I spend most days rushing between online meetings at zoom university and working at a retail store that pays me minimum wage. My feet ache and sometimes I come home to the entire house already asleep. When I walk up the stairs they creak, like I’ve just stepped on someone’s back and decompressed all the tension built in there. But there’s still tension in the house, even when I don’t step on people’s backs, or toes. My parents come from places where waterfalls run through the amazon, and the desert blooms cacti with flowers you can eat. Two different continents, separated by 4,499 kilometers. Yet, Brooklyn housed a love that gave birth to two kids and a marriage that hopefully lasts a millennium. I was raised like the border between two countries.
There’s trading. Sometimes it’s food, sometimes it’s clothes, and sometimes it’s the music we listen to or the movies we watch. Sometimes my mother borrows bits and pieces of my dad’s homeland and gives them to us. Other times, my father does his research and perfects the old ways of my mother’s family to make her smile. They share trade secrets with my sister and me. Like how to make sure the spices are balanced perfectly in the mole for pozole on Christmas, or how to make the perfect roti without burning it to a crisp the way I like it.
My father’s voice is loud and sturdy. Sometimes his tongue is too rough when he wants to maintain his role as head of the house — a problem he often has with three women, two of whom were born three generations away from him, and raised in another new wave of feminism. I do not carry the same beliefs as my grandmothers did, but I do believe in the wisdom that follows their blessings. My mother blesses me every day before I go to work. Sometimes my father scoffs, and sometimes he searches for God when he needs guidance. Sometimes I take the guidance meant for him and change it to fit what we need now. Sometimes he doesn’t like that.
My mother’s family always reminds me that I look like I belong. They say, “You look just like your mom, just la trigueñita version of her!” Trigueña means of mixed origin. I’m always told I look like my mom, regardless of our differences in color and facial characteristics. My father’s family always reminds me that there’s a notable distinction between themselves and my sister and me. Like West Indian blood doesn’t run through my veins the way it does theirs. Maybe it’s because I never got to dance across the equator like they did. Or maybe it’s because my skin lacked the melanin a Guyanese summer would have given me. As a child I didn’t understand where those things came from. I didn’t understand the nuances between race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, or anything that others view as adding value to your life. To me, it was just my life.
It’s a balancing act for me, like making sure I don’t step on my parents toes. I walk the line between three countries, because I was born in one entirely different from the ones my parents came from. I change traditions to suit my beliefs. I learn from the ghosts my parents carry and look towards the souls I’ve yet to meet. There’s this saying, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá.” It translates, “Neither from here, nor from there.” That’s how it felt being raised like a border between two countries. No one understood what it was like. I didn’t know enough to be accepted in both niches, and although I grew up in Queens, perhaps the most diverse place on Earth, there were always some things I couldn’t relate to.
I dislike the idea of exclusion. I am always the loud person that makes people laugh. I am not the usual soft spoken woman my cultures would have preferred. The “calladita te ves mas bonita” that Mexicans tell their daughters to be didn’t rub me the right way as a kid. I like trading with people, the way my parents traded with me. I eat food from across the globe and I’m not afraid to explore when given the opportunity. Jumping into the void is what makes me happy, even if it sometimes terrifies my parents. The tension in my house builds when I don’t walk the line my ancestors before me did, but they didn’t have to carry three countries on their backs the way I do. I have never favored the conventional route. My parents obviously didn’t either when they had me, and I refuse to let generations before me stay where they are when I was put on a different path. We grow and heal and learn with the next generation. I am a first generation in this country.
