By Zoe Garcia
I don’t speak Spanish, but it’s the first thing people see on me. You were first recorded on a proof of tax payment, belonging to a Diego Garcia in 17th century Mexico. The soft g, whose sweetness is bittered by the jarring are, interrupted by a piercing see then fizzling out into uh, like something forgotten. You were extracted from the word ‘artz’ meaning ‘the bear’, which is probably the animal some European ancestor of mine hunted. But I don’t look European, I look Mexican.
I was eleven when I first owned a pair of tweezers. By then I was already tall enough to lean over the counter three inches away from the mirror, the edge dug into the fronts of my thighs leaving two dents in the muscle from leaning the same way every day. I plucked the hairs from my eyebrows until they were thin, until I looked clean. My father has eyebrows that meet in the middle and spread up to his temples and down the sides of his eyes. They looked like smudges on me. I would dust the small, black remnants from my face and see less of him. I straightened the curls out of my hair, then used a curling wand to replace them with tame ones. The wand left circular burns on my left arm and one on my right wrist. There is no erasing you. This ritual was carried out in silence. When other girls performed their version before school, the version with music and breakfast waiting, my ritual was followed by an angry car ride to a photoshoot. My mom was never one to fall for my traps:
“Putting this much heat on my hair is killing it.”
“You have to look like your headshots.”
“Then let’s take headshots with it natural.”
“You won’t get as many bookings.”
It’s true. They wanted to hide you, but just enough. Ethnically ambiguous, the newest trend, was in the subject line of every casting call email. ‘Ethnically’ attracted all different looks so that brands could stand out for their inclusivity efforts, but ‘ambiguous’ made it so that the average American could connect with the person on the screen.
Jose was fresh from Mexico and spoke absolutely no English when I met him. He washed the dishes at a fine dining restaurant around the time I began running food out to tables. He always welcomed me with “china,” and when the line cooks asked him why, he twirled the air around his head with his fingers, referring to my halo of frizzy curls. It means curly hair. Roman, the Head Chef pronounced with a hard ‘ch’, who learned English in restaurant kitchens, is from Mexico. Mario called me “hermanita” because we looked similar. He had just moved from Mexico and he was proud. “Garcia,” I revealed to each of them, you. My proximity to them was celebrated. You were celebrated. They taught the sous chef Spanish swears. He was a Laotian boy about my age with a thick South Carolina accent. From the shade of his snapback, his eyes wandered away from me as I came back for another plate to run, “Yo como panocha. Everything panocha.” I took the steak or the fish or the soup from the window and our eyes met as he waited for my reaction. I scoffed and turned away from the men. “I know more Spanish than you,” he teases.
“This boy wants to be Mexican so bad,” I heard men’s laughter as I left.
I’ve always said half Greek before half Mexican so that the Greece imagery lingers longer and clouds the Mexican. The artistic and philosophical richness of the Greeks is worshipped in the American curriculum, and what of the Mexicans? In my elementary school class, I remember we dedicated one day to learn about the Olmecs, Toltecs, and the Aztecs, their technological advancements, and how they were conquered. But the conquering hasn’t stopped. The conquered are pushed to the edges of society, made into myth. The imagery that comes to mind are the quiet brown people that build and clean and mow our country. I think of that clip from The View, a purple-haired lady that said, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”
When I was younger, the word Mexican sounded to me like a slur in the mouths of anyone that wasn’t Mexican. As if Mexicans were a problem, and there was a Democratic and a Republican way to deal with them. I remember my friend, a white boy, called me a spic just to see my reaction. I asked my dad if anyone ever called him that, and someone did. I expected, hoped, that my dad fought back, but he didn’t. I didn’t have to ask why, I know it’s easier to shrink. We were told the wrong story about our people, that we are silent and passive. Is there a flower that withers itself to survive? I was young, I needed to bloom.
