female self-identity: how does a Chicana feminist shape her own life as a woman within a male­ oriented Chicana culture?

Heart of Aztlan, which probes further into the spiritual identity of Aztlan, and Tortuga, a compassionate tale about terminal illness and man's indomitable will to live.

The works of Rudolfo Anaya center around the concept of Aztlan and the affirmations of a mestizo heritage. Bless Me, Ultima (1971) won Anaya national and international recognition.

A social protest novel in the tradition of The Grapes of Wrath, the novel sets out to expose the gross exploitation of-migrant field workers by agricultural business.

th concept of Aztlan, the ancient Indian homeland in the Southwest, came to be a central symbol of Chicano cultural affirmation; the question of mestizaje, of being of mixed European and Indian ancestry, led writers to rediscover the Indian roots of their cultural heritage

Any first page by an American detective novelist–John D. or Ross Macdonald, say, or Raymond Chan­dler or Mickey Spillane or even Linda Barnes--will con­vince us that the writer has read Hemingway. In Spillane's case, with no great comprehension.

Take, for instance, that first sentence from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,

And that's why the very first line is so important.

who, high on the chemical rush of violence the brink of committing a hate crime or perpetrating a genocidal massacre, would be stopped by the memory of a young girl's diary?

doctor's assistant once told me that the only books and films she likes are those that are cheerful and uplifting, because there's enough doom and gloom in the world without looking for more.

What if reading were proved to be even healthier than exercise? Imagine the sudden spike in reading everywhere as the health andlongevity conscious allowed their gym memberships to lapse andheaded to the library and the bookstore?

shocked that a government arts grant should go to a person who had photographed a crucifix submerged in a vial of urine. (Did Andres Serrano think, Beautiful! when those contact sheets came back?)

"A desolate boredom settled over everything. The warm days are over." Why should that seem beautiful?

Yet one of them thinks that the nothing that happened was about the two of them not having sex, while the other thinks that "nothing happened" meant that she didn't commit suicide, as she seems to have considered doing.

people for whom it is a matter of life and death.

Unraveling the word beauty can get us so ensnared that it’s no wonder that for a time, critics and academics and even some artists agreed that it was probably better not to use it at all.

Is there a meaning of beauty on which we can agree?

That's beautiful when the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic invited the gallery audience to cut her with razor blades-or shoot her?

What I want you to know is that I wrote it from a place of love; I think the point was to explore--and to tell the world--the ways in which poverty deforms and contorts the body and the soul, el cuerpo y el alma, even as beauty still finds ways to shine through the sweat and the grime, the ways in which poverty damages ... las maneras en que la pobreza lastima....

Still, this feels like a kind of reinvention, now that I'm on my own, introducing myself as Joe rather than Jose, ever since a sixth-grade teacher suggested it. It's been so long, it feels natural.

I'm not always sure how I did it, or what that means exactly.

Out there, among the outhouse and Gramma’s pigsty, Rex looked as tragically displaced as his kneecap.

the most important thing her bilingual program has taught her is this: she is now more, not less, than who she used to be.

The power to express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots, flooding my soul’s cracked dirt. Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.

His shrill screams raked my nerves like a hacksaw on bone, the desperate protest of his dignity against their inhumanity.

Much of what the culture condemns focuses on kinship relationships. The welfare of the family, the community, and the tribe is more important than the welfare of the individual. The individual exists first as kin—as sister, as father, as padrino— and last as self.

Their silence stays with me now.

High school English teachers encouraged me to describe very personal feelings in words. Poems and short stories I wrote, expressing sorrow and loneliness, were awarded high grades.

I had insisted that I be allowed to do it for two reasons: (1) the thought of seeing a translator's name on the cover of my book was humiliating, and (2) how could I claim Spanish as my mother tongue if I required the services of a translator?

I don't dominate English; English dominates me.

If I wanted to be accepted and included, I knew I would have to do what my parents never asked of themselves--fight the long, difficult battle to conquer English and offer up my mother tongue as a sacrifice.

My Spanish remained at the level up to which I had studied in Mexico–third grade.

