by Alisa Valdes
She had this new CD collection, too, full of screaming homely Latingirls like Julieta Venegas and that man-looking chick from Aterciopelados. At sucias gatherings back then, she screamed along with songs by a heavy-metal group called Puya, until she lost her voice. Amber dropped her last name that year, too. Quintanilla. She said she didn’t want people in the recording industry associating her with Selena. (You know, dead Selena, murdered Tejano singer Selena, holy, practically sainted Selena?) That was because, she said, “My music is harder than that, tougher than that. Selena was a wuss.” What kind of sacrilege is that?
And now? Now she’s living in Los Angeles with another rock en Español guy from Mexico. Apparently, they had an Aztec wedding ceremony last year, but did not exchange rings (Eurocentric symbols of ownership, she says), did not invite any sucias (we weren’t enlightened enough yet, she said, and she didn’t want our “mocking energy” to ruin things), and did not register the marriage with the government (false governments mean nothing to us, she says). This dude calls himself “Gato” and he’s the son of a corrupt Mexican government official. (That’s redundant, isn’t it?) Amber plays in a rock band of her own, singing mostly in Spanish and increasingly in Nahuatl, and, she says, negotiating with a few labels about that record deal she’s been chasing for a few years now. She records her own albums and sells them from fold-up card tables in nightclubs. Her hair is still long, but now it’s black. Black black, witchcraft black, all twisted up in these Medusa things that look like a cross between braids and dreadlocks, with strands of colored yarn woven in here and there. I don’t think she’s brushed it in a year. Her lipstick is this dark, gothic purple that almost matches her hair, and her eyes are rimmed in black liquid eyeliner. She’s had her nose, eyebrow, tongue, belly button, and nipple pierced, and her clothes are usually black, like her hair. She’s not ugly or anything, mind you. She’s just Amber. She’s pretty, always was. And she’s got these abs to die for because she only eats raw food, “the way our ancestors did,” she says, and because she runs a million miles a week with Gato up in the Hollywood Hills. Come to think of it, wasn’t it the Aztecs who ripped people’s beating hearts from their chests and took big old bites? That’s raw, for ya. But in the magical American Mexica movement of the new millennium, the Aztecs are now, like, pacifist vegans, not bloodthirsty conquerors. The Mexica version of the Aztecs, to me, sounds a lot like Ralph Nader in a loincloth.
Tonight she’s wearing a tight black jacket with fake feathers around the wrists and neck, like something Lenny Kravitz might spit up. She’s got a tight black crop shirt under that, even though it’s the middle of winter, so we can all see her damn rippling abs. Her pants are giving Rebecca a heart attack because they’re covered with colorful drawings of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a bikini. She has platform boots that lace up the front. Looking at her next to Sara is almost as shocking as that time the real Martha Stewart presented an award on MTV with Busta Rhymes.
We all move to a bigger table, and start chatting as sucias will. We don’t order yet, and everyone but Usnavys waits to start on appetizers until Elizabeth arrives. That means we wait another half hour. Then here she comes. I’m distracted by the rest of Sara’s story, which has to do with a bad deal on fabric for the guest room at her house, but seems as thrilling as a good mystery novel, so I don’t see when Elizabeth pulls up in her white Toyota Tacoma with the massive cross hanging from the rearview mirror and those little metal fish stuck to the back grate.
I find it hilarious; here’s this woman, so tall and thin and beautiful that she earned a living as a runway model during college, and she drives a freakin’ pickup? By choice? Maybe it’s because I’m from the Deep South, where pickups are reserved for a certain kind of Kool-Aid-drinking, bra-needing man named Bubba. She says it’s comfortable, handles well in the snow, and is just right for carting stuff around. It’s true: Elizabeth is always taking boxes of donated clothes and canned food from her church—a mammoth, shiny space-cube in the suburbs—to the city’s homeless shelters. She volunteers her truck every summer to the Christians for Kids summer camp in Maine, hauling inflatable rafts and archery equipment. At the end of summer, she piles the truck bed high with bales of hay, and children on top of that, for a slow drive to the creek. Whee.
