Sense and responsibility

We were never taught to believe that horizons were intangible things. The bold black line where the sky and earth met seemed always to exist only several miles away from our home, and, if our mother would only let us, my sister and I were positive that on a Saturday afternoon we could reach that line before it disappeared to the other side of the world. But we were at an age when we could also block out whole cathedrals, mountains, and moons with our right eyes squinting and the left ones shut, our thumbs held out, eclipsing the intended object. Our world seemed, to us, the center of the entire God-fashioned universe. My sister and I would sit on a couple of empty fertilizer pails drinking strawberry Kool Aid, leaning back against the trailer's aluminum walls, our legs dangling and swaying back and forth to an understood rhythm. There we would sit and contemplate the seconds it would take the mountains to engulf the sun, to transform gracefully from an immense royal blue, and to disappear and be replaced by the striking sincerity of the desert night. My parents never invaded or countered our wondrous musings; it was, instead, in town and at school where we learned to deal with perspective.

Both my parents had a very limited knowledge of English. Their English was forced, painful, unmelodious. They knew enough to get by. When we would go to town for visits to the dentist, to the bank, or to shop for groceries, my sister or I would translate for my mother. With age the novelty of it all wore off It became apparent to us how people treated my mother, how they talked down to her and easily bypassed her. It became apparent how a person without possession of English went easily unnoticed. By fourth grade I refused to translate for my mother. I would, instead, sit off to the side in an uncomfortable, orange chair and watch her wrestle with a language that tore her throat and pained of shattered pride. Shame became synonymous with being Mexican, with speaking Spanish. Shame came when the women laughed, the ones who sat behind counters, who spoke to my mother, shouting like they were housebreaking some stupid, lazy dog. And when the words finally did emerge from my mother's throat, they were dry and gray, a mouthful of ashes that floated meaninglessly to the four blank walls of an air-conditioned office. After a while I even refused to go inside those offices with my parents. I would prefer to sit in the car, in one-hundred-and-ten degree weather, enraged, suffocated, and embarrassed rather than watch those people smile condescendingly at my father, who stumbled over his stubborn, heavy syllables and wrung the obscure vowels into the creases of his sombrero.

At home, though, my mother brought us up on Spanish. She would rub it slowly into our chests until the sore throat was gone, until we could return to school the next day and struggle with the cryptic sounds of instruction. Spanish, then, was the soothing voice of my mother reciting poems and prayers to me before I fell asleep. It was the faint memory of my grandparents singing love songs in the coolness of their adobe kitchen. Spanish was the sound I thought the stars must make. And when I heard love in Spanish it was the angels in church wanting and whispering to each other from across the altar.

English was functional, precise, and calculated. English was also Sesame Street, Bugs Bunny, Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mickey Mouse, Big Macs, and movie stars. But perhaps, most importantly, English was the language of what really appeared to matter. English was the language of instruction, and when I sat in my school chair twisting my fingers into the shape of a cross under my desk, praying ten Ave Marias hard and determined so that the teacher wouldn't call on me, she still would. Even God, His mother, and all the saints, it seemed, would ignore my prayers if I did not recite them in English.

It would be easy to lie, to say that my elementary and middle school education was strenuous, but it really wasn't. It is much easier to learn a language at a young age, to let its grammar seep into one's unconscious. Unconscious, also, was my assimilation. The people I most respected at that time were my teachers-Ms. Reynolds, Ms. Tite, Ms. Fairbanks, Ms. Sexton, Mr. Cox, Mr. Kruse, and Mr. Applegate-and they were all white. I associated my parents with a different kind of knowledge. Theirs was the one of manners, of Educacion; of "yes, sir," "no, ma'am," "thank you," "may I," and "please." My teachers had the knowledge of books. There were written sources behind their reasons. They were the progeny of Shakespeare, Washington, da Vinci, Lincoln, Kennedy, the Declaration of Independence, Custard, the Alamo. Their ancestors had so valiantly defeated the Indians for us; they had traversed a frozen Delaware for us, sailed the Mayflower, and walked on the moon for us. How in any way could they not be right? And us, the Indians, the Mexicans, the poor, white trash, what did we have? From what glory had we sprung? My pride was in my country, in my founding fathers, in the great nation of English. Mexican, my Spanish accent, was my burden and I was expected to rise above it.