Every Thanksgiving, my tia makes too much turkey.
She spends hours preparing it. Waking up early to pick up the pan frances to make the panes con pavo. Getting the sauce ready. Chiles guajillo. Chile pasilla. Garlic. Onion. Tomatoes. All blended up and coated over the turkey. Our grandma’s recipe, the same recipe Tita would make on Christmas Eve back in El Salvador. The same we had for every Thanksgiving. The one time out of the year when we all get together. They haven’t been the same since you left.
We have leftover pan con pavo for days. We don’t mention how rude it is for you to skip on Thanksgiving again.
Instead, we take your share with us home, and heat up those cold, soggy sandwiches.
Gurgling noises were coming from underneath my white polo—was it the chalupa from lunch? My lanky arms wrapped across my stomach, hoping those growls won’t get the teacher’s attention. His black eyes darting across the rows of students. Maybe if I didn’t make eye contact, he won’t notice me sitting there in the front of the class, as he searched for the next unlucky reader. César, he finally chose.
On the page in front of me, a trabalengua, focused on the erre, the sound I struggled with all sophomore year long, all lifelong.
The fumbling began immediately, something about a carro caro, expensive car. Each and every syllable clucking and sputtering around in my mouth as my tongue stiffly jerked up and down to replicate the musical trill of the double R, erre sound. Snickering began. The class rubbernecking the imminent car crash of the next word. Li-chera-chura, my mouth, a junk car with a messed-up starter, phonetically stumbling to create the rapid delivery and smooth rolling, characteristic of Spanish. The class erupted in laughter.
By the end of the week, everyone came to see the wreckage and question the cause. An anomaly in our little school. Our sophomore class was less than two hundred, and nearly all were Spanish speakers. Right in the center of the San Fernando Valley, with its history of redlining, made it a school of predominantly children of Spanish speaking immigrants.
Why can’t you speak Spanish? the green-eyed classmate from Jalisco probing for an answer for the heresy. No sabo wasn’t in our lexicon yet. How could I, as prieto as I am, not know Spanish? My cara de nopal comes with expectations of flawless Spanish. I put off taking Spanish for a school year to avoid those questions. Everyone in my family speaks English, I never really needed to speak it, I shrugged it off. I speak English, they speak Spanish; I communicate just fine without it. But every word that came out of my mouth was a lie.
It’s not that I don’t want to speak Spanish. Every other weekend that year of high school, there were Spanish lessons with Tita to attain the perfect native accent. A give and take, she practiced her English and I, my Spanish. She’d transport me to that old colonial town in El Salvador. The town existed long before the Spanish, dating back all the way to 250 AD. Sihuatehuacán, until the Spanish conquered and renamed it to Santa Ana. It, once again, became a war zone. Grenades going off within earshot of my grandma and her daughters. Bodies of young men left on the ground after battles. Forcing her to leave with them and settle in Los Angeles. I’d sit, listening to her stories, treating every word like gospel. Each memory a precious but fragile gem that she entrusted to me. Putting her faith in me to carry them tenderly close, so easy to lose.
Fingers for guns that were pointed to her back. Scars to prove each story. Questions in my bad Spanish would interrupt the action for clarification. Pauses for me to remind her of the English word—I know that feeling well. Listening to Spanish is second nature to me, but putting my thoughts into Spanish isn’t. Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, but for everything you want to say. Somewhere between the thought and my tongue is a void that swallows each thought and spits out a poor translation. Each time she stopped and I’d translate, we are pulled out of our city with the cathedral in the center of the town.
As much as I struggle with more than one language, my cousins are trilingual. English. Spanish. ASL.
Hector was four when the doctors diagnosed him as deaf. By then, he found hearing aids uncomfortable. To this day, he refuses to wear them. It didn’t matter, we’d find ways to communicate.
I would cobble together whatever was in reach, my no sabo-version of American Sign Language. Sign the letters from the ASL alphabet. Use the little bit of ASL from the book with the red spiral. Mouth the word. Mime. If all else fails, pull out pen and paper. My bootleg ASL limited to things within reach—things I could point to. Never talk about things that’s not in the room—too hard. Stories, more abstract concepts, feelings—also too hard. A busted-ass Spanish and busted ass ASL.
As kids, Hector’s younger brother, Bobby, would jump in when he saw me pulling out the pen and paper. He’d roll by on his scooter with the red, soft handles. Holding the scooter with one hand, signing with the other. His long skinny brown fingers moving almost as fast as Hector’s. Catching Hector up, translating my poor description, on how we hit one of the neighbor kids with a water balloon, changing his facial expressions to help define the intensity of each word, cracking up the whole time.
Up until high school, my cousins were in and out of my life, sometimes living in the same apartment building, sometimes all of us in the same apartment.
When we weren’t trying to overcome the communication gap, we communicated in languages that we were all fluent in—punches, insults, and video games. On the days when it was especially hot, we’d stay inside with AC cranking and spend our days playing Grand Theft Auto. Bobby would pull out the folded page he safeguarded. A rule-lined page from a notebook with small rips and a golden tinge. He’d unfold it slowly, not to cause any more damage. A page full of his scribbles; incantations for wealth, to control weather, and material possessions.
Down, X, Right, Left, Right, R1, Right, Down, Up, Triangle. Infinite health. How easily he’s able to will things into existence.
