Whenever I ask my mama what her first memory of America was, she says, "Who cares about me? You were born here." You were born here. That's my first strip of memories, my parents taking turns to berate me whenever I misbehaved or, later, asked about their pasts to deflect an imminent punishment. Never "Stop doing that!" or "Be quiet!" or "Finish your dinner!" It was "You were born here! It is something you can never lose. Don't forget that." "How can I?" I shouted. "You tell me every day!" I was five when I said this. "Ay, ¡qué malagradecida!" I had no life before America the way my parents did. I am a second-generation Mexican-American daughter of Mexican immigrants, meaning that of course I was ungrateful. I heard about my parents' sacrifices and how they forded an endless river of prejudices so often it sounded like a polished comic routine. When I was born, a white nurse asked my father, Gonzalo, "English is okay, Dad?" Through a haze of drugs and pain, my mamá, Dolores, sprang upright in her hospital bed and shouted, "Lady, we speak English!" My mamá, who is proud of her English but rarely uses it aside from talking to me, enrolled me in English-only classes at our elementary school. Mr. Chela decided the Spanish-language program was a better fit. The idea was parents could better help their children with their homework in a language they understood. Dolores refused. School was for me to learn English, not her. "I don't want you to be a slave in America," my mamá said.
"Teacher told me Lincoln freed the slaves!" I said proudly.
Mamá rapped me on my butt with her chanclas, twice. Once, for being disrespectful, and twice, for wasting my knowledge.
"Use your smarts for good," she said. "Not backtalking tu mamá."
Mr. Chela threatened to transfer me to a school in the Valley an hour away on an old, wheezing school bus, thinking Mamá would back down.
"If they talk to you in Spanish," she said, "answer in English. If you don't, the school will take you away from me and we will never see you again."
My mamá and I ended up in the principal's office, two scolded women sitting in moldy, oversize chairs. Dolores shouted at Mr. Chela while I trembled that someone would come and snatch me away.
"Cálmese, señora," he said. "Somos mexicanos, ¿verdad?"
Dolores slapped away his proffered high five and said, "Show respect for a woman."
"My own kids are in Spanish-language classes," he said. "Your daughter is not ready."
Dolores rolled up her sleeves and said, "Look at our skin. I am lighter than you. Who is more American? Who deserves to learn English more?"
"You're crazy," Mr. Chela said. "But you win. Now please get out of my office."
Mamá tells these stories often, at family dinners and to strangers at tiendas pushing plump babies in shopping carts. My father, Gonzalo, whose English is tentative, shy, like a child hiding behind a parent's leg, has long ago mastered his passive head-nod-in-agreement. He is my mamá's physical responsibility and repays her care with a benign acquiescence. Before his erratic hand trembling got him fired and then made him unemployable, he was a hard worker, which is how every Mexican describes their dad. On Gonzalo's job sites, white men with clean nails called my father "a solid guy," which he repeated with pride. (We do not say "retired" in our house; trabajadores never retire.)