by Adi Alsaid
It was easy to scream at Angel when he used them hateful words. But the real fear came when we heard about families being ripped apart, even people we knew being rounded up and taken away. Curse words wouldn’t protect Leticia and her family.
* * *
Although it was my car, Leticia claimed the radio. She was our DJ for the two hours until we reached Salvation Mountain. The bag of snacks stuffed in the tote bag rested by her feet for easy access.
“Let’s listen to Ariana Grande,” Leticia said.
We sang Ariana at the top of our lungs, the windows wide open, carrying our loud, out-of-tune singing voices to the cloudless blue sky.
“Why can’t your car be a convertible?” Leticia asked. She tapped the Puerto Rican flag hanging off the dashboard. The flag was the symbol of my origin story: Puerto Ricans who ended up in California and so far away from the island. As for the car, it was a hand-me-down from my older brother, who’d practically run it into the ground.
“It nearly is. You don’t see that?” I pointed to what looked like a bullet hole. My brother swore it was just a fluke, a rock that somehow penetrated the exterior of the car. I didn’t believe him. “Don’t complain. At least we have a car. I don’t see you driving anything.”
“When I have money I’m going to buy a convertible like the one Louise drives, and I’ll get license plates that says Browngrlz 4ever.”
“That’s too many characters for a license plate, stupid,” I said. Leticia snort-laughed, which made me laugh too.
The traffic slowed down a bit, and a man who looked like someone’s tio in the car driving alongside of us stared, so I did what I did.
“What are you looking at?” I yelled.
“Mind your business, you ugly piece of...” Leticia added and we snort-laughed some more while the tio returned his attention to the road. We felt fearless. Bold. Like we could say and do whatever we wanted.
The first hour went fast. We could track the time from the albums we sang along to (Ariana and Bad Bunny) and the amount of snacks we ate. We talked about the dreams we had (I don’t ever dream; Leticia’s dreams are always about flying), and we talked about the best red lipstick ever made (Wet N Wild Cherry On Top). We didn’t talk about the future, because that meant stress and I didn’t want to invite stress into the car with us. More and more raids were occurring in Vernon, where her parents worked. Every day we wondered if the man in the White House would round up all the “maybe citizens” and lock them away. This was our constant fear. It forced us to create contingency plans. My parents’ garage could shelter a family for a while, but a better idea would be to find a white family to hide them. We talked for hours, figuring out what we could do if the worst happened.
But not today. Today we were on an adventure.
“I see it!”
Leticia didn’t hear me at first. She was too busy rapping along to Janelle, but I could see it. Salvation Mountain. It seemed to pop up out of nowhere on the long stretch of road.
“Wow,” Leticia finally said. She even lowered the volume of the radio, as if the vibrant colors might sing out a melodious tune to welcome us and she didn’t want to miss it. I slowed down to let the ethereal landscape come into focus, and then found a parking spot. We weren’t the only ones who’d made the trek. The place was filled with people. Families and hipsters and tourists.
“You ready?” Leticia asked. She handed me Cherry On Top, and I adjusted the rearview mirror to reapply.
Whenever we arrived at a new space, Leticia and I had an unspoken rule. We entered with imaginary armor; armor that would protect us from questionable stares. We walked in at the ready, our lips pressed tightly together until the space was ours and we could smile widely.
Circles of girls wearing the typical music festival uniform posed in front of the waves of color. Leticia took hold of my hand, and we walked past them to the top of the mountain, right to the large sign in red that states God is Love. She stood in front of me, taking picture upon picture. Smiling. Serious. Silly face. Then it was her turn to make the same faces.
“Together,” I said.
Leticia held the phone high so that it could include both of us and the extreme hues that enveloped us like colorful clouds. The sun kissed our skin. For those brief moments, we owned the celestial land.
“Let’s explore,” she said. We followed the yellow path down the monument and entered the cave-like rooms where so many objects were on display. My favorites were the old books and the sand-encrusted mirrors.
“If you had to live here, where would you sleep?” I asked.
Leticia wrinkled her nose and studied the room carefully.
“Right here.” She pointed to an elevated space made to look like a bench. “And you would sleep here.” She pointed to the floor and laughed.
“You wish,” I said, lightly pushing her.
Leticia found the perfect spot for us to eat our sandwiches, away from the crowd, underneath a tree painted in rainbow colors.
“I wish I had skills like an artist,” she said. “I don’t have any skills. I don’t even know why I’m bothering going to school.”
I shook my head. School would soon end, and with that came decisions that were made a few months ago: community college for Leticia, work for me. Leticia got this way, sometimes; she’d start to doubt herself, and that quickly became contagious, because I too would start to doubt myself.
“You’re going to school because you’re smart, stupid,” I said. “Because your parents are busting their asses to make sure you do something other than work. Besides, you are not going that far. Take some classes, see what you like, and then keep moving forward. Pa’lante, remember?”
“Pa’lante. Right. You’re not attending, and maybe that’s why I’m nervous. Like, how am I supposed to follow when you are not right by me?” she asked. “What if I fail? What if I waste everyone’s time and money?”
