowded Lake Merritt? Then she smiled. It was one of those too-good-to-be-true, sparkle-on-the-teeth kind of smiles, too. I think my jaw dropped, because I was absolutely certain that she was smiling at me. She couldn’t have been smiling at Panzas, who had his back to her, clueless that she was even there, and who, by this time, was jumping all over me, digging me deeper into the sand and screaming “dogpile!” like a wild call to our other classmates. That shining smile was all the fuel I needed to shoot him off me and jump to my feet and smile back.
Then, clearly still under the control of her pull, I made a beeline for the open swing right next to her. Not even Chava, the pushiest kid in school, could beat me to it. A trailing group of kids yelled behind me, all wanting to get there first. They were loud, there was sand kicking up everywhere, and the sky couldn’t have been more blue, but somehow, somehow, the swirl of my entire playground world came to one finite focus point of glimmering quiet—her sweet sunflower face.
I may have tripped over the first words I ever said to her. “Uh, what are you drawing?”
“My little brother on the swing. You wanna see?”
I answered with an idiotic “Nice!” when I peeked over her shoulder to see that she was a really good drawer. Like, super talented and all that. Then she smiled again and literally, my heart shot out of my chest like an out-of-control boomerang and zoomed back in three seconds. No one ever explained that something so outrageous could happen to me. I sure as heck didn’t know that moment would eventually lead me to be her boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend, but her first, and she my first girlfriend, and that eventually she would do me wrong the way she did.
Analicia’s voice was in the key of F. Definitely in F. How do I—a snot-nosed twelve-year-old—know that? Well, I’ve got perfect pitch, and I can’t help but match the pitch of everything I hear to its note. Playing piano did that to me, and I’ve been playing for so long, it comes second nature. Amá says I shouldn’t advertise “my talent,” but whatever, I don’t think anyone my age really cares about stuff like that.
Anyhow, a sunflower of a girl made me go bonkers with just her smile and her key-of-F voice. It’s true. See, I didn’t have a phone because I was in the fifth grade and Amá wasn’t about to give me one, but Analicia did because it turned out she was a year older than me. Yeah, I know, it’s insane, she’s an older woman. But I didn’t text her. I couldn’t. What was I going to do? Use Amá’s cell phone? So, I just let it go because it was too wild for me to believe that sort of thing happened to people—especially to tall and skinny piano-playing fifth-grade nerds like me. And even though I scanned the park for her every day when I came to outdoor school and we happened to be on the playground, I didn’t see her there again.
It wasn’t until a year later, on the first day of middle school, that I walked into the cafeteria and saw someone with a yellow glow around her. It was Analicia! She waved me over! I made another beeline for her. I’m telling you, that’s the kind of power her smile had over me. And with as little as a “Hey, Lalo! I thought I’d never see you again!” we began.
Amá had folded and finally given me a phone by that point, so I texted Analicia before lunch and asked if she wanted to sit together in the cafeteria. By the end of the day, she was my girlfriend and the kids at school were berserk with gossip about the “new couple.”
“It’s the first day
of sixth grade! Why is this even happening?” Panzas basically yelled at me as we walked out the front doors of school. I didn’t expect him to understand. Which was fine. He had never been pulled by a magnetic sunflower before.
That night, over text, I found out that Analicia was a Marvel nerd, like me, and she didn’t like DC as much; that she practiced martial arts, like me; she liked hip-hop musicals, like me; and she drew anime, my absolute favorite. Like, how could she be more perfect? She couldn’t.
So, I really liked to hold her hand and drape my arm over her shoulder while we walked. I mean, it made me feel electric. Though I did wonder all the time about what it would feel like to kiss her, I was too chicken to try. Then, this one time, as I was walking her to class, out of nowhere, she kissed me. I didn’t have to do a thing. She was the one who held me by the face and planted a big fat wet one right on my lips. I was pan dorado. Toast—all crispy and dark on the edges and overdone. I was so done.
