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Overview
Weaving together narrative essay and bilingual poetry, Claudia D. Hernández’s lyrical debut follows her tumultuous adolescence as she crisscrosses the American continent: a book "both timely and aesthetically exciting in its hybridity" (The Millions).
Seven-year-old Claudia wakes up one day to find her mother gone, having left for the United States to flee domestic abuse and pursue economic prosperity. Claudia and her two older sisters are taken in by their great aunt and their grandmother, their father no longer in the picture. Three years later, her mother returns for her daughters, and the family begins the month-long journey to El Norte. But in Los Angeles, Claudia has trouble assimilating: she doesn’t speak English, and her Spanish sticks out as “weird” in their primarily Mexican neighborhood. When her family returns to Guatemala years later, she is startled to find she no longer belongs there either.
A harrowing story told with the candid innocence of childhood, Hernández’s memoir depicts a complex self-portrait of the struggle and resilience inherent to immigration today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936932559 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 07/09/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 855 KB |
About the Author
Claudia D. Hernández is a poet, editor, translator, and bilingual educator, born and raised in Guatemala. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and writes in Spanish and English, and sometimes weaves in Poqomchiʼ, an indigenous language of her Mayan heritage. Hernández is the editor of the anthology Women, Mujeres, Ixoq: Revolutionary Visions (Conocimientos Press 2017), and the founder of the ongoing photography project Today’s Revolutionary Women of Color. She currently resides in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
Mamá was always running away from something, someone. Her present—her past; the hunger that chased her; Papá’s drunkenness and obsessiveness; her mother’s abandonment; the heat of Mayuelas or coldness of Tactic; her beauty—her long hair.
I remember when Mamá would bathe Consuelo and me together in the Pila, a washbasin made out of cement. I was four and Consuelo was six. We didn’t have hot water; our pila was out in the patio surrounded by the shade of the tamarindo trees. The water came straight from the river, cold and fresh. Mamá never allowed us to drink the water.
“It’s stale! You’ll grow a solitaria, a tapeworm, in your tummy!” she would say.
The washbasin was filled with water. It had two sinks on each side. One sink had a ribbed surface and it was usually used for hand-washing laundry. The other sink was for doing dishes. Its surface was smooth. Mamá would sit both Consuelo and me on the ribbed sink so that we wouldn’t slip. The pila was high from the ground.
“Sindyyyy!” Mamá would yell, “help me rinse the girls.”
Sindy was my oldest sister—eight years older than me. She acted like my second mother when she babysat me and when Mamá left to El Norte for three years. There were times I hated her for that.
Mamá’s fingernails were always long and sharp. She scrubbed my head fast and furiously with the cola de caballo shampoo. The Mane ‘n Tail shampoo would burn my eyes. We hadn’t heard of baby shampoo in those days. Sindy’s job was to drop buckets of water on my head. I felt like I was drowning every time the water would hit the crown of
my head. I always managed to breathe through my mouth as the see-through, soapy veil of water covered my face.
After the bath, Mamá would dress us up in summer dresses to keep us fresh in the scalding heat of Mayuelas where the ceiba trees and mango trees bloomed with tenacity. Mamá kept us clean. She fed us every day, three times a day: huevitos tibios, soft-boiled eggs, sweet bread with a cup of milk or a Coca-Cola. Sometimes she fed us Nestle Cerelac by itself—completely dry. It was my favorite.
I remember Mamá was always moody. I didn’t know why.
“You two better not get dirty!” she yelled after bathing us.
I loved playing outside with the mud.
On that summer day, the mud felt especially cold and refreshing on my skin. Nobody was around to keep an eye on me. Sindy and Consuelo were inside the house with Mamá doing chores. I decided to taste the mud.
I grew up listening to stories about how four-year-old Sindy loved to eat clumps of dirt from Tía Soila’s kitchen’s adobe walls. I was four and I wanted to see for myself why Sindy loved it so much. Tía Soila was Mamá’s aunt, but we also called her Tía Soila—aunt Soila.
I knew exactly what I was doing, and I knew it was wrong. Sindy got beat up many times for eating dirt. I looked around one more time before picking up a handful of mud. I was nervous. I was terrified of Mamá.
I hid my dirty hands behind my back, and before I knew it, I found myself grinding rocks with my baby teeth. Two seconds later, I spat everything out and ran to the outhouse bathroom. No one saw me. I couldn’t get rid of the salty-chalky taste in my mouth.
I spat and spat everywhere, in the darkness of the toilet, all over the dirt floor, until my mouth felt dry. Eventually, I began to appreciate the petrichor scent trapped in my mouth. I finally understood why Sindy desired clumps of dirt in her mouth. It was a different type of hunger we both had.