The message I received from my teacher was that if I wanted to be seen and heard, I would have to learn English. As long as I spoke Spanish, I would be ignored and put in a corner.

But now I had become as the burning ember floating in darkness that descends on a dry leaf and sets flame to forests. The word was the ember and the forest was my life…

But then, the encroaching darkness that began to envelop me forced me to re-form and give birth to myself again in the chaos. I withdrew even deeper into the world of language, cleaving the diamonds of verbs and nouns, plunging into the brilliant light of poetry’s regenerative mystery. Words gave off rings of white energy, radar signals from powers beyond me that infused me with truth.

One day a guard took me out to the exercise field. For the first time in years I felt grass and earth under my feet. It was spring. The sun warmed my face as I sat on the bleachers watching the cons box and run, hit the handball, lift weights. Some of them stopped to ask how I was, but I found it impossible to utter a syllable. My tongue would not move, saliva drooled from the corners of my mouth. I had been so heavily medicated I could not summon the slightest gestures. Yet inside me a small voice cried out, I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back! I’m fine!

words that grafted me into awareness of who I was; peeled back to a burning core of bleak terror, an embryo floating in the image of water, I cracked out of the shell wide-eyed and insane

Soon I had a thriving barter business, exchanging my poems and letters for novels, commissary pencils, and writing tablets.

The bare white room with its fluorescent tube lighting seemed to expose and illuminate my dark and worthless life. When I had fought before, I never gave it a thought. Now, for the first time, I had something to lose—my chance to read, to write; a way to live with dignity and meaning, that had opened for me when I stole that scuffed, second-hand book about the Romantic poets.

Until then, I had felt as if I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more.

Only by action, by moving out into the world and confronting and challenging the obstacles, could one learn anything worth knowing.

The book reflected back to us our struggle in a way that made us proud.

screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms.

Battered and bruised she waits, her bruises throwing her back upon herself and the rhythmic pulse of the feminine. Coatlalopeuh waits with her.

Malinali.

It wasn’t until I went to high school that I “saw” whites. Until I worked on my master’s degree I had not gotten within an arm’s distance of them. I was totally immersed en lo mexicano, a rural, peasant, isolated mexicanismo. To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins bcause lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, where I go I carry “home” on my back.

los intersticios, the space between the different worlds she inhabits.

Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey.

mitá y mitá, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posses supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.

The queer are the mirror refl ecting the heterosexual tribe’s fear: being different, being other and therefore less, therefore subhuman, in-human, non-human.

therefore, he or she would not use witchcraft against you

Which was it to be—strong, or submissive, rebellious or conforming?

Because, according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear.

Sí, soy hija de la Chingada. I’ve always been her daughter.

At a very early age I had a strong sense of who I was and what I was about and what was fair. I had a stubborn will. It tried constantly to mobilize my soul under my own regime, to live life on my own terms no matter how unsuitable to others they were. Terca. Even as a child I would not obey. I was “lazy.” Instead of ironing my younger brothers’ shirts or cleaning the cupboards, I would pass many hours studying, reading, painting, writing. Every bit of self-faith I’d painstakingly gathered took a beating daily. Nothing in my culture approved of me. Había agarrado malos pasos. Something was “wrong” with me. Estabá más allá de la tradición.

Gané mi camino y me largué. Muy andariega mi hija. Because I left of my own accord me dicen, “¿Cómo te gusta la mala vida?”

I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

Esos movimientos de rebeldía que tenemos en la sangre nosotros los mexicanos surgen como ríos desbocanados en mis venas. Y como mi raza que cada en cuando deja caer esa esclavitud de obedecer, de callarse y aceptar, en mi está la rebeldía encimita de mi carne. Debajo de mi humillada mirade está una cara insolente lista para explotar. Me costó muy caro mi rebeldía—acalambrada con desvelos y dudas, sintiéndome inútil, estúpida e impotente. Me entra una rabia cuando alguien—sea mi mamá, la Iglesia, la cultura de los anglos—me dice haz esto, haz eso sin considerar mis deseos. Repele. Hable pa’ ’tras. Fuí muy hocicona. Era indiferente a muchos valores de mi cultura. No me deje de los hombres. No fuí buena ni obediente. Pero he crecido. Ya no soló paso toda mi vida botando las costumbres y los valores de mi cultura que me traicionan. También recojo las costumbres que por el tiempo se han provado y las costumbres de respeto a las mujeres. But despite my growing intolerance, for this Chicana la guerra de independencia is a constant.

