RACHAEL MARIE WALKER is a Seattle writer who learned to love words in the weeds of Virginia. Their work can be found in Electric Literature, Pithead Chapel, Foglifter, and other publications. Their website is rachaelmariewalkerwriter.com.

¹ Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica. “Assimilation Progress Report,” Beast Meridian. p. 36.
² James, Elizabeth Gonzalez. The Bullet Swallower. p. 95.
³ Cisneros, Sandra. “Hips.” The House on Mango Street. p. 49. 

PREGUNTAS FINALES

PREGUNTAS POR LA LECCIÓN: ¿Qué sabes?

EJERCICIO UNO: UNA HISTORIA DE UN ABUELO

Él ámo Westerns and los vaqueros and read Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey paperbacks in the garage, smoking cigarettes. I think of him when I vape and play Red Dead Redemption II.

Él trabajo in the Air Force, and this is how my grandparents met: my grandmother, una secretaria at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, him, stationed there. She married quite late for the time, and she was much older than him. I will never know this story, and have only my imagination to fill in the gaps. 

His parents were absent, for some reason or another. I don’t know why, and never will. There are mysteries burrowed into my skin. His sister, Aunt Rosie, raised him. 

We met my grandfather and Aunt Rosie once, right before él muriò. What I remember of this: flashes of strawberry hard candies in a dish, Aunt Rosie’s house next to the train tracks, how the whistle and lights woke me up, the house shaking as we slept in sleeping bags on the floor. The three of us, mis hermanos y yo, making paper airplanes and letting them fly across a bedroom. How my grandfather delighted in this, these three children who were his and weren’t his, finding joy in los avións, what he loved more than anything. My mother taking us around his small hometown of Sullivan, Indiana, the government building made of salmon marble, eating Dairy Queen Blizzards. My mother could not understand why he would leave his daughters for a place like this. Su mujer sent us home with Sunday School crafts. 

El hospital where my grandfather died. He was bed-bound, hooked up to a ventilator. My mother blamed his lifetime of smoking. He picked it up when he was a teenager in Vietnam, my mother said, and he never could kick it. My grandmother said she scrubbed the ceiling where he used to smoke for months, but the yellow stain of nicotine never went away. His wife made a joke, that he was sixty-sick years old. My mother did not think this was funny. We left the hospital. As we walked back to the car, my mother said, never smoke. No recuerdo esto, but my sister, who couldn’t have been older than five, does. I wonder if this is why she is the only one of the three of us who never picked up smoking. 

We took a road trip to visit him from Virginia to Indiana. We drove in one go, my mother and her then-boyfriend rotating drivers, stopping at Denny’s for meals, bathroom breaks in gas stations. This was the last time I was in Indiana until I drove cross-country at twenty-five. I thought of stopping by Sullivan to see my grandfather and Aunt Rosie’s graves, but I didn’t. Yo conduje al Chicago, and kept going, and left my past where it belongs. 

Él muriò in la primavera. My brother went with my mother to the funeral in Indiana. They flew there, something my mother could not afford. My mother took us to the air and space museum often, and when she looked at los avións, I now know, she was imagining her father, how, in another life, he’d teach su hijas everything about how to fly. 

He did not come to my mother’s wedding to my father. My grandmother said that if he came, she wouldn’t, and my mother chose her mother instead. El cuera—my mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father—sternly said to my grandmother how unfair it was to make my mother choose between her parents. My mother was a joven bride, veintidós. Of course she chose her mother. 

My mother can tell when someone else carries trauma. She recognizes it instantly. It’s a superpower, almost, how the deshecho can find the deshecho. So, too, can predators.

EJERCICIO TRÉS: UNA HISTORIA DE UNA ABUELA 

My grandmother, born 1931, in the barrios of San Antonio. Her seis hermanos, una hermana, their little house with children spilling out the sides of it. Her father, mi bisabuelo, a cruel Pentecostal faith healer. Her mother, mi bisabuela, who suffered los malpartos, una y otra y otra vez. Their house backed up to train tracks, and when the train stopped, they sold tamales to hungry passengers. 

