This past weekend we went to Dallas for a few days. We were there for the Blissdom 2013 national conference, and while it was everything we had expected and a lot more (there were mixed drinks at some of the tabletop booths so ya se imaginan…), what really made the trip extra special was something Edgar said at Anjelica’s aunts’ home. We were staying with them while we were in Dallas. One, to not pay for a hotel. And two, because you already know in Mexican families if you don’t stay with family that’s just as bad as turning your back on us.
So there we were. It was late on Saturday evening. We had already come back from the conference and we were exhausted. One of Anjelica’s aunts was making capirotada – if you’re not familiar it’s very similar to bread pudding – and we were all sitting around the table talking. Then Edgar started asking questions.
Edgar: Yeah, but in English… what is the word for that in English?
Anjelica’s Aunt: How do you say enchiladas in English?
Edgar: En-chee-la-ttas.
Anjelica’s Aunt: Pos hay está, in English you say ca-pee-ro-ta-dah.
I haven’t been able to stop laughing at that exchange. It reminded me so much about some of the many language barriers of my own that I’ve had over the years. For the longest I called one of my parent’s friends everything else but her real name of Calletana. It was such a tender moment that I had to recreate it in the videos below:
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So the other day Edgar and I were talking. Of all things our conversation ended up turning out to be about girls. He’s right about that same age that I was when all the little boys in my classroom, including myself, first began to discover that not all the girls in our school were prone to severe cases of the cooties. Okay, so to be completely honest there was just one little girl at McCook Elementary that seemed to have miraculously avoided contracting that hideous affliction that made us all but allergic to the rest of the little girls in our school.
Her name was Maria Cantu, and every single one of us age 10 or above at McCook Elementary who wasn’t already in love with one of our teachers was completely and madly “in love” with her. She commanded a room. The playground. The lunchroom. We worshipped her and I think she knew it. Even to this day I sometimes wonder whatever happened to Maria Cantu. Not that I would even expect her to remember me or anyone else from back then, or that I would even recognize her if she were sitting right next to me in the room right now. There’s no way. At this point she’s more a figment of my imagination than anything else.
But still, there was something special about that first crush that has somehow managed to stay with me for almost three decades of my life now.
I wondered if this would be Edgar’s Maria Cantu too?
Does his Maria – coincidentally that is her name too, Maria (I would say “what are the odds?” but we’re in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and let’s face it Maria might as well be Kim, Cindy or Sandy here) – awaken in him the same innocent feelings of friendship and wanting to play with his crush at the playground or after school that my Maria did in me? When we go shopping for Valentine’s Day cards this year will he save one of the bigger, showier ones for her? Better yet, will he ask his crafty mother to make something extra special just for her? He is his mother’s son after all, and unlike me, Edgar and Angie are all about the little detalles.
Which brings me to another point in this whole schoolyard crush post. He first confessed to Anjelica that he had a crush on this little girl named Maria. I won’t lie and say that I wasn’t a little hurt by him telling her first instead of me, but like any good Mexican parent I then made it my personal mission to get him to confess that same secreto to me. After which of course I acted like it was the first time I had ever heard it in my life.
¿Pos qué más me quedaba? It’s not like I could rat myself out.
Anyway, it also made me think. What if we didn’t live here. Would his crush still be a Maria and would that make any difference whatsoever?
I’d say it’s safe to say I’m in plain loquito mode now. But I do think the crush is pretty cool too.
Time to take this boy Valentine shopping!
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Every once in a while, if we’re lucky, and it doesn’t happen all that often at all, we kind of get a glimpse at ourselves that we normally wouldn’t otherwise see. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. It happened to me just the other day. A local university student was interviewing me for a class assignment about something that somehow had something to do with my background and my being a blogger now. Don’t ask me why or how, I really don’t know. Anyhow, I was running my mouth and blabbering about a million things all at once – come to think of it, I wonder if she was able to pull anything useful from her notes? – when it happened!