“What if you succeed? What about that? Stop saying no to yourself. If you win, I win. We are here to take over. Together.”
She nodded. “You are right! We made it to Salvation Mountain.” She paused. “It was a magical place on our list, and now we can scratch it off, because we got here. The magic is part of us. We can do anything.”
I pointed at some posing white girls. “They don’t know this yet, but we got this,” I said. “All of it. We are going to win in spite of the walls and the dumb obstacles they place before us. We’re warriors.”
“Warrior hermanas,” Leticia said. “We should get a tattoo right here.” She pointed to her flexed arm, then pulled out her phone and added warrior hermana tattoos to our list.
“Here, eat.” She handed me half of the Palomilla steak sandwich we’d picked up from Tito’s Market. We finished our food and stayed another hour, until sunset. The drive back would have us hitting El Monte late. We had to go.
“The guy who made this, Leonard Knight, was such a religious freak,” Leticia said as she read writings on the wall that declared peace and faith and temperance. “Everyone should live like this.”
“Like religious people?” I asked. “Living righteously only works for people with money.”
“No, you’re wrong,” she said. “We can live by these rules. Everyone can. If they took these words into their life, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now. People wouldn’t be afraid of my family.”
I didn’t want to argue with Leticia. It was her tone. She needed to be right, so I let her be right. She took a picture of the sign, and we quietly walked back to the car.
* * *
To leave Salvation Mountain, we had to take the two-lane road towards Niland, California. When the cars in front of us slowed down, we knew there was trouble ahead of us. How was it that we hadn’t noticed the roadblock on the way in? We’d been too busy singing, too busy rushing toward Salvation.
“They’re checking,”
Leticia said. There was no panic in her voice, not yet. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with this. But we’d let our guard down, and now we were stuck behind these cars, inching closer to the men in uniform. “What if they take me in? What’s our plan?”
“Don’t say a word. I will talk.” We hadn’t done anything wrong, and we had to maintain that feeling because fear would get us nowhere. “We’re good.”
The closer we got to the checkpoint, the tighter my hands gripped the steering wheel. We were not even close to the border, but here they were, ICE, doing what they did best. Leticia pulled down the mirror and placed her hair up in a bun. Her lipstick still glistened red. The car in front of us was full of a bunch of girls we’d seen earlier, taking pictures in front of the mountains, just like us, except they were white.
One of the patrolmen talked while the others looked on menacingly. Jokes must have been exchanged, because one of the girls flicked her hair back and laughed. Leticia connected her phone to the car charger. She practiced her smile, as did I. I stopped the car in front of the line of border patrol cops. One of them held a leash connected to a large German shepherd.
“Who here is Puerto Rican?” he asked, pointing to the miniature flag hanging off the dashboard.
“We both are,” I said. Big smiles. I turned to Leticia and she nodded.
“Too bad,” another patrolman teased. I focused on the one in front me, but sometimes glanced over—to the dog, to the men wearing sunglasses that shielded their eyes. Their mirrored sunglasses reflected my face.
“My family is from Bayamon, but we moved to Los Angeles. Silly, right? We should have stayed near the beach.” I spoke too fast. His name tag said Ortiz.
“Where are you from?” I asked. Beside me Leticia shifted. Her leg bounced nervously.
“Mexico,” he said. A patrolman led the dog around my car. My gaze went to Ortiz’s badge and the revolver that clung to his hip.
“You’re an Ortiz. That’s my mother’s name,” I said, clearly becoming more and more like ditzy Thelma. “We could be related.”
“No,” he said with finality, and he was right, because he had the gun and all I had were my stupid words. We smiled at each other. “So, you’re not even really Puerto Rican. You were born here.”
And I joked, “So?” But he shook his head, because I’d failed his test. The cop who stood behind him didn’t grin at all. His hand rested on his belt buckle. I continued to talk. Tell jokes. Flirt.
“And you?” he asked Leticia. She looked straight at me, her smile intact.
“I’m from Bayamon too,” she said. “We’re cousins.”
He stared at her for a long moment. My hands still clutched the wheel. My knuckles turned white.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to El Monte,” she said. “We’re going home.”
The patrolman with the dog finished his inspection. He stood alongside the others. No smile. No recognition at all. The man with the Ortiz name tag did the head nod, alerting us we were free to go. I shifted the car from Park into Drive. Leticia didn’t turn the radio back on. We continued in silence. I watched the roadblock recede behind us.
My heart was pounding so hard that my whole body seemed to shake with each beat. So many things raced through my head, words I should have said or not said. Had I smiled too much? I must have looked like a fool, like a parrot spouting nonsense. I couldn’t even look at Leticia, because I could feel it. I could sense her fear, and it was bound to explode.
“Puerto Rico. Do I look Puerto Rican to you?” she asked. Venom underscored her tone, and I understood why.
“What? Would it have been better for him to figure out you’re Guatemalan?” I asked. “I didn’t know what I was saying. I just wanted him to let us go.”
