St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, Oklahoma City. Recess, 1965.
It's kindergarten and we are on the playground. A nun blows a whistle and it's time to go back inside. We line up and a little boy in front of me turns to look at me. He asks, "Why are your hands brown on one side and white on the other?"
I look at my hands. I wonder, too. When I get home, I ask Mom, hoping for a good answer so I can tell the boy. I don't remember now what she said, but since then, there was a realization that this is how it will always be: Me—an undercurrent, at the start of every school year. As students file into the classroom, I will always wonder, Will there be another girl who looks like me?
School enrollment form. Dayton, Ohio, 1975.
There are boxes for Black, White, American Indian and "Other race." There is no box for "Mexican."
I study the words and stare at the boxes. What am I?
"Write in Mexican-American," Mom says. She sits at the sewing machine, her eyes on the folded hem under the needle. She untucks a sharp pin and places it between her lips, lifts the sewing foot with her thumb and repositions the fabric.
I pencil in the words "Mexican-American" below the list, and draw my own box in front of it.
And I check it.
Wayne High School tennis courts, 1977.
Somewhere in the days of glorious heat and the wonders of summer, you smack that ball across the net, a clean swat that feels just right as it leaves your racquet.
It's the kind of swing that revels in the soar, and you imagine that you are Chris Evert in her white skirt and quick tennis shoes. Racquet, strong, steady and fast. You scramble across the court for the return. You lunge, arms eagle-wide, running past the singles white line, your right arm outstretched, to swipe fast and hard once again. The ball sails and you turn and run toward center court. You stop—and do that shuffle that Chrissie does, wrist across forehead, ready for the return.
Skin is that kind of summer heat that drapes a darker shade across the length of your arms, legs, knees and face. There is no turning back. This is summer. The thwack of that little yellow ball. The pop of a new can.
St. Peter Festival, July 1977.
We take a shortcut across a small field through the carnival trailers to get to the festival in the parking lot. The damp of the evening is already setting in, the sun low, casting strips of dark shadows around the carnival machinery. From a near distance the Bullet's oval carriages swirl high and wide and the riders' screams hail down amid the grind of gears. The scent of fresh popcorn mixes with the confectionary cloud of cotton candy in the breeze.
We slip between the trailers and step over large black cables that snake between them. My boyfriend Mike leads. The back of his neck is red with sunburn; my skin is a deep, dark brown. I have always darkened quickly in the summer, even in the shade, even with sunscreen.
But before we get through the trailers, the outline of a man appears off to the side, a haze of smoke before us. When Mike passes in front of him, I hear the man's cigarette voice call out,
"Jock!"
I hurry, too, head down. And I hear the voice again. It is venom, but he spits it out like it was an everyday word, "N—."
I am surprised, but then the word registers and suddenly I feel the weight of my body heavy and in slow motion. I am keenly aware of how I look. The dark of my skin. The white of my T-shirt.
He says it again, like we didn't hear, and I grab Mike's arm and we stumble forward over a sudden tangle of thick utility cords, my head hot and spinning until we reach the festival grounds.
Later, when I tell the story to my friend Kim—I dare not tell Mom or Dad— I say this word—nickel—instead because the real "n" word is too visceral for my mouth to form. I shake when I recall his voice and how he said it.
"What an asshole—" I say, my eyes unblinking, my heart racing.
License to drive.
Your sixteen-year-old self is pumping gas at the Sunoco and a grown man in a green T-shirt on the other side of the two pumps looks between them and asks, "What are you?"
A quick glance up and you see a half-smile, the curl of lip, curious eyes.
You can't measure the meaning, so you look down again and say nothing.
What am I?
Ohio University, 1981.
The Filipino boys working the cafeteria line beside me during college say, You look like our women. We thought you were Filipina.
To them, I am perhaps a curiosity because my features don't "fit" a particular idea they might have about what a Mexican girl is "supposed" to look like. I can't blame them, because I, too, didn't know until many years later after a trip to Mexico, the full range of Mexican skin color, and this, even though my father's skin is olive and my mother's is brown like mine. My eyes are more like Dad's—narrowed when we smile or laugh, not as wide and dark as Mom's. And my hair is thick and untamed—unlike any of the women on either side of the family.
The ancestors, and today.
Skin is that ancient river of pride and discontent, centuries of limbs that worked scythe and plow across the fields of agave that gave the Spanish conquistadors their tequila and their silver.
Skin is the brown women I never met who ground their corn on metates and mixed the water with it to form masa. They patted the stretchy yeast with that familiar technique the women in my family do today, forming the soft dough into perfectly round spheres, setting them to rest inside a bowl, covering it with a cotton towel just like Mom does.
For centuries women have done this, flattening the softened masa by hand one at a time, turning each one down on a flat board to roll out and turn, roll out and turn. They place the tortilla on the comal until it bubbles, turning one last time, creating a staple for the centuries, a piping hot creation that still nourishes.
Today I make tortillas to recall these traditions, and I lift my head and shoulders back just like Mom taught me to, regardless of the curiosities.
Yes, I am the brown girl.
I draw my own box. And I check it.