Borderlands/La Frontera
Check Your Allyship
Last week, I bought a book of poetry by Javier Zamora, a Salvadoran-American poet who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border at nine years old. In the opening poem, Letter to Abuelita Nelli, he writes, “I can’t go back and return. There’s no path to papers. I’ve got nothing left but dreams.” The ability to cross borders is a privilege afforded by the trivial circumstances of my birth.
Navigating Járvar University
Zoe: I had a big dream. It was a dream that my family had never dreamed before: I wanted to go to college and, better yet, I wanted to leave the state that had been my home my entire life. I wanted to be all of the dreams my single mother could never realize. I wanted to be those classes she didn’t get the chance to take and the success she could have had if she had been zoned to a better school in a zip code whose residents didn’t have an 8% college graduation rate. I was the hope for a future that was going to be different. I didn’t cry when I opened that admissions packet, but I have cried since I got here.
Living in a Machista World
Ruben: I was thirteen years old and my body was changing. I had to start wearing deodorant and was convinced that my brain was broken because I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in my class. The awkward videos about how puberty worked started to make sense. I’d barely left childhood—although most men act like children until at least their early 30s—but I was suddenly bombarded with questions about my sex life. Sometimes they came from sweaty, brown-skinned teammates whose grossly explicit fantasies about smashing girls hinted at an upcoming lifetime of violent masculinity. But, much more often, the questions were implicit and from family members. They’d ask if I had a girlfriend, make suggestive comments when I said I didn’t, and treat me like I was a full-fledged, girl-crazy, conquest-prone, machista adult before I even knew what a blowjob was. Machismo was thrust upon me like an old coat, one that I wore because it was bequeathed even though it fit uncomfortably.
English Only, Please
Zoe: We were in a place shrouded in shadows, the lights were dimmed—it was almost time. Happiness. I can only remember un sentimiento completo de felicidad. We were in a room mixed con gente de culturas diferentes, but dominated by the majority—white space, white place—como un mar de gringos con specks de color. I started with a story in the language que quería hablar, el idioma de mi cultura, de chisme. “No puedo creer que eso ocurrió...” I told Ruben with a smile, as our event hadn’t started just yet. “Hey!” I turned to look at this girl, my friend, una sonrisa lista, about to ask her what was up. “English only, please,” she said authoritatively, aggressively. My face fell, my heart racing. Silencio. No pude responder.
The Forgotten Ones
Zoe: When I was in the third grade, I’d catch the school bus down the street at 5:45 a.m. when the sky wasn’t even thinking of brightening to welcome a new day. I’d travel for an hour and a half with the sun rising behind us as we ate up miles upon miles of black asphalt on freeways that, like the yellow brick road, would end in a completely different place from anything I had ever known. My own Oz was a school for gifted and talented students, dominated by white and Asian upper-middle-class residents on the west side of town. To say it was different from the predominantly Latino and low-income elementary school I was zoned to on the east side is an understatement. Despite the fact that Houston had a sizable Latino population at the time, I was the only Latina in my entire grade for three years before I got to middle school.
