In Between: etse lado y el otro lado

In Between este lado y el otro lado

Olivia Prado

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To mi familia en este lado y el otro

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In Between este lado y el otro lado

Olivia Prado 5

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We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one).

We distinguish between Mexicans del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado.

Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in.

Being Mexican is a state of soul – not one of mind, not one of citizenship.

Neither eagle nor serpent, but both.

And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.

Borderlands|La Frontera Gloria AnzaldúaWW

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. t abl e of c onte nts

13. dirt covered 24. bean picking bean 28. popo and itza 34. phenotype 44. mexican-american gothic 54. chicken-coop 63. institution 70. bill 79. can you believe it 88. mi familia 98. a wall of words 110. papers

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. d i r t c ove re d

I often try to remember my earliest memories to the best of my ability. I like to think about the time I didn’t care about dirt being between my toes, and how it collected along the backs of my arms, and sprinkled itself throughout my scalp. The rows of asparagus that resembled tiny tree lines across each spread of acre.

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I stopped quickly at each tower of milkweed to inspect it for creatures, my trusty bug box in hand. I knew that my parents cared about my bug interest, but others who worked in the field were only there to get the job done, and soon these plants would be uprooted and discarded. Once I inspected each plant top to bottom, I made my way back to the truck where my siblings and cousins huddled together to play hangman on a pad of paper. Once in a while I would show them my finds, they didn’t care. I remember my mom being excited that I wanted a bigger bug net. She and my dad brainstormed materials to buy to build a place for my caterpillars. In the corner of my room, I hung my hoops and netting so I could share my space with these companions. I watched over the weeks of summer as my caterpillars ate the leaves of milkweed that I filled their home with until they were ready to leave me.

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Have you ever held something so fragile in your hand that you didn’t feel that you were touching it, instead it was touching you? It is as though it is made of air. You are aware of its presence, but it holds no weight. Two towering wings engulf a tiny body between them. They look to be bright orange upon first glance, but with time, a million tiny iridescent flecks begin to appear in the light of the summer sun. Suddenly, what was once orange and white becomes speckled with every color of the rainbow and in between. I felt like these beings were always mystical and mysterious. Where do they go when they leave me? Who are they when they come back? I once heard that monarch butterflies return after four generations. They leave and reproduce and then return, following the blossoming environments that trickle throughout the Western Hemisphere.

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Migration is something I think about often.

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How do I define it?

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To me, migration is what brought my family where we are today. Both naturally and because of diaspora. I think back to the time of Aztecs, the trail of tears, the industrialization of southern California, these events displaced people. I think about the movie Mi Familia, and the character El Californio who said When I was

born here, this was Mexico, and where my body lies, this is still Mexico. El Californio did not immigrate, or migrate, or naturalize, yet he was labeled as the other.

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I don’t have those feelings toward my home.

I do not live on land that I can say will always be Mexico.

My family moved here.

We migrated, drifting until we could drift no longer.

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But that was never my story either. Like the butterfly, I am the generation between travelers.

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. b e an pick ing b e an

I remember laying in the dirt alongside the tiny green bean plants. At the time they were small enough to look like individual leaves of spinach. I was tired of standing, so I army crawled on my elbows. I was twelve. I had tan lines from my shirt collar, which I hated because it fell under the category of farmer’s tan. At least it would only be bean season for a few more weeks and the worst would be over. Weeding acres of beans in the scorching sun was much less appealing than picking up rotten apples in the cool fall. When we did apples there was no dirt or baking sun, but sometimes the squish of the rotten fruit in your hand made your stomach turn, and put you off apples for the next few weeks. The apples weren’t ours like the beans were. We picked apples for other people, we picked beans for ourselves. We were the hired help when it came to the rotten apples.

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I remember one summer of beans specifically. My brother and I drove an old green truck down the back roads to get to the field everyday where my dad was already waiting for us. We kept a bag of cereal in the seat between us for our breakfast and breaks. Usually we got there early enough to see the family of deer that feasted upon the beans every dewy morning, if my dad had not scared them away by then. This was our first year using a harvester. Even though this was a nice addition to the family, there still had to be someone there to catch the beans that came out of the machine, and that’s where we come in.

