On once being a Mexicana, and why now I call myself Mexican American.
On the west coast of Mexico, some 6 hours west of Mexico City, there is a town called Lázaro Cárdenas. Once an underdeveloped seaside monte, the town quickly grew, becoming one of the largest seaports in the Pacific, giving way to industrialization, and welcoming in sailors and shipping containers alike.
Stories are told about a time when the large river that flows out to the ocean was so clear that you could see straight to the bottom, and an oar would knock gently against turtle shells. Now, the water runs muddy and brown, and only the poorest residents dare bathe on the river bank.
This is the town that my father is from, and when I was a kid, I was from there too. My family lived there periodically throughout my childhood, sometimes for months at a time, and it is the place that taught me that beauty and pain could coincide.
Growing up, my father would tell stories of his childhood. A white pair of Levi’s he wanted desperately, how his mother sacrificed to buy them for him, and the ass-whooping her got when he fell off a swing and ruined them with mud.
The stories of the family working on a huerta de coco, harvesting coconuts, and how he was too little to work so his job was to take the family lunch everyday. His mother, my Abue, would pack a tin lunch pail that would reflect the hot sun and irritate the bulls in the fields that my father had to walk through to reach the huerta. My sister and I would beg him to tell the story again and again, the time when a bull caught the glint of sun and charged at my dad, who narrowly escaped by diving under a section of the chain-link fence.
The time the circus came into town, and how he so badly wanted to go. How he somehow got the money together and bought tickets, only to find out at the entrance that he’d been scammed. The heartbreak of not being allowed entry and the cruelty of the scammer still sticks with me to this day, and I think about my father who desperately wanted to go inside and see the show.
The poverty that drove him to want to join the church, and how the priesthood turned him away because he didn’t have any money. How this experience led to his dispassion with organized religion, and eventually he thought his only option was to immigrate to the United States, where he had a younger brother.
Of course, by the time I got to Lázaro, the things that my father had once left behind in search of a better life were now reminders of the home that he’d lost. Experiencing this life for myself, through my father’s longing eyes, gave me the sense that i should appreciate it as though I were going to lose it, too.
My uncles were fishermen, and they would take my dad on boat rides to catch swordfish- some to sell on blue tarps and plastic tables at the fish market by the river that reaked of fish but was somehow wonderful- and some to bring home.
My cousins and I would sit on the stoop outside of my Abue’s kitchen and eat fresh lobster straight from the shell, camarones al mojo de ajo and a la diabla (this one I usually didn’t eat, but I’d watch my braver cousins suck the shells and suck in air through their teeth when the chile hit their tongue).
My Abue’s is where I learned to wash my clothes by hand, in the pila with pink Zote, grabbing cool water from the concrete basin and pouring it from a plastic dish to soak the clothes. Dragging them over the ribbed slab on concrete, scrubbing them until the suds formed, and then rinsing them again and again until the water ran clean. We would hang the clothes up to dry on lines in my Abue’s courtyard, fastening them with plastic pins, and watch them sway heavily with water in the hot breeze.
My Abue, que en paz descanse. A rare image of her relaxing in one of the batitas she always wore.
I remember when a neighbor bought the first washing machine the house had seen, the excitement as we all gathered round to watch it work. It was a circular thing that only washed the clothing, but didn’t rinse them, and so when the cycle was done, you still had to drag the sopping clothes over to the pila, rinse them, and then hang them to dry. The machine also wasn’t hooked up to a water line, and the soapy water would drain directly into the courtyard, leaving mini streams of bubbling, frothy water.
For showers, there was a small, concrete room with a toilet, a showerhead, and 2 massive bins.
The showerhead ran rainwater from a reserve somewhere around the house (admittedly I never took the time to find out where), and mostly it ran warm, spilling the fresh water over our bodies.
When the rainwater ran out, my uncles would run a hose through the courtyard and would fills the bins with the icy water. This water was cold, and we would bend into the bins to meet the water level, filling a plastic dish, and splash the water over our heads. Those showers I rarely enjoyed, but the cold water was nice when it was so hot outside that little sweat beads would form above my top lip.
Lázaro.
While in the U.S. we had indoor supermarkets with everything you could want, in Lazaro we had mercados, or fresh-air markets, with vendors selling giant cuts of meat, flowers, aguas frescas, beans, tortillas, clothes, chicken feet, slabs of crispy chicharrones, leather sandals, and more. The walks with my Abue to the market were among my favorite adventures, smelling and seeing everything, carrying groceries back home for her, and sometimes being rewarded with a fresas con crema from La Michoacana or an agua fresca, ladled into a plastic baggie and poked with a straw. I can’t prove it scientifically, but trust me when I say that anything tastes better if you drink it from a little plastic baggie with a straw.
In the U.S. we had our own home, with our own space and our own rooms, but in Lazaro we spent most of our time outside and with family. My Abue’s house was more courtyard than it was home, with an open-air casita that had 6 hamacas and an adobe oven. We were on top of each other, always, neighbors and friends stopping by, my cousins and I running around, and Sundays….Sundays were the most sacred day of all as this was the day reserved for family. My Tias would cook and there would be drinking and dancing, or, mostly- we would go to the beach.