Mi mamí tells us, my siblings and I, this as we make tamales for Christmas dinner. 

Our bodies have known violencia y crueldad. Are our wombs, too, cursed? My grandmother tenía los malpartos, una y otra y otra vez. 

Estaba embarazada only for a few weeks, but I remember thinking: I, too, am part of this, the fear of my own womb. My mother didn’t have miscarriages, but her pregnancies were brutal. I threw up in the dorm hall sink and thought of her as I brushed my teeth, wiped away tears with the back of my hand. 

People who weren’t white in the 30s were pushed to the margins, built communities together. My grandmother’s barrio was mostly Tejanx, same as my grandmother, una mezcla of everyone who had come and gone through southern Tejas. My grandmother talked about learning Chinese from a shopkeeper’s daughter of the same age. 

She married late, moved with her new husband from station to station. Mi tía was born, and eight years later, mi madre. She raised my aunt, and especially my mother, on her own. My mother’s stories of her youth are cloaked in loneliness—empty houses, working part-time at the TJ Maxx, walking through the woods to get home from school. In the late eighties, there were expectations that mothers stay home, and my mother, whose mother worked two jobs, did not have that luxury. My mother graduated from Fairfax High School. The mascot at the time was Johnny Reb, a Confederate rebel. Fairfax City had a large Latinx population despite this. Ellas estaban solitarias. They did not reach out to it. 

When I was born, my grandmother tried to raise me bilingually. I was born before my parents were really ready for kids, so we lived with my grandmother for the first year of my life. We moved out to the mountains, where almost everyone was white. My grandmother still worked, but came to visit often, and we drove out to see her once a week. When we all went to Virginia Beach—mi familia, mi abuela, mi tía, mi tío, mis primos—my grandmother enséñanos la español as we drove. We played Spanish Scrabble when we arrived, laid out on the carpet, asking our grandmother and mothers que palabras they saw in our tiles. 

She didn’t stop working until she turned eighty. She had felt disempowered before and vowed never to feel like that again. She said, maybe now yo viajaré, maybe now I’ll spend more time in San Antonio. She started to get sick, instead, and she never made it out to San Antonio. Her brothers started to die, got older. Ella llamó a su hermana y su mejor amiga.

My partner and my grandmother loved each other, happy to have someone to speak Spanish with. Ella estuvo imaginado us to have a happy home together, to get married and have kids, to draw a circle, a segue around whiteness, and return back to who we were supposed to be. 

This does not happen, but I didn’t correct her when she introduced my partner as “my granddaughter’s fiancé” to nurses.

LECCIÓN TRÉS: COMPREHENSIÓN LECTURA
INTRODUCCIÓN A LA LECCÓN: Here are three stories about people in the speaker’s life. Each section follows with questions to gauge your understanding of the lessons. 

¿De quién estoy hecho? ¿A quién puedo reclamar?¿Quien me construido? 

Una otra voz diferente³ about una cuerpa Latina, specifically, the hips we are so often sexualized for:

One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where?

They’re good for holding a baby when you’re cooking, Rachel says, turning the jump rope a little quicker. She has no imagination. 

You need them to dance, says Lucy. 

If you don’t get them, you turn into a man. 

Y una mas²:
It’s the strangest thing. I was born in New Spain, which then became Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, and wound up in the United States, and meanwhile my house has always stood in the same place. The Texans call me Mexican and I’ve never even crossed the Rio Grande. 

Una voz diferente¹ about Tejas:
TEXAS HISTORY     learn a swindle:                         Mexico lost its                         pacific
goldveined 
mountains     to someone else’s                         destiny manifest 

Mi abuela married a white man, had two daughters. I know very little about mi abuelo because, after his infidelity and divorce, he left his daughters’ lives and moved back to Indiana. My mother was only six. My mother says this is one of the great mysteries of su vida, why her mother stayed in Virginia instead of moving back to Ohio, where they’d lived before and all loved, or back to San Antonio, where my grandmother’s family was, is, and forever shall be. We are the branch that stretches off the tree, the branch easiest to sand off. When she got married, my grandmother changed her name from Beatriz Botello to Betty Cox. I have to wonder if she was running from something, the way I always seem to be, and it’s easier to slip into whiteness, the way it always seems to be. Whiteness wears me; it’s easier, it’s less of a fight, to let it. 

