Para mi hermane

I still struggle to embrace the reality that my café-con-leche-with-extra-leche-ass self has ancestors in México. Somewhere in Nuevo León in the place a third of my last name comes from they are there. Mis antepasades. Wanted dead and alive by a woman who might never get to meet them. Due to fear apprehension and not knowing who specifically they are beyond the hazy memories of a man who chose assimilation. Because for all twenty-three years of my life I have been taught silently that anything less than 100% purity negates my authenticity. Putting milk in the coffee transmutes it into not-coffee faster than the holiest of padres transubstantiates a cracker into sacred flesh. I know that I will be branded a gringa for some time. Maybe my whole life.

But I want to change that.

I want to know more about the language my mother was barred from as a child than food orders and pleasantries. Because Spanish was the language of “other people” I had to learn to be content with hearing it as an echo through the cramped halls of an underfunded school instead. I want to know more about the music that consecrated the quinceañera I never had than an ode to wealthy field workers, set in grainy 2000s cellulose. Because watching a Los Tigres Del Norte music video in history class doesn’t make up for losing a whole chapter of family scrapbooks. I want to know more about who I am than the eternally Californian white girl with a spice tolerance. Because hell, my nose still runs like a waterfall after wolfing down a bolillo con queso y jalapeño.

I know that I could have started all of this long ago, the day hola first left my lips to mingle with the dusty air of an elementary school trailer. That in certain company, every r I fail to roll will earn me the scorn of a dozen mal ojo. But acquiescing to that scorn, to every thought of “just be white” that nips at my brain would only be a disservice to the people that have fought and cried and bled to bring me into the world. So I refuse to stop embracing my history, and I refuse to deny reality any longer.

¡Soy chicana y no lo negaré más!