10/10/2023
Image Analysis
My mom’s adolescence has always been a mystery to me. Sure, I know what the house in which she spent her early memories looks like, with its deteriorating wooden balcony and rusting metal fence. I’ve tried to grasp the nitty-gritty details, the memories she holds in her heart with her back turned away from me. She hints at things–like how she and her younger sisters were abruptly taken out of the backseat of her mother’s car by child protective services on a dry summer day. How I “shouldn’t know” about the way the men in her life treated her. She packed her bags and left home at the ripe age of 17, but I still couldn’t tell you why. A single anecdote lasts me for months - I turn it around in my head, examining its edges as it soaks in my analysis, in my questions, in my desire to know more. The stories I do know of my mother before she became my mother, back when she was the protagonist of her own stories, had to be plucked from their roots and tirelessly pulled out of her like her thick eyebrow hairs. The small anecdotes she’s sprinkled here and there throughout my life consume me, all while causing me to become frustrated with their lack of information. Why do I carry around my mothers’ tears like my own water weight, without knowing what makes our eyes start to water?
As I face these evolving questions about myself and my mother, I’ve come to realize how my familial relationships impact my ability to navigate this complex terrain of life. Growing up, I felt more akin to my father’s side of the family due to my physical proximity to them, whereas there is this disconnect physically and emotionally I have with my mother’s side. My father’s parents came to San Francisco from Ireland in the 50s on a boat holding hundreds of other dreamers. I grew up in this city, watching Gaelic football games with my white cousins and uncles, the only kid whose skin was a little tanner than the rest. I attribute my love for tea and physical affection to these gatherings, but it was the moments shared with my Mexican side of the family that have distilled in me a longing for family connection. These family gatherings were so large, that one would suspect the accumulation of low-rider cars on the street to be just another party in San Diego, except we all shared the same blood. My tías would gossip at the dinner table about recent events at the Chicano cultural center - a “gray water tank [transformed] into the vibrant Centro Cultural de la Raza.” (Sylvia Enrique, my Abuela, 2021). As I eavesdrop on this small talk, I’m embarrassed by my inability to indulge in their conversation. I can’t contribute anything of substance about the center, a pillar of my family’s history. It’s like my physical distance from the landmark has affected my ability to connect with my relatives and my culture.
While my cultural context is strongly rooted in both Chicano activism and the Irish community, I struggle to determine where I stand between the two. This questioning was awakened recently when my roommate Sofia gifted me a book in response to our avid 3 a.m. conversations about identity, our parents, and our mothers. We both battle with ever-evolving questions regarding our heritage and how it contributes to ourselves, specifically in what amount. This book titled, This Bridge Called My Back, is written by poet, playwright, and cultural activist, Cherrie Moraga. In this book, she uses various forms of writing to explore feminism and what it means to be Chicana. I skimmed through the pages, paying close attention to the ones where Sofia left sticky notes and annotations behind. I was led down a path that made me feel less isolated in my inability to pinpoint my identity. After reading this book, I felt so connected to Moraga. Her words have inspired me to go beyond my one-dimensional realm of thinking. She pushed me into the waters of questioning, and I am thankful for this. (Maybe I’ll send her this essay).
First through her mentioning of my favorite taqueria in San Francisco, La Cumbre, to her experiences of growing up as a child of a white Anglo man and a Mexican woman, I relate to her words, feeling like her little sister in a way. In her article, “La Guera,” Moraga cites her mother as her main inspiration, “I remember all of my mother's stories, probably much better than she realizes. She is a fine storyteller, recalling every event of her life with the vividness of the present, noting each detail right down to the cut and color of her dress.” I’m jealous. The stories I do know of my mother before she became my mother, or at least until I was conscious enough to know she had a life of her own, had to be plucked from their roots and tirelessly pulled out of her like her thick eyebrow hairs. I wish so badly that my mother could recite her past to me as if it were yesterday, but she chooses to put those bad things in a bottle with an airtight lid. Later in the article she writes, “But this, [her mother’s background], is something she would like to forget (and rightfully,) for her, on a basic economic level, being chicana meant being “less.” It was through my mothers desire to protect me from poverty and illiteracy that I became “anglicized;” the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future.” In these lines, I see my mother; the woman who assimilated into the dominant white culture for the sake of economic stability, for the sake of her unborn daughter (me) and my future. It is from my mother leaving her family in San Diego at 17 that I, as a result, have become anglicized, left with this void of never-ending questions and confusions about myself.