The only thing responsible for ethnicity is .1% of the DNA strand. A fragment of the thread that makes up a human, the spec of a spec that keeps the human race in their separate, made-up categories is kept alive and meaningful through stories. My .1% says I had a grandparent or great-grandparent that was 100% Indigenous American. Any Mexican in me is labeled ‘Unassigned’ and less than .6% on 23 and Me, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I wanted distance from you. The percentages were accompanied by a colorful map. Europe was deep cobalt blue and Asia was red, representing Indigenous Americans as their First American ancestors migrated from East Asia. The Americas were gold except for Mexico which had blank stripes through it. As if I had finally straightened, brightened, plucked, hid you into almost nothing. They are unsure of my ancestry, but I share a lot of DNA with people in Jalisco, Mexico. Only a DNA test can’t tell you your ancestors were renamed, re-educated, relocated, or that half of you is carrying out the task of erasing the other half.
I could say I was never meant to speak Spanish because some ancestor of mine was never meant to learn it, but that’s too easy. I haven’t learned Spanish because I have no one to use it with. There is a man that does construction on the house next to mine, who says to me, “¿Hola,cómo estás?” He says nothing to my white neighbors. One day, I stop and look up to the sky for the response, and I hear it in my head but my mouth is afraid to attempt it. In Spanish, he says, “You don’t speak Spanish?” I know to say no.
In an earlier draft, I recalled the memory wrong. “¿No dice español?” I wrote as if the man asked me that. When I read this mistake to my class, a boy from Venezuela corrected me between laughs. It is funny, she doesn’t say Spanish? I was so close. The man said, “¿No hablas Español?” But there is a dam that keeps you from flowing into me. My dice, the innocent laugh behind my hands, the Venezuelan correcting the American’s Spanish in an American classroom, the way Mexican sounds like a slur when I read it aloud no matter how gently: it all swirled around in my brain for the rest of the day, until I would find myself at a green light saying to the space next to me “No, no hablo español. Mi dad no me enseñó.” The man working on the house next door understood because he too neglected to teach his son Spanish. A moment of silence came over us, then back to politeness.
Ethnicity is a story. I thought ours was fading into nothing, but there is always a stranger who sees you on me and pokes a hole in the dam. Then comes the flood. Mexican fluidity in a Jarbe dancer’s dress, Mexican immigrants pouring into the country on the news, Mexican force and flow in Nahuatl drums, Mexican music fills my ears and my room and my heart. Mexican tenderness. If not through language, you and I must forge another bridge. I tried separating myself from whiteness, but it is all around me. There is an artist whose music I fell in love with and immersed myself in for weeks for its folky indigenous essence. His alias is El Buho, but I found that he is actually Robin Perkins from England. I could sway myself back into isolation and dismiss him as a colonizer, but that would reinforce the blank spaces in you. He can be both, after all, I can too. I’ve been saying half Greek, half Mexican as if one is in the other’s way. A story does not go either/or, it goes and then, and then, and then…
I have cacao ceremonies by myself some nights- it’s my own way of celebrating you. Cacao was the Olmecs’ drink of the gods which then spread to the Incas and Mayans and Aztecs and Toltecs. These ancient people that seemed close to myth became tangible in the form of a drink. It was used in rituals, but then brought to Europe by the man that conquered Mexico, and was given to the soldiers in place of food. It was later transformed into mass-produced chocolate. Then finally, cacao’s sacred medicine was lost in cheap, sugared-down, Nestle milk chocolate powder. It has been reintroduced to the mainstream world as a healing tool in spiritual communities. It contains phenylethylamine, the chemical we release when we fall in love and orgasm. It is a seed that is worshiped, warmed, sweetened, and sipped by a girl attempting to drink her last name.
I thought the brown identity was made of pain and by revoking you, I could escape it, and in many ways I have. But there is always some force that brings us together. I owe it to my ancestors to find ways to embrace you.
Zoe Garcia is a young writer from Texas. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Dramatic Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). During her final year at SCAD, she began writing guided meditations for her podcast, Portals, and hosted live meditations in local yoga classes. Much of her work points at the deeply mystical experiences hidden in ordinary life.