Carry the teeth under your tongue.Let them root there.This is how you will learn to speak.

feartakeseverything

you cannot live in fear you cannot heal in fear

The Tejas sun took a boyI do not know, a young manwho wanted to reach Chicago,his brother's number etched inhis belt, his mother's pleas notto leave in white rosary beads he carried. The sun in Tejasstopped a boy the river held.

Today at the vigil, the native singersaid we are all connectedby water, la sangre de vida.

A river killed a man I loved,And I love that river still

Right here(or maybe a little farther down)my great-grandmother washed the dirtout of her family’s clothes,soaking them, scrubbing them,bringing them upclean.

and that Herbal Essence hairspray does not have the same healing powers as Aqua-Net.

they happened when we learned that tíos going to college meant they were going to prisonand that’s why ‘Macita wouldn’t accept collect callswhen we realized nobody in our familyhad ever been to a university and that maybe it wasn’t going to be that easy for us to go

when they were looking I’d comb Barbie’s hairdrown her in a cloud of Aqua-Netand take off in her corvettecuz we didn’t need no mantelling us what to do

When I walk throughthe desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.

(I’ve printed my name at different schools for indifferent teachers who’ve snickered at my native surname, who’ve turned me in “for speaking Spanish on         the premises”

Insist on personal interviews. The past is the present, remember. Men carved me, wrote my story, and Eve's, Malinche's, Guadalupe's, Llorona's, snakes everywhere, even in our mouths. Rule 9: Be selective about what you swallow.

I'm the mother of stars. My daughter's white head rolls the heavens each night, and my sons wink down at me. What can I say - a family of high visibility. The baby? Up there also, the sun, the real thing. Such a god he is, of war unfortunately, and the boy never stops, always racing across the sky, every day of the year, a ball of fire since birth. But I think he has forgotten me. You sense my ambivalence. I'm blinded by his light.

Even if he hadn't talked to me from deep inside, he would have been special. Maybe the best. But as my name is Coatlicue, he did. That unborn child, that started as a ball of feathers all soft green and gold, heard my woes, and spoke to me. A thoughtful boy. And formal too. He said, "Do not be afraid, I know what I must do." So I stopped shaking.

I looked in vain insidemy clothes, but the soft ball had vanished, well,Descended. I think I showed within the hour, or so it seemed. They noticed first, of course.

Avoid housework. Remember, I was sweeping, humming, actually, high on Coatepec, our Serpent Mountain, humming loud so I wouldn’t hear all those sighs inside. I was sweeping slivers, gold and jade, picking up after four hundred sons who think they’re gods, and their spoiled sister.

Rule 1: Beware of offers to make you famous. I, a pious Aztec mother doing my own housework, am now on a pedestal, “She of the Serpent Skirt,”

I am evil. I am the filth goddess Tlazoltotl.I am the swallower of sins.The lust goddess without guilt.The delicious debauchery. You bring outthe primordial exquisiteness in me.The nasty obsession in me.The corporal and venial sin in me.The original transgression in me.Red ocher. Yellow ocher. Indigo. Cochineal.Piñon. Copal. Sweetgrass. Myrrh.All you saints, blessed and terrible,Virgen de Guadalupe, diosa Coatlicue,I invoke you.

You bring out the colonizer in me.The holocaust of desire in me.

You bring out the Mexican in me.The hunkered thick dark spiral.The core of a heart howl.The bitter bile.The tequila lágrimas on Saturday allthrough next weekend Sunday.

Since a child, the river and its veins of canalswere places for me to think. Places to heal.Once on the river’s bed, I began to cleanse.I ran.

But who to kill? Not her–sweet allure wrapped in a black skirt.I’d kill myself first.Kill me first?But she was the one who quit!