In a meeting with my teacher in response to this essay, she asked the simple question “What do you identify as?” After a long pause, my mind was blank. I responded, “Latina? To be honest, I don’t really know.” Why did I feel guilty saying this? Does my blond streaked hair make me a phony? I think my lack of knowing the answer to this question comes from my lack of knowledge within my mother’s own background. I’ve resented her for hiding things from me, for my innate distanced stance from my Mexican roots. I’m brought back to the decisions she made earlier in her life. Why she chose to leave her life behind and board a train to San Francisco at such a young age? I wonder if she did this all on purpose, if in a way, she wanted to shield me from the perpetrators of her bruises, but my lack of clarity was a byproduct of this effort. At the same time, however, my mother’s decisions to create a better life for her and her child have allowed me to encounter a multitude of opportunities. Similar to Moraga, I was, “Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made.” Unlike my mother, and unlike Moraga’s mother, I consume a freedom that has been handed to me. While my freedom does not directly coincide with wealth, I can attribute my opportunities to the successes of my father.
This freedom was defined bright and explicitly this past summer, as I ventured off to France alone, symbolic of my “senior trip.” This trip was funded by him, on a simple proposition; that I help him restore his recently inherited (following my grandfather’s passing) cottage in Ireland. Throughout the month of June, we exchanged opinions on paint swabs and swept large masses of bird shit off the wooden floors. He loved it. Just my company and hard work made him hum happy songs as we colored the adobe walls. We would spend hours on end working and listening to music. This straightforward promise was appealing to both of us, but during these weeks I kept returning to the thought of my mother back home. These thoughts were probably ignited by my deep longing for her soft voice or a sip of her hot tea. I was so conflicted during those weeks spent in the green country hills. Would being away from home for a month impact our relationship? It was hard enough for her that I was moving to college across the country. With my mother’s inability to maintain her contact list, I’ve become her primary source of company. Leaving the house for just a few days felt like a stab in her back. Was choosing to go on a month-long trip out of the country selfish? I remember asking my mom what she thought about this whole thing. But during these conversations, I never once received any doubt from her. She wanted me to leave, to create a life of my own in a new world where every block and storefront is not a reminder of my childhood. I think I understand now why she was so eager for me to leave. She had left too, thirty-three years prior, trying to find a better life on her own, but the pressures of her adolescence weighed down her ability to experience true freedom in the search of adventure, of enjoyment. For her, leaving was an act of necessity, but now as her daughter, she wants me to witness that freedom as an act of making my life my own.
So I went.
By late July, I had been traveling from hostel to hostel in Paris, meeting characters from all these different corners and crevices of the world - but that's for a different story. I was experiencing so much liberation at once, like a burst of flames that comes when you start a fire. This fire was too hot at some point; I felt isolated, unable to speak to the world around me. I needed some sort of familiarity, or some piece of the puzzle that is my life to pop out at the perfect moment.
Eliza was the missing piece. While she had been traveling around Italy for a few weeks prior, she grew up just 40 ft across Grove Street from me, our houses sharing the same Victorian-style old-school San Francisco architecture. Sam, the owner of the corner store at the end of the block, has her birthday marked in his calendar too. Growing up, we made worlds of our own everywhere we went - cushioned skyscrapers and fairylands using succulents as the building blocks of the societies we created. Eliza would help me feel grounded, we could make a fairyland together in this foreign place to make us feel more at home, back on Grove Street.
She had planned to fly to Paris from Italy, where I had been staying, then we would take a train to the west of the country, to a small town called La Rochelle. The plan was to meet up at the Paris train station and board a train together, but things didn’t run as smoothly as anticipated.
