So my response to the “Who Am I?” assignment was a bunch of bullshit based on the few details I’d gathered about my family’s involvement with serving the United States of America. There was Pops, who used to manage the computers at the federal building downtown before quitting for better pay at Presbyterian Hospital; there was my abuelo, a borracho wifebeater and former helicopter pilot who I had yet to meet; and there was Moms’s father, a gabacho who died of dementia before I was born but got a Silver Star for some heroic stuff he pulled during Okinawa. I jammed what I imagined their lives to be into a single barely-baked story about my lineage of dutiful American citizens.
So yeah, I said, standing in front of our class, palms dampening my typed-up notes. I guess that’s who I am—in the USA n’ all.
The teacher, Mrs. Anderson, gave an is-that-it? raise of her brow. She was a pale, dyed-and-permed vieja, always dressed in black high-waisted pants and at least one piece of turquoise jewelry like she never left the 80’s—like she was doing an impression of my mother in twenty years. I offered her an apology in the form of a grimace that farted across my mouth.
Thank you for a—Mrs. Anderson paused, drawing more attention to my inadequacy—complete presentation.
Completely fucken boring! some cabrón yelled from the back row of desk chairs, which belonged to the chamacos who’d absorbed no knowledge other than the idea that they weren’t built for this whole school thing.
Pandemonium erupted then, gushing to the point that Mrs. Anderson kicked the dude’s smug ass out to some higher authority’s office. Between the whoops and cheers I’d slipped back to my seat near the window, my whole head a single and hot heartbeat. Once Mrs. Anderson restored whatever order our world allowed, it was América’s turn to give her presentation.
I am New Mexico, she said, appearing to stare into everybody’s and nobody’s eyes at the same time, the way I imagined a president would during a speech. Her claim prompted some mumbled heckles from the back as well as some eye rolls from the popular hynas who always seemed to smack their lips and chew their gum louder whenever América spoke.
But their reactions just fueled the fire in homegirl’s tone, which leapt with confidence as she laid out her whole pinche history—how she moved here to live with her gran tío over at one of the mobile home parks off Central after her abuela, the sole family member who stuck around to raise her, passed away from lung cancer in their almost ghost town up near Española—how she was born into one of them northern New Mexican clans, the kind that’s been rooted in the mountains and desert for centuries, stretching beyond statehood and the Treaty of Guadalupe and the Pueblo revolts, all the way back to Spanish settlement—how each drop of her blood was blended by conquistadores and Indios and all the other pendejos who tried to make this land theirs.
While América danced through her story, the puddle of embarrassment that’d pooled in my stomach evaporated, giving way to nausea and excitement, as if the butterflies inside me were all pedo on tequila. I clung to each syllable that fell from her tongue, realizing how little I knew and how much I wanted to know. About what, though, I wasn’t sure.