Maybe it’s because she grew up poor in Colombia and doesn’t understand the nuances of American culture the way the rest of us sucias do. Elizabeth Cruz thinks trucks are cool.
One time I asked her how she ever expected to get a man driving a thing like that, and she shrugged. For a woman who loves kids as much as she does, Elizabeth seems in no rush to find a father for some of her own. She’s been single forever. Never even had a serious relationship that I know of. She goes on dates now and then, but never seems to stick to one guy more than a month. We try, we sucias, to set her up with whatever halfway good man we know and don’t want ourselves. But it never works out. And it’s not because no one is interested, okay? Just today Jovan Childs, my favorite dreadlocked flirting buddy at the paper, asked me—again—if I would hook him up with her. “I can’t believe you,” he whined. “You’re friends with Elizabeth Cruz and you won’t give a guy a break and introduce him. What’s wrong, you want me all to yourself?” I blew Jovan a kiss and didn’t tell him the truth: that I like Elizabeth too much to wish his brilliant, womanizing self on her—though I’m just self-loathing enough to think he might be an interesting prospect for me if things with Ed end badly, which I’m sure they will.
Anyway, Elizabeth says her tepid romantic life is because most men think she’s supposed to be a docile imbecile. They think this because she’s so intimidating in her beauty. “Great beauty can be a great handicap,” she said once, at one of our sucia dinners, without a hint of vanity. We all just stared at her. Amber laughed out loud. “I’m serious,” Elizabeth said. “I recognize beauty opens certain doors, but it also keeps some doors locked. Given a choice, I’m not sure I would want to look like this.” Usnavys said, “Don’t worry, Liz, it won’t last forever.”
Of all the sucias Elizabeth is by far the most fine. Her limbs are long and lean, even though she eats everything she wants, and her face peacefully symmetrical. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does, you can count on her saying something deep and unexpected.
Elizabeth is also the sucia with the best chance of ever stealing Roberto away from Sara, something she would never do because she’s Christian, a very nice person, and Sara’s best friend. On those occasions when we assemble for a meal, ski trip, or yawny Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade, Roberto always asks about Elizabeth, and no other sucia. He gets that look in his eye, too, when he asks. He also stares at her like that, even in front of Sara. He did it at their wedding even. We all just stood there watching him watch Liz while Sara danced with her father. We looked at each other and wanted to kick his ass. Liz seemed embarrassed, and avoided him at every turn. I’ve mentioned it to Sara, and she says, “What do you want, perfection? Elizabeth is gorgeous, he’s a man. He can look, but if he touches, and he won’t, he’s a dead man.”
I can’t imagine trusting a man that much. Again: Must be nice.
Elizabeth also has a hard time because she’s a black Latina. Black as in African. She won’t tell you this, but I know it’s true: Black American guys love the way she looks, and more than one has commented on her resemblance to Destiny’s Child lead singer Beyoncé Knowles, in part because of the dyed blond hair and in part because of the perfect body. Tonight, she’s wearing comfortable-looking blue jeans, duck boots, a thick brown wool sweater, and one of those Patagonia-type parkas, in forest green—very bland if you ask me. Her hair hangs down long and straightened, and she has no makeup on and still looks better than the rest of us combined. It’s those teeth, those incredible white teeth, and that golden brown skin, and those large, liquid eyes. She’s a hell of a dancer, too, especially when you throw on a cumbia or a vallenato. Girl digs her some Carlos Vives.
Non-Latino black guys don’t understan
d her background. I can’t tell you how many times a black American guy has accused me of lying when I told them my beautiful “black” friend was a Latina. “She doesn’t look Latina,” they say. “She looks like a sister.” Says who? I ask. They don’t know what to answer. You can’t make people travel or understand history, and I’m tired of trying. White American guys come at Elizabeth with all this baggage most of the time, and have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that she’s Latina and looks like that, too. And most Latinos, sadly, would prefer to date a butt-ugly illiterate white girl from South Boston, bucktoothed, retarded, and pigeon-toed, than a super-fine, virtuous black Latina with an amazing career.