As I was saying what I was saying I realized just exactly what I was saying.
I started to choke up, but managed to play it off like it was just a cough or something in my throat. We were talking on the phone so she couldn’t see that actually my eyes were in fact a little watery.
I think the question had started off with her asking me something about how I became a writer. I told her how growing up my parents had always worked either outside (my dad) or cleaning houses (my mom), how for me gaining an office job like the ones my sisters had at the time was the ultimate level of success because it meant I didn’t have to clean houses or work outside, how I had always enjoyed writing since I was a kid but had long ago then told myself I would not be a starving artist trying to sell my words, and that in the irony of life that was precisely what I ended up doing after college.
I told her about how lucky I have been along the way to meet such compassionate and giving mentors. How my entrepreneurial spirit is the product of my mother, and my love of words the product of my father. Who despite both only having an elementary level education have taught me so much more about life than I could have ever learned in any classroom.
Then I started talking about Edgar. It hit me in that moment that the plans he has for himself are so much more sophisticated than mine were at his age. That the doors of opportunity – excuse my being corny for a bit – available to him are so much wider than they were for me. That perhaps for him the limit is not an office job away from the sun, a broom or a mop… and here is where I kind of lost it for a bit. I know. Soy bien chillón. It’s true. I guess I had just never processed this truth, about him, about me, about our family. It made me wonder what my own parents must have thought when they made this realization about us. And in a very rare and honest way it kind of gave me an “aha” moment I hadn’t experienced before.
There will be brighter days ahead for him, for me, and for us!
There will be for you as well.
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Shut up stupid! That was the line that got Edgar cracking up last night while we were reading Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. This is my second time reading the book. His first. After that, it took me all of five minutes to get him to stop laughing en carcajadas so we could continue reading.
Okay… so the truth is I didn’t really try.
It was rather rewarding just to listen to him instead.
You see, we had just finished reading the story of Oliver Twist together a couple of days ago, and all of a sudden I thought What if I read Caramelo to him? Would he enjoy it? That was it. My mind was made up, and our next read together would be sort of an experiment. I guess you could say a blind experiment on one side.
An experiment in what? – you might ask. In his bilingual and bicultural integration, I guess. I’d like to tell you there was a very well thought out reason for wanting to test him on this, pero, well you all know me better than that. I’m not that sophisticated. I just want to see if he can relate to her story, and by how much.
Edgar has only been to Mexico when he was too young to remember. Unlike me, his summers haven’t been spent running up and down the arroyos of a rancho, exploring the wonders of a foreign but familiar land, entertaining family with his English and pochismos. Making everybody laugh when he can’t get more than a couple of sentences out in Spanish before blabbering a bunch of incomprehensible vocabulary in Spanglish. He doesn’t know what it means to have to wait for running water. To boil dirty green water from the local pond to take a bath instead. To buy galletas by the pound. To ride in the back of a pick up on the way to town. To see a young kid his age hustling for the first time. To feel guilty for having better things than everybody else. And then having to experience the heartbreak of saying hasta pronto.
He doesn’t know, but I wondered if he would understand it.
At first, I think he was confused. Now, I think he gets it. How do I know? By the smile on his face. The giggling after certain paragraphs. The way he just lays next to me mentally creating a picture of the words being read. It’s something neither Anjelica or I ever had at his age. To be able to see so much of ourselves, our culture, our families, in one book. It’s making the second read of Caramelo, for me, very rewarding and satisfying on a whole new level.
Is bilingualism in the US more acceptable these days?
What are hardworking parents to do these days when they can’t find the time to teach their children the language skills they want? ¿Pues qué más? Hire a bilingual nanny! At least, that’s what the website FindaNanny.net is insinuating in their latest post, 10 Ways Bilingual Nannies Can Benefit Children. Among the reasons they list for this being a sound parenting decision are: bilingual nannies can help children master a foreign language, they can introduce children to a different culture, they can serve as linguistic role models for children, and they can encourage a love of diversity, as well as help bilingual parents reinforce their non-English tongue, among other reasons.