I wanted to kill somebody.At moments, it had nothing to dowith the Paragons.

Once my little sisterran barefoot across the hot sandfor a taste.My mother roared like the ocean,“No. No. It’s their beach.It’s their beach.”

Still (though it sounds bad) I’d give my lifefor ten places there,

reminds me of when I have to               reach right down               inside me, right into               the fleshy hurt and let it               come inching out–then bursting out               by way of laugh/cry, and cry

I am the welder.I am taking the powerinto my own hands.

Yes, fusion is possiblebut only if things get hot enough –all else is temporary adhesion,patching up.

No magic here.Only the heat of my desire to fusewhat I already knowexists. Is possible.

Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes,but so very few make it out of here as human

looking around, each with a dream in their heart,thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives.

The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay,our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value.Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick.

Our expectations are high: in the old world,they talked about rehabilitation,about being able to finish school,and learning an extra good trade.But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers,to work in fields for three cents an hour.

We are born with dreams in our hearts,looking for better days ahead.

yes, i’ll laugh, carnales,just like we all want to laugh,not to mock us nor to spite you,just to say i understand, pero eso sí, compiras,’no quiero regresar.

i am leaving soon, this callous nationof bars and cement and barbarity,it seems strangethat a name can call out to me and mesmerize meyet repel me,one a girl, now a woman,and the othera jagged prison world

she used to always smilecon ternura morenacomo su piel,

her name was ironicand poetic,for she was Soledad Guerra,        solitude and war,

Soledad was a girl’s name

Y mi espalda         ardeunder hot Azteca sun

La pinche vida         Que a tirones la vivimos                 under a never changing sun         nos sigue jodiendo.

Mis pasos        lentos        slowly kiss  the dirt Y me voy         solito         al filo de algodón

Neighborhood of my adolescence         neighborhood that is no more        YOU ARE TORN PIECES OF MY FLESH!!!!        Therefore, you ARE. LA LOMA–AUSTIN–MI BARRIO–

some died young–fortunate–some rot in prisons

Neighborhood of Reyes’ Bar         where Lalo shotgunned         Pete Evans to death because of        an unintentional stare        and because he was escuadra,        only to end his life neatly sliced         by prison barber’s razor.         Durán’s grocery & gas station         Güero drunkenly stabbed Julio        arguing over who’d drive home        and got 55 years for his crime.         Ráton: 2o years for a matchbox of weed. Is that cold?         No lawyer no jury no trial i’m guilty                                Aren’t we all guilty?

Neighborhood of groups and clusters         sniffing gas, drinking muscatel         solidarity cement hardening        the clan the family the neighborhood the gang                         NOMAS!         Restless innocents tattoo’d crosses on their hands        “just doing things different”         “From now on, all troublemaking mex kids will be         sent to gatesville for 9 months.”         Henry home from La Corre         khakis worn too low–below the waist        the stomps, the greña with duck-tail                                         –Pachuco Yo–Neighborhood of could-be artists

i think i heard her once        and cried         out of sadness and fear         running all the way home nape hairs at attention         swallow a pinch of table salt and         make the sign of the cross         sure cure for frightened Mexican boys.

inherited superstitions were exchanged        waiting for midnight and the haunting,         lament of La Llorona–the weeping lady         of our myths & folklore–who wept nightly        along the banks of Boggy Creek

Did only Mexicans have cooties in their hair?                                 ¡Que gacho!

close bodily contact, thigh &        belly rubbings under shadows of Cristo Rey Church.

making eyes at girls from cleaner neighborhoods         the unobtainables        who responded with giggles and excitement.

Speeches by elders,         patriarchs with evidence of oppression         distinctly etched upon mestizo faces.

Neighborhood of my youth        demolished, erased forever from        the universe.

Did you ever notice, Feliz continued, how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she’s the Virgin. I guess you’re only famous if you’re a virgin. She was laughing again.

When her kid’s born she’ll have to name her after us, right?Yeah, you got it. A regular soap opera sometimes. Que vida, comadre. Bueno- bye.

Everything happened to women with names like jewels. But what happened to a Cleofilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face.

