Us, in Progress

by Lulu Delacre

  “¿La utz awach?” she said.

  Frank did not understand a word.

  “Ri in nub’i’ Romina,” the girl added, pointing to herself. “Ri in nub’i’ Romina.”

  Frank thought she was saying her name.

  “Soy Frank,” Frank said, pointing to himself and smiling back at the intriguing girl. “I’m Frank.”

  “‘S-o-y’? Soy Romina.” The girl pointed to herself. “Frank.” She giggled, pointing to Frank.

  A quick learner, Frank thought, surprised. As Romina rose from the ground, she dropped her drawing. Frank picked it up and stared at it for a long time. He had never seen so many swirling colors forming such a fantastic landscape. It was a picture of a blue river at the foot of lush green mountains sprinkled with pink and yellow houses. But the blue river wasn’t really blue, because it was made with swirling stripes of aqua and green and pink and violet. And the green mountains were drawn with swirling stripes of yellow and aqua and blue and lavender. The only black-and-white thing in the drawing was the skirt of the girl in the foreground. She walked barefoot down the hill and was bent over under the weight of the load of wood she carried on her back. Frank handed the drawing back to Romina, looking at her with a mixture of awe and admiration.

  “Muy bonito,” Frank said, gesturing to the drawing. “Very pretty.” He couldn’t help smiling at this girl. She held his complete attention.

  “Bo-ni-to.” Romina giggled. “Pre-tty.”

  Romina opened her bag, searching for something in it.

  Just then Frank heard his father calling. And Dad’s voice brought Frank back to reality. Frank shook his head, wanting to break the spell he was under. He had forgotten that Romina was most likely illegal.

  “Here, Dad! Come here; I found one!”

  Dad came over, followed by the agent on duty.

  “What’s going on?” they both asked.

  Romina took a folded card out of her bag. She gave it to the agent in uniform, looking straight at him with a smile. The name and address of her aunt in Providence, Rhode Island, was written on it. As was the name of the Mayan dialect Romina spoke: K’iche’. Dad and his colleague looked at each other. Dad walked away, talking on his cell phone as the agent led Romina to join the group.

  After just a few steps, Romina turned around and called Frank by name. She handed him her beautiful drawing.

  Two days later, Frank sat leaning against his bed, inking another superhero. All his black line drawings were full of angles. He felt the need to look at Romina’s drawing again. He pulled it out of its hiding place in his secret notebook. Even though it had been drawn with crayons on cheap paper, it was truly striking. He remembered Romina’s golden eyes. There was something about her that made him wish to see her again. He stroked Romina’s signature on her drawing with the tip of his finger and felt a deep longing. And then he was ashamed. She was beneath him. Or was she? Was it wrong to feel this way? Did it matter that she was not from a good old Spanish family like Gramps said Frank was? Frank sensed that he and Romina would be friends if they were classmates in Mission. He was so immersed in his thoughts that he didn’t hear Mom come into his room with a pile of clean laundry.

  “¡Qué bonito dibujo!” Mom exclaimed. “Did you make it? ¡Déjame ver! Let me see!”

  Startled, Frank hid Romina’s drawing and showed Mom his pen-and-ink art instead. But Mom didn’t fall for it. She kept probing until Frank told her in short bursts all about Romina. He told Mom how they had met and how mixed-up he felt about this girl.

  Mom sat next to Frank at the foot of his bed and placed her hand on his.

  “Frank, you think you’re above others because of those stories Gramps tells you,” Mom said. “Y está mal. It’s wrong. Mi padre, he doesn’t even know the truth. And you should learn about it.”

  “What do you mean?” Frank asked, puzzled.

  “Bueno,” Mom said. “It’s all in a letter your great-great-aunt sent me a while back. She’s the family’s genealogist. Wait here.”