If you can imagine, the harvester looked like a big yellow tractor, only it had two spinning brushes underneath to pull beans off plants and a belt that pulled them to the top of a chute that emptied over a small wooden shelf. The shelf was just big enough to hold one and a half trays, so my brother and I took turns manning the lever on the chute and emptying the trays into the larger boxes.

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what am i doing here? how did i become a figure standing in a field that people drive by and think look at those

illegals. which beings of the past made this the trajectory of my life? i’m not illegal. but maybe some people think i am when i’m out working in the dirt as a beaner picking those beans. once a substitute teacher said to me that she could tell who the illegals were when she was in the south because they were the ones carrying weapons.

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. p op o and it z a

I belong to a nation, in which I have a number and pay taxes and travel within the boundary of. my father belongs to a different nation. in my nation, he is considered an alien. i’ve never understood that word, but he appears other-worldly to me too. he was an invincible man growing up. a mythical being

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that accumulated his strength from his ancestors. he is the luchador, the apache, the aztec. in my country, my mighty father and those like him are not welcome with open arms. and in his own nation, he is no longer welcome either.

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like the mighty aztecs, his home no longer exists. my father has changed too much to return and mexico has changed too much to be called home. my father does not belong to a nation that exists.

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. phe not y p e

I don’t look like my father. I do and I don’t. My dad has dark tan skin and coarse black hair, grey and black now.

His arms and chest are almost entirely bald. He says that’s from his Apache grandmother. I have always wanted my skin to look like my dad’s. I wanted the same thing my dad got from his ancestors. I wanted to look like someone.

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Or my mother. With her curly fire red hair. And white freckle covered skin. To the outside world I was her adopted brown daughter.

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my sister was mom’s carbon copy. when we go to large gatherings we are introduced as a family, except for my sister.

who is la guera? she is also our sister, we clarify.

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Once my sister was a toddler and my parents were grocery shopping, my mom was going to one aisle and my dad was headed toward another. First my sister tried to go with my dad, but she soon changed her mind and threw a tantrum screamed, “NO! I want to go with my mom!” My dad, frustrated trying to calm his crying toddler, was approached by a woman.

He wasn’t approached, my sister was.

She said, “I’ll take you to your mom, little girl.”

My sister immediately retracted, “I want to stay with my dad!”

I still don’t know how to feel about that story to this day.

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I’ve never thought of my grandma as Mexican. My mother’s mother. Jam. She’s a small curly haired woman who hosted all of our family gatherings. At every gathering her father would be there. Old Grandpa, I call him. He was the first of his family born in America after they immigrated from Mexico.

Looking back I’m not sure why I never saw Jam as Mexican or Mexican-American. Every summer Jam would hold our hands out in front of us and compare tan lines running from our index fingers to our thumbs. Every Christmas she would sing Feliz Navidad with her father while he played guitar. In reality, I think Jam and I are more similar than I thought.

Half mexican. Non-spanish speaking. Not specifically connected to the land of Mexico. As I got older Jam started to share more stories from when she was young. Like getting a job picking asparagus with her best friend Sue.

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A kid came up to me and asked me if I was Black.

No, I told him.

Are you Asian? he continued.

I shook my head.

Do I look Black? Or Asian?

He didn’t ask me if I was Mexican.

Maybe I didn’t look like what he thought a Mexican would look like.

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. me x ic an -ame r ic an got hi c

instead of white they are brown they work for the people in the big white house. you can still see it in the distance if you look for it where the rich white farmer lives in the big white house.

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When I think about buses and migrants now, I think about manzana. A select few know about the manzana bus.

Driving around small towns, it would appear bright white over a hill with huge red letters facing you down.

MANZANA. As it got closer and closer you could make out the drivers and passengers of the packed buses. We’d always know to avoid the grocery store when the manzana bus was there because the line would be too long.