In my father’s basement, he has boxes of old photo albums. While visiting home as a college student, I paged through old pictures of my parents in the year between their marriage and when I was born. My young parents in their 90s glasses and matching sweaters. My mother’s Catholic conversion documents all mentioned mi abuela as Beatriz Botello, and I wondered, and I wonder, if my mother did the same work of wondering who she was, who she could claim. 

¿Quien soy?¿Quienes somos?

I define my Latinx-ness as how it informs how I know, how I move through the world: the hybridity of being more than one category, the hybridity of language, the hybridity of culture. My mixed-ness allows, demands, a flexibility. I write like a Latinx writer, meaning: with an eye for places I can wedge myself into, where I can fit in the in-betweens. Yet: in-between is a perilous place to make a home. 

The space for nonbinary people in Spanish is in the margins, scribbled in pencil. Between genders, between sexualities, between histories: I wade in the in-betweens. 

I identified as bisexual for a long time, felt both in and out of queer and straight spaces. Now, I easily float into queer spaces; I identify as una lesbiana and, perhaps, that solidity—I am one thing, I am—yo soy, not yo estoy —perhaps my Latinx-ness is similar, I just need to look, I just need to see, I need to be seen—necesito ser visto—

My gender remains inscruitable, undefined, unseen. No soy feminino o masculino, no soy feminina o masculina. 

¿Quien soy? 

LECCIÓN DE VOCABULARIO: 
White person – el gringo/ la gringa
Denial – la denegación
Heart – el corazón
Heartbreak – la congoja (una nota: this is an idiomatic expression in English without a direct equivalent in Spanish).

KNOWLEDGE CHECK: ¿Qué sabes?

Trauma, when it has been as consistent and sustained as colonial rape, is passed down through genes, as surely as anything else about me. Bodies whose ancestors have known starvation hold on to weight. I wonder if this is the same predilection for anxiety and PTSD, and the same resilience.

INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA: 
Precipitating traumas can be interpersonal or collectively experienced. Rarely does one happen without the other. 

I think it is no accident that the women in my family, my sister, my cousin, my aunt, my mother, are all nervous, afraid of settling down, always with one foot on the ground. 

Or maybe that’s just me, and I’m projecting. 

¿Qué esta mal conmigo?

INTERPERSONAL TRAUMA: 
This is not my story to tell, but it races alongside my DNA. 

What is my story to tell: sexual violence, perpetrated again and again, until I start to suspect that I am the problem, I am the common denominator. Is there something so broken about me that I invite this? 

¿Qué esta mal conmigo?

My college boyfriend was cruel. Among his cruelty was when he denied my Latinx-ness specifically because it made me angry. Deny me, and deny me, and deny me. I am here out of enormous fate and circumstance, after histories of miscarriages, difficult pregnancies, the unlikeliness of me, and he erased me, again and again.

My stepfather told racist jokes about Mexicans during his family parties. He supported the border wall, voted for Trump. My mother, overworked, exhausted, stood in the kitchen and said to me, “doesn’t he realize he’s talking about me? Does he notice? Does he care?” 

Mi tía dejó de visitar. Being around my stepfather was un acto de violencia all on its own. Our small senses of selves grew even smaller. My stepfather blotted our histories out with the pad of his thumb, erased us for his own comfort, his own idea of what a wife, what children, should look like. 

¿Que me pertenece?

It is expected, and the whiteness is proof rather than a refutement. My parents have been divorced for almost twenty years; it’s easy for my non-immediate family to forget that my siblings and I somos algo más.

My body was not itself run through the coal mines, but the trauma of a place like that settles in a body, too. My grandfather, in hospice with advanced Parkinson’s, a teacher for 40 years, says: “who knows if we were genetically predisposed to this? Almost everyone before us died at 40 from black lung.”

