assure him nothing is a problem, even as I doubt that I am qualified for this job, never having been an assistant before.

One day you simply find yourself in the classroom stay­ing quiet and growing small every time the classmate sitting next to you asks another classmate where they're from.

Which is to say, one day in my therapist's office I begin to tell him how much I resent the machista culture of Mexico that broke my mother's spirit, coercing her into a loveless marriage of submission to her husband

This is actually one of the few positive lessons I learned from my father: Sometimes you need to do humiliating things for work, to get through bad times. And it actually taught me quite a bit, that summer I spent there

ever since a sixth-grade teacher suggested it. It's been so long, it feels natural.

Which is to say, I stopped going to church a long time ago.

left to find a way out of the gay closet in that city where I hear being gay is not so bad.

outdoor jobs in the sweltering heat of South Texas.

I'm feeling like the embodiment of the American Dream, which feels like both an embrace and a repudiation of my Mexican parents' dream for their children.

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

He was buried with the help of some unknown migrant in an unmarked grave out in the grape fields, but regally, in a quiet funeral fit for a dog king, a very long way from the Matamoros Bridge where he had started with the Mimis.

They had been left behind in the grape fields, and it was Marge and Mare who returned in their place.

Mimis had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, enchanting both people and places, in such a way that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event, and while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, and enthusiastically hopeful. And then, if you got near them, or were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way they felt, too.

looking very much the picture of the Mexican-taking-a-siesta thing, but without the sombrero.

would realize that all my envy was utterly unfounded. That we had been "migrant workers" for that period didn't occur to me, or to anyone else. That label would never stick. Could never stick. We couldn't descend to that level.

Dan and I were left seething with envy.

You're just jealous of Rex," she said. And she was right.

Mom developed a fascination with the Mimis, too, like she couldn’t believe her luck now that she was related to royalty. Feeding into their fantasy gave her one of her own, so she was always ready for an air-conditioned trip to the mall.

“Yo no puedo-o hablar-o Españal-o,”

And since she had the balls in the family, we identified–culturally–as Mexican.

for the first time they were really experiencing the sub- and superconscious derision that exists when cultures and races collide against one another in geopolitical reassignment, like you find in border towns,

With his fancy haircut and new powdery smell, Rex found himself terrifically misplaced on our property, about five miles outside of the Brownsville City limits.

Me and my brother Dan and Syl and me

intoxicating everyone who came near and caught a whiff of the Mimis’ Anais Anais perfume

Little by little I will rediscover what I once lost, one word at a time.

But I am slowly reclaiming what I’d been forced to give up–my connection to my mother tongue and, with it, my relationship with my own mother.

she is now more, not less

My daughter's journey to learning a second language was the opposite of mine.

We moved to Davis, California, where the local school has a two-way Spanish immersion program even though the city is 70 percent white

ilingualism was a gift that I could have given him, but I didn't realize, until too late, the importance of this gift

Unfortunately, the area in Los Angeles where we lived when he was in elementary school did not have a bilingual program, although 70 percent of its student body was Latino.

Do your children speak Spanish?

My mother sought refuge in her immigrant enclave and stayed out of reach from the dominant culture.

I would have ever made it to college. Instead of being a best-selling author as I am today here in the United States, I would be a maid in Mexico earning five dollars a day.

I was haunted by words such as beneplácito, rutilante, urdido, aspeado, edredón, contubernio, apabulante, escudriñar, acérrimas, fehaciente, engullido, féretro ...I couldn’t sleep at night, tossing and turning from a tremendous sense of loss.

but worst of all I felt as if I had once again betrayed my mother tongue.

You should focus on your next book,” they suggested. I didn't put up much of a fight. I felt insecure and ashamed.

"Yes, I know I am married to English now, but Spanish was my first love."

I knew my translation was not perfect, but it was mine.

I was humiliated, but I understood why Sandra was concerned

It was from Sandra Cisneros

Through the years, I've gotten emails from readers sending me a list of errors I made in my translation: accent marks I missed, verbs I conjugated wrong, Spanglish words I used such as la yarda instead of el patio. They are so concerned they even send me the page numbers, too.

"No hablas muy bien el español, verdad?"

Because I am ashamed to write solely in English

When I respond that I write only in English, people look at me in shock, with a mixture of confusion and sometimes criticism.

fight the long, difficult battle to conquer English and offer up my mother tongue as a sacrifice.

I was forced to make sacrifices and compromises that my parents never had to make.

Do I belong here? Do I belong over there? Do I belong anywhere?

my third grade Spanish was replaced by English until I began to think and dream and write only in that language.

Not once did anyone say speaking two languages was an asset, especially in a diverse country like ours.

To me, she wasn't just rejecting my story--she was rejecting me. I felt ashamed to be an immigrant and a Spanish speaker.

I sat there thinking I was the problem-my lack of English was the problem. It didn't cross my nine-year-old mind that perhaps it was my school that was the problem, that my teacher's failure to be sensitive to my needs was the problem.

