Juan of Words

Would You Vote For Me?

My blog has been nominated for an award!!  I’m so excited!

So my wife was out to lunch with one of her sisters and she came across this contest, the 2011 Houston Web Awards.  Without telling me, she went ahead and nominated my humble little home on the net for one of the categories: Best Personal Blog, and well, the news was very well received when she finally sent me an email with the link to her nomination.  I haven’t the slightest idea how fierce the competition is, or if Juan of Words actually has any chance of winning in this category, or any other one for that matter, but just the idea of gaining any recognition for all my hard work is quite flattering and exciting to say the least.

And here is where YOU come in… LOL!  I generally don’t like to ask for things like this, but hell, I really would like to win!  It would be fun.  So, if you would PLEASE, follow the steps below and vote for my blog as the “Best Personal Blog” in the 2011 Houston Web Awards (ANYONE CAN VOTE)!

Desde lugeo ¡muchisimas gracias!

Step 1: Click to Enlarge

Step 1:  Click Here to access the 2011 Houston Web Awards Official website.

Step 2: Click to Enlarge

Step 2:  Next, click on the phrase BEST PERSONAL BLOG (highlighted here for your convenience).

Step 3: Click to Enlarge

Step 3:  Then enter your First and Last Name, and your Zip Code… an email is optional, but not required for a vote.

Step 4: Click to Enlarge

Step 4:  Next, find the category for “Best Personal Blog” and enter my blog address www.juanofwords.com (TIP: it’s category # 9).

Step 5: Click to Enlarge

Step 5:  And Finally, click through the “next” buttons at the bottom of the page until you reach the submit page (2 pages away) and click “Submit.”

And that’s it!  Nothing will be left but to find out the results on June 30, 2011.  Thank you all for taking the time to read this and for your continued support and friendship over the course of the last two years of this blog.

¡Los quiero un chingo!

Una Piedra En El Camino, Me Enseño Que Mi Destino

Las piedras...

Las piedras en México tienen historia.  They’re jagged and rough.  Shapely in all sorts of colors and sizes.  Smooth to the touch.   Rough to the grasp.  Sturdy.  They tell the story of generations gone by, of old men playing their instruments and singing their música de vara, of old women walking by at the dawn of early morning, wrapped up against the cold in their rebozos, always in pairs, with their pails of fresh corn, heading to the molino, of huaraches de piel walking alongside mules, sheep and all sorts of other assortment of livestock, of children running to take care of mandados, of young men with their alcohol and cigarettes, laughing and carrying on, of young women giggling and smiling, trying their best to be proper while the objects of their affection walk by, of young boys and girls escaping from school, marching to the beat of el himno de independencia on Independence Day, of so many cousins showing us how to get from one place to the next without ever being seen.

That’s what I remember in those rocks.

I imagine Mamatule and Papanino, my grandparents, sitting at the front of their kitchen, wrapping up their tobacco in corn leaves, smoking it ever so peacefully in the dead air and silence of night, my father as a young man courting my mother, the young girl from Monterrey who showed up at the rancho every couple of months with her padrinos, wearing nice dresses and sensible shoes.  Shoes, in this place, where most girls walked around barefoot.  I imagine their conversations.  My mother playing hard to get, stern and dismissive, measuring every single one of her expressions ever so carefully, a half smile here, a look of agreement there, my father unrelenting, with his big smiles and nice words, staking out her every move from the tanque where pigs swam around to get refreshed and people carried pails of water to heat up for their baths, and slowly winning her over, one platica at a time.

I try to envision our land before the casita de escobas, that’s what they called the firmer shrubs they used to fill in the gaps between the frames of wooden sticks in those days, before the first room of cement blocks went up, when it was up to the people of the pueblo to decide whether the newly-wedded couple of my parents deserved to have this empty section of land donated to them, and then when they were there together for the first time, what conversations they might have had, what first moments they might have lived, welcoming my eldest sister, their firstborn, and then the ones that followed, the decision to leave home, first apart, cada quien a su tiempo, and then together, all of us together.

And I’m inspired.

It was there we began our journey.  The only place that ever felt like home, where even though it wasn’t my precise history that took place, it called out to me, made me feel one with the land, with the air, with the water, in a way that I’d never felt before.  Our apartments, houses here were mundane.

Those piedras, majestic.  Respectable.  Ours!

Translating For My Parents

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

At times I didn’t want to translate.  It was embarrassing to be the interpreter.  To not understand what that person was saying or how exactly it was my parents wanted me to convey their message.  It was unnerving, uncomfortable, even shameful.  The way people would look at me sometimes.  The tone they’d use.  The frustration in their voices.  In my own parents body language.  We knew the English language and we were supposed to be able to express their emotion and context all of the time!