“His stupid face. His stupid grin. The way he talked like all he had to do was ask for ID.” Her voice trembled a little, because she was angry, like me. So angry that I wanted to cry.
“He didn’t though. He let us go, so we beat them. We tricked them.”
Leticia shook her head. “It’s so easy for you. You can come and go. You never have to worry,” she said. Her words stung.
“It’s not my fault I’m Puerto Rican,” I said. Puerto Rican means nothing, just ask the reality show host living in the White House. Just ask my family back on the island, who worry about their jobs and keeping their houses. But Leticia was right. I could move around. We’d left the island and found something better. Leticia’s family had left Guatemala with the same hope, and yet a simple checkpoint could mean the end for her.
“I was just trying to get us out of there,” I said. “Did you see the way they were looking at us? How the dog was looking at us, like it knew?” I said this loudly, because she needed to believe me. I hadn’t noticed how my foot was pressing down on the gas pedal. I was speeding. I thought about that time she’d told me about her cousins having to duck down in the car to avoid getting pulled over. How they wouldn’t travel to San Diego or anywhere near the border.
“I’m tired of hiding, of my parents having to pretend everything is fine while people around them think California is safe,” Leticia said. “I’m tired of having to look down at the floor when a cop talks to me.”
“But I have to look at the floor too,” I said, needing to defend myself. “We’re warrior sisters, aren’t we? We are in this battle together.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “It’s easy for you. My dreams aren’t of flying. They are nightmares of being locked away in a windowless cell.”
I rubbed away tears, but they kept flowing.
“I hate this life,” she said. “We can’t just get in a car and be free like Thelma and Louise. A stupid movie about white women.” She took off her bandana and tossed it out the window.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt ashamed for flirting with the border patrolmen, for doing what I had to do. Things are easy for me and my family. I’d be dumb to think otherwise, to believe that, because we are both brown, the world isn’t playing favorites when it clearly does.
I spotted the sign that read Salton Sea. I needed to get out of the car—it felt too crowded with emotions. I parked and didn’t bother letting Leticia know what I was doing, just opened the door and got out. Leticia soon followed. Flies circled us. The ground crunched as if we were walking on bones. Tiny bones. There was no one around to witness our sneakers crushing the stones to dust. Leticia was angry, and I didn’t know how to reach her or how to make things better. Leticia’s superpower was empathy, but my superpower sucked.
“It smells like death,” she said after a long silence.
“Yeah,” I said.
I didn’t grab Leticia’s hand. I just stood by her. We stared at the desolate Salton Sea and waited for a sign to point us back home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of the young adult novels Dealing in Dreams, The Education of Margot Sanchez, and Never Look Back. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.
VOLVIÉNDOME
Alaya Dawn Johnson
It’s different, every time I go back. The very familiarity makes it strange to me, as though I have fallen asleep to travel the old corridors of my half-forgotten childhood, where my friends and family and I slide into our grooves, side-by-side troughs in the sediment of the last thirty years, so deep that we can hardly see one another. But I am not asleep as I land in National (we old Washingtonians who remember our loyalties still refuse to use that bastard’s name). I am awake and my skin feels inside out, rasping like a hair shirt, as I step onto the gate bridge. The air is thick and sweet, the sun weak; I am stepping across a chasm, into another time, another life. I was born in DC, and I spent my twenties in New York, but five years ago I packed two suitcases and fled a
cross the border. I remade myself: I learned Spanish, found kindred spirits among my fellow displaced, diasporic artists of Mexico City, entered a master’s program to sit with ancient texts in old languages and dream of the past. I liked so much of the person I was becoming that I began to flinch from the girl I had been. Her places were not my own.
And yet, I have landed. I try not to think about what I have come here to do. It’s an old trick: some decisions, however necessary, must be left to the edges of your thoughts until you have already jumped; then, they can be grieved.
I think of Mexico instead—evening downpours, the morning trash bell, atole and tamales for breakfast, the old sun, the burning eye. But everyone else wants to get off the plane; my past pushes me forward. It’s different every time I go back, but this feeling of being two in one, a snake required at regular intervals to slide back into a dry and raspy skin—this is the same.
It is—a kind of—home.
* * *
I was nineteen years old, about to go on my third date with an older man. He had convinced me to give him my email address at a political rally that I was covering for my university newspaper. He had said, “Do you want to have your most interesting interview of the night?” I was feeling both overwhelmed and beautiful. He was too old for me, thirty-six, but I told myself I didn’t care. At least he was interesting. He had a kind of totalizing presence that comforted me with its familiarity, even though I halfheartedly bit back. The grooves were already there; his genius had just been to find them and make himself at home. We went to the restaurants that he wanted, listened to the seventies bands that he liked, and he lectured me on the big-name leaders of the US political left that had been neglected in my Washington DC private school education: Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Eric Foner, Howard Zinn. A bunch of white men, but when I called him on it, he said, reprovingly, that no white man was more anti-racist than he was. Didn’t he love black women?