¿Que me pertenece?

UNA NOTA: The Molly Macguires were an Irish secret society active in Northeastern Pennsylvania. They organized against predatory coal mining companies. Some testify that the Mollies were violent and destructive; it’s impossible to get a comprehensive picture of their objectives and ethos. Their history has intentionally been erased. 

UNA NOTA: Irish ancestory, too, is complicated by colonialism, and Irish ascendency in America toward whiteness. People of the Irish diaspora became cops, sought to gain power in white hegemonic power structures through buying into them. The revolutionary anger present in Irish immigrants and Irish diasporic people has, for so many people, recontextualized itself into racism and grasping toward whiteness as power. 

My father’s family is overwhelmingly Irish, from the coal fields of Pennsylvania. I look the way someone would expect an American descended from Irish people would look. I don’t have to justify this, not even a little. My grandmother’s last name is Callaghan, Walker, itself, Irish, and at family parties, my uncle gets drunk and talks about our family in the Molly Macguires. 

Me siento culpable. 

This is what whiteness wants, doesn’t it? To swallow everyone whole, to erase difference and force assimilation?

¿Merezco esto? 

I ask my siblings what they think of this. We feel similarly: uncomfortable claiming an identity where we look so different from what we’re expected to look like. 

“It feels appropriative,” says my brother. “We look so white.” 

Mi hermana y yo somos rubias; mi hermano es moreno. ¿Se lo merece más? 

Whiteness, itself, appropriates. It takes, and inhales, and congeals. 

¿Merezco esto? ¿Ser Latine? 

¿Que me pertenece? 

¿Es suficiente? 

I feel guilty about how bad my Spanish is. 

As a teenager, I tutored a Puerto Rican classmate in Spanish. When I told my mother his last name, she did a double take, put her hands on her hips. 

“You’re tutoring someone whose last name is Vasquez? That’s embarrassing for him.” 

She reacted similarly when I got a B- in Spanish. I assured her it was mostly because I hadn’t been turning in the homework and I got As on all the tests. 

“You have to do better than this,” she said.

Despite placing into 300-level Spanish classes in undergrad, I decided to take introductory French to fulfill my language credit. If I was bad at French, I’d just be bad at French, en lugar de male en ser Latine. 

¿Que me pertenece? 

UNA PEQUEÑA LECCIÓN SOBRE HISTORIA TEJANA:
We were here, and we were Indigenous. 
Spain arrived.
We were here, and we were Spanish.
Through colonial rape, we were mixed: Indigenous, Mexican, Spanish. 
We were here, and we were mestizos. 
Spain pushed upward. 
We were here, and we were mestizos. 
The United States pushed down.
We were here, and we were Mexican. 
Tejas declared its freedom.
We were here, and we were Tejanx. 
The United States took Tejas back.
We were here, and we were Americans. 

My mother says I look like her but with my dad’s coloring. The coloring dominates. My uncle says the Walker genes tend to run strong, and in Northeastern Pennsylvania where my family comes from, people can tell a Walker by the forehead, the smile, the height. The blonde hair, blue eyes, from my white grandfather combined with my dad’s side. I recognize my mother’s nose, forehead, teeth, dimples, in my own face. Of course, the way I am built. When I was still skinny, my mother and I shared clothes. 

My mother is also in the process of reclaiming her Latinx-ness. She spends more time speaking Spanish, she makes tamales for Christmas dinner, she revives old traditions. She visits her family, our family, in San Antonio. They look so much like her, but I see my own body reflected back, how they carry weight just like I do. 

A body carries the memory of the bodies that built it. 

When I ask my mother where we come from, she says: Tejas, before Tejas was Tejas. It’s contested territory, southern Tejas. It has belonged to itself, belonged to Mexico, belonged to Spain, belongs to the United States.  

“We just never left,” Mom says. “It changed hands, but it didn’t make a difference for us. We were too busy trying to stay alive.” 

UNA HISTORIA DE DONDE ELLE VIENE: preguntas de la raza, el etnicidad, y apariciones.

