In just one year of living in the United States we, meaning my sister and I, had according to our mother, become Americanized. Isabel and I preferred hot dogs to empanadas, watched TV in English, and ate cereal with a tiger painted on the front of the box, digging our hands deep in search of prizes. We talked in English at home when we didn’t want Mom or Dad to understand what we were saying. To combat this or at least slow it down a bit, Mom decided to enroll us in Bilingual. Mom learned of the Bilingual Program from a woman she worked with in the housekeeping department of the Marriott Hotel. Her son, the woman had told her once as they tucked the ends of a sheet into the corners of a king-size bed, was being taught all his school subjects in Spanish. So, on the first day of school Mom took the day off work, something she never did, in order to take us to school to enroll us in Bilingual. That September I was going into third grade, and Isabel fifth.
“We shouldn’t be in Bilingual,” Isabel said to me.
We were sitting on the couch watching “Tom and Jerry” on the TV and waiting for Mom to finish getting dressed. Mom always wore her best clothes—a red shirt with a pair of black slacks— whenever she went to see important people—doctors, lawyers, school principals. She had worn the same outfit on the plane when we first arrived in Chicago.
“Mom said Bilingual was so we learn Spanish,” I said.
Isabel flicked two fingers on my forehead. “We already know Spanish,” she said. “We shouldn’t be in Bilingual. Bilingual is for kids that don’t know any English. No one talks to those kids.”
Isabel, being older than me, cared about people talking to her. She didn’t acknowledge me on the hallways or in the lunchroom because little sisters were like the kids in Bilingual—older siblings didn’t talk to them.
To Mom, losing our language meant losing our culture—who we were, where we came from, and everyone who came before us.
At home, in our third-floor two-bedroom apartment on the North Side of Chicago with the black metal fire escape out the dining room window, Mom made sure Colombia was with us. Mom decorated the apartment to remind us of back home. She put throw pillows on the couch that were the colors of the Colombian flag—yellow, blue, red. On the living room wall above the television hung three gold-plated plaques arranged in a row depicting various aspects of the Colombian way of life. One plaque depicted a man dressed in traditional Colombian peasant pants and shirt, his hat with a strip of cloth colored yellow, blue, red. The center plaque depicted the Colombian flag with a condor perched on the staff. The third plaque was of a woman in a dance pose wearing a skirt the colors of the Colombian flag and a white shirt with sleeves that fell over her tan shoulders. The Chicago apartment reminded me of Colombia more than the actual house we had lived in in Colombia had. The living room seemed to me a replica of the consulate’s office where we went to get our Visas and passports, minus the large oak desk.
We walked beside Mom the three blocks to school in silence until we got to the front door. Mr. Castro, our security guard, opened the door for Mom and us to enter. Mom quickened her pace once inside; Isabel and I walked a little faster in attempts to keep up with her.
“Mrs. Shorter,” Mom said to the school secretary, who sat behind a barrier made out of wood meant to keep most people out. It had a door that swung open when someone behind it pressed a little button to let administrators and teachers and the kid that recited the pledge of allegiance over the school PA system inside in the mornings. If you weren’t an administrator or a teacher or that kid that recited the pledge of allegiance and they found you in there, you were in trouble.
“Do you have an appointment?” the school secretary asked.
Mom looked at Isabel who quickly translated what the school secretary said. Mom turned to the school secretary and nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“Follow me.”
Yes and okay and thank you were about the only words Mom knew in English so Isabel had to translate everything for her—letters from immigration, job applications, and papers our teachers sent home for her to sign.
“But your daughters know English now. They don’t need Bilingual,” Mrs. Shorter said. “They are doing quite well.”
Isabel translated for Mami.
“Bilingual. Yes,” Mom said. Mom’s lips tightened. She turned to Isabel. “Dile.”
Isabel told Mrs. Shorter that our mom was insisting that we be put in Bilingual, she wasn’t going to leave otherwise.
Mrs. Shorter sat up straight and took in a deep breath. “Can you tell your mother that Bilingual is for children that don’t know any English?”
I watched Mrs. Shorter’s face scrunch up as Isabel translated.
“She says she wants us in Bilingual,” Isabel said.
They went back and forth a few more times until finally Mrs. Shorter hung her head, then looked up at our mother. “Fine,” she said. “Tell your mother you will both start Bilingual tomorrow. You and your sister will be pulled from your homeroom at 1:15 pm.” Then Mrs. Shorter looked directly into Mom’s eyes. “But it’s no bueno.”
Isabel translated and Mom stood and smiled at Mrs. Shorter. “Thank you very much.”
Decorating the apartment wasn’t the only way Mom kept Colombia alive as if it was another member of the family. On Saturdays, her only days off of work, she made us write letters she dictated to our grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and just about anyone we knew back home in Spanish. We wrote to tell them about our friends in school, the toys we got from the community church, and what foods we ate. We described in vivid detail and accented words the apartment we lived in and the streets in our neighborhood, how they were paved and how when it rained the roads didn’t become mud puddles, but rather the water ran down a sewer. Our fingers cramped from the speed at which we wrote. We wrote every week but when we got responses back it was to letters we had written three or five weeks before. We often had to try to remember what question the person writing us back was answering. Mail took three to six weeks to get to Cali, Colombia, from Chicago, Illinois; coming back could take longer.
Isabel and I were pulled out of our classrooms at 1:15 pm that next day and taken to room A12, a little room with no windows in the lower level of the school next to the janitor’s closet, to learn in Spanish what we had already learned in English. We sat at a large rectangular desk next to kids who didn’t speak English.
I sat between Guadalupe, a little girl from Mexico, and Miguel, a boy from Puerto Rico. Isabel sat at the other end of the desk next to a boy named Juaquin from Chile and another boy named Armando from Argentina.
