What’s in a name?
Huera means “light.” Lucy means
“light.” Huerta means “garden.”
When I was a kid, Carmen, who calls me
her fifth daughter and who I call my other mother, and Gloria and Ana (my
lifelong very close friends who became family to me decades ago) started
calling me Huera. I can’t even remember when; it may have even been the first
time I went over their house. Properly spelled, it’d be Guera, but Huera’s a
common variation. Huera’s a nickname for lighter-skinned Latinas as well as
non-Latina, Euro-descent family members or friends of Latina/os. For my two
years of high school, I was Huera to most of my friends and acquaintances, even
the non-Latina/o ones there. After 10th grade and the end of my schooling as a
kid, I lived with Gloria and Ana’s family, and with my first boyfriend’s family
(if that relationship can even be referred to in such placid terms as “my
boyfriend”), and with another family who all called me Huera. Sometimes I just
stayed with people for a few days or a week here and there. For them, I was Huera. (And I stayed with
relatives for whom I remained Lucy.)
***
Gloria’s family called themselves Colombian
or Hispanic. They moved to East L.A. (Lincoln Heights) from Colombia when
Gloria was three. Gloria’s father had previously immigrated to Colombia from
Bulgaria. Spanish and English were both commonly spoken in their home. There,
we ate platanos, yuca, lentijos, arroz, arroz con leche, and carne (round steak)
divided into small pieces between us all, or sometimes a mixture cooked in the big
pot with turkey legs, garbanzos, rice, corn, tomato sauce, and vegetables. If
we were lucky, we had empanadas (a kind of turnover with meat, rice, vegetables)
and buñuelos (balls of different cheeses mixed with cornstarch and deep fried).
Platanos are fried plantains, but I learned them as platanos and called them
that for so long that calling them fried plantains feels somehow false. Yuca is
cassava. Lentijos are lentils, and again, I learned them first as lentijos...
Arroz is rice, but I think of it in that context as arroz still. Arroz con
leche is rice cooked with much more water along with cans of condensed milk and
cinnamon sticks to make it have the consistency of hot cereal.
Carmen worked all day at a sewing
factory; she wanted dinner ready by the time she came home from work.
***
Paul’s family called themselves Mexican.
He and his siblings and their parents (and I think their grandparents) were
born in the U.S.; and it may be that their families’ presences in California
precede when the U.S. took it from Mexico. Paul and his four siblings didn’t
know Spanish; their mom Agnes did. I think their dad Joe did, though I never
heard him speak it. They’d divorced years before I knew them, and I only saw
him occasionally.
Agnes hated cussing because Joe used to
cuss at her, explicitly, degradingly. Paul and his sister Dolores swore quite a
bit, but Agnes would say in substitution, “Bless you!” She said it as someone
else would say, “Damn you!”
Agnes worked at Lockheed holding a 40
pound riveter all day. Aerospace jobs dominated the Antelope Valley. Agnes had
divorced Paul’s dad because he’d taken to beating her and having affairs. One
day before I knew them, when Paul’s oldest brother Jesse was 15, Jesse grabbed
a butcher knife from the kitchen counter and held it toward his dad who was slapping
and shoving and kicking his mom. Jesse yelled, leave her alone, and he said if
his dad ever hit her again, Jesse would kill him. Agnes told me that one time,
and Jesse told me another time. And Joe never hit her again. They let him stay a while; she said she felt kind of sorry for him after that. But they weren't a couple anymore. One day, she came home from work and he had another woman in her bed, and that's when she threw him out. I think she could have whooped both of them by then, or at least by the time I knew her and knew Paul's dad. Man, was she strong.
When I lived with them, Agnes had this boyfriend from Mississippi (who she later married), way older than her, who came over Sunday
mornings to cook us all grits and pancakes. Dinners were a set in stone routine. Except
for Thursdays, we had pork chops, canned green chiles, refried beans, and
canned corn. During my time there, I was usually assigned to cook them. (And I
watched Dolores’s baby girl because she’d gotten a job at Lockheed, also.) On
payday Thursdays, they drove through a fast food Mexican restaurant on the way
home to pick up our favorites. Saturdays, Agnes put on her Conway Twitty or
Loretta Lynn albums and we cleaned – Pine Sol in the bathrooms and to clean the
kitchen floor, using washcloths instead of mops (Agnes said mops were for lazy
people) – using brooms to sweep the flat carpet (again, vacuums were for the
lazy). I knew better than to argue. Meanwhile, we heard Loretta Lynn
sing about sleeping single in a double bed and Conway Twitty singing with I
think Loretta Lynn – he was Jimmy and she was Joanie, and Joanie had ended up
marrying his best friend John by the end of the story-song.
