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In third grade, my teacher announced that our reading class had too many students and needed to be split. One by one, she started sending the bulk of the Mexican kids to one side of the room and the white kids to the other. When she got to me, however, she peered over the rims of her glasses and inquired: “What are you, Stephanie? Hispanic or white?”

I’d been asked this many times before, but didn’t have a ready reply. Both? Neither? Either? Half my roots dwelled beneath the pueblos of central Mexico; the other half were buried in the Kansas prairie. I had inherited my mother’s olive skin and my father’s blue eyes. Abuelita Elizondo stuffed me with tortillas and beans; Grandma Griest fed me chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes.

Scanning the classroom, I noticed my best friend Melida among the brown kids. “I’m Hispanic,” I announced. The teacher nodded and I joined the Mexicans. A few minutes later, a new teacher arrived and led us to another room, where she passed around a primer and asked us to read aloud. I quickly realized the difference between the other students and me. Most of them spoke only Spanish at home, so they stumbled over the strange English words, pronouncing yes like “jess” and chair like “share.”

I had the opposite problem: I spoke fluently in our English-only classroom but stuttered at Abuelita Elizondo’s. My mother had faced such ridicule for her Spanish accent growing up that she never used her native tongue at home. Even though I lived in Corpus Christi, some 150 miles from the Mexico border, my Spanish had barely evolved beyond “Donde esta el baño?”

When my turn came to read, I sat up straight and said each word loud and clear. The teacher watched me curiously. After class ended, I told her that I wanted to be “where the smart kids were.” She agreed and I joined the white class the following day.

My collection started with Beverly Cleary’s tales of a girl who baked a doll into her big sister’s birthday cake and a boy who delivered newspapers with his trusty dog Ribsy. Gradually it progressed to stories about runaways who slept in abandoned boxcars in the forest and grandiose bedrooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were Sweet Valley High twins who roared around sunny California in a convertible, and a girl named Deenie who rubbed her Special Place with a washcloth until she got a Special Feeling. (I sat in my bathtub for hours, trying to find my own Special Place. Was it that spot behind my elbow? Or just beneath my pinkie toe?)

All the while, I wondered: Who were these people? Where were their tios with their big-ass trucks and their primos with their low-riders? How come nobody ever ate barbacoa or cracked piñatas or listened to Menudo or shopped at HEB?

Although I noticed literature’s dearth of diversity at an early age, it didn’t occur to me to take offense. I just assumed that white people’s stories were more worthy of being told. After all, everyone on TV was white, the characters in my Highlights Magazines were white, the singers on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 were white (or black). On the rare occasions Mexicans made a media appearance, they were usually either a housekeeper, a wetback, a cholo, or a puta; in my Texas history textbook, they bore the sole distinction of murdering Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

And so I began emulating the white girls in my books—rolling up magazines to use as kindling in my little house in the big woods, cutting up carrots for my pet pegasus, and attempting to visualize what my big sister and her friends were doing in her bedroom (where I was forbidden) with my ESP. Though I only visited her once a year, I started relating better to Grandma Griest out in Kansas because she more closely resembled the feisty Jewish grandmothers in my books than Abuelita Elizondo, who lived on the other side of town. I used to pump my white grandma for stories about her life on the prairie as she baked me fat vats of macaroni and cheese. When I wound up across the counter from Abuelita Elizondo hand-rolling tortillas, however, I’d sit in silence—and not just because of the language barrier. I simply couldn’t fathom she had anything interesting to say. Rather, I’d watch her flip the masa on the burner and wish she’d whip up something like Are-You-There-God-It’s-Me-Margaret’s grandma would instead. Like matzo ball soup (which I imagined to be minimeatballs drowning in cheese sauce).

Consequently, I never heard firsthand about how my abuelo watched his own father get killed by a runaway mining cart as he waited on the opposite track, clutching his lunch pail, or how his mother then crossed the Rio Grande into Los Estados Unidos by canoe with five centavos and a half dozen children in tow. Entire generations of our family became Kineños—the Mexican cowboys who worked the animals and the land of the legendary King Ranch of South Texas. I learned few of their names and none of their stories.

Before I could reply, she offered that a Hispanic H on my transcript would get me a lot further with college scholarship committees than a white W. I agreed to the change and the funding poured in—so much that I enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin free of charge. I was ecstatic—until I actually started meeting “real Latinos” (i.e., those who bore the hardships of their skin color) in my classes. I quickly realized I had reaped only the benefits of being a minority and none of the drawbacks, and guilt overwhelmed me. Had I snatched away scholarships from a real Mexican kid out there? If so, what should I do? Give back the money I’d received? Take out a loan? Transfer to a cheaper school?

