a conversation Alexandra Calleros

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a conversation

Alexandra Calleros

Beauty lives in solace, in the silent hum of subtle heartbeats. My heartbeat. In the solemn chords of a piano playing quietly. In the art of being my own. In the art of driving down open roads and staring into the unknown. I am a long way from home- somewhere along the thin lips of the city and the country- when I recall mourning Ritchie Valens and everything he briefly came to know. I recall hating him for singing about some white woman named Donna and not a paiza girl like Maria or Alejandra. A girl with some color, something a little familiar. A girl of our own kind. He was another paiza trading us for the other side. But maybe I’m the biggest hypocrite yet because I too have loved a white man instead of Mario or Alejandro. So while I left those feelings to simmer underneath the surface, I remember the liquid quick rush of falling into the craze of him. He was still, for all intents and purposes, completely paiza and proud with one slick piece of black hair that curled against his skin like the perfect color of warm baked pan. He had a voice that flowed from the United

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States to my beloved México and to the rest of the world- and he made all the white folk shake their out-of-rhythm, bone-studded hips to La Bamba. Who knew you could do that? Who knew white people with pleated collars and pastel yellow sweaters the color of banana popsicles tied around their blonde-frosted necks could wave their ivory-thin wrists, and mouthe the words to a song in a language they couldn’t even speak- the same white people who told my mother that having a bilingual tongue would inhibit my learning abilities and the same white people who told me to go back to Mexico even though I was born at the local St. Joe Hospital- but I guess they could speak the language of Ritchie Valens. And I guess I’m a little bitter or fascinated or both. But I hated Ritchie Valens again when he died and left his mother to scream something like “no, not my Ritchie ‘’ in the backyard of their first real home and that hurt. It did. Her hearttorn howl scarred my soul. And I hated him even more for dying in the middle of a beautiful corn field. The audacity of him- to die in a plane crash in the middle of a field which once fed the bellies of our ancestors. His soul seeping into the soil of a field that kept our people bright with life. A soil fermented by their strife. Yet there is a particular art in arriving at a destination without recalling the road that led you there, only the voice that accompanied you there.

I live in a world now which prizes the chase: the chase of a good life and the chase of riches. I’ve settled beneath it all, as if this body hasn’t floated in the salty Pacific- floating above it all. And there’s a swell in my heart longing for the freedom to live that way once more. To pluck corn from its straw husk with my soiled-soaked fingers once more. My tips ache to trace the roots of my bloom to my indigenous México. How did I fall so far from it all? How did I forget its scent and its essence and its cactus prick against my dark-haired neck? I feel like I’ve lost

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something. Like this freedom I enjoy was paid by a price greater than I and it’s left me indebted to something like the dead. Dead women. Like I’m selectively living in ignorance for the sake of bliss. Something leaking from my nail beds-I feel something like a bitter taste coating my open glands as I try to live. A history so rich and so deep and so dark and so light and so heavy and so frightening that I want to turn a blind eye to what lies behind me- to the bones underneath my sinking feet. To the corn fields staring back at me. Jarring. An ominous form that lacks angles but overflows in a prophecy with dimly lit curves. One that whispers in my ears and laxes the fibrous strength surrounding my white bones. Rendering me silent. Maybe it’s a call to the past- a call to the lineage that precedes me. A call to the mujeres that birthed me- to the indía girl that carried me in her small womb and surged me forth some time along the breadth of long ago.

So I think of her- that indía girl- and I think of mi abuela and mi ama and myself. Mi abuela climbed trees each day. She betrayed them, too; chopping their tender wood and stacking it thirty feet high for the men to buy. I can picture her now: a stubborn girl loved by the sun, freckled and stern, but free. A free spirit. One the moon missed when she went away. One that climbed fat, old oak trees in tattered skirts while the thick soot of wooden flames settled within the tissues of her young lungs. Silently filling her inner crevices with a smoky blackness from the crackling wooden fire atop which she warmed tortillas de masa each morning and each night. I think of her long thick, dark braids tied at the ends with chocolate brown leather strings resting against the heat of her curved back. I think of all the mujeres that birthed me- of their sanded kitchen table rocking back and forth as they amasar; a large chipped stone is positioned insecurely under one leg and it can hardly keep it afloat. I think of the unfettered corn

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husks soaking in our largest clay bowl filled with clear water- the bowl never moved yet the water still reached up to tease me ever so- and I can taste that rich, warm smell of nearby steaming onions, pork and garlic. Perfect. I feel the ache in my jaw and the tingling against the inner stretch of my cheeks and I think of the familiar pricking of my squinted eyes from the roasting guajillo chiles and cebollita cambray.