After a hectic encounter with almost missing the first train in Paris, we got off at our transfer station, checking the time every five minutes to make sure the next one didn’t try to deceive us. We sat waiting on the station platform, amidst the clickety-clack sounds made as train wheels rolled over the metal tracks in distanced intervals. Despite there being a considerable number of commuters, the French seemed to avoid small talk within the confines of transit. So, it was just us, two American girls, and the wind to fill the silence. After getting off the train, we dragged our ripped duffel bags and broken suitcases to a new sanctuary; a stranded bench on a station platform. Now sitting, Eliza wiped the percolation off her forehead; a product of the humidity and our strenuous departure from our first train. She then plucked the most appealing cigarette from its pack and lit it; its body a sacrificial trade for a nice buzz. Her half-open eyelids uncovered her piercing irises. She sat slightly hunched in her light green shirt and long white skirt, with her right arm folded beneath the left elbow belonging to the forearm which belonged to the hand which belonged to the cigarette. Her fingers loosely choked the neck of the thin white tube as it made its way into her mouth. She gazed directly ahead at me with tired eyes. It was then that I pulled out my favorite point-and-shoot film camera. In the viewfinder, I saw her, sitting on the edge of the bench, despite the tumultuous series of events we had just encountered while passing through hundreds of miles in a foreign country. I clicked the shutter.
As I look at this image which is posted neatly on my dorm wall, I think about my trip to France and am conflicted with my own liberation. How I can use it in a form of expression of curiosity. It’s been handed to me. I’m reminded of my mother, who boarded a train to San Francisco at the ripe age of 17 from the only life she knew back in San Diego. It’s like when I look into Eliza’s tired eyes, I look into the eyes of my mom, awaiting the train to her new life. I am reminded of how the act of leaving was necessary for her, but I’ve been granted the ability to sit and marinate in my freedom, not out of necessity but out of privilege.
You see, the entire time I’ve been writing this essay, I haven’t known the details as to why it was necessary for my mother to leave. For the entirety of my conscious life, I have felt like she’s held a blindfold over my eyes, restricting my ability to see the truth about her story, about my own background. But I’ve realized now how wrong I was, how naive I had been to think that her decisions had this “traumatic” impact on me and that now, ‘I don’t have a clear picture of my identity.’
In the drafting stage of writing this essay, a massive lightbulb turned on inside my brain. I thought to call her and ask. Crazy idea, right? Well, I think I had been so hesitant to do this simple act due to the vulnerability it would inflict on both of us. Maybe I didn’t want to face the truth, to have to hear her trauma and examine its edges day by day for who knows how long. I had known how important it was to her that I wasn’t aware of those things. These past few years, I’ve had brief encounters with the thought of initiating the conversation, but always turned them down. Maybe I was scared, maybe I wanted her to make the first move, to bridge this gap that took a toll on our relationship. After calling, I realized that I was the one who needed to initiate this vulnerability; this space for my mother to release her inner child, not from a place of forcefulness or burden. She needed me to open my ears, for my mind to develop a little bit more, to hear and understand her trauma. She needed the piece of mind that showing me her bruises wouldn’t color my own skin those deep hues of blue and purple. These hues that she’s been familiar with her entire life.
So I go back to the question, ‘Why do I carry my mother’s tears like my own water weight?’ In an attempt to answer this question, I asked her about the perpetrators of her tears in her early childhood. I took this moment of curiosity and ran with it, finally allowing my feet to move from their familiar place in the cement. It was hard. I didn’t know what questions to ask her, how to ask said questions, or how to frame them in a way that wouldn’t interfere with her ability to delve into an honest answer that she was comfortable with sharing. If I were to give you the details of her past, I would leave you with a rock in your throat, I care for you too much to do so. So, I’ll give you a short, concise version, like remakes of songs without the swear words.
My mother told me just the beginning of her story. She lived a childhood of never feeling loved or wanted, of hiding, of being told she would be, “dead by 20.” She “felt like [she] had to be invisible or completely malleable just to survive.” My Nana, my mom, and my tías would get evicted and have to move from place to place, frequently adjusting to new walls. Abuse haunted the hallways in their small apartments. Unfamiliar men’s shoes lined the hallway at night. There was never enough food in the fridge for all six of them. She told me, “We had so many break-ins; they knew it was just a mother and her five daughters, so eventually they started breaking in while we were home.” Due to their numerous interactions, child protective services became familiar with mom, her long brown hair, and her big front teeth. It was when she was brought to live with her grandparents, however, that she became aware of a world outside of the only derelict and abusive one she knew.