I really thought everything was going great. We were texting all the time, spending most of our lunch periods together except when Panzas and the kids in band would make me practice with them. I’d send her video recordings of me playing her favorite songs on the piano. She sent me drawings. Our moms even met at a PTA meeting and actually planned supervised “playdates” for us on the weekend because they didn’t have a clue about the smooching. Though, in all fairness, Amá would say, “It’s nice you have a sweetie,” and wink at me, which made me believe that she knew something was up.
Anyway, we were locked in and it felt like I was a walking ignited Tesla machine. Then, two months in, Panzas slipped me a note during math: Meet me at your locker at lunch. Come alone. Code word: burrito!!! What worried me about that note was the code word. It was something Panzas and I used only in very extreme cases; burrito meant business. Cosa seria. When I got to my locker, Panzas’s face was all pruned up. And then he said, “Dude, Chava likes Analicia.”
“Oh yeah. So? Who can blame him?”
“Nah, Lalo, he ain’t kidding. He says he’s going to take her from you and everything.”
“Well, I’d like to see him try,” I said, because she was a whole human and wasn’t something to be taken. Plus, I was feeling pretty confident that nothing, absolutely nothing in the whole universe, could destroy what Analicia and I had.
When I let Analicia know what Panzas said, she confessed that Chava had been texting her and telling her all sorts of sweet things. She showed me how she was trying to keep it cool with him and had gently turned him down, which was a relief. The next day though, when Analicia and I were in the hall and Chava was walking by and looked our way, I gave him a dirty look. But later, Ms. Dominguez, the dean, called me in because Chava reported me for being “aggressive”! Imagine, for a dirty look? The dingus. Ms. Dominguez let me go because I told her I never said a word to the kid and he couldn’t prove a thing. What I didn’t say to Ms. Dominguez was that Chava was right to call me out—he knew that I was sending him a message that he better not even think about Analicia.
Things seemed to chill after that. Maybe my laser mean face had put him off. But it didn’t last long; Chava wasn’t done. The next day he started texting nasty emojis to Analicia, like eggplants and drooling faces and other messed-up things like, I don’t know why I even liked you, you aren’t that smart. She sent me screenshots of those texts. After school I went looking for Chava. I was not going to let him get away with being abusive and sucio to Analicia. Lucky for him, I didn’t find him. I didn’t find him the next day, either, because he didn’t come to school. Panzas said he heard Chava’s parents were splitting up and so he was going to have to move or something. Whatever. I wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
Analicia let me jump on her phone and I texted Chava. It’s Lalo. I’ve got Analicia’s phone. We’re showing this to Ms. Dominguez. I’m not sure if it was my threat, his parents’ divorce, or what, but Analicia said he stopped texting her—así no más.
When Chava finally came back to school the following week, he acted like nothing had happened. Like Analicia and I didn’t exist. I thought, Good. Let’s keep it that way. But then Panzas handed me another Code word: burrito note. This time Panzas had a summons. Chava wanted me to meet him after school, to fight. All right, I thought, I’m going to have to take him down once and for all. Chava was literally a head shorter than me, so I knew it would be over with quickly. But we never made it to the fight. Ms. Dominguez got word of it, and she brought us both in for a restorative circle, which is just fancy speak for trying to make us squash it. At the circle, Chava’s chest was all puffed out like he was a balloon or something. Oh yeah, I thought, let me just pull out my phone and show Ms. Dominguez the kind of weasel he really is. Before I could do that, though, Chava had his phone out and was showing Ms. Dominguez and me the love texts between him and Analicia! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My girlfriend, the sunflower, actually liked this guy! She said there was something forbidden about Chava and that she liked the thrill of him. I mean, YUCK! I wanted to scream and pound his face in with a karate kick. I felt like my insides were burning up and melting. It was literally the worst.