Nothing could harm him. They’d chase him down, but he was impervious to bullets. Another incantation on the PS2 controller, and he’d spawn a jet plane.
He hops in and flies far into the deep blue sky, far above the pixelated city skyline, above the oceans, above the mountains.
Buried in the back of the dusty family photo album—after my school portraits through various stages of acne, all the kids in front of the Christmas tree, Bobby with his birthday cake— there is a black and white photo of a thin woman with braids. All alone on the final page. Ella hablaba un dialecto. I think? Mom looking at the photo. On the back, Petrona.
Petrona, I’m sorry this isn’t in Nawat. I’m two languages removed from you. There’s so much shame in forgetting our past, the people that are no longer with us. How did you honor those that were gunned down, on that warm January of 1932? Your town had already gone through so much by then, stripped away from your culture that connected you to your past. Your sweet boy, my grandma’s father, was too young to be targeted by the government. But what about the others? The ones you grew up with. The ones you shared summer days with, when you could breathe in the hot air into your lungs, exhaling it as you laughed with them. In front of that same church where you had your Spanish classes with them, Iglesia de la asunción, you saw Jose Feliciano Ama’s body. His frail lifeless frame, hanging in front of that white church. Not long after, you saw their bodies. By the end of the month, more than 30,000 dead, targeted by the language they spoke, every man in your town killed during La Matanza. You had that little brown boy to raise, the one you held tightly in your arms when he had a fever. Did you dare teach him Nawat after the killings? Kept him safe. Held your tongue.
Full erasure of your community, your family, world. You were forced to adapt—adopt the language of the perpetrator that caused all this destruction around you, that ended the life you knew. No language to connect us, your stories are gone. A systemic unlinking from the past and from each other.
The photo was taken before Spanish class, before Tita was born, before they were forced to leave El Salvador during the Civil War, after La Matanza, after the Nahua hablantes de kuskatan made Ahuachapan their home, after the Spanish made Ahuachapan their home. There’s no room for grief for someone you never knew. I don’t even know what I don’t know. No sabo qué no sabo.
I remember Wolverine’s bright yellow and blue jumpsuit and claws. A small button on his chest plays his catchphrases: BACK OFF BUB and SLICE AND DICE. Wolverine’s a man of little words. No need to explain himself, he communicates with his claws. Slicing up those he disagrees with. My prized possession, much too precious for my cousins’ grubby little fingers.
But Wolverine has nothing on Professor X. When we’d get hyped up during the screeching guitar of the X-Men intro; I’d imagine I had Professor X’s power, blasting my cousins with psychic forces. Only his imagination limits Professor X’s powers, his ability to connect to others’ thoughts. If only it was as easy as putting your fingers to your temple to transcend the limitations of language. Ascend to the invisible network of thought that isn’t held back by words and sounds. The network that causes you to react with stomach pangs when you’re nervous or scream out when a cousin smacks you while you’re running in front of the TV. Language is a poor translation of your thoughts. There are feelings, memories, behind everything you say. If only it were as simple as putting your hand to your temple. Let others know how we truly feel about them—how much we love them or how much we miss them.
On those nights at the Xavier Institute, after everyone goes back to their rooms, and Wolverine lays down and looks up at the ceiling—no masks or catchphrases to hide behind— does he think of the past he no longer remembers?
A recurring dream: I’m running under a star-filled sky, an endless ocean of sand surrounding me, however the mesas and sagebrush stay in place. As hard as I run, my legs are dug deep into the ground. It’s the same desert in my mind’s eye when my grandma would tell stories of crossing into this country. But I’m not as brave as her.
No matter how hard I think of running, my legs don’t follow-through. The picture is clear, the intended outcome, but there’s failure in the execution. I’m there, too inadequate to continue.
The message never reaches the intended receiver, messages of love and affection never leave the sender; too much noise in the channel is disrupting the source. No amount of European languages, text messages, phone calls can take the place of the disconnect. The disconnect grows with each channel. We want to close the gap, but fear holds us back, afraid of addressing the grief directly. This disconnection is how we adapt.
I like to imagine I’m a braver person. I show up to my tia’s house on dia de pavo. Tita, como estas? Oh si, mi nuevo carro es muy caro; an absolutely fucking perfect erre. Mom hands me a plate of pan con pavo, the bread soaking up the rich sauce, just how I like it. How you doin’, bro?, my fingers signing to Hector, Do you still think of Bobby?
More than a decade later since you were killed, and I’m back in Spanish class, struggling with the words. I’m inadequate to put into words the void that is left by your absence.
My memory of you keeps getting dimmer, Bobby. Every year that passes, every Thanksgiving, when our families meet, we don’t dare mention your absence. Once again, another great forgetting is occurring—another loss, disconnecting us from history and from each other. Forgetting fills the void of lingual inheritance – a cultural amnesia we’re cursed to repeat. Forgetting fills the void that is left by your absence.
I don’t address it directly. I tell myself that by not speaking of you, I am preserving the possibility that you still might come in through that door, holding your scooter, and help yourself to a pan con pavo that your mom made, and sit down next to Hector to catch us up on where you’ve been all these years. That if we speak of your death, that possibility ends. But if I don’t speak of you, I lose you a second time.
***
Artwork by Beatriz Camaleão