Not that he isn’t a good man. She has to remind herself why she loves him when she changes the baby’s Pampers, or when she mops the bathroom floor, or tries to make the curtains for the doorways without doors, or whiten the linen. Or wonder a little when he kicks the refrigerator and says he hates this shitty house and is going out where he won’t be bothered with the baby’s howling and her suspicious questions, and her requests to fix this and this and this because if she had any brains in her head she’d realize he’d been up before the rooster earning his living to pay for the food in her belly and the roof over her head and would have to wake up again early the next day so why can’t you just leave me in peace, woman.

This is the man I have waited my whole life for.

The first time, she had been so surprised she didn’t cry out or try to defend herself. She had always said she would fight back if a man, any man, were to strike her.But when the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again, until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas.

He has a very important position in Seguin with, with . . . a beer company, I think. Or is it tires? Yes, he has to be back. So they will get married in the spring when he can take off work, and then they will drive off in his new pickup--did you see it?--to their new home in Seguin. Well, not exactly new, but they’re going to repaint the house. You know newlyweds. New paint and new furniture. Why not? He can afford it

Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think? You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end.

He had said, after all, in the hubbub of parting: I am your father, I will never abandon you. He had said that, hadn’t he, when he hugged and then let her go.

“I like you as a boy,” I tell him.        “Then you’re gay,” he says.        “Don’t you like me?” I ask.        “I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”        We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

The summer we are fourteen and playing dress-up with our mothers’ clothes in their bedroom with Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall, we talk about getting older. We sit on my mother’s bed, the dresses zipped up halfway and pooling around our waists. We have not become monsters yet.

Rio will tell me that no one can love me as hard and as real as he has every year since we were fourteen. I will say something to destroy him: “It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.”

I look at my veins, blue beneath my skin, and wish I could fly.

The tomatillos’ papery husks crack and flake when they are ready to be harvested. I watch my body do the same.

We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them.

They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.

They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress.

Roque was the proudest man, full of joy because he was with her. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t an engineer.

Everybody saw him catch it with no bobble. He felt all the eyes and voices around him as if they were every set of eyes and every voice in the stadium.

He saw this Mexico as if it were the backdrop of a movie on afternoon TV, where children walked around barefoot in the dirt or on broken sidewalks and small men wore wide-brimmed straw hats and baggy white shirts and pants.

She almost always gave the man her number if he was wearing a suit. Not a sports coat but a buttoned suit with a starched white shirt and a pinned tie meant something to her.

I’m going back to take him off the respirator. I know that’s what he would have wanted. At last, I can give him something. Something that matters.

I got lost in the homework my father gave me. It helped to keep me from worrying. In the end, I made the following list:1.Georgetown  2.University of Texas  3.University of Chicago  4.Stanford  5.UCLA  6.Brown  7.Washington University  8.Berkeley  9.Northwestern  10.Harvard

I think I knew something about addiction. I was addicted to drawing my mother. I had hundreds of sketches of her.  I never sketched my father.

One of the women was telling the other woman that the streets of Juárez were becoming rivers of blood. She spoke about a young woman the soldiers took away who was never seen again, and they spoke of the kidnappings and beheadings and houses where people were found tortured. They talked about all the women who had disappeared.

These are the things my father bought me that year:  1. Driving lessons.  2. An Apple computer.  3. An iPhone.  4. A brand new Volkswagen.

When he left my room, I sort of laughed. He was like fucking Moses writing down the Ten Commandments.  I put the new rule at the top of the list.

“It’s good,” he said. He had a strange look on his face. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, but my father wasn’t a crier—and the look went away. Just like Blanca had gone away.

“Dad, what if I’m not really good?”  He smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Dad.”  “You want me to call you Eddie?”  “No, Dad works.”  I nodded. “Look, Dad, maybe I’m not a good kid. It’s not like you know me.”  “You’re soft,” he said.  “I’m not.” I hated him for saying that.

