neither here nor there

BY DIVINA CENICEROS DOMINGUEZ

BY DIVINA CENICEROS DOMINGUEZ

layout GRACE DAVILA & JULEANNA CULILAP photographer ALEC MARTINEZ stylists JOSEANE TEJADA & NOELLE CAMPOS hmua ADRIANNE GARZA & LILY CARTAGENA models LUIS CAMARENA KUCHLE & NANI VILLALVAZO

The way you make arroz con leche is the way many of us first experience love. You have to let the rice soak for a good while before it even touches the pan, allowing it to expand and, therefore, receive.

I was four years old when my tiny foot first landed on American soil. The hot air that tangled my hair, the kind of heat that makes you sleepy and rest your head on the car window, was just as familiar as it was in Mexico. Only now, I was in Texas — Laredo, Texas.

The city itself is as ordinary as any other. It’s small enough where you can sneeze, and, in the millisecond that you’ve closed your eyes, you’d find yourself in a neighboring city’s I-35 wondering how the fuck you missed your exit. Its radius makes you feel like you know everyone and, for better or worse, everyone knows you.

It took a while to adapt to my new world and even longer to embrace it. Laredo was the place I should’ve, but never actually, called home for the 13 years I lived there. Most of my time there felt like watching water boil. Just waiting for something to happen. Waiting for me to happen.

Time just has a different way of working there. There’s a stillness to the city. It’s not a race but a slow simmer, a long exhale — like steam wafting out from the pot with milk and cinnamon on a rolling boil. Still, I’ve grown to like its cadence. I’ve now made Austin my home, but it’s not till I’m back in Laredo that I ever seem to exhale, too. A piece of my heart opens, and, for a moment, and I’m reminded of all the things I’ve grown to love there.

The way you make arroz con leche is the way many of us learn to talk: little by little, slowly unlocking and continuing the traditions that your mother, and her mother and her mother (and so on) passed on to you. This will be the body copy you will be using! Make sure to not mess with the font or sizing. You can however play with the drop cap font and column size!

When I’m back, I don’t have to speak a single word of English. Instead, I speak Spanish — the language that was there with me during my first words and the stories that were passed down to me by my mother, and her mother and, well, you know how it goes. I speak my language to preserve my history. Still, because my life is in this country, I find myself stumbling, forgetting, and holding words at the tip of my tongue when they used to flow with ease. Life is hard, and death comes faster than you’d think.

Every November 1st, I light a white candle for everyone I’ve lost. I place it on the altar with the little marigold flowers, papel picado, and decades-old tequila bottles I’ve yet to open, but I know my great-grandfather would enjoy — wherever he is.

We make our loved one’s favorite foods for Dia de los Muertos and leave them on the altar. I wonder what my children will leave for me. If I think hard enough, I can just taste the smell of tomatoes and onions on a skillet every morning with two sunny-side-up eggs and my grandmother’s serrano pepper and avocado salsa verde. The one that makes my tongue burn and eyes water. The kind you can’t find anywhere else but the white and green little house I grew up in; the one that’s three blocks away from the train tracks and the big Catholic church. My people are seas of stained glass.

I can close my eyes but still see the kaleidoscope of fully saturated colors on the Sunday church service: greatgrandmothers with their flower-embroidered shawls that bloom like spring; men with caterpillar handlebar mustaches and golden belt buckles that shine like justice; girls with colorful ribbons in their braids that weave together like three-headed snakes.

This “nothing feels like home” feeling — I don’t know it yet. Laredo was the place that made me who I am today, but I still can’t bring myself to call it home. I was four years old when my tiny foot first landed on American soil, but to many, I’m not anywhere other than the wrong side of the line drawn on the imaginary sand. As punishment, I was exiled into a limbo of uncertainty for almost two decades. A reality where Mexico is just a blinking star in the sky, a mirage of what once was. A reality where I’m just another faceless “illegal” immigrant, another stack of paperwork to process that still has yet to arrive.

During these past four years, I’m reminded daily that my existence doesn’t matter. I live in a country that doesn’t love me, but I’m somehow expected to love back. When I close my eyes to sleep, the dark inside my eyes sees no American Dream — only a blur of nameless immigration

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lawyers and 17 years of maybe-this-year’s whispered every four years on November 3rd’s. Will I ever be able to take my shoes off in a place that urges me to run away?

When I’m sad enough, my thoughts struggle to define exactly what community is. Is citizenship a prerequisite? I was born in Mexico, but I doubt I can truly be part of a community I’ve barely been a physical part of. Every day I spend in Austin, I lose my language little by little; I replace the foods I grew up with; I forget the stories that my mother and her mother and her mother whispered to their children. I’m my mother’s daughter, but also the conglomeration of my experiences outside of her.

You can throw a stone in Laredo, Texas and have it land in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I’m a blink-of-an-eye away from my home country but haven’t set my foot on it since that hot, windy day 17 years ago. Laredo is the only place where I can taste a piece of my heritage, but only through the windowpane. Still, if I ever go back to Mexico, will I come to the realization that I’ve spent my entire childhood romanticizing a country that didn’t care about me enough to invest in my life when I was there? I feel more Texan than I do American, and on good days, Mexican enough. But when I’m with my people, my community, my loved ones, and all the other in-betweens of people who’ve shaped me, I don’t really care about identity at all.

Laredo, Texas, was my happy medium. The city itself is as ordinary as any other. It taught me not to drive, not to swim, and not to serve arroz con leche until the next morning — when it’s 8 a.m., and four screaming children wake the whole damn house up. The one on Guerrero street, with the yellow brick wall and the olive tree in the front yard. Only there, it seems, we’re all together sitting on a wooden dining table that belonged to my mother, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother. With them, I’m not an immigrant, I’m not worried or anxious or looking over my shoulder, I’m not American or Mexican-American or Latinx or anything else.

Laredo never really became my home, but maybe immigrants like me never get to find a home. Maybe home isn’t where the heart is, but in my footprints — scattered in little pieces like raisins on your arroz con leche, along the mountains of Monterrey, the hot earth of Laredo, and the rolling hills of Austin. ■