I kind of like that last reason! Reinforcing. Hmm…
Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t really know too much about the FindaNanny network, other than that they brought their article to my attention, and that they apparently can help connect nannies and parents in some way. Still, their reasoning does kind of make sense. We all know how hard it is to get these huercos to be fully bilingual.
My reason for writing this post, however, was not only to tell you about this article. What it brings to mind, at least in my mind, is this question: Is it becoming more acceptable, even more popular maybe, to raise bilingual children in this country? That hasn’t always been the case if it is. Not too long ago the idea of passing a law to make English the official language of the United States was getting a lot of play all over the media. What changed?
I won’t pretend to have the answer to that question. I don’t. Instead, as someone who grew up in a bilingual, bicultural household, and who would very much like to have Edgar do the same, I say “Ojala. Ojala que finalmente we’re gaining a true appreciation for the benefits of bilingualism and biculturalism.”
And if we do hire a bilingual nanny for his/her language and cultural skills, let’s make sure and compensate them accordingly too!
This week, we finally connected the internet to our television at home. Don’t ask me how I did it. The truth is I don’t actually remember. I just kind of kept pushing buttons until it worked. Still, once we got the connection going and we were able to login to our NetFlix account Edgar and I couldn’t agree on which movie to watch together. He likes family and kids movies, which as you all know are mostly cartoons and super hero stories. Not really my cup of té. I prefer comedies, dramas, thrillers and action movies. Think stupid funny. That’s usually my guilty pleasure.
Esta vez, though, we settled on Under The Same Moon. You remember… the mostly in Spanish film about family separation and immigration starring Kate Del Castillo, Eugenio Derbez, America Ferrera, Carmen Salinas, and others, that was so critically acclaimed just a couple of years ago. I’ve seen it myself probably a half dozen times. Each time I can’t stop myself from tearing up like a big old baby when Carlitos finds his mom at the end of the movie. It’s that good! I think so anyway.
Watching the film with Edgar, however, was kind of an eyeopener for me. I guess I’d never really given much thought to what his notion about immigration really was. Sure, he knows that my parents and Anjelica’s parents both came from Mexico to this country as immigrants and that a lot of our relatives still live there now. We’ve explained to him what “crossing the river” and “crossing the border” mean. He’s heard the story about my mom crossing the Rio Grande river with me in one arm and my older brother in the other, sitting on nothing but a rubber tube, over and over again, and he’s probably going to keep hearing about that one forever. We’ve even sat down and talked to him about why some of our family members refer to themselves as mojados.
Sin embargo, I don’t think it had ever fully sunk in. Watching the movie, though, he started asking things like: wait, so if you have papers you don’t have to cross the border? just because he doesn’t have papers he has to hide under the seat? wait, why doesn’t his mom just go back home? why did they just let him get arrested? why didn’t they help him? We tried our best to answer his questions, but the truth is for some of them we just didn’t have the right answers. I don’t know that anyone does.
It got me thinking. I don’t remember my parents ever really sitting us down to explain to us what it meant for people to refer to them as “illegal.” We knew la migra was who we were supposed to hide from. We recognized their green and white trucks when they would drive by and we would always run away from them as fast as we could. We knew that because mamá y papá didn’t have papeles we couldn’t travel past the border town we were living in. They could be captured and deported at the next closest immigration checkpoint. We knew that when we had to leave our home in Texas to try and start a new life in Mexico it was because our parents weren’t supposed to be here… but I don’t think we ever really understood why.
I’m kind of glad they let us figure it out on our own.
Now that begs another question in my mind. How do you explain to a child what it means to be undocumented? Is there really a right or wrong answer? Is it a matter of personal choice? I don’t know. ¿Qué me dicen ustedes?
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