I slept on the couch that night.  I was sad and I was confused. It took me a long time to fall asleep. I listened to all the sounds on the street, an ambulance, the train, cars coming and going. I thought, at first, that my life in El Paso was going to be just like my life in Juárez—only the language would be different. I tried not to think about bad things. I tried not to think about my mother. But I did think about her and I thought about Marcos and Jorge and then I started to cry and I cried for a long time. And then I stopped.

He bought me a one-person bed. He bought me a bookshelf and a desk. “You’re going to study,” he said. “You’re going to read books, you’re going to make straight A’s in school. If you don’t, you’ll be out on the goddamned streets.”  I nodded.

I was afraid my mother wasn’t coming back. But she did come back. She had a suitcase with her. The suitcase was full of all my clothes.  I looked at her and she said, “I’m going to take you to meet your father.”  I didn’t say anything. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. I was scared. That’s what I remember.

Sometimes I think books and telenovelas and drawing saved my life.

We were like a team. Since my bike had been stolen, they got together and stole another bike—and gave it to me. That made me really happy. You really have to like someone to steal a bike for them.

She told me once, “The clothes here are a better quality.” She had this thing about quality. She liked elegant and beautiful things. She had lots of jewelry and she wore it all the time—rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets. I think she probably thought my father wasn’t a quality man. Or maybe he couldn’t buy her quality—elegant, beautiful things. All he gave her was me.

“If the rich don’t care about the problems of the poor, then why should the poor care about the problems of the rich?”  The rich and the poor, they were big topics of conversation in Jorge’s house. In my house too.

My mother had a picture of San Martín Caballero in her kitchen. San Martín was a gentleman on a horse and he was offering a beggar his cloak. I don’t know why I remember that. I guess you could say he became my patron saint because I’ve always given beggars on the streets all the change in my pockets. I didn’t have a cloak like San Martín Caballero, but I always had a quarter and a few pennies.

It seemed the newspapers were full of such stories. This woman found on the side of the interstate. This one pushed from a moving car. This one’s cadaver, this one unconscious, this one beaten blue. Her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker. Always

La Llorona calling to her. She is sure of it. Cleofilas spreads the baby’s Donald Duck blanket on the grass. Listens. The day sky turning to night. The baby pulling up fistfuls of grass and laughing. La Llorona. Wonders if something as quiet as this drives a woman to the darkness under the trees.

Nothing one could walk to at any rate. Because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car.

The town of gossips. The town of dust and despair. Which she has traded for this town of gossips. This town of dust, despair.

Just stroked the dark curls of the man who wept and would weep like a child, his tears of repentance and shame, this time and each.

We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters.

I think I was numb, that’s what I think. I’ve been numb most of my life. That’s how I’ve survived.

“Your English is good,” he said.  “I speak Spanish too,” I said. “I like Spanish better than English.”

he would take me and Jorge with him to do things and I sometimes felt like he was my dad—only I knew he wasn’t. I was sad sometimes, but not sad, sad, sad. Just sad in a normal way, I think.

I didn’t think it was a good thing to know how to fight, to use your fists on other people. I never liked the idea of hurting other people—and if that made me a joto, then I guess that’s what I was.

I remember the fence around the school, a fence that was there to make us feel safe. I remember the first time I got into a fight. I wasn’t any good at it.

“One of us will always be waiting here for you. We’ll teach you how to live with the voices.”

You can feel it here, a shuddering under the skin. How the river here connects to the river everywhere. How the river carries hopes and dreams and losses and anguish. How the river is both water and blood. How the earth here weeps and sings at the same time. How it longs to be like the quiet earth elsewhere. And I understood that the voices were telling their own stories and the stories they’d been trusted with and the stories of this land that no longer had a voice to speak them. And my story was one of those stories.

I have deaths curled inside of me. Layered and limned with my grief. I lost my mother when I was little, my brother soon after I met you, my grandparents after we married, some friends, and now, too, our daughter.

Socorro

Sometimes I look for her when I’m awake. I get lost in our house wondering why I can’t find the nursery. I wake up thinking I hear her crying.

sometimes something moves over your face that reminds me of the ocean, and I know you’re thinking of her.

Even now, all these years later, when my lips are on your skin, I can still taste those tears. Or perhaps I’m tasting yours, all the tears you’ve never released, restless oceans pushing up against the surface of you.

