Our family en route to Mexico City, c. 1964; I am seated on my mother’s right.
In the year of my near death, 1987, I was sick over a ten-month period. Had I been ill with something physically visible, I might’ve known to run and see a doctor. But when we are sick in the soul, it takes a long time to realize a spirit wound that won’t heal is equally as dangerous as a flesh wound that can’t.
The following was written in 1989 as I was rising from that dark night. It overwhelmed me then and overwhelms me now to realize the timing of these accolades; they could’ve arrived posthumously. I’ve learned since then that despair is part of the process, not the destination.
Once, several years ago, when I was just starting out my writing career, I was asked to write my own contributor’s note for a literary anthology. I wrote, “I am the only daughter in a family of six sons. That explains everything.”
Well, I’ve thought about that ever since, and yes, it explains a lot to me, but for the reader’s sake I should have written, “I am the only daughter in a Mexican family of six sons.” Or even: “I am the only daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother.” Or: “I am the only daughter of a working-class family of nine.” All of these had everything to do with who I am today.
I was/am the only daughter and only a daughter. Being an only daughter in a family of six sons forced me by circumstance to spend a lot of time by myself because my brothers felt it beneath them to play with a girl in public. But that aloneness, that loneliness, was good for a would-be writer—it allowed me time to think and think, to imagine, to read and prepare myself for my writer’s profession.
Being only a daughter for my father meant my destiny would lead me to become someone’s wife. That’s what he believed. But when I was in the fifth grade and shared my plans for college with him, I was sure he understood. I remember my father saying, “Qué bueno, mi’ja”—that’s good. That meant a lot to me, especially since my brothers thought the idea hilarious. What I didn’t realize was that my father thought college was good for girls—good for finding a husband. After I finished four years of college and two more in graduate school, and still no husband, my father shakes his head even now and says I wasted all that education.
In retrospect, I’m lucky my father believed daughters were meant for husbands. It meant it didn’t matter if I majored in something silly like English. After all, I’d find a nice professional eventually who might marry me, right? This allowed me the liberty to putter about embroidering my little poems and stories without my father interrupting with so much as a “What’s that you’re writing?”
But the truth is I wanted him to interrupt. I wanted my father to understand what I was scribbling, to introduce me as “My only daughter, the writer.” Not as “This is my only daughter. She teaches.” “Es maestra” were his exact words. Not even “profesora.”
In a sense, everything I have ever written has been for him, to win his approval even though I know my father can’t read English words. My father’s only reading includes Mexican comic books—La Familia Burrón, his chocolate-ink Esto, a Mexican sports magazine, or fotonovelas, little picture paperbacks with tragedy and trauma erupting from the characters’ mouths in bubbles. My father represents, then, the public majority. A public who is uninterested in reading, and yet one whom I’m writing about and for, and privately trying to woo.
When we were growing up in Chicago, we moved a lot because of my father. He suffered bouts of nostalgia. Then we’d have to let go our flat, store the furniture with Mother’s relatives, load the station wagon with baggage and bologna sandwiches, and head south. To Mexico City.
We came back, of course. To yet another Chicago flat, another Chicago neighborhood, another Catholic school. Each time, my father would seek out the parish priest in order to get a tuition break, and complain or boast, “I have seven sons.”
He meant siete hijos, seven children, but he translated it as “sons.” “I have seven sons,” he would say to anyone who would listen. The Sears employee who sold us the washing machine. The short-order cook where my father ate his ham-and-eggs breakfasts. “I have seven sons.” As if he deserved a medal from the state.
Our family en route to Mexico City, c. 1964; I am seated on my mother’s right.
My papa. He didn’t mean anything by that mistranslation, I’m sure. But somehow I could feel myself being erased. I’d tug my father’s sleeve and whisper, “Not seven sons. Six! And one daughter.”
When my oldest brother graduated from medical school, he fulfilled my father’s dream that we study hard and use this, our head, instead of these, our hands. Even now my father’s hands are thick and yellow, stubbed by a history of hammer and nails and twine and coils and springs. “Use this,” my father said, tapping his head, “and not this,” showing us those hands. He always looked tired when he said it.
Wasn’t college an investment? And hadn’t I spent all those years in college? And if I didn’t marry, what was it all for? Why would anyone go to college and then choose to be poor?
Last year, after ten years of writing professionally, the financial rewards started to trickle in—my second National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; a guest professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; my book sold to a major New York publishing house.
At Christmas, I flew home to Chicago. The house was throbbing, same as always: hot tamales and sweet tamales hissing in my mother’s pressure cooker, and everybody—my mother, six brothers, wives, babies, aunts, cousins—talking too loud and at the same time, because that’s just how we are.
I went upstairs to my father’s room. One of my stories had just been translated into Spanish and published in an anthology of Chicano writing, and I wanted to show it to him. Ever since he recovered from a stroke two years ago, my father likes to spend his leisure hours horizontally. And that’s how I found him, watching a Pedro Infante movie on television and eating rice pudding.
There was a glass filmed with milk on the bedside table. There were several vials of pills and balled Kleenex. And on the floor, one black sock and a plastic urinal that I didn’t want to look at, but looked at anyway. Pedro Infante was about to burst into song, and my father was laughing.
I’m not sure if it was because my story was translated into Spanish, or because it was published in Mexico, or perhaps because the story dealt with Tepeyac, the colonia my father was raised in and the house he grew up in, but at any rate, my father punched the Mute button on his remote control and read my story.
I sat on the bed next to my father and waited. He read it very slowly. As if he were reading each line over and over. He laughed at all the right places and read lines he liked out loud.
He pointed and asked questions, “Is this so-and-so?”
“Yes,” I said. He kept reading.
When he was finally finished, after what seemed like hours, my father looked up and asked, “Where can we get more copies of this for the relatives?”
Of all the wonderful things that happened to me last year, that was the most wonderful.