The casita with the hamacas. On Sundays, the hamacas were hung in the rafters and this is where we would dance, eat, and be together. You can catch a glimpse of my dad leaning against the post in the background.
Sacred, not religious, Sundays.
Often, that meant packing into my uncle’s pick up truck- a long, white thing with a thick blue stripe running up either side of it. Usually I sat in the back on the bed of the truck, on top of coolers filled with drinks and food, or on little stools made of wood and leather hide. I would grab onto the sides of the truck and hold on as we drove over dirt roads and through the streets. Wind whipping through my salty hair, knotting it badly, the wind irritating my sandy skin when the truck picked up speed, music blaring from the front cabin. Occasionally the wind was such that I couldn’t hear anything from the cabin, but when we slowed down I’d catch glimpses of a norteña, a banda, a mariachi.
We would argue about which beach to go to- my favorite was Playa Azul but it was the furthest away so I rarely won. Playa Jardin or Erendira were the most common with the most expanse, beautiful sandy beaches you’ve ever seen. Driving up, we’d pass acres and acres of coconut trees, dirt roads, and lagoons. We’d stop at Pollo Loco and buy roasted chickens, medio kilos of torillas, and beers and Jaritos. Sometimes, we’d eat at the restaurants lined up on the beach, with platic PepsiCo chairs and toes stretching into sandy floors. That was always a treat and I’d eat as much seafood as I could get my hands on.
Playa Jardin or Erendira. I think I was 15 in this picture.
I remember the strangeness of moving back to the U.S. after every stint in Mexico- the amount of time spent alone and the amount of time spent inside. Our house always felt so quiet and I often found myself missing the noise, the yelling, the laughter, the music, the joy. The feeling of loneliness was never a creep but a slap, bringing the stinging realization that much of life in the U.S. is spent alone.
Going to the local park on weekends in the U.S. didn’t even come close to the feeling of running up and down the beach, scorching the bottoms of my feet and ducking under waves, swallowing salty sea water. Even the mountains, when we eventually moved to Colorado, felt like a weak substitute that left me wondering- is this ever going to be enough?
The family on Sundays.
Like most beautiful places, Lazaro had secrets too. A few of my Tias were being beaten by their drunken husbands, and the whole family knew but kept it private so as to keep things “within the family”. My Tias were made to feel ugly, unworthy, unloved, but they would stay because of the kids, or perhaps they had nowhere to go.
My grandparents, together for decades, were married when my grandmother was only 14. She ran away with my much-older grandfather and quickly started having babies. They were so poor that my grandmother would tell stories like the time she had an ear infection that was so painful and persistent that she lit a zucchini on fire and stuck in inside her ear to burn whatever was raging inside of her (it worked, in case you were wondering).
My grandmother thought about leaving my grandfather many times throughout their marriage, but two things stopped her. First, the children. The more babies she had (eventually, 13), the more stuck she became. And second, she never learned to read. She would tell stories of daydreaming about her escape, quickly realizing that she couldn’t even read street signs to know where she was going if she were to leave.
Once, as a young girl, I found a yellow notebook full of lines of delicate writing- Concepcion Rios Arroyo.- written over and over on the lined paper. After my grandfather died, it became clear that he hadn’t thought to put the house in my Abue’s name before he passed. Legally, she didn’t own the house so in preparation to go down to city hall to fight for her home, she was teaching herself how to write her name.
Witnessing the pain of the women in my family, the humiliation of public suffering for the sake of familial privacy, I made a decision at a young age that I would never be a victim. That if I ever found myself slighted, I would put myself first, family be damned.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the conviction to not become a victim would later shape my life and my relationship with my family. In my own way, the decision to put myself first in later years was my way of honoring the women before me who felt like they didn’t have a choice.
Like so many of us third-culture kids, I have felt the immense joy that comes with living in the home country, the place where your values came from, your dreams, your love of family, and food, and pleasure in simplicity. But like so many of us too, there is a deep sadness for the place that we’re no longer a part of, that we’ve grown apart from. The memories of the smells, the colors, the people who we held dear, it is a painful existence to be both happy it happened but saddened that it is no longer a life that we can feasibly give ourselves.
It is these stories that make me feel like a proud Mexicana, because though now I’m a proud Mexican-American, whose dominant language is English, and who has spent most of her life in the United States, I was once a Mexicana- running around the streets with my cousins with tanned skin and wild hair, loving mi tierra, mi patria, mi gente. While I can’t claim that identity now, I claimed it once, and most days that’s enough for me.
I’d be quite curious to hear about what other third-culture kids think about this. I don’t claim this Mexicana identity now because I recognize that my experience is much different from being born and raised in Mexico. I try to hold space for this as I think that if the roles were reversed, I might be irritated that someone who grew up in the U.S. for most of her life was claiming to have the same experience as me.
But if you ask me to describe a happy childhood memory, these are the stories I would tell you. Writing about this now, it transports me back to these happy moments, and after an adult life of trying to figure out who I am and where I fit, it reminds me of who I really am at my core.