Only her face was as I remembered it, dark and serene. Her eyes black and radiant. When it was time to kneel, I looked to her, looked only to her, and prayed with my heart in my throat: Milagrosa, make it stop.

Any moment now, they’ll learn my name and then their voices will never stop.

They kept whispering my name. Over and over, in looping chains, so that the o at the end merged with the A at the beginning, creating a new name for me. A name without end.

What I am is yours. I am yours even when you are away. When I am alone. I am yours for as long as I breathe and even after. I am yours for as long as you want me.

You missed everything, even the scent of the air and the heat of the nights and the feel of the earth.

To you, the Rio Grande Valley wasn’t simply a place on a map—the name itself was an incantation. Earth and sun and magic all at once.

To love you is to live here. The palm trees lining the highways and the fruit-bearing trees in the orange groves and the mesquites everywhere all whisper your name to me.

the songs I remember from the nineties, the Cure, the Cranberries, new and old Tejano, Michael Salgado and Intocables, and old conjuntos, Los Relampagos and Los Tigres del Norte and Los Cadetes de Linares looping over and over again.

When the whispers began, I tried to outrun them, first on the treadmill then at the university track. I tried weights. I tried punching the bag in the garage. I tried jerking off. I tried drinking. At home and then at the bar down the street. And then at the icehouse on the far edge of town.

I didn’t grow up like you—I wasn’t used to their omnipresence, to the constant questioning of my citizenship.

I hear your car park in the driveway, hear your keys at the door, hear you make tea and drink it in the kitchen, hear the groan when you take off your shoes. And you sit there for a bit and breathe. And when you come to bed, I greet you with open arms and hold you tight. You tuck your face into my neck, and I breathe in the scent of your hair. And you tell me about your day. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we cry. And we lie there, breathing together until the alarm goes off, and I have to leave you, get showered and dressed, go to work.

I start awake, find myself patting my own chest, feel a phantom warmth smaller than the palm of my hand over my heart.

no one’s life depends on how awake I am. I don’t love my job. But it’s a living, and sometimes that’s enough.

I pat the hand she puts on my shoulder and tell her in Spanish that I know that my mother, from the other world, would thank her for taking such good care of me.

I don’t doubt that she’d greet you like a long-lost daughter if you ever walked in through the door.

I’ve never told you, but I loved a boy once. Loved him for his dark skin and the sadness of his eyes and for the way he dug his fingers into me when he held me.

He taught me the silhouettes of golden eagles and vultures, roadrunners and bob white quails, by tracing them over and over on my skin. I hardly had to say his name, Abel. I’d just cry out like a grackle the way he’d taught me, and he’d turn to look at me.

Before he ever said the word love, he said, “If they knew, my brother would fight over who’d put a bullet between my eyes.”

It was because of him that I learned to love you.

I went back but he didn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up screaming, wake up calling for him. With time, the silence froze something inside me, but the bird songs stayed with me.

All of those splintered wings and their deafening sound. Your voice was filled with such longing.

Since then, my heart has belonged to you only

when you were introducing me to your parents, I heard the cenzontles and they made me think of him and I felt a little less like a stranger.

Their songs already lived in my bones. And I knew your home could be mine.

You’d said it’d be your hobby room and double as a guest bedroom, but it didn’t even have a bed in it. Just a single chair. The first time I found you there, your eyes were closed and you were silent, shaking and shaking in that chair.

It was there when I was with you, growing so loud I could hear it even when we were with your family—the cacophony of voices, music, TV, children, and pets unable to drown it out entirely.

In English and Spanish and languages whose names I didn’t know.

I bleed as the vicious gloves of hungercut my face and eyes,as I fight my way from stinking barriosto glamour of the ringand lights of fameor mutilated sorrow.

I am Joaquín.I rode with Pancho Villacrude and warma tornado at full strength,

My back of Indian slavery                Was stripped crimson        from the whips of masters        who would lose their blood so pure        when revolution made them pay,

I am the black-shawledfaithful womenwho die with meor livedepending on the time and place.