  Mom left the room for a moment. When she returned, she had three pages handwritten in a script that must have taken years of calligraphy exercises to achieve. Mom read the letter aloud. There was a line that Frank asked Mom to repeat several times: Sólo el que carga el costal sabe lo que lleva adentro. He memorized it. He wanted to transcribe this Mexican saying later: Only he who carries the sack knows what it holds. The letter cited historical sources that documented the ancestry of Mom’s mother, Gramps’s wife, all the way back to the 1820s, to the Republic of Mexico. She was a descendant of the union between one of the Spanish governors of Mexico and a Mayan Indian woman. This fact had remained a guarded secret for generations, Mom explained. All high-society families valued the purity of the blood. And now here was his family history in plain sight for Frank to ponder what all this meant for him. He jumped to his feet and started pacing around the room. His hands turned to fists inside his pockets. Frank despised the bad people crossing the river. He could hear Gramps in his head saying, The worst are the indiecitos ignorantes.

  “Am I a mix of Spaniard and Mayan?” Frank asked under his breath. How was this possible?

  “Frank,” Mom said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  He looked at Mom, wanting to understand, wanting to be cool with it. But he just couldn’t. He needed to shoot some targets.

  A few weeks later Frank was back at the shooting range with Dad. He loved hanging out with him. As they waited to register, Frank remembered the talk with Mom. Once he had calmed down that afternoon, he had gone back inside to transcribe the saying onto the back of Romina’s drawing. Frank had spent many days trying to understand how these words related to him. Initially the knowledge of having a Mayan ancestor chipped away at the image Frank had of himself. But after reading some of the books on the Mayan civilization Mom borrowed from the library for him, something started shifting inside. He began to see things differently.

  “Here you go,” Dad said, making Frank focus on the task at hand. “Steady.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Frank raised the gun with both hands and aimed at the target. And he noticed that the rage he used to feel when shooting had lessened. Frank had recently learned that some of the kids crossing the border were escaping violence in their countries.

  “Dad?” asked Frank. “Do you treat all people crossing the border the same?”

  “It’s an important duty to protect the American way of life,” Dad said. “You have to follow the code of conduct, though. It’s not an easy job, Frank. Specially when you’re dealing with kids.”

  It was the last day of summer and Frank was at Anzalduas Park again, this time with Mom. She sat at a picnic table, reading under the shade of the trees, which dripped with Spanish moss. Dad had to work—on a Sunday—again. Frank took a soda out of the cooler and went over to the fishing dock.

  He gazed at the Rio Grande in front of him, but this time he didn’t scan it with anger. He had gone a few more times to the shooting range with Dad. He loved spending time with him, and still wanted to one day be a Border Patrol agent. But now he didn’t think that all people who crossed the river were bad. He thought again about how hard it must be to travel alone, not speaking the language, afraid of the Mexican gangs that at any moment could hurt you, extort money from you, or even kill you. It dawned on him that Romina was not only talented; she was courageous. He asked himself if he would have had the same courage if he were in her place. Little by little, Frank had come to realize that he was proud of having Mayan blood running through his veins. Gramps was wrong. Now Frank felt richer by being a mix.

  He trashed the empty soda can and walked back to Mom’s table, wondering about the letter he had written to Romina. During the Border Patrol’s summer barbecue, he had given it to the translator who had helped process and release Romina from custody. Frank had written a few sentences at the bottom of a pen and ink drawing he had created especially for her. He had asked her to teach him a little K’iche’. Fearing Da
d’s disapproval, Frank hadn’t mentioned the letter to him. What if Dad thought he was doing something wrong? Frank slid his hands into his pockets. He still carried his slingshot in one of them, but he sometimes forgot the ammo. The park was full of families enjoying themselves before the start of school. Frank noticed the green jays flying about. And, as he got closer to Mom’s table, he could see that she had set it for three. Frank arched his eyebrows in puzzlement. And then he saw Dad in the distance. Frank raced to meet him.

  “Dad!”

  On a flowered tablecloth Mom had spread grilled Tex-Mex chicken wraps, nopalitos salad, chorizo-stuffed chilies, and slices of cold watermelon. Frank grabbed a watermelon slice and sat across from Dad and Mom.

  “How come you’re here, Dad?”

  “What? Want me to go?”

  “No!” hollered Frank.

  “I switched duty with a friend,” said Dad. “I didn’t want to miss supper with y’all! It’s back to school tomorrow for you.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Summer sure flew by.”