***
Sandra’s and Ruth’s family had moved
from L.A. out to our Mojave Desert town (the story with so many of us), and
they called themselves Mexican or Chicana/o. Sunday mornings, their mom would
pick up menudo (soup with tripe) and we’d eat it with a lot of lemon squeezed
in. I was living with them when we went to a New Year’s Eve party and Beaver
(another common nickname; real name Jesse; different Jesse than Paul’s brother)
– Beaver was stabbed in the chest, and his lung (or lungs?) collapsed. The
ambulance took 45 minutes, arriving after he’d died in the arms of a close
friend. Beaver was 20, married with two little girls. He and his wife had argued
that night, and she’d left early. A guy only one person knew had been brought
to the party, an 18 year old from L.A. He’d started to fight a 14 year old, and
pulled out a knife. Beaver stepped in between them to good-naturedly tell the
newcomer to just calm down, that he didn't really want to use that knife. Somehow the knife ended up in his chest. All of us
(Gloria and Ana; Paul and Dolores; Sandra and Ruth; Beaver and his wife Sandy)
moved in the same larger crowd and knew one other as friends to varying degrees.
***
Sometimes I was mostly living in my old
car that my parents had given me. And when I’d park in front of Yolie’s place to
feel a little safer, her mom would often spot my car out there in the early
mornings after Yolie’s dad left for work. She’d tell Yolie to go out and get
me. Her mom was deaf. She read lips and she spoke. But she only spoke Spanish;
and my Spanish had so many gaps. Still, she communicated so clearly that she cared, and
that I didn’t need to feel unwelcome. She always made us potatoes cooked into a
mixture with meat and sauces that we’d eat in a couple of tortillas, and she
never hurried me to leave.
***
A couple of weeks after Beaver got
killed, I left Lancaster. My friend Gilbert, who’d lived in a foster home in
Lancaster for a while before moving back with his family in La Puente (east of
L.A. in the San Gabriel Valley), showed up in town by bus. He talked me into moving
to get away from my ex-boyfriend and to try something new. And so I lived with
him, his mom, stepdad, and siblings. They too called themselves Mexican, and
called me Huera, and spoke mostly in English, with bits of Spanish thrown in,
but Gilbert also called me Lucy when he felt like it. He did it almost in that
way that parents sometimes use their kids first, middle, and last name to get
their attention. He loved to loudly, exaggeratedly enunciate his grandfather’s favorite
expression, delivered with rolled eyes and dry sarcasm: “Valgame dios.” (“God
help me”). Gilbert cooked magnificently and dramatically; he later became a chef.
He often made us chilaquiles for breakfast (eggs, torn up corn tortillas,
cheese, Pato sauce…). His mom made a special fish soup for special occasions. And
with their family, I had lengua for the one and only time ever (beef tongue).
Some of our friends and family couldn’t
believe we weren’t ‘boyfriend and girlfriend,’ especially when we had to share
a room as the house filled up with even more extended family who’d had to move
in, but we were not. Yet we went almost everywhere together and functioned as a
platonic couple. Finally, after yet another big argument, I decided to move
(which meant putting everything I had in 4 or 5 brown paper grocery bags and carrying
them to the trunk of my car). Gilbert’s mom walked out there on that sunny late
morning, and she kept telling me to stay and that she’d have Gilbert move in
with his grandparents in Echo Park. But I said I couldn’t, that I didn’t feel
right having him leave his own family’s home in order for me to stay. He and I
revived our friendship once we weren’t living together.
