Borders

The arbitrary border between Mexico and Texas has led to the separation between the culture I was born into and the culture my ancestors struggled to cultivate. While media doesn’t differentiate between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, I have felt the sting all too often. I am too brown to be among white people and not brown enough to be among my fellow Mexicans. I can’t handle spicy food, guacamole tastes like vomit, and my Spanish, no matter how much I work on it, will always sound different from someone born in Mexico.

My dad used to tell stories about my grandfather’s illegal travels across America. Ironically, I later learned his parents were American citizens who returned to Mexico after running from the law. So, he had as much of a right to be in the States as any other American citizen. He just didn’t know it. So, instead he was handcuffed to a tree and had to shimmy his way up the trunk so he could escape the cops. He had to travel cross country until he found someone to cut them, then had to find someone to break them open a few months after that. I am not sure how he lived his life like that. I certainly never could.

My father dove off cliffs and came to a strange country where he barely spoke the language. My mother came to America when she was fifteen to be with her mother. She still barely speaks English. They are both unabashedly Mexican, even in America. I do not have that security. I was not born in Mexico. I was born in Texas, which used to be Mexico, but that was still not quite close enough.

I used to spend every Christmas break in Mexico. Before the drug cartels, before I was old enough to understand shame, before my mother used to be terrified at the thought of us going. My dad’s side used to come down as well. We spent the holidays under the stars, in the mountains, with people I adored. Then, unfortunately, came the drug cartels, the shame, and my terrified mother.

I didn’t go back until I was an adult. By then, I knew what it was like to be laughed at for using the wrong word in Spanish, to have the vocabulary of a scholar in English but speak at a fourth grade level in my native language, a language I once spoke enough to be put in bilingual classes in attempts to anglicize me. I knew shame. I knew that I was not really Mexican, not really American.

I hadn’t seen my Mexican family in years and talking to my cousin was more foreign than a language. We no longer played with dolls. She was a girl who couldn’t keep going to school after her middle school education because her father didn’t believe girls should do such a thing. I was planning to go to college or I was in college maybe, but I was definitely going farther in my education than she ever would. I barely spoke to her. Instead, I focused on my little sisters and making sure their experience was okay.

There is an arbitrary border created by the Rio Grande that separates Mexico from America. It’s funny because Texas was one a part of Mexico. It has a large Mexican population. It has its own culture. It is still not enough. People still tell me I am not enough, that my body might be brown and my ancestors might have been native, but I do not count. I lost the right to count because my father and my mother crossed an arbitrary border, because they chose to give life to us here.