Mrs. Suarez, our Bilingual teacher, passed out a worksheet with math problems—multiplication and division, and some word problems written in Spanish.
“Culo, muchachos,” Armando said with a side smile.
Isabel and I immediately looked at each other, stunned that he would say such a word out loud in class. The other kids burst out in laughter and Mrs. Suarez froze mid-step.
“Suerte,” Armando said. “Culo. Good luck.”
At home Isabel and I told Mom what Armando had said, and she shook her head. “Esa gente,” she said. “Butcher the language.”
To Mom, “esa gente” referred to anyone not Colombian. When you lived and grew up in a place where all you see are people like you, everyone not from where you are from are “those people.” The first time I heard Mom use this phrase was during the Miss Universe pageant of 1986 that year, the last one we would watch together as a family. The Miss Universe pageant was a big event at our house, right up there with the FIFA World Cup. The World Cup and the Miss Universe pageant were like American football and apple pie to us.
Isabel and I became friends with the Bilingual kids after a few weeks. We sat at lunch together; we traded lunches. I would trade my platanos, which Guadalupe argued were not bananas, Miguel called them guineos, and we traded stories of what things were like in the countries we were from and what we missed most. Guadalupe missed her grandmother’s homemade chocolate, Juaquin missed father, and Miguel missed pastelitos, which were tamales. I tried to remember things from Colombia I missed but couldn’t think of anything. I didn’t miss the mosquito net we all slept under or the tadpoles that squirmed in puddles on the streets after a rainy day or only having three channels to turn the TV to or the outhouse with no light in the middle of the yard next to ducks my aunt kept so we had eggs for breakfast. Isabel said she missed Postobon, an apple-flavored soda.
At home, Isabel and I started talking like the kids in our Bilingual class. I would tell Isabel she was being a paja and should go to bed early. And when Dad asked for a beer after work I said here is your palo as I passed it to him. Isabel and I found it hilarious that in Mexico a torta was a sandwich and a pastel was a tamale, and how Miguel didn’t roll his r’s when he said car or rice. Mom didn’t find this amusing. But at least being in Bilingual meant we didn’t have to write letters to anyone in Colombia anymore. Bilingual was keeping our Spanish fresh.
The Miss Universe pageant of 1986 started like all the ones prior to that year had—Mom predicting and praying for a victory for Miss Colombia. It was 6 p.m. Isabel turned on the TV to the Univision channel. Mom was in the kitchen putting the last empanadas in the serving tray and Dad sat on the couch—his t-shirt rolled up over his stomach so that his perfectly round belly button was exposed. I sat crossed legged on the floor inches from the TV. When the announcer called out the first contestant Mom ran in and sat next to Dad. Miss India walked across the stage, then Miss Argentina. When Miss Venezuela walked out Mom said the Venezuelan’s cheated. Then it was Miss Colombia’s turn. When Miss Colombia walked onto that stage all four of us leaned in closer to the TV. We were all proud of Miss Colombia. Then Miss Puerto Rico walked on stage and the magic spell we were in was broken. We straightened ourselves up and watched as the announcer called the next contestant, Miss Switzerland, and so on. There were seventy-seven contestants in all representing different countries that year, countries like Guam that I had never heard of before. It was almost midnight when Miss Venezuela was crowned Miss Universe and Miss USA the runner up. We are all disappointed; Mom was devastated.
“It’s rigged,” she said and stormed off to bed.
Mom never wanted to come to America, but Dad said we couldn’t pass on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Tio Arturo, my dad’s brother, had managed to come to the US and was living in Chicago. He had gotten his residency after he married Tia Maggie and now he wanted his only brother with him. Our dad was Tio Arturo’s only living family member—on Dad’s side family died young. To Mom, coming to America meant leaving behind her family and friends, her home, her country. She refused to assimilate saying she was too old to start new. And while Dad enrolled in English classes at the community college, Mom doubled down on the Colombian theme in our new apartment. Among Mom’s favorite phrases was juntos pero no revueltos, which meant we were together but not scrambled or mixed together.
A few nights after the pageant during dinner, I made the mistake of asking Isabel to agarrame a spoon from the kitchen. Mami’s head lifted from her plate so fast you would have thought she’d gotten whiplash and gave me the look. The mistake wasn’t that I’d asked for the spoon; the mistake was in the word I used—agarra instead of coje. I didn’t use the word coje anymore after learning it meant a sexual act in the Spanish Guadalupe spoke. All week Mom had been watching us closely trying to catch one of us speaking like those people—was I rolling my r’s, was I using funny words to describe things, was I speaking in a different accent in Spanish. That day Mom had had a particularly tough day at work having to take on extra rooms to cover for a coworker that didn’t show up. She had come home an hour later than normal looking extra sweaty and disheveled with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken because she didn’t want to cook.
“What did you say?” Mom said.
Sensing trouble, Isabel stood up and went to the kitchen. Isabel always moved away from me when Mom got angry at me and would quietly laugh and point at me from a spot Mom couldn’t see.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said.
“So now I’m hearing things?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
I didn’t say anything. When Mom got mad the best thing was to just say sorry and look down at your hands.
“We’re losing them, Javier,” Mom said. “Is this what you wanted? To lose them to this place, these people?”
The next day Mom took the day off work to take us to school. She told Mrs. Shorter to take us out of Bilingual.
That Saturday, on Mami’s day off, we woke up to a bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast and two pieces of paper on the dining room table.
“Today we write to your Tia Martina,” Mom said.
“But why,” Isabel and I said at the same time.
“Because I may not be able to stop you from becoming Americanized, but I can stop you from becoming.” Mom took a deep breath and made a face of asco, like she was eating something rank. “Esa gente.”
Isabel and I looked down at our poor fingers. Letter writing started up again.
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