Fill in the blanks: Let’s return to the narrator above. Aquí hay pensamientos elle que tiene sobre su identidad.

1. Tu puedes justificar y justificar, pero la gente negará tu              porque                  .
2. ¿Qué importa su             ?                   .
3. Detenerlo. ¿Por qué te quejas? Lo tienes muy fácil. Su                   no es importante,                              .
4. ¿Quieres sufrir? ¿Es eso que lo quieres? ¿Sufrir porque su             ?                   .
5.                   .             no te pertenece.

VOCABULARY YOU WILL NEED:
Race: la raza
Ethnicity: el etnicidad 
You know how you look: sabes que tú mires

Like all things, this quickly gets complicated, especially in the United States, a country based so much on how much we can take away someone’s autonomy based on what they look like or who we think they are.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND RACE? 
From Explain it Like I’m Five (ELI5) on Reddit, u/deviousdumplin: 
RACE: how you are perceived based on physical characteristics. 
ETHNICITY: A “kin group” based on culture, language, shared history, and self-perception.

LECCION DOS: LA RAZA, EL ETNICIDAD, Y ALGUNOS OTROS PREGUNTAS DE IDENTIDAD

INTRODUCCIÓN A LA LECCIÓN: A few things to think of here: how do differences of self-perception and perception of others interact? Where does the language we possess lack the nuance and specificity needed to dissect something as complicated and multifaceted as identity? How do we doubt ourselves? 

My Salvadoran partner and I lived together when the census came out. We did it together, on our phones, at opposite sides of the kitchen table. 

“Why is Hispanic or Latino not a race?” said my partner, annoyed. “It’s just an ethnicity?” 

“Seriously, the race category is super limited,” I said. I filled out these forms the same way I always do: a check for white, a check for “other,” a check by “Hispanic or Latino.” 

“Latinos are such a huge group in the US. How do we not get our own check mark? How are we an ethnicity but not a race? Am I supposed to check off white? In what world am I white?” 

Before my partner and I loved each other, we were friends, working at a country club together. They clocked me as Latinx when they shouted something into the kitchen in Spanish and I responded, without thinking. A look between us, a knowing. Nos enamoramos while drinking stolen beers after our shifts, sitting on the back patio as the spring started to bloom. Hablamos de nuestras familias y las historias que compartimos.

PREGUNTA: ¿Como piensen los demás de ti? 
Por ejemplo:

The only people who seem to clock me as anything other than white are men who sexualize me: when I work as a bartender, leaning toward the top shelf, a customer saying, that ass ain’t white. I tell my coworkers that I’m Latinx. The chef, with his coat shoved up to his elbows to show off his faded tattoos, says that’s a Latina body if I’ve ever seen one. Unprompted, while I am at a stoplight on my bicycle in the DC summer, from a man standing nearby: no white girl has an ass and thighs like that. 

Occasionally, another white-passing Latinx person will see me, and recognize something in me that they’ve only seen in themselves, a question, I don’t mean to assume, but—it is like catching a glimpse of oneself in a restaurant window. This happens rarely, but it feels freeing, being seen. 

PREGUNTA: ¿Como te ves?
Por ejemplo: 

UNA NOTA: Some Spanish speakers have been working to establish a nonbinary pronoun similar to “they/them” in English. While “Latinx” has been accepted widely in English-speaking circles, “x” makes a very different sound in Spanish than it does English (think, “ch”). Some Spanish speakers have instead adopted “e” as a gender-neutral alternative. We’ll refer to this narrator with a gender-neutral “elle” instead of “ello/a.” For nouns and adjectives, the speaker is still searching for a suitable nonbinary alternative; they have decided to default to feminine nouns and adjectives, as this is how they are most often perceived. 

LECCIÓN UNO: ¿Quien eres? 

INTRODUCCIÓN A LA LECCIÓN: Think about how you move through space, how people around you view you. Consider: Is this accurate to your experience? ¿Por qué o por qué no? 

Volume 15.1, Winter 25

Rachael Marie Walker

For Betty Botello Cox, 1931-2024

Proceso de Eliminación