“We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.” –Gloria Anzaldúa
You’re at some Tia’s house for a birthday party of a cousin you don’t know. There’s loud music that echoes through the neighborhood and invites you inside. Vicente Fernadez? Does it matter? You can’t name the song, nor can you utter a single lyric. Momma instructs you and your siblings to make your rounds and greet everybody in this room. As you move from one beer ridden breath to another, you’re finally stopped with a question. Each syllable jumbles in your mind and you short circuit trying to decipher what Abuela just said. Frantically, you stare at Momma in hopes that her eyes hold the cheat sheet to this test. Suddenly, the whole room breaks into laughter (finally something you understand) as Momma guides you and your siblings to the living room couch. Even as you sit there glued to the screen the plastic cover seems to creak in a mocking tone because you don’t know what El Chavo is saying on T.V.
Your relatives call you a “no sabo” to express their frustration with you for not understanding a word they say. You cannot reciprocate their frustration, though, because then it’s rude and you fear The Belt. It’s ironic how we paint these “no sabos” as the outsiders of the community, yet we don’t allow them to learn and develop. Language becomes a border that prevents you from knowing each other beyond names. There’s constant guilt on your shoulders when a relative passes away because you two never knew each other. You couldn’t talk to each other, yet you guys were constantly at the same family parties growing up. My communities are too comfortable deciding who belongs where, gatekeeping, yet we claim Atzlan to belong to everyone. If you’re from the land, I’m from the land too. After all, both our last names only make sense when spoken with an accent.
My Mexican-born mom came here to seek a new life and new opportunities for her future children. Throughout her education in America, constant racial bullying persisted due to her weakness in reading and speaking English. At school, she strived to be the “Mexican American” (a term coined during WWII and used by Mexican veterans who wanted to claim a higher status than other Mexican immigrants), but her home honored Mexican patriotism. She lived her life resisting the American hegemony while pushing for her children to be more Americanized, so they wouldn’t face the same struggles she did. As a result, I am the brown kid born with a white tongue. My tongue learned to dance to Biscuit the Dog books with words my mom could push through her thick accent. I started to rely on my dad, who only knew the American language. Although my mother strengthened her language as all her kids grew up, she still pushed back on her kids trying to do the same for her. Every time I pronounced a word funny, she responded with, “Say that again? One more time? That’s not good.” There now lies the Rio Grande, beautifully flowing between my mother and I, the rapids pushing us apart.
I learned the basics of communication with my relatives, like asking how they are doing and simple greetings. But when they went off the script, various shocked phrases came shooting at me. I’d freeze up mid-conversation, and they’d respond with confused glares. I never knew what else to say. I learned to recognize their whispered side comments whenever my mom brought us to their houses, where I’d sit alone with my brothers as we watch TV in Spanish while everyone else played lotería on the plastic-covered table in the kitchen.
La Crisis
I remember in either first or second grade the school sent me to an ESL class to illegitimize myself more. I enter the cold, dark, trailer classroom and lock eyes with the old white lady arranging her bookshelf. Her class just ended for this surprise appointment with me.
“Hi! Come sit down,” she says in an almost babytalk tone, like my ears cannot decipher her vowel patterns.
She spreads her vocabulary cards out in front of me as if she is going to determine my future. Bold comic sans must be her favorite font. I examine the words closer and recognize that these are words I learned the year prior. She must not know our curriculum and how high my A.R. points are.
She shows me a card that represents my past, present, and future and asks me to read them aloud. Board. Frown. Because. We looked over a stack of 20 before she gave me the verdict.
“Great job!” she grabs a clipboard and scribbles something out. “You can head back to your class now.”
My walk towards the trailer door allowed me to process my confusion. That was so useless. As I close the door behind me, I look back at the sign on the classroom window. Mrs. Becker. ESL. English as a Second Language. Do they think I can’t speak English? During the rest of my walk down the halls, my brain is occupied with doubts about my reading abilities and myself. My mom’s second language is English. She’s Mexican. Am I?
To this day, I don’t exactly know why I was sent there or why my younger self came to that conclusion, but the thought process started a much larger conversation—one that I wouldn’t understand until my college years.
Los Coyotes
My year at Fresno State after transferring introduced me to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. The way she navigated her own identity and created a space at the border where one can waltz between both sides spoke to me on a deeper level than I can articulate. That next year, a professor gave me a book off his office shelf and told me to read it and come back with my thoughts.
Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years encapsulates her own navigation through prose and poetry. She and Anzaldua worked together on other texts and frequently discussed their conceptualization of intersectionality. When I first read Moraga’s book, I finally felt seen. I felt seen in Anzaldua’s book too, but I don’t know, this one felt more real to me. I remember blowing through it twice that week and immediately discussing my revelations the following week with that professor. With the help of a paper for a writing conference a month later, I fully immersed myself in Moraga and memorized all 149 pages.