Small pleasures living an unworthy life. This is something that will never end, I told myself. How ignorant, how oblivious of a young girl to dare and dream. Dare to dream that this life was one of beauty and nature; one to be respected by all. I think of the roasted chiles and their blackened flakes shedding into the soft flesh of my small hands as they’re rinsed under cooling water. How it feels to peel back their wet charred skin with my slippery hands. Their hands. Our hands. There’s a pride in me that develops; beating within my young chest. A pride settled deep somewhere between my ribs and the crevice of my beating spirit. It’s a natural kind. One that calls to the organic ways- the ways that brush my fingers against fields of corn to pluck golden kernels and and prepare a million platillos for our pueblos and for home- for when we realize that indeed we are far away from México, her colors and scent are nowhere near. So we refuse to leave the thought of her in fear that we might forget her- as if we could ever forget her.

Now I hate to speak of this, it’s something along the lines of foolish. But as I look onto the American road and see the hundreds of acres drowning in corn, I think of all the meals my people have made. I think of our caldo de res con elote y papa, tamales de elote con fresas y queso, tamales de chile verde y pollo, our gorgeous tortillas de masa, elote con queso y chile, caldo de pollo con elote and everything else. I especially think of

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our sacred atole de masa- this is a hot and creamy and thick and filling and healing latte-version of ground corn. It can be starch white or pale yellow depending on the corn’s complexion. Maybe even a pastel hue of lustrous purple speckled with cinnamonlaced foam if you’re lucky. The mujeres at the kitchen table make this drink from scratch- for me and for you and for them. It heals the sick and fattens the skinny. It’ll fatten the fat, too. But the mujeres at the kitchen table don’t care much about that. They sip this drink each day and it settles into their overflowing breasts and rounded hips and pudgy arms and they enjoy it. They used to tell me that this revered drink would make me look like a real woman one day- and they were right- I guess it really did. They’d take silent sips between loud laughter and hushed secrets. The hombres would enter at dusk and down this hot drink in gulps. The atole smoky and soothing as it laced their ribbed throats. They’d slam their clay mugs onto the rocking table and return to where they came from. The mujeres would resume, sipping and cooking and laughing and breathing and never stopping because leftovers weren’t a thing. And when they briefly settle into a quiet sip, mi abuela looks past the sheer curtain and into the lazy horizon. She measures time with her eyes and pain with the colors of the sky. She bows her head to God, and takes a sharp breath- remembering. She lifts her eyes and begins to speak in that same hushed town that quickly shuts our lips to listen to her accented words.

“Ay, Dios. Your ama, aguanto mucho,” she starts. There’s a thin blue line around her dark brown irises that brightens when she recalls home, “I remember the smell of Guanajuato- like moving dust, a warm sun, and dried chile de arbol.” She shutters, “But more than anything, I can smell the cold of winter- frío cannot describe it lo suficiente. I still feel it in the marrow of my old bones. It pierced us- made us prefer a

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grave over the aluminum shack we called home. The grave, we dreamed, was warmer than what we had here on Earth. Nestled in the cracks between hell and hardened crust,” she breathes. Her hands rest firmly on the edge of the steel sink, they always did. “But your ama was thirteen when she first gave birth. The baby. She was named Martha, she died. So then I became Martha. I was the first of seventeen who lived for more than a few months. But then I became the first of eleven who lived past a few years. Pero Ama and Apa had no way to feed us all- so they left to the otro lado- to el norte. And I was left to raise the rest. But Ama, she suffered, ” she placed a freckled, wrinkled hand on her rounded hip and continued, “Apa left me alone, but not Ama. He always went after her. She lost her biggest baby, almost a year old, when I was eight. The younger ones saw the flies buzzing near his eyes and thought they were too many. They covered his baby face in plastic. To help. I was flipping tortillas inside and Ama was away to el norte. But she knew something was wrong. She came back the next day, the baby was still warm like a straw mat that was sitting in the shadow of the sun. But Ama was still very young and I was young and Apa didn’t care enough so the baby died slowly, losing one breath after the other and after the other until the wind took his last one. Apa took her away for a while then, she lost so many babies she couldn’t be a mother to those in heaven and those here at home.” She purses her lips to pause, but never to finish.