  “Hey, son, remember the Mayan girl from Crazy Joe’s?”

  “Yeah?” Frank looked at Mom, who looked away.

  “I saw the translator today. He’s been in touch with social services in Providence. It looks like the girl is doing okay.”

  “Um,” said Frank. He bit into his watermelon, not wanting to meet Dad’s eyes.

  “Anyway, I have a letter she wrote back,” Dad said as he slid an envelope across the table. “Want it?”

  Frank gulped his food. “Oh,” he mumbled.

  “Sure glad you took an interest in her,” said Dad. “These kids have gone through a lot, ya know?”

  Frank looked at his Dad and nodded. Then Frank opened the envelope under the table. Inside, he found a drawing. It had a blue river surrounded by many tall gray buildings. But the blue river wasn’t really blue, because it was made with swirling stripes of aqua and green and pink and violet. And the buildings weren’t really gray, because they were made with squares and rectangles of ivory and tan and blue and lavender. In the foreground a girl with long black hair looked straight at the viewer, a snow cone in her hand. Three greetings were written one above the other in a column next to the girl’s face: ¿La utz awach?, hola, and hello. It was signed Romina.

  Frank stared at the drawing for a long time. He caressed the girl’s face and smiled. He folded the drawing and gently slipped it into its envelope, and then he slid the envelope into the pocket of his cargo shorts. Looking up, Frank lifted his eyes to Dad and then Mom. They were both smiling at him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to friends and acquaintances who throughout the years have shared bits of their lives with me, shedding light on difficult issues that touch young Latinos. I am thankful to the dedicated journalists whose articles inspired and informed the stories in this book.

  I’m most grateful to medical doctors Arturo E. Betancourt and Anastacio De Castro for their careful review of the stories that explore medical conditions.

  Muchísimas gracias to my daughter, Verónica E. Betancourt, for her invaluable insight and help in the development of the collection. You are a great developmental editor.

  I’m especially grateful to my editor, Rosemary Brosnan, for her unshakable faith in me and her insistence in asking for more than I ever thought I could give. Without her trust this book would have been quite different. I also thank the talented and skilled editorial and design teams at HarperCollins for their brilliant ideas, adroit comments, and for making me feel that the production of the book could not have been in better hands.

  Thank you, gracias, merci, to the photographers whose pictures inspired many of the portraits in the collection. I appreciate the generosity of Heart to Heart Children’s Village in Honduras, a nonprofit organization that cares for children like those in my stories.

  To the members of my critique group: Jennifer O’Connell, Susan Stockdale, and Janet Stoeke, as always, thank you for the “extra eyes.”

  TRANSLATIONS OF SPANISH WORDS AND PHRASES

  The Attack

  m’hijo: my son

  sí: yes

  fútbol: soccer

  una estrella del fútbol: a soccer star

  ¡Qué bueno!: Great!

  milagros: miracles

  la Virgen de Guadalupe: the Virgin of Guadalupe

  gracias: thank you

  ¡Ay, Diosito mío!: Oh my God!

  Vamos a rezar: Let’s pray

  niños: children

  mis milagros: my miracles

  Selfie

  El pueblo de Los Angeles: the town of Los Angeles (a historical site in Los Angeles, CA)

  ¡Ay, niño!: Oh, child!

  abuelo: grandfather

  ¿Estás loca?: Are you crazy?

  hola: hello

  mami: mom

  ¿Qué voy a hacer contigo?: What am I going to do with you?

  Día de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead

  fiesta: party

  calacas: skeletons

  calaveras: skulls

  ¡Felicidades!: Congratulations!