This is true of all Latinos I know, no matter what color they themselves happen to be. They want a light girl. You can see it in our soap operas and magazines. All of the women are blond. No lie. I mean, if Hollywood pretends we all look like Penelope Cruz and JLo, the Latin media pretends we all look like a Swedish exchange student or Pamela Anderson.
Either way, everyone ignores the black Latinas.
It’s like black Latinas, deep dark Latinas, don’t even exist, you know, even though nearly half the nation of Colombia is black, and same with Costa Rica, Peru, and Cuba. There are more blacks in Latin America than in the United States, but no one here seems to know that. Now and then a black character will pop up on a Univision or Telemundo series, and she’s invariably wearing a turban and a long white skirt, pushing a broom around and concocting some witchcraft revenge on her kindhearted blue-eyed master; the evil Aunt Jemima, in other words. Or Sambo. Just last week I saw a telenovela with a black male character and the dude actually had a bone through his nose and danced around a big old bonfire, ululating. Most of that Latin soap garbage is made in Mexico, Brazil, or Venezuela, where they have yet to experience any kind of civil rights movement for people of color, but it gets watched all over the Spanish-speaking United States. Nobody in the American media is commenting on it, either. They probably don’t have a clue it’s going down, or if they do they’re probably too scared of seeming critical of those neato Latinos to even try. Anyway, I’ve tried to bring it up with Elizabeth, but she brushes me off.
“That’s not it,” she says with that placid look of hers and that sheepish, magnetic smile. (She’s got the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen—did I mention that already? I guess I did. That’s because my own are a spectacular yellow.) Then politely, with her almost imperceptible hint of a Spanish accent, she’ll say something like: “I’m seek (sick) oaf (of) the way jew (you) relate everything to skeen (skin) color, Lauren. It’s so … American. In Colombia, nobody cares.” I find that very hard to believe. Plus, she’s here now, and America cares. And she has yet to find a man.
SO HERE WE are. The sucias of Boston University, gorgeous and brilliant, talented and crazy, every color of the rainbow, a few different religions. We hug, we gossip, in Spanish, English, and every conceivable mix of the two, we order our twenty-one—yes, twenty-one, four for five of us, one for Rebecca—plates of food, our beers, and Materva sodas, and then we get down to the business of catching up.
We talk about that first night out with the sucias, after the bouncers at Gillians dumped us on the curb.
“Remember how cold it was?” Sara asks, sipping on her ginger ale. Why does she look green? Is she ill, or am I drunk?
“Ooosh.” Usnavys waves her hand in front of her. “It was freezing!”
I remember. There’s this way the night air just sort of stands chilled and still in Boston after all the clubs have closed and even the T has stopped trundling through Kenmore Square. Dead, frozen, salty air. Like tonight.
“We were crazy,” Elizabeth adds, shaking her head and leaning forward. “Completely crazy.”
Oh, yeah. Only the youngest, dumbest college students are still out on the street at that hour, puking in gutters to prove they’ve finally, like, grown up. That was us, the sucias, sick and laughing and staggering and, we believed, finally free.
“And we walked,” Amber says. We all laugh, and she retells the story.
Like the young estúpidas we were, we walked back to the dorms that night—past the trashy alleys swarming with water rats the size of small dogs, past Fenway Park, along the creepy, butt-smelling Fens. We saw some young Latino guys handing foil balls to some white lawyer-looking guys in nice cars on one corner. We saw a guy with a greasy Afro and a pink pimp hat yelling in Ebonics at some chick. We saw two men getting it on in the reeds along the stinky water. It was, like, Wow, girl, we finally here, in Boston, in college, in the big city. Without parents, together. We pushed each other and giggled like we’d never die, freezing cold in our tight Rave club clothes—all of us except Rebecca, who looked like she was on her way to catechism class in a wool suit and red headband; she hugged her thin arms close to her body and stared at us like we were crazy. The rest of us had this crazy blue steam coming out of our mouths into the dark cold, but not Becca Baca. I wondered then if she were the devil, with icy communion wine in her veins, and was just loaded enough to ask her. She didn’t find it amusing. In fact, she didn’t talk to me for two months. Even then, that girl was uptight.