But in all honesty, it was hard.  It still is.  I’d flutter around in half English words, half made up Spanish vocabulary, trying my best to dialogue in conversations far beyond my comprehension level, not to mention my age.  There was a lack of sophistication in my vocabulary.  I didn’t understand technical terms, industry specific terminology and much less indirectas or habladas.  My mother would finally just end up getting frustrated and either muster up as much of the English language as she could or resort to telling off the cashier at the grocery store in a very fast paced, pissed off Spanish.

This variety was always much harder to understand because it was all emotion, and most of it pure anger and frustration.  We’d storm out of the store, leaving all of the groceries behind, either in the cart as we had collected them, or on the register in bags and on the conveyor belt, my mom going on and on about how the cashier had tried to overcharge us and act like she didn’t know what we were saying.  I can’t tell you how many times we played out this same scenario, in multiple stores, over the years, but to my mother’s credit, it did take a hell of a lot to infuriate her to the point of leaving everything behind.  Especially since she was shopping for the entire household and didn’t have the time to go back through and pick everything out all over again one by one.  Though, to this day, she’s not above cursing someone out in Spanish and walking out on them if she feels she’s being wronged.

You can understand why as soon as I turned into a teenager I tried my hardest to avoid these confrontations.  With much more reason when one of my parents weren’t the ones requesting the interpretation.  If they had an appointment I’d run to the restroom right when they were about to get called in, I’d play dumb, like I didn’t understand what was being said, or I’d just plain refuse to be the official translator.  It’s a little embarrassing to admit now, but I did.  A few times I even allowed us to walk away with our heads bowed down in shame after somebody humiliated us for not being able to communicate “properly” in the English language.

If I felt degraded I can’t imagine what my parents were feeling.

It wasn’t until complete strangers began asking me, more often than not, if I spoke English, that it hit me: to a lot of people, not everyone, we Mexicans were all the same.  It didn’t matter if my parents had come to the United States as adults and I had been born and raised in this country, we were all Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics… whatever they wanted to call us – a docile people who could be reproached, directed, reprimanded, and insulted, especially if we didn’t know the official language of the nation.  I decided to stop stepping down and stepping back.

Now I’m the first one to tell anybody to stick up for themselves however they can.  In English, Spanish, Spanglish, or whatever other vocabulary they can muster.  I guess being a pelionero runs in the family!

Lessons From My Mother

Mi Madre

My mother has always been a strong woman.  Much stronger than any of us could have ever imagined, I think.  She was the one who crossed the Rio Bravo with a child on each arm, my brother Chuy in one, me on the other, sitting on nothing more than a rubber tube as she made her way into this, the nation of opportunities. The one who less than 24 hours after being deported and separated from us for the first time at the Texas- Mexico border for not having legal documentation – leaving us all, her children, sobbing uncontrollably with her departure – called from a public phone to let us know she had once again crossed illegally into the United States.  The one who in her time scolded an immigration judge so severely, for not wanting to grant her a legal status under the 1986 amnesty, that she made her change her mind and allow her a permanent residence.

Aside from all her strength and courage, however, to me, my mother has always been the woman who’s taught me more about life than anyone else.  We never had much in our home, but thanks to her, we never really felt like we were missing anything.  If there wasn’t enough to eat she’d sit us all at the table to eat before she did, if we didn’t have enough money to make ends meet she’d go clean houses, iron clothes, make tortillas, gorditas or tamales to sell, and when, on more than one occasion, we felt that we had lost all hope, mamá would pray for and with us.  She is and has always been the strongest part of our family.  The one who never failed us, the one who never gave up, the one who’s always tried her best to find a way to help us, and the one who’s always proved to us, time and time again, that for any one of us, her seven children, she would do anything.

Through her love I learned that humility is worth much more than gold, that the only thing pride is good for is to make one miserable, that one should always have dignity, regardless of what we’re doing, that we are never more, or less, than the next person, that helping others is the same thing as helping oneself, and most importantly, that family is sacred.  That no matter how mad we get or how severely we fight, we’re still family.  The same body.  The same blood.

My mother has been many things in her life.  A daughter who was given away.  An abandoned teenager.  A young woman in love.  A wife.  A maid.  Even a “recogida”.  The one who cleaned my teachers’ homes.  The one who cleaned executive offices.  The one who as a young woman confronted her family in order to come to el Norte.  The one who never denied helping any of our family members once she was here, taking in as many of them as needed it.  The one who took care of my grandmother in her final years.  And the one who at our side, in her role of mother, has shed an infinite amount of tears in our happiest, saddest and most bitter moments.