***
From there, I moved in with my cousins,
who were in the ‘white world’ in my mind, a world that was strangely unfamiliar
to me in certain ways. Their music, their ways of dressing, their makeup (or
lack thereof), their one step instead of two step slow dance style, their other
ways of dancing, their casual drug use… I had before mostly only drank or smoked
weed (which I mostly avoided because it sometimes made me faint – low blood
pressure). For my white cousins and their larger crowd, some of whom became friends
of mine, I was the different one. They welcomed me, but I felt like I’d moved
from another country in some ways. I’d grown up in my own white family, but this
experience had been so blended with what I called back then Mexican or Chicano or
Colombian or Hispanic family, friends, food, culture... My mom made us chorizo
and eggs from as far back as I can remember. Our larger family-friend meld was
‘multicultural’ (a word I didn’t know then) – mixed, blended… – especially in
my specific experiences.
My dad told me that his identical twin
– my Uncle Alto – got called ‘Chicano Jones’ for a while as a teen, because he’d
picked up a Chicano accent from his friends. They grew up in South Central L.A.
after they’d moved from New Jersey as 6 year olds. At 16, Alto married his pregnant
girlfriend. He quit school to work fulltime at a factory full of chemicals and
other dangers (a friend almost died by electrocution there). Three kids later,
his marriage ended, and in his late 20s, he married Dolores, who had two very
young kids, Isabel and Johnny. He became their dad; they became my cousins; Dolores
became my aunt.
The white cousins whose ‘world’ I’d
joined were (in part) Alto’s daughters from his first marriage. They felt
animosity toward “Dolores and her family,” and sometimes still do, even decades later. Yet they feel affection as
well. When my cousin Isabel’s husband and son were murdered (elsewhere in this
blog, I call her Elizabeth out of over-anxious concern for her privacy) – when
they were killed, my cousin Carolyn immediately came out from Colorado. Love,
jealousies, pains, resentments, nostalgia (memories of Carolyn in Isabel’s
quinceañera) – all these and so much more are welded together…
More than once, I lived with Alto,
Dolores, Isabel, and Johnny (and various others who happened to be living
there), and Dolores’s family became my extended family as well. We’d sit around
the table at her parents’ home in Montclair (near Pomona, east of L.A.), and
tell stories for hours. They always had a stockpot of beans on the stove with
the burner turned low, and a stack of homemade flour tortillas for whoever
showed up or was living there (there was always a crowd). And coffee. Pelón,
Dolores’s brother, had a heroin habit he’d brought back years before from his
Vietnam tour, like some other vets from that war. No one said much about it. Pelón worked full-time, raised his
son, and quietly got his fix as needed to function. No one there saw that part
of his life. And then one day, for reasons no one understood, he O.D.’d; he
died. But before then, Pelón was Pelón, not “a drug addict,” or anyone to be preached
to or ostracized or pitied.
***
Finally, I moved back to Lancaster as a
single mom with my two-year-old son. I rented the duplex adjoined to Gloria’s.
She was married by then (her husband was Mexican – he couldn’t speak Spanish),
and they had two kids. I moved back and forth between Lucy and Huera – and I
enrolled at the community college. So much code-switching – a term I only have
learned in more recent years – moving back and forth linguistically,
culturally, ontologically (?)…. (Ontological: “of or relating to essence or the
nature of being” The Free Dictionary.)
Ontological: a word I only learned in recent years; what is funny is
that academics are always talking about ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of being in
the world,’ but it was from Gloria that I first acquired this expression back
when we were kids. She said things like, “He has such a weird way of being…”
***
At a pedagogy group this year
(pedagogy: “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic
subject or theoretical concept” Google), one of the guys – a white guy in his
late 20s or early 30s – friendly, smart, one of those people who it just seems
like everyone would like – who’s just now finishing up his PhD in education – had
us do a reading on critical race theory. One thing the Filipino-American author
of that text said was that because whiteness is dominant in the U.S., someone who’s
white could never know how it is to be the only person of color among a group
of whites – that being the only white person among a group of Latinos,
African-Americans, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans… was not the same, because
the dominant white culture remained beyond that specific situation. This seems true to me.