And I watch this process, the mujures of the kitchen table, until the day they die and leave me to rock the table back and forth alone- their mindful use of our land coats every splintered fiber in the table and in my bones. Their souls float in the kitchen- telling me which way to go- when to turn the masa over and knead some more- when to coat my hands in scorching hot water to prevent the masa from sticking. Their red-brown hands

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grounding blue corn in a speckled molcajete are now my light almond ones. Satisfied yet now fully alone. A beautiful blue masa- exotic and familiar buries itself between the spaces of my short fingers. Longing for here and for home. Shaped by our skilled palms into imperfectly perfect rounds then lightly seared over a fire and filled with melting Chihuahua cheese and bright orange squash blossoms. The flavors combine to form a crisp bite as a reminder of who I am and of what land I derive. From where do you derive? And then I think of Takaki and all that he learned now that I’m nearly alone. He’s a good writer- Takaki. He tells the truth in all of its ugly. He’s a man. Not the kind that justifies colonization, but the kind that question every type of privilege; especially the white kind of privilege. He’s well-read and wellversed and intelligent. He believes in teaching history- not the fallacious history taught by old white men to defend a genocide of Native Americans for the sake of “birthing capatilism” or the lynching of the black man for a reason I still have yet to be given- but history in its entirety. In its full state of sinister countenance. And amidst his thick pages of good words, some were particularly foolish. Some caused the blood in my veins to pulse and the fluid in my spine to coagulate, if for just a moment. On a particular page of his work, I found words that said something like the early English pioneers on Turtle Island began to eat one another for the sake of survival. My eyes scurried further and found words that cohesively formed phrases which spewed something about husbands digging up the carcasses of their late wives and children to eat the soiled, shredding meat surrounding their decaying bones. They were facing the hollowed face of starvation. I kept reading. At some point between his ugly words, I began to comprehend. The white man starved in the middle of a corn field. I laughed at the sick irony. But then I began to pity the white man that came on a ship and birthed sons after sons that killed parts of me- early parts of me. Parts of

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me that belonged to the child womb of that indía girl- grinding corn into dreams. Parts of me that belonged to the poverty which drove my ama and apa to work as braceros and abandon their children in the solemn parts of a lonely pueblo- leaving their children to be raised by wolves and elderly neighbors. Leaving their children to meet graves before even school age. Parts of me which are bitter and angry and desperate for something like historical reprieve. For a rewriting, for a revision of what we are as humans. I can’t say that I forgive history for my light complexion and the continuous praise I receive for it in my own pueblo- despite it being the proof of my lineage deriving from rape. Or for every time I’ve been asked, “where do you come from?” when my lineage is traced to the roots of Turtle Island and theirs from across the ocean. But we avert our eyes from that. We live in bliss, selectively. Purposefully. For the spreading of the india girl who is my mother’s mother’s mother’s pain too hard to bear. Like a rose thorn in the center of a palm, we pluck its body and rub its scar. For pain grows too heavy in knowing that she was taken against her will to birth the generations that birthed mine. That birthed me. I can’t say I forgive. I can’t say that today. But maybe that comes with the grave.

ART

Personal Connection

Brennan Gould

Sadness Solidified Chloe Oronato

Inscriptions Christina Oronato

Texting Chloe Oronato

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Digital Collage Brennan Gould

CONTRIBUTORS

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Noah Cha is a junior studying Finance at the University of Notre Dame living in Stanford Hall, originally from Southern California.

Lina Abdellatif is a freshman Posse and Questbridge Scholar at the University of Notre Dame. She is majoring in Neuroscience. She is known for her groundbreaking research on how the skeletal system is a myth, and she intends on fabricating data in order to support her position. She cannot read.

Sarah Kikel is a junior majoring in PLS and minoring in Sustainability. She is commonly found swinging on Sorin’s porch, singing the praises of reusable cups, and hyping up The Observer. She likes Virginia Woolf.

Veronica Kirgios is a junior majoring in Honors Mathematics. Growing up in a household that speaks three languages has given her a deep appreciation for words and this past semester especially she has begun to recognize her love for expression through language. Most of her poems are deeply personal and revealing, as they reflect on difficult moments in her life and how they have shaped her. Through poetry, she has begun to heal. Perhaps someone will read them and feel seen or understood in her writing, that would give her great joy.

Molly O’Toole is a first-year English major. She is from Arlington, Massachusetts, and lives in Welsh Fam. She loves baking cakes, reading Mary Oliver and Sylvia Plath, and going for long walks. Molly wants to thank her roommate Tara for staying up with her all night to talk about fate.

Hannah Tonsor is a sophomore studying English with minors

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in Musical Theatre and Digital Marketing. Plans to pursue a career in publishing. Lover of coffee, but can’t really tell the difference between a good and bad cup. Anna Staud is a junior at Notre Dame studying Economics and English with a Concentration in Creative Writing and minors in Theology and Latino Studies. On campus, she sings in the Folk Choir and is a proud Wild Woman of Walsh Hall.