It’s difficult for me to express just how much my mother has always meant to us.  There aren’t sufficient words to show her how important she is to me.  That even though sometimes it might feel like we’re growing farther apart, every day that passes I feel closer to her.  With time, and the weight of my years, I’ve come to understand so many things, and it’s with great pride that I do scream at the top of my lungs that “I am my mother’s son!”

Without you we would be nothing mamá.  I love you!

This is the English translation of the original blog post entry, ‘Las Lecciones De Mi Madre’, published in the Houston Chronicle’s Spanish-language publication La Voz de Houston.  To read the original post in Spanish Click Here.

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The Importance Of Reader Mail

Lo bonito de la vida.

There’s something to be said about reader mail.  I’ve often thought this, but never had the nerve to write about it… until today.  You see, to hear myself utter the words “reader mail” in it of itself sounds pretentious to me.  Como aquel que se cree demasiado, o el otro que le hecha demasiado crema a sus tacos, like ‘who the hell are you to be thinking you’re big and bad enough to have reader mail?’  That’s what usually goes through my head when I start to even think about writing on this subject.

No offense to any of my good friends who have already written about this subject matter, quite well I might add.  Believe me.  There have been many idle moments spent in front of my computer reading over your very insightful thoughts… most of which I agree with.  Sure I’ve shared the occasional comment that made me feel extra nice, but from that, to pretending I have any right to demand anything at all, much less reader mail, from you good folks, is a tremendous stretch of la verdad. I am just grateful some of you keep coming back.  ¡En serio!

So why write about it all?  And why now?  It’s pretty simple really.  The other day… this weekend actually, in between grilling up a storm, puras fajitas para Easter you know, and knocking back as many Bud Light’s as I could get my hands on, I received a message from a friend, and a pretty regular reader of this blog, that really made me think.  Though we’ve never met in person, I assume we have pretty similar backgrounds from some of the communications we’ve had in the past.  She’s Mexican like me and pretty proud of her cultura también. Basically, her note was about another woman that she knows who is going through a rough time, and who, like many of our madrecitas once did, is doing as much of whatever she can to see her kids through.

I won’t go into the details of this woman’s life… porque no es mí lugar, but I did want to share a portion of the letter that, I’ll confess, made me tear up a little:

She shared with me about all the cooking and selling of her food (that she’s done) to keep her and her three children afloat. One of the sales items, of course, was tamales. It was the day after I read your post ¡No Te Rajes! I printed a copy for her to share with her children. She doesn’t speak English, but I think it would make her kids proud to know that a successful writer/blogger shared their same history.

I just want to thank you for sharing your personal history with us. And I want to let you know that it is more meaningful to some people than you will probably ever know.

I’m not to sure about the “successful writer/blogger” part, LOL… but I can honestly say, it is my complete honor and privilege to share this piece of my own personal history, and probably many other parts of it as well, with these three young children, and thousands of others out there también, who like many of us, are growing up in a reality, that we all know to well, very rarely offers much foresight beyond the day to day.  If my writing can be meaningful in that regard – in offering so much as a “hey I’ve been there too” to any one of these young kids – I’d feel pretty damn successful already!

Gracias por el mensaje.

¡No Te Rajes! Don’t Give Up

Echandole ganas

This is not a sob story.  We were young.  We were poor.  And we were frugal.  We knew how to stretch a dollar.  And how to make a few dollars out of a dozen or so tortillas, tacos or tamales.  A little effort.  A little dose of creativity.  And most importantly our seeming innate sense of ingenuity.  If there was one thing we all walked away with, from the doors and memories of our childhood, it was the inability to ever truly give up.

In all honesty, we didn’t know any better.  We were bumpkins.  Country bumpkins.  In the truest form.  Too blinded by our ignorance.  Coming from a world of nothing but dirt roads and imagination.  Where all we knew was como salir adelante con el sudor de la frente… and by the occasional generosity of complete strangers.  No street cred.  Just wild curiosity and bewilderment well beneath our years.  Everything was new.  Every opportunity a chance to be amazed.

I’d like to say we were more sophisticated, but we weren’t.

We didn’t know how to give up.  Even now, though we’ve gotten much better at it, when it really counts, we just can’t seem to be able to lie down and take whatever comes in our direction.  Maybe it’s just human nature, not anything exclusive to our family of nine.  But every time I’m at the brink, right there about to give in, wanting to let go… wanting to not care anymore, I can’t.  I’m eight, nine and ten again, trailing door to door behind my mother, selling her tortillas, offering to clean houses, anything to make a few extra bucks.  I’m in the parking lots of Fiesta and Wal-Mart: tamales… ¿no quiere tamales? Would you like to buy tamales?, over and over again despite the dirty looks and rejection of our hard work.

And I’m reminded of just who I am and where I come from.

Mis padres nunca se han rajado. I’m hoping to do the same.