I resolved instead to become the H emblazoned on my transcripts, taking a job at the minority recruitment center at the admissions office, volunteering at Latino public schools, joining Latino organizations. But though UT was home to the Ben-son Latin American Collection, the largest university archive of Latin American materials in the United States, Latino voices were bizarrely lacking in my classes. In my mandatory “Survey of American Literature” course, we spent four months dissecting the works of Twain, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dickinson, James, Melville, Eliot, Poe, and Hemingway. Then, on our final day of lectures, the professor devoted forty minutes to the Harlem Renaissance and ten to the poetry of Adrienne Rich. I raised my hand just before the bell rang and asked about Chicano writers. As everyone gathered their papers and headed toward the door, he recommended I read The House on Mango Street. And that was it.

Fortunately, the Chicano professors I later sought out did introduce me to the vibrant world of Latino letters—and I had an entirely new cast of characters to emulate. I decorated my walls with images of Frida Kahlo and the Virgen de Guadalupe, slammed tequila shots, ate beans and rice, and got a Colombian novio (bad idea). I changed my white-bread middle name (Ann) to my mother’s maiden name (Elizondo) and made everyone use it. I even set aside my liberal views on abortion and gay rights and delved back into Catholicism.

But something stopped me from committing fully to this little cultural excavation. I still had no desire to learn Spanish—perhaps because I couldn’t fathom where it would get me besides, well, Mexico. And I had wanderlust. Bad. So rather than study the language that would have enabled me to talk with my dwindling elders, I majored in post-Soviet studies, learned some Russian, jetted off to Moscow, took a crash course in Mandarin, then headed over to Beijing. Between 1996 and 2000, I visited more than a dozen communist and postcommunist nations, where I documented the family histories of everyone I encountered—research that later served as the backbone for my first book. But never did it occur to me to record the stories of my own family on my visits back home to Corpus Christi. I didn’t think anyone wanted to hear them.

In August 2000, I joined an eight-member documentary team for a nonprofit education organization called the Odyssey. Armed with laptops, digital cameras, and copies of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, we divided into pairs, piled into cars, and traipsed a total of 315,000 miles across the country, documenting the histories generally omitted in classroom textbooks—slave rebellions, garment worker strikes, the American Indian Movement—and posting them on a Web site monitored by hundreds of thousands of K-12 students nationwide. Late that autumn, our director sent me to Brownsville, Texas, to write about the legacy of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the 1848 agreement that forced Mexico, after it lost the war, to cede 55 percent of its territory (including present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah) to the United States for $15 million.

I hadn’t been that far south since I was eleven. And what I saw shocked me. Portable “Skywatch” towers were manned twenty-four hours a day by armed agents with infrared, thermal-imaging night goggles. Stadium lights illuminated the riverbeds. Electronic sensors detected motion, body heat, and ground radiation. A green-and-white INS jeep roared by every minute; a helicopter, every ten.

I walked across the International Bridge in a daze. Hundreds of Mexicans milled along the banks of the Rio Grande below, hawking rosaries, contemplating their chances of crossing. Just as my great-grandmother had some seventy years before. As I crouched down for a better view, my fingers instinctively curled into a note-taking position. I wanted to talk with them so badly my throat ached. But—directions to the nearest baño notwithstanding—any attempt to communicate would have been futile. I had to settle instead for interviews with a white National Park Service ranger and a Chicano university professor, conducting them in the language of the people the treaty had benefited. This shamed me, deeply. I started thinking of the extraordinary citizens I had met during my travels who had bravely sacrificed for their culture: those who had nearly perished in the gulag for printing underground newspapers in their indigenous languages; the Tibetans who had risked death for worshiping their ancient gods. I, meanwhile, had abandoned half of myself long ago. And now I wanted it back.

In some ways, I am too late: All of my elders are dead now. Though I am deeply grateful for the Griest family stories I managed to collect as a child, the history of my Elizondo family is what I am likely to spend much of my literary career recreating. What is salvageable can be obtained only via a very long road, the first leg of which entails a serious study of Spanish; the second, a prolonged stay in Mexico. The thought of doing this terrifies me. If I had never connected with a single soul in Russia, it would have been disappointing—but bearable. In Mexico, it would crush me.

But I realize now that Spanish will give me a greater intimacy with my family, with my culture, and ultimately with myself, and I feel ready to attempt this commitment. As for future writings, I hope to honor those who search library shelves for books that legitimize the strange spices emanating from their grandmothers’ kitchens. And to empower them with the stories they have to tell.