My journey toward learning English was so traumatic that, to this day, I'm still dealing with the repercussions

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.

Words gave off rings of white energy, radar signals from powers beyond me that infused me with truth

As the months passed, I became more and more sluggish. My eyelids were heavy, I could no longer write or read. I slept all the time.

hen the guard would open my cell door to let one of them in, I’d leap out and fight him—and get sent to thirty-day isolation. I did a lot of isolation time. But I honed my image-making talents in that sensory-deprived solitude.

listening to sad Joni Mitchell songs.

Twenty-three hours a day I was in that cell

was no longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence.

I had a place to stand for the first time in my life

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.But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest:

he sounds created music in me and happiness

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

It was the only way I had of protesting.

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

But there was nothing else. Eventually they negotiated a deal with the actual drug dealer, who took the stand against me. When the judge hit me with a million-dollar bail, I emptied my pockets on his booking desk: twenty-six cents.

I began to learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my place in the universe.

The language of poetry was the magic that could liberate me from myself, transform me into another person, transport me to places far away.

Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible threat from without lessen—my sense of teetering on a rotting plank over swamp water where famished alligators clapped their horny snouts for my blood.

Behind a mask of humility, I seethed with mute rebellion

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

mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs and hands to the outdoor incinerator

Coatlalopeuh

The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer.

But I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me.

I am a turtle, where I go I carry “home” on my back.

“saw”

My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance.

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.

Yet still others of us take it another step: we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us.

How does one put feathers on this particular serpent?

Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent).

What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other.

They called her half and half

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.

With ambition (condemned in the Mexican culture and valued in the Anglo) comes envy.

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

La gorra, el rebozo, la mantilla are symbols of my culture’s “protection” of women.

She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast.

only the nun can escape motherhood

to the church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother

How many times have I heard mothers and mothers-in-law tell their sons to beat their wives for not obeying them, for being hociconas (big mouths), for being callajeras (going to visit and gossip with neighbors), for expecting their husbands to help with the rearing of children and the housework, for wanting to be something other than housewives?

Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates.

Something was “wrong” with me

I was “lazy.”

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

leave the source

You do not speak for the dead.The dead speak for you.

Needle or pen, brushed oil, machete or drum, leather,cilantro, stomp—be patient in the tooling

bloom and battle of flowers

You cannot be afraid to unhinge the jaw—let the sun blister your mouth. Know thirst.

We are always beginning again.

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

fear is a prisonfear is worse

fear is a prisonfear is worsethan the diseasefeartakeseverythingsome will say this is a warwar raging within usblood turned against itselfout bodies falling in battlethe enemy everywherewithin and without but the word war turns us against ourselves and the word diseaserenders us victims and the war is unendingand a war always claims casualties

that helped identify his bodyin the news more timesthan a photo of him while alive.(I never knew why the birdsare angry. My mother saidsomeone stole their eggs.)

Thousands of fish killed after Pemexspill in el Río Salado and everyoneruns out to buy more bottled water.Here, our river kills more crossersthan the sun, than the singular heat of Arizona, than the ranchlandsnear the Falfurrias checkpoint.It's hard to imagine an endangeredriver with that much water, especiallyin summer and with the Falcon Reservoir in drought, though it only takes inchesto drown. Sometimes, furtherwest, there's too little riverto paddle in Boquillas Canyonwhere there are no steel-column walls except the limestone canyon's dropand where a puma might push-wade across,or in El Paso, where double-fenced murossparkle and blind with bullfight ring lights,the ring the concrete river mold, and above

Here, our river kills more crossersthan the sun, than the singular heat of Arizona, than the ranchlandsnear the Falfurrias checkpoint.

(or maybe a little farther down.)

This river hereis full of me and mine.This river hereis full of you and yours.

some primos are still in the closet

some never married – the lucky ones

yeah, those were the days when Ken would grind the camouflage off G.I. Joe’s asswhile my cousins weren’t looking 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 that was before lip-syncing to La Isla Bonita became uncoolbefore Barbie lost her hair due to all the hairsprayand Ken and G.I. Joe went their separate ways to a segundathat was before we had to grow up

Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no tronobas pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeńo

A poet’s devotion, can’t t reach beyond mere walking

that in our barrio, where a whole country is a parody of itself, there’s still plenty of wood to burn, and that the winds of the people are keeping all flames aglow

in the unemployment line, their wrinkled bodies worked-over

by darker still textbook committees.

mend their broken history with their timely tales

(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

smelled patio flowers burning in the stabbing sun,

barrio streets

Be selective about what you swallow

Verify that the inside voice is yours.

Near them I'm like a snail with no shell on a sizzling day.

Why is it they always get to us?

Avoid housework. It bears repeating. I was too busy washing, cooking corn, beans, squash, sweeping again, worrying about my daughter, Painted with Bells, when I began to bump into their frowns and mutterings. They kept glancing at my stomach, started pointing. I got so hurt and mad, I started crying.