Joe Carper is a freshman living in Alumni Hall. He is majoring in Philosophy and planning to minor in Constitutional Studies. Joe is involved with Liturgical Choir, the Alumni Hall Most Dangerous Mass Band, and the chess club.

Alena Coleman grew up in New Harmony, Indiana-- a utopian experiment turned living museum. She studies English and Spanish, but she wishes she could be a puppeteer. She hopes that all your fences have gates.

Chelsey Boyle is a junior English Major and Computing & Digital Technologies minor. She plans on adding the Honors Creative Writing concentration to her Major and completing a poetry collection for her Senior thesis. She enjoys skydiving, mansplaining the stock market, and catfishing flat-Earthers. Caroline Kranick is from Jessup, Pennsylvania and currently resides on campus in Ryan Hall. She is currently majoring in English and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, after which she hopes to attend law school or engage in some other form of graduate studies.

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Natalie Munguia is a junior studying Neuroscience and Behavior with a minor in poverty studies from Yakima, WA. When she’s not on the 10th floor of the library, you can find her running around the lakes, baking in the Lyons kitchen, and spending time with her friends.

Anna Falk is a freshman from Cincinnati, Ohio majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. She intends to double major in English and minor in French. While she thoroughly enjoys music, dancing, and baking, she is known for her love of Dr. Pepper and her anger that ND only sells Mr. Pibb.

John Salem is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame who is majoring in English and Philosophy. He has been writing poetry since he was 10 years old, making the low quality of his work all the more abhorrent. John is from Cleveland, Ohio, and often uses the innate beauty of the city to inspire his poetry. He is interested in all forms of writing, ranging from prose to journalism.

Bella Niforatos is a Psychology and English major from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She feels compelled to write in order to satisfy a primal hunger inside of her that demands words as tribute. She also enjoys dancing, immersing herself in the mountains, and dreaming about outer space.

Renee Yaseen is a junior studying International Economics— Arabic. Her opinions can be found in the Wall Street Journal (May, July, and October 2020), and in The Observer. Her poetry appears in Bluing the Blade (2020), Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (2020), and Overachiever Magazine (2020).

Taylor Anthony Batilo is a freshman from the Philippines but

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currently lives in Aurora, Colorado; He is in pursuit of a degree in Chemical Engineering and resides in Fisher Hall (YGR). He will also ignore your collective groan at the phrase “Chemical Engineering” as he carries on reading and writing.

Alexandra Calleros is the founder of the American Dream Project- a local nonprofit focused on minorities, especially firstgeneration students, achieving their dream careers through college planning mentorship. She is currently a senior Pre-Med and English Writing major at Saint Mary’s College of Notre Dame and writes in pursuit of social justice.

Felicity Wong is a freshman from New Jersey and Hong Kong, but she calls Lewis Hall her home. She intends to major in English and minor in philosophy and public service. Her love for creative writing began at the age of five when she wrote and illustrated her first story. Ethan Osterman is a junior philosophy and statistics major from Seattle Washington.

Matthew Ellison is a writer/filmmaker and current MBA student at the University of Notre Dame. His films have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, TIFF, Venice Film Festival, Champs-Élysées Film Festival, and on Short of the Week. Matt has also directed short documentaries focusing on issues ranging from the relativity of success to the push for equality amongst coaches in professional soccer.

Payton Oliver is a first-year undergraduate student, currently majoring in Finance and minoring in Collaborative Innovation. Outside of class, she is a part of the Mock Trial team and enjoys reading and creative writing when her schedule allows for it.

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Julia Yuxuan Yang is a junior Accounting and English student at the University of Notre Dame. She is from Houston, Texas.

Chloe Onorato is an English major with a Creative Writing concentration and Studio Art minor at the University of Notre Dame. She has published writing and art in The Juggler and enjoys the Mustard Creative Writing Club. Her dream is to be a professor who writes and illustrates her own books.

Victoria Dominesey is a first-year English major at the University of Notre Dame. Having moved frequently throughout her life, it’s difficult for her to declare exactly where she is “from.” She has a passion for writing and hopes to pursue it further during the remainder of her time at ND.

Christina Onorato is a second-year Visual Communication Design major and Business Economics minor studying at the University of Notre Dame. Artistic expression has always been an important part of her life. She loves painting, photography, digital media and design, drawing, sculpture, singing, and playing the piano.

Brennan Gould is a freshman engineering student from Richmond, Virginia. He is a resident of O’Neill Family Hall and is planning to study computer science. Brennan works primarily in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and also enjoys creating 3-dimensional elements to be brought to life on the 3D printers at Stinson-Remick.