Manzana is apple to those of you who haven’t taken a basic spanish class. I picked apples, but I’ve never been on a manzana bus.

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Sometimes I think I remember the other bus. But then I think maybe I just remember the pictures of the bus. Apparently it had desks, just like a classroom. Because it was a classroom. We used to ride in the bus with our parents to all of the migrant camps. I don’t remember the camps at all or the people in the camps or the people learning on the bus. I don’t think I even know what my parents did all day driving the bus around.

So I asked them. And we went for a drive.

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Thats me with the bus parked behind me in our front yard.

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During our drive I photographed various housing units and listened to the stories my parents told me along the way. My mom told me about one farmer who agreed to let them park the bus at the camp, but if they had to go to the bathroom then they would have to go across the street to the corn field.

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i think about the difference between those two buses. one as a classroom and one as a ride to work. one bright yellow and the symbol of education, one white and dust covered. maybe people ride in the big white bus as they strive to live in the big white house.

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. chicke n -c o op

We drove up to a building my parents called the chicken coop. A long blue metal building, something that is easily recognizable to people from rural areas as a poultry barn.

Old rust covered a/c units jutted out of the walls as evidence that birds had once been raised there. Now box fans occupy the windows, old grey waterlogged furniture sprinkled along the sides of the building.

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Something catches my parents off guard.

A dumpster.

Only places with people living there would have a dumpster, but surely the chicken coop had been decommissioned in the years since my parents had taught there.

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I got out of the car and made my way up to a white paper in a clear plastic slip attached to a wooden post.

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It was for a permit of the c u r r e n t y e a r .

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People were still living

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in the chicken-coop.

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. i nst itut ion

What Latin studies classes have you taken?

um...none?

–in conversation with a panel of faculty artists

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I think about what drove my parents to do the work they did. To spend days on the road and at run down camps teaching ESL. My mom told me on our drive around the camps, that my dad and uncles used to take over for the people who could not leave their tasks in order for workers to register for the courses.

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A small price to pay for the education of others.

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My parents have never used the word activist to describe themselves and I’ve never understood why?

Isn’t providing the opportunity for education to laborers a political action?

Isn’t putting the time in to help others that need it activism?

Do you need someone else to call you an activist before you can then label yourself as that?

Maybe they didn’t think the word applied to people whose names weren’t in the news or spread across papers recognizing the work they’ve done.

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. bi l l

Sometimes I feel like I’m pretending to be Mexican.

But I’ll still advocate for them–us. In Mi Familia, Jimmy pokes fun at his family’s anger by saying That was a political action. I’m a goddamn revolutionary!

Is this a political action? Am I a goddamn revolutionary?

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I recently learned that I come from a long line of goddamn revolutionaries. Bill, Guillermo, Old Grandpa’s brother, used to be an activist. I don’t think I ever met Bill, but I like to imagine how it must have been to witness his passion in real life. I read articles written about Bill and I wonder if he would have called himself an activist, a goddamn revolutionary. Because I never met Bill, sometimes I like to picture him being Jimmy and speaking Jimmy’s words. I like to imagine him giving one of his speeches to a sea of people the way you see Martin Luther King Jr. give speeches. I like to think he shouted his ideas into the ether and people actually listened, took hold, and didn’t let go.

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Jam has kept pretty extensive archives of our family. She has given me all the newspaper clippings she has of Bill’s life as an activist. I like to hold them in my hand and think about reading them at the time they were published.

Before I even read the words, I felt like those words were connected to my words. Once I did read the words, I was shocked at what he had to say. Bill wrote a column for a local newspaper (I haven’t been able to find which one)and opened one of his articles with, “If you have missed my Column these past two weeks it’s because I injured my foot and haven’t been able to get my article to the hall. If you haven’t missed it, go back to your Chronicle, you deserve each other. I’m kidding, of course, no one deserves that.”

