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4. Marked for Life
- Utah State University Press
- Chapter
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4 ( 9 2 , + - 6 9 3 0 - , :VWOPH3}WLa Time has not lessened the pain of my mother’s humiliations. She came to this country as a teenager, not knowing the language. She’d been a straight A student in Mexico but found herself working a factory job in Chicago. She escaped a life of blistered hands on the assembly line by studying to become a secretary. She could almost pass for white—until her accent betrayed her. I couldn’t hear it as a child and didn’t know what having one meant to her. At her first office job, a coworker, this white woman, asked her why she didn’t go back to her own country. Stunned and unable to verbally defend herself, my mother was struck silent. Every time she tells me this story, it is always laced with anger. She knows her accent has cost her job opportunities in the past. For my mother, success meant speaking perfect English. She was set on both me and my brother being bilingual. As children, she forced us to speak English when we were with her in public. We protested, but sharp pinches to our arms kept us in line. Still, my childhood was a happy one insulated by intense family closeness . My grandparents lived on the first floor and I grew up on Mexican food, music, and traditions. We lived in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and I attended schools where all my classmates and teachers spoke Spanish. When I was seven years old my family picked up and moved to Skokie, a northern suburb of Chicago. My parents were drawn to its good schools and promise of a better life. I was placed in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. My teacher, a young blonde woman with pimples, scolded me for not pronouncing vowels exactly the right way. When I spoke in front of the class, revealing a slight accent, my classmates laughed, and made sure to correct me. I didn’t know what to do so I laughed along with them. 4HYRLKMVY3PML While sitting at the kitchen table one evening doing my homework, my mom leaned in to inspect my work. She saw the accent mark I used in the o over López and asked me why I was still writing my last name that way, telling me I should stop. When I asked her why, she replied, in Spanish, “Because they’re going to know you’re not from here.” I didn’t understand, but I did as I was told. I was literally erasing a big part of who I was. Later, for a school project, I was to interview somebody I admired. I chose my mother. She was the center of my world. To me, she was a giant, a strong and confidant woman. I confessed to her that when I grew up I wanted to be just like her. “I want to be a secretary too,” I said. But my mother turned serious, looked at me, and told me I must never say that again. She said I was going to be somebody. I was going to go to college and be a professional. And it was at that exact moment I began to see just how powerless and vulnerable she really was. This Wonder Woman that was my mother was brought down to size. I couldn’t look up to her anymore. The spell had been broken. I began feeling ashamed of my parents. I would go out of my way to keep them away from the world of school, especially my father. I’d inherited his brown skin. He was a stern and proud man, a man of few words. He spoke semibroken English, and his writing was plagued by poor grammar and syntax. He had less formal education than my mother and worked downtown as a janitor. I only saw them reading bills, never a book. Survival in my new environment meant suppressing my working-class Mexican ancestry, passing myself off as straight, and adopting the Anglo middle-class mannerisms of school. This deception came to be second nature. By the time I got to high school, I was tracked into lower-level classes and rarely made honor roll. I got detentions because my way of explaining confrontations with teachers wasn’t in sync with those of the school’s. They demanded respect they had not earned. I was more afraid of disappointing my...