Moraga grapples with the duality of her identity like I do and articulates what it means to live between borders. She writes in the introduction, “I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups.” There it is. My whole life described in two sentences. I remember being so taken back on my first read-through that it felt like I had just learned how to read for the first time. All this built-up anger toward myself is not just something that happens to me—it’s something that happened to people in the 70s too.
Ecstatically, while drafting my paper and pushing the text further, I talked to my mom a lot about what I wrote and read. I know my main motivation behind this action was to call her out for everything she has said to me about not knowing Spanish. I still feel guilty about this, especially because it was so recent. Each time I told her about Moraga’s work and my own relation to it, she hit me with the same two responses:
“Okay.”
or
“That’s not entirely true because we never shamed you for all that.”
Maybe I’m making all this up. Maybe she is right. Maybe I just want to be the victim in every situation. However, days prior to this, she laughed at how I said La Michoacana. But she is more Mexican than me by default, so obviously she must be right about these things. Who am I to criticize her?
But I think at that moment, I just wanted visibility. I wanted this border to become permeable and glide through each section with no friction. Writers are so in touch with themselves. Too in touch. It is sickening how much I know myself. Yet, our words rarely transcend beyond the language we call home. We rely on our language to take us across the border to reach those with clashing beliefs. And sometimes, we are left in the desert. Abandoned. Dehydrated. And we pray for those on the other side, those scholars who articulated intersectionality already, to save us and carry us back home. So, there I was, using these authors to carry me across La Frontera, while she built the wall higher.
No Sabo
After presenting my essay on the panel while my mom sat in the crowd, I can admit there was some anxiety about her response. I remember being so scared to speak on an issue in the book because I did not want her to feel targeted. I mean, yes, the essay critiqued the gatekeeping within the culture. But it also served as a call to action to change these borders within the community. For my mother to break down the border between herself and her child. To not restrict but, rather, allow her child to embrace the fluidity of their identities.
PBS News did a segment on young Latinos who don’t speak Spanish and how they are now reclaiming their culture after facing shame from their community. I saw this video on TikTok and after hearing every interview from one of the young Latinos like me, I felt their pain. You see, the Pew Research Center states that 78% of Latinos say speaking the language is not necessary to identify as Latino, and I agree with the majority. You don’t have to speak English to be American either. Language shouldn’t be a border we put up to differentiate ourselves from each other. It’s bad enough that there is a language barrier that prevents us from fully understanding each other—why should we thicken it? The same research also shows that 54% of Latinos who do speak little to no Spanish have also been shamed by their community. What are we doing to each other?
I recall telling my mom about the video immediately after I watched it, and I explained that I felt so seen. I told her I have always felt shame from our family because of how my tongue cannot learn to dance to the Spanish language. Anxiety gradually filled my body as each word spilled out of my mouth and exposed my true feelings. Should I be doing this?
Her silence suffocated the room.
We’ve never been the social type, but I wish we were. I wish I could decipher if this silence tore down the walls or placed more restrictions and passed more laws. The space between the unknown and certainty pushed and pulled me around for what seemed like forever. Not one, but not quite the other. This silence created “otherness.”
My brain translated her words to, “But that’s not you,” and “I NEVER shamed you for not knowing Spanish.” But it’s not about whether she ever actually said that she felt ashamed her child doesn’t know Spanish; it’s about the actions and reactions that build the wall between us. My own community locked me out. There’s a side of my identity I cannot access, that lies on the other side of the brick wall, in isolation. With each glance after I try to roll my Rs and after every “Say that again” the wall, the border, La Frontera pushes me away.
I know that my accent will never be perfect, that it will always take me longer to process what others are saying in Spanish, but I also know that I will never be restricted. I will forever occupy the space between American and Latino. White and Brown. English and Spanish. In the opening of her book, Moraga writes, “In Spanish, ‘compromiso’ means obligation or committed. And I guess, in fact, I write as I do because I am committed to communicating with both sides of myself.” And I do the same. Each time I write, I pray that, in the end, a voice is heard. I hope a lost voice is found and finally appreciated in a space where they did not feel welcomed before. I want to guide “no sabo” children to La Frontera and show them how they can occupy both sides, and the middle too. Show them that this land, Atzlan, is all of ours. We are children of the land. The land does not belong to just one language; it cultivates the language of its children and cherishes each one.
Author Bio: Jacquelyn is currently an undergraduate senior pursuing a B.A. in Creative Writing. In their writing, they tend to focus on themes of intersectionality and how hard it can be to feel fully accepted in the communities that their identities fall into.
Recollections: Of Being is a literary column brought to you by The Collegian, founded and organized by Aura Peredia. We publish writing and art, either political or personal, to create a bridge between varying valley voices.
For previous installments of Recollections: Of Being, click here.