He directly called people out in many of his pieces. He was bothered by passivity. In an interview with his long time rival, the Chronicle, he said, “Many Midwestern Chicanos don’t know about their cultural history because they grew up in migrant families –– always moving, never having a base”

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Bill, I wish you were here for me to talk to now. I’d like to share my writing with you the way you share your work with me even after death. Should I view myself as having a strong home base? Bill, I do not feel my roots to Mexico the way you seem to. Yet you are so sure that land has nothing to do with your attachment, reassuring me that it has nothing to do with mine. I am scared that I will ruin the clippings from touching them too much, folding them and unfolding them again. Then what will I be without your words? Would I be one of those that you called out for not taking action? Have a call to action.

Call them to action.

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I thought Bill’s story was one from the archives, something I have to go through a filing cabinet to find. But this is beginning to be his story too. Maybe it’s a hybrid of our stories. Very much in the present. Maybe when Bill shouted into the ether, I listened, I took hold of his words, I didn’t let go.

There are four generations between Bill and me. Four generations. What are Bill’s ideas now that they have left, reproduced, and returned?

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. c an you b el ie ve it

One of my favorite pictures of Bill is of him meeting César Chávez.

They’re shaking hands and smiling, two revolutionaries sharing their ideas.

Years later I met César’s grandson, Eduardo.

Three and four generations between.

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I was so excited to meet him that I told the only other Mexicans on campus that I knew at the time. I told them about how Eduardo had never worked in a field before making his documentary even though his grandfather was Chávez and how I couldn’t believe there could be such a generational difference. I came from four generations of migrant farm workers and worked on our family’s farm myself.

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They all looked at me like I was crazy.

He never worked in a field! Can you believe it?!

None of them had worked in a field.

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I couldn’t believe it.

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I felt embarrassed. I wanted to crawl into a hole. All of these successful sophisticated Latinos that were in front of me, suddenly made me afraid to admit the fact that I spent every summer before then covered in dirt. Weren’t we the same? We all came from a struggling Mexican at one point.

Right?

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It didn’t really feel that way.

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I am trying to think of what to say next.

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I feel really distracted by the fact that I have to defend the making of this book.

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this is the physical manifestation of something i feel the power of that holds no weight. where will my ideas go when they leave me and what will they be when they return. when i used to think about my identity, i thought of it as two sides of a coin. mexican and american. this book is my summer sun, and i’m seeing all of the parts that make up me.

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. mi f am i l i a

I don’t want you to make this work to please your family.

It seems like you’re trying to make something that would make your family happy.

-in conversation with faculty artist

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I got Riley to watch a movie with me. After telling her that I feel like people don’t get my project, she asked me what would make people understand your project more.

Watching Mi Familia/My Family. A story of immigration, colonization, deportation, racism, fiestas and activism. It is a story about a family. Riley couldn’t believe the dramatic twists and turns of the detainment of Maria even though she was a citizen and the murder of Chucho by police even though he was unarmed. She asked me how so much could go on in a movie and yet, it made sense. How did all of these parts fit into the whole? I told her that that was what I mean when I say I am Mexican-American. A life just as dramatic and just as true.

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Gregory Nava says about Mi Familia that he wanted to explore the story of a family through three generations. I tried to understand more about Nava and Mi Familia by watching an interview with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Initially, I wanted to know more about Nava’s take on the Mexican-American experience. He went into topics that suggested his intention for the film. While people praised the film for its representation of Chicano culture and Chicano life in LA specifically, Nava explains that his real intention of the movie revolved around the human condition and generational trauma.

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He talked about how the family’s trauma was something worked out through three generations.

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Something worked out through generations.

Something that started, and like a butterfly effect, returned and resolved.

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While this is what I wanted to find when watching the interview, I soon found myself entranced by more of Nava’s words. He talked about how his movie was a way of honoring his father specifically. Something that I’ve been faced with when writing this is the comment that this is to please my family and that I am making something my family would like. But what’s wrong with that? What if I think my family deserves something that honors them too?

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Nava brings up a good point in his interview that Mexicans in America feel a great pride for this country. When his father met the president after a Mi Familia screening at the White House, Nava expressed how much his father deserved the recognition being a WWII veteran and a man who put his life on the line for his family and his country. He said the country of the United States meant everything to my father. It brought Nava to tears to think about the work he made bringing so much honor to his father and to his family. Nava uses the word celebrated. He celebrated his family’s achievements, and for the first time they were celebrated by the U.S too.