We sucias were stupid in other ways, too, like always walking around trying to speak Spanish just so people would know, you know? Just so they’d know we were Latinas, because with us you can’t always tell from looking. Only Sara and Elizabeth got Spanish right all the time, and that’s because Sara’s from Miami, where (duh) Spanish is, like, the official language (don’t laugh, it truly is a foreign country down there) and Elizabeth is from Colombia, where Spanish, like, is the official language. The rest of us stumbled through El Castellano, with all the grace of drunk hippos in a glass shop. Nobody knew the difference. Nobody knew that we had no idea what a Latina was supposed to be, that we just let the moniker fall over us and fit in the best we could. The important thing, though, is that we were sucias, and sucias stuck together. We studied together, shopped together, worked out together, complained together, laughed and cried together, grew up together. Sucias stuck to their word, too. Still do.
“We’ve come a long way since then,” Usnavys says with a wink. She raises her glass of white wine, pudgy pinky out. “To us.”
“To us,” we chime in. I guzzle the rest of my beer, burp—prompting another wrinkle in Becca Baca’s nose—and signal the waitress for another. I can’t remember how many I’ve had. I guess that’s a bad thing. At least I’m not driving. I keep drinking for the next hour, and listen to the stories.
“Miranos,” I babble in Spanish, convinced, as I get when drinking, that I can do anything, including speak Spanish without butchering the language. “Que bonitos somos.”
“Bonitas,” Rebecca corrects me. Is that a triumphant smile? “Que bonitas somos. We’re girls.”
“Whatever.”
Rebecca shrugs in a way I interpret to mean, “Fine, be an imbecile if you wish.”
“Leave her alone,” Elizabeth says. “She’s doing the best she can.”
“It’s good you’re trying,” Usnavys says, her eyes soft with pity. But it’s too late. I feel like an idiot. And the words burble up.
“My life sucks,” I say. “It’s true. I’m stupid. You happy now, Becca Baca? I’m an idiot. You’re perfect, I’m crap. There, I said it.”
“No, no you’re not. Stop it, Lauren,” Elizabeth says. “You’re fine.”
Sara puts her hand on Elizabeth’s arm and nods. “Yes,” she says, “you’re fine, Lauren. Cut it out.”
Even though I swore I wouldn’t do it again, I’m drunk and can’t help it. I begin to offer what are probably too many pitiful details of my own life. I can feel Rebecca thinking I shouldn’t reveal so much. She gives me that look. No one notices, so I feel crazy paranoid again. And pathetic. But I can’t help it. There’s something in me—beer, mostly—that makes me talk too much.
I tell them the whole thing: that Ed the Head has been distant and evasive, that I think something’s going on but c
an’t be sure, that I tried to find out by breaking into his voice mail at work, which happened to have the same password as his ATM card, whose code I remembered from that one time I had to use it to get cab money while he hailed the taxi. I tell them what I found there: a couple of messages from a cute little breathy voice thanking him for dinner and the great time. I tell them I don’t know if it’s worth it to marry a guy I don’t even find physically attractive, who lives in New York and spends more money on just one of his tailored shirts than he did on my last birthday present, a big-headed San Antonio Texican who wears cowboy boots with his Armani suits and tells everyone his name is “Ed Gerrymile-oh” instead of being honest and saying his name is Eduardo Estéban Jaramillo, former dusty-ass adobe church altar boy.
I tell them I’ve tried to boost my sagging self-esteem by flirting unhealthily with the slick hip-hoppy Jovan Childs across the newsroom, that it escalated almost to the point of a kiss just the other night when he took me to a Celtics game, that we were so close I could see the wet, yellow rubber bands on his braces. I tell them that even though I have seen Jovan in action with other women—he measures his self-worth by how many ladies he can date at once—I have this crazy hope that I’ll cure him of the commitment phobia because he is the most intensely intelligent and talented writer I’ve ever known and his columns make my heart break in a million pieces every time I read them.