  Güera

  colita: small ponytail

  la familia: the family

  chaparro: shorty

  cho-co-cho-co-con-ají: chocolate with hot pepper (using the first syllables of the word for chocolate)

  azabache: jet; a black gemstone

  tíos: uncles; in the text it refers to uncles and aunts

  abuelos: grandparents

  de cariño: lovingly

  güera: Mexican term for “blonde girl”

  Cho-co-cho-co-cho-co-güe-ra: chocolate, blonde (using the first syllables of the word for chocolate)

  A que no se da cuenta la güerita: I’m sure the little blonde won’t notice

  Vé, charla: Go, chat

  Tú se lo quitas: You take it

  cada palabra: each word

  cho-co-cho-co-cho-co-DUL-ce: sweet chocolate (using the first syllables of the word for chocolate)

  cho-co-chi-ca-con-a-JÍ: chocolate, girl with chili pepper (using the first syllables of the word for chocolate)

  Burrito Man

  m’hijita: my little daughter

  Papi: Dad

  por favor: please

  Sí, sí, m’hijita, ya verás: Yes, yes, my little daughter, you’ll see

  refritos: refried beans

  cortadito: among Cubans, espresso with a shot of milk

  buenos días: good morning

  tu favorito: your favorite

  ¡Hasta mañana!: See you tomorrow!

  demasiado tarde: too late

  Band-Aid

  tres leches: three milks; a Latin American dessert made with three kinds of milk

  ¿Aló?: Hello?

  mi amor: my love

  mi hermanita: my little sister

  linda: pretty

  la gran madre: the Great Mother

  Ay, Diosito santo: Oh my God

  la migra: immigration police

  Sí, sí, entiendo: Yes, yes, I understand

  resanbinsi: Honduran rice and bean dish made with coconut milk

  Firstborn

  locura: craziness

  mofongo: savory green plantain dish popular in Puerto Rico

  Ay, bendito: Oh, dear

  nena: girl

  tu hermana: your sister

  ¿Verdad?: true; in the text: Isn’t it so?

  seguro: sure

  coquí: small tree frog from Puerto Rico named after its song

  Es postre: It’s for dessert

  tostones: double-fried green plantain fritters

  ¡Feliz cumpleaños!: Happy birthday!

  Feliz, feliz en tu día, amiguita que Dios te bendiga: Birthday song in Puerto Rico; “Be happy, happy today, little friend, may God bless you . . .”

  Luci tiene razón: Luci is right

  Cubano Two

  Cubanos: Cubans

  Tum, pakatum, pakatum, pantum: onomatopoeic words

  cumbia
: cumbia; called the musical backbone of Latin America, it predates salsa and other Latin rhythms

  Sudamérica: South America

  Norteamérica: North America

  ¡Rica azúcaaa’!: Delicious sugar!

  resolver: fix (in Cuban dialect, to patch things up until the next crisis)

  chiquitico: little one (in Cuban dialect)

  iguales: the same

  oye.: listen

  música: music

  vacilón: someone who enjoys having a good time (colloquial word)

  sázon: seasoning

  Peacemaker

  Abu: abu is short for abuela

  Purísima: Immaculate (in Nicaragua, this refers to the beloved Virgin Mary and her feast day)

  gofio: Nicaraguan candy

  Titi: Auntie

  Tío: Uncle

  buñuelos: sweet deep-fried fritters popular in Latin America

  pan dulce: sweet bread

  un hombrecito: a young man

  todo un hombrecito: a real young man

  cafecito: little coffee; often it refers to an expresso or shot of strong coffee

  The Secret

  Te tengo que contar algo: I need to tell you something

  Nada de trabajo, nada: No work at all, none coyote: jackal; term used to describe the person who enables illegal border crossing for a fee

  nada: nothing

  ¡Mentirosa!: Liar!

  Dulcería Lupitas: Lupita’s Sweets Shop (a Latin American sweets store in Chicago)

  paleta de tamarindo: tamarind lollipop

  salón de belleza: beauty parlor

  Selecciones: Spanish version of Reader’s Digest

  ¿Qué pasa?: What’s going on?

  abuelo: grandfather

  paletas: lollipops

  ¡Tamarindo!: Tamarind!

  Pickup Soccer

  ¡Órale!: Let’s go! (Mexican exclamation)

  Saturday School

  Escuela Argentina: Argentinean school

  ¿Te pasa algo?: What’s going on with you?

  ¡Vas a aprender mucho aquí!: You’ll learn a lot here!

  ¿Tú sabes dónde me siento?: Do you know where should I sit?

  ¿Y vos, cómo te llamás?: And you, what’s your name?