So here I am, waiting at the barbershop to get a fade, and our song has to come on. Yeah, Analicia and I had a song. Big surprise. It’s “Sunflower.” From the Spider-Man soundtrack. I don’t know how, but it starts filling my head with all of these memories about what it was like to be a sixth-grade boyfriend and feel electrified, so I just had to type it all into my phone. Maybe it’s easier to write it down so all the static I’ve got built up inside has somewhere else to go. Or maybe it’s because I miss her every time I hear that song.
LA MIGRA
by RENÉ SALDAÑA JR.
We’re boys, so at the sight
of their white trucks stirring
up dust in the distance,
we scamper like cockroaches.
Just like that, in no minutes flat,
they’re right up on us, the words
on the back panels easy to read:
US BORDER PATROL in green.
They step out the air-conditioned trucks,
men in green uniforms carrying guns
at the ready—Cowboys of the New West—
always on the lookout for mojaditos,
brown wetbacks, whose hair and skin and eyes
are brown like mine, whose crime is to want
to work in the fields alongside our mothers
and fathers, whose only dream it is
for their children to play marbles or
hopscotch with us—
all of us
free and brown and laughing,
all of us
running to hide from La Migra.
LA PRINCESA MILEIDY DOMINGUEZ
by RUBÉN DEGOLLADO
Thursday, My First Day of School
When you move schools—because your mother has to hustle no matter what and go where the chamba goes, or that one tía (not naming names) who said that family is family and you can sleep on the sofá as long as you need, but then starts giving you all side-eye when one month turns into two—it’s like walking out before the end of one movie and walking in late to the next. You miss the important parts, the names of people, why they do what they do, whether they get what they want, and what happens to them in the end. I know most people won’t get this reference and it will go whoosh right over their heads because they live their lives on puro rewind and fast-forward, streaming this and that, hitting the back button whenever they get bored. But they can always go back to it and see the parts they missed. I get it because my life is always being interrupted and I’m dependent on other people’s Wi-Fi. The movie I keep walking out of is Mileidy Dominguez: Just Getting Settled, only to walk into Mileidy Dominguez: La Interrumpida as it’s about to finish. And mind you, these are both dollar movies and not
new releases.
Of course, I don’t tell Miss Yoli, the clerk, any of this as I’m registering myself at Dennett CISD Ninth-Grade Campus, my third school this year on my world tour across Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. I want to tell Miss Yoli my theory about my life in movies because I can see she’s a nice lady just by how she’s kept me in her office instead of sending me away to the lobby to fill out paperwork and how she’s not already attacking me about my mom not being here or going off about the purple streaks in my hair, which can’t be dress-code approved. When we were up north, I had a school tell me to leave and not come back until my mother could come with me and I could show them that my hair was a “normal” color. This kept me out of school for weeks because it wouldn’t wash out right away and Mama couldn’t get off work. And there wasn’t a papi to speak of, then or now.
I keep all that in and instead tell her this. I go, “Yes, my name is Mileidy Dominguez, pronounced Mi Lady.” The clerk looks over her readers, her ’80s salt-and-pepper wings of hair waving in the fan that she refuses to set in oscillate mode even though I wouldn’t mind it because there’re no vents that I can see.
“Mija,” she says, “it’s actually pronounced Mileidy.” She really emphasizes that Spanish d in my name, the d that is pronounced like a hard th.
I like this clerk even if she won’t share the fan with me. She needs it more.
“I actually go by Leidy, you know, because I don’t want people thinking they own me even though that’s my legal name. Like, I don’t want them to say ‘my’ when they talk to me.”
“Leidy, you’re sure your mother can’t come to fill out the forms?”
“Keep asking the questions, and we’ll get to that truth together.” Mama is working a new job at Stripes selling mostly cigarettes, cases of beer, and lottery tickets, and of course breakfast tacos in the morning as the viejos go to work. She can’t get out of a shift because she’ll lose her job, and I don’t feel like telling Miss Yoli this because I want to be a woman of mystery for at least fifteen more minutes before she pulls out that form I hate.
Living Beyond Borders Page 12
