Feelings We Don’t Have Words For In American Yet

There was that one day when Dad took time out of his Sunday to drive me and my little brother to that Latino Book Fair in San Bernardino. He’d kept his promise, and it made me happy, but I mused on the fact that it was never a problem to get him to deliver his promises. It was just that we never made any.

We drove past dirt fields and feeble-looking buildings, and when we arrived we were handed plastic bags decorated with Edward James Olmos’ face. The bags were filled with brochures detailing his foundation’s mission of spreading literacy. We stayed for hours sorting through books in Spanish, crafts of stained glass and feathers, and bright paint on baked clay. At one of the many overflowing shelves, my dad found his favorite novel. Pedro Paramo. It reminded him of his school days back in Mexico. He bought it for me. He also bought two Neruda collections to be read in Spanish. “To be read the way he wrote them.” I recall holding the books like priceless treasures in my small hands, mainly because Dad never mentioned books he had read as a kid. Dad never talked about the past at all. I made a promise to myself that I’d take them with me everywhere I went no matter where I went in life.

Later, we befriended a friendly, soft-spoken cartoonist. The quiet man was decorating paper doorknob hangers with a black Sharpie when we arrived at his booth. Dad watched as Alcaraz used his Sharpie to draw us. Dave was smiling, and I was smiling too, sheepish with puberty. I liked Dave’s hanger the most. His pale little-boy face was already thinning out, but Alcaraz had just captured on a piece of white paper what was left of my brother’s softness forever. When I bought a tall candle with a sticker on its blue glass that read “The Struggle for Indigenous Rights Has Not Ended!!!” Dad said my eight dollars would be spent on bullets. My mind registered an image of high, foggy mountains of a deep green and faceless people carrying the dead-weight of other faceless people. I didn’t know what to do with my candle anymore.

Dave bought a children’s book written for six-year-olds titled “Dave, No!” but it was okay that he wasn’t six years old anymore. I fell in love with an Aztec calendar. Or maybe it was Mayan. There was no way for me to know in those days. There were girls in folklorico skirts dancing with boys in cowboy hats. Men in snakeskin played instruments. I asked Dad why these kinds of events didn’t come around more often, but the only answer I got was another promise that we’d come back next year.

We stayed until the booth-keepers started shuttering up and we could find no more brochures, no more bookmarks to stuff into our plastic bags. I remember how hard we were laughing when we walked back to our car—laughing and, for once, speaking, and speaking in Spanish.

When we pulled out of the parking lot, we saw a group of other brown-skinned people. They were across the street, holding banners. Their shirts and signs read: “Edward James Olmos is a racist full of self-hatred” and “Eurocentric Sellouts!” and “No Somos Latinos! No Somos Hispanos!” We drove past them, and they started chanting and shouting and raising their signs. Dad looked past them and said nothing and it was almost like they weren’t there at all, except that I couldn’t help it. Trying to keep it all at the corner of my eye, I couldn’t avoid them, their words, I mean: Ethnocide, Mexica, Anahuac, Nahua, Mestizo Myths. As an adult, when I would learn how anger is a substitute emotion, and silence, a coping mechanism, I would recall that moment. How I never got to ask my dad what hurts. “What hurts?” I didn’t ask that day. We were quiet the whole...