Her tone shifted when she referred to “Yellow Pages,” those famously known National Geographic covers with the bright yellow borders. Her grandparents had collected these Yellow Pages, filling multiple cabinets with the knowledge that they held. My mother is dyslexic and wasn’t put into school until she was seven. When living with her grandparents, she couldn’t take in the knowledge about the wonders of our world, like she does today. She could, however, flip through the images in the Yellow Pages, in awe of the beauties found on the thin magazine paper. “This is how [she] knew there was more to life, that there was this thing called adventure and freedom that existed.” So fast forward a few years to my mother sitting at a train station at 17 years old. I can see her there, with her tired eyes half open, looking at the world in disappointment and resentment, but also met with a sense of hope. She evoked her own freedom, inspired by her memory of the Yellow Pages. With this newfound self-induced freedom, she hoped to get on the next arriving train and leave that bad shit behind her. I finally know some of her history. While it’s only a portion, it’s more than I needed to understand the purpose behind her discretion.
I started this essay by introducing my internal struggle with my identity. How when I would greet those little boxes, the ones you see on important forms asking for your race or ethnicity, I was left questioning. These tiny little boxes the size of a pebble would cause my stomach to drop to my shoelaces, drowning in a state of perplexity. My identity evolves with the passing of time, as does yours, theirs, and everyone’s; it’s never stagnant. However, I think my immediate reaction to those little boxes is attributed to my naivety about my history and, further, my mother’s own history. As I told you in the beginning; growing up, I was familiar with my father’s Irish side but I had a disconnect to my mother’s Mexican side. I was left there standing between two bridges, one sturdier than the other. This disconnect is a product of my mother’s own resignation from her past. So, I initiated this phone call in curiosity as to why she decided to leave home. What I got in return was my wake-up call; none of it was about me, but at the same time, all of it was for me.
I said none of it was about me, but at the same time, all of it was for me. During this call, my mother made me aware of the invisible shields she’s put up around me my entire life. She's my guardian, my fairy godmother in hiding - she's the one who's protected me my whole life. She set up this major defense system, with me being the valuable gem at its center. This defense system has been covert, hidden from both the perpetrators it was fending off and the very thing it was trying to protect.
My mother is my freedom fighter.
This phone call didn’t pick me up and bring me to the doorstep of the answers to my questions, nor did it clarify my perception of my identity. It did, however, bring to light questions that I otherwise would have kept under the wooden floorboards. It allowed me to gain this perspective that my mother’s suppression of her past didn’t cause my identity crises. The point of her discretion was to shield me from living with the trauma she dealt with while making it her highest priority that my life would not be a mirror of her own. Bringing more tears to my eyes than were already rolling down my cheeks, she parted with, “I've done a lot in life to try to heal my inner child. I don’t want to open that part of me back up, without being able to hug you.” So, I await the rest of her story. Whether it’ll haunt me or inspire me, I so deeply thirst to understand her more. She finished the call letting it be known that, “[I] have been [her] greatest joy in this life.” I breathed in the last exhale of my mother’s breath and hung up the phone.
CITATIONS
- Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981.
- "Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Chicano Movement." San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 July 2021, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2021-07-08/centro-cultural-de-la-raza-balboa-park-chicano-movement
- "National Geographic." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Oct. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic.
- La Guera Cherrie Moraga - University of Texas at El Paso, borderlandsnarratives.utep.edu/images/Readings/Moraga-CL-La-Guera-091979.pdf. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023.
After you read my essay, I invite you to listen to some of the songs that traveled through my ears as I typed. Whether they relate for you or not, I hope you can listen with a different perspective, maybe an understanding of my mother or your own, or maybe they’ll just sound nice.
- I don’t understand anything - Everything But the Girl
- Clean heart - Sade
- Away - The Cranberries
- (They long to be) Close to you - The Carpenters
- Heartache - A Girl Called Eddy
- Know that you are loved - Cleo Sol
- Dreams - Solange
- Like a tattoo - Sade
- So far away - Carole King
- Mama, you been on my mind - Jeff Buckley
- Forwards beckon rebound - Adrianne Lenker
- Sunrise - Norah Jones
- I Gotta Find Peace of Mind - Lauryn Hill
- Chicano Park - Los Alacranes (my tío Chunky)