Avoid housework

The dewdrops in, if you know what I mean

Protect your uterus

Women swallow sacred stones that fill their bellies with elbows and knees.

There’s something wrong in this worldif a woman isn’t safe even when she sweepsher own house

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.

The Agustín Lara hopeless romantic in me.The barbacoa taquitos on Sunday in me.The cover the mirrors with cloth in me.

You bring out the colonizer in me.The holocaust of desire in me.The Mexico City ‘85 earthquake in me.

You bring out the Dolores del Río in me.The Mexican spitfire in me.The raw navajas, glint and passion in me.The raise Cain and dance with the rooster-footed devil in me.The spangled sequin in me.The eagle and serpent in me.The mariachi trumpets of the blood in me.The Aztec love of war in me.The fierce obsidian of the tongue in me.The berrinchuda, bien-cabrona in me.The Pandora’s curiosity in me.The pre-Columbian death and destruction in me.The rainforest disaster, nuclear threat in me.The fear of fascists in me.

When all was gone,the concrete riverwas always thereand me, always running.

Two tongues that come together is not a French kiss but bilingual love.

sea of sí

mar de amar

sol of your soul

smile sewed like a semilla

sonrisa is a sunrise

smile sewed like a semilla

recalling the song of bullets

sweet allure wrapped in a black skirt

My two-and-a-half-year-old boyand his 10-month-old sisterlay on the same bed,facing opposite ends;their feet touching.They looked soft, peaceful,bundled there in strands of blankets.I brushed away roaches that meanderedacross their faces,but not even that could wake them.

Once my little sisterran barefoot across the hot sandfor a taste.

My mother roared like the ocean,

ip drinks from long straws

oilsweeter than honey

Mouths full of laughter,the turistas come to the tall hotelwith suitcases full of dollars.

and three or four rivers

Its abstract gloryis beyond my grasp.

ocean that lives within

maybe I look like a bitch, probably      because that’s what       I am.

reminds me of a woman looking            directly at a man               (and he doesn’t like it)           of a woman fighting with her kids               (but they need it)           of a woman needing something real              and swearing at the world               (and the world doesn’t have it)

But in the end, some will just sit aroundtalking about how good the old world was.

My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines

But it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated.

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.At the gates we are given new papers,our old clothes are takenand we are given overalls like mechanics wear.We are given shots and doctors ask questions.Then we gather in another roomwhere counselors orient us to the new landwe will now live in. We take tests.Some of us were craftsmen in the old world,

i’ll laugh at mean ass convicts who terrify the worldyet love to eat ice cream,

i’ll probably burst out laughing,not at you or me or even at some ruca,but at all the pendejadas, all the crazy liesthat say that we are savage;

seems everyone is a convict,                even the guards and counselors                        do time here,                        everyday trudging into                        this abysmal human warehouse.

and she used to always smile

she was soft and brownand beautiful,

Neighborhood of could-be artists

somewhere. . ., someone remembers. .

my Loma of Austin my Rose Hill of Los Angeles my West Side of San Anto my Quinto of Houston my Jackson of San Jomy Segundo of El Paso my Barelas of Alburque my Westside of Denver

For me: only the NOW of THIS journey is REAL!

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?         Indian mothers, too unaware        of courtroom tragi-comedies        folded arms across their bosoms        Saying, “Sea por Dios.”

he art form of our slums         more meaningful & significant         than Egypt’s finest hieroglyphics.

Henry home from La Corre         khakis worn too low–below the waist        the stomps, the greña with duck-tail

NOMAS!

Zaragoza Park

Kids barefoot/snotty-nosed        playing marbles/munching on bean tacos        (the kind you’ll never find in a café)

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

Her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker.

Was Cleofilas just exaggerating as her husband always said

There is no place to go

Sometimes she thinks of her father’s house. But how could she go back there? What a disgrace. What would the neighbors say? Coming home like that with one baby on her hip and one in the oven. Where’s your husband?

this father, this rival, this keeper, this lord, this master, this husband till kingdom come.

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.

From what she can tell, from the times during her first year when, still a newlywed, she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead

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.

Pain or rage, Cleofilas wondered when she drove over the bridge the first time as a newlywed and Juan Pedro had pointed it out. La Gritona, he had said, and she had laughed. Such a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after.

Woman Hollering

Pues, alla de los indios, quien sabe

La Gritona

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.

The kind the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life

In the town where she grew up, there wasn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards. Or walk to the cinema to see this week’s film again, speckled and with one hair quivering annoyingly on the screen. Or to the center of town to order a milkshake that would appear in a day and a half as a pimple on her backside. Or to the girlfriend’s house to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup.

She would not remember her father’s parting words until later. I am your father, I will never abandon you.

“It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.”

He will become the kind of brave that says yes to everything. When I graduate college he will be in rehab fighting a heroin addiction.