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I think that’s what a lot of people are looking for.

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Whether they call it recognition or representation or celebration or something else.

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. a wa l l of words

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duolingo pops up on my phone every now and then, reminding me that i can’t speak spanish not that i am entirely illiterate i just have never been fluent but is fluency the understanding of the language entirely? in that case, is anyone fluent? the dictionary says a fluent language is spoken accurately and with facility but then what do words with multiple meanings do to the accuracy of speaking?

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when i use words in english i think about what they mean. if someone uses the word illegal to describe an action, then that action was a violation of the law. if someone uses the word

illegal to describe a person, is that person violating the law or the idea of existence itself?

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this isn’t coming across the way i want it to.

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the words alien and illegal are no longer valid in describing humans in this context, in fact it’s dehumanizing. the government, and even my university, use the term alien to mean permanent resident. resident alien. alien status. someone expressing to me they can tell who the aliens are because they are dirty, or they know the illegals because they are carrying weapons, is not the same context as filing your resident alien status.

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to me, the words alien and illegal are more hurtful than the words beaner or spic will ever be.

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I’ve never been able to speak to my grandparents. Any time I see them I say hello and they say hello back and hug me. Usually they ask me how I am in spanglish. When I tell people this, I describe it as a language barrier. A border of languages.

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when i open my mouth to speak

words

i awkwardly belch hola. my knowledge of the spanish language dissapates like handfulls of sand that you try your best to keep contained, but no matter what you’re going to have about

two grains

left in the end.

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I think about how they are non english speaking citizens.

They naturalized in 1998. The year I was born.

Naturalize. What is natural about that? Another definition of naturalize instead, to introduce or adopt (foreign practices, word\s, etc.) into a country or into general use.

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. p ap e rs

When I was in kindergarten, the nurse of my elementary school sent me home with pamphlets in spanish, even though my white mother taught at the school. There were about two brown girls in my elementary school at the time, so I’m sure he just had me confused with the other mexicans who also spoke english. i was given documents in spanish even though my documents dont say im spanish here are your papers he has papers he has documentation let me document you

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i am documenting you and myself and them–us

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just as much as my grandma compulsively collected newspaper clippings and miscellaneous photos, i am compulsively collecting words and ideas and pictures for you here. see how these things document me? i’ve shown you my skin and the marks i make with my hands and the people i see with my eyes.

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documenting the in between of this side and the other between brown and white between english and spanish between living and dead between the one who speaks and the one who listens.

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. i mage s cover photo. My dad sent me many images from his phone in preparation for this work and this was one. It is multiple of my relatives working to plant asparagus crowns.

p12. This is my father’s parents and many of his siblings in their family vehicle during their time workng as migrants.

p15. This is a picture that my grandmother gave my dad to keep after they had a house fire.

p18. Innocencio, Bill and Old Grandpa’s father who immigrated from Mexico.

p24. Our bean harvester and my brother attaching the trailer to it that summer.

p29. Popo and Itza, oil on canvas panel, 2021. p30-31. A text conversation with my dad about his tattoo that is an image of Popo and Itza.

p34-35. Mom and Dad

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p36. My sister, Dad, Tia Letty, and Tio Javi in front of our family’s restaurant and store. (taken on the worst camera my family has ever owned)

p41. Jam, oil on pannel, 2021. p45. Mexican-American Gothic, colored pencil, 2017. p48. Myself as a child with the classroom bus in our front yard behind me.

p58-59. More images of my dad’s family given to him by his mother.

p64-65. From my dad’s planner when he drove the class room bus with my mom.

p71. Newpaper clipping of Bill’s interview. p.72-73. Bill’s speech when about the fairness in educational opportunity when it came to migrant laborers.

p76. Bill and César Chávez. p101. Resident Alien, oil on pannel, 2021. p106. My grandparents recieving their citizenship in 1998.

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