And yet I said with some trepidation at
sounding ridiculous, “Well, I know what he’s saying, but I feel like my
experience is kind of different…” But
what words could I use to quickly convey that experience? Even what I have
written here is minuscule compared to the realities. And awkward, I worry. I said a few sentences
about it – something which undoubtedly sounded inane (“I grew up with Hispanic
friends and some family…”)
(Even the use of the word “Hispanic” is
wrong now in academia; but none of my “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Mexican” or
“Colombian” family and friends use “Latino,” so it always feels a bit feigned to
me when I use it… I noticed when I read the 2011 book, Living “Illegal”: The Human Face of Unauthorized Migration, that the
immigrants who the authors called Latino/a called themselves and others from
Latin America Hispanics. Some of the authors are Latina/o. But still, there is always something about this
that feels strange for me, as if I’m going to tell my family and friends that
they don’t know it, but they’re supposed to be using the term Latina/o now
rather than Hispanic. It seems like an academic directive, because I learned it
in academia.)
I thought even as I said what I did in pedagogy that the guy in the group would see a white woman silly or presumptuous enough to think that she could
know. He smiled and shook his head and said, “No.” And I
can’t say that I know. I don’t even know how such a feeling could be measured,
or whether the Hispanic part of my family feel it in the way that the
African-American part of my family might feel it or the (first generation) Filipina
part of my family might feel it. Immigrants or native born? So many variables. But
I know that the nice guy from pedagogy has no idea what my experience
really is, either, as far as these things go. It is possible that he doesn’t understand how melded you
can get, so that you sometimes feel like some kind of undercover person moving around
amidst white people, wincing or lecturing or hurt and mad at times at the little or not so
little comments made which often imply whiteness as a norm and reveal racisms.
Sometimes some white people say things about people of color that they would not say if I were not white. And I feel angry, not
in some kind of ‘politically correct’ way (as some white folks who imagine
themselves to be ‘tell it like it is’ people think is the case) – no. I take it
personally. I take it as if they were expressing digs and slams about me or my
mom or my sister or my kids.
***
One time my friend Sophie was at a gathering
of her spouse’s coworkers and their partners, and a guy started putting down
Mexicans. She finally smiled and said, “Well, you know, I’m Mexican.” He hadn’t realized this, so he felt safe to
express some racism. He stammered and stuttered and tried to dig himself out of
his mortification.
Sophie doesn’t call me “Huera.” I know
her from another time and place in my life. She understands Spanish perfectly;
her mom spoke it to her, and then she answered in English. But Sophie hasn’t
spoken Spanish since she was six, because at the school she attended in Dallas,
Texas, kids used to get in big trouble for speaking in Spanish. She will
only pronounce Spanish words with an American-English accent. Sometimes I have said to her, "Man, what the heck did they DO to you in that school?" She only smiles.
***
Last year, I asked my good friend or
“brother” Joel (pronounced with two syllables; accent on the second) what word
he’d use, and he said he’d say Mexican to describe himself and his birth
family. He was born and raised in a small town in Texas. He said he’d use
Hispanic to describe his immediate family – his wife and two kids. Joel married
my “sister” Ana (Gloria’s sister; she always calls us sisters in a way that
goes beyond the use of this term in female friendships; we really are family).
So as a family, they are now Colombian-Mexican-American (reorder the words as
you wish). Joel and I sometimes email each other (to joke or debate), and in
one a couple years ago, he accidentally called me “Huerta” instead of “Huera.”
Huerta means garden, mostly a working, food-producing garden. I have run with that in my correspondence with him, and
sometimes with Ana or Gloria. After all, I am a gardener. Before I returned to school, it was my
passion. It has lain a bit dormant since then.
Huera means “light.” Lucy means
“light.” Huerta (I write it to him as HuerTa to playfully emphasize the new
“T”) means “garden.”
I don’t know what these things mean exactly. I am always writing about the need for finding our commonality, for finding solidarity. And I have family and close friends from such a multitude of backgrounds. Here I have shone a light on some of the “Hispanic” parts of my culture. I’m trying to explain part of who I am, and what I know, and why “race” or “skin color” or “ethnic background” are so inadequate at expressing one’s culture. I have a culture, partly regional, partly familial, partly friendship-based, a mix of so many experiences – and it is this garden, the particular people whose roots have been bound up with mine, years ago, or at various points along the way, even up to the present. Roots are always growing. Any gardener can tell you that about their HuerTa.
