Language, Love and Visibility: Looking Back on an Immigrant Childhood

In the years since this memoir was first published, readers have asked me a number of questions: What does your family think of the book? How did you start writing a memoir in essays? Is the book available in Spanish? The question that took me by surprise, though, came in 2020 on the eve of the pandemic. After a book reading at Vanderbilt University, a Black student in the audience wanted to know about love. How do you experience love? she asked.

I frankly don’t know how I answered her that evening. I was so taken with her question that I repeated it to friends for weeks and also silently to myself. I thought of my father and his bruises, of my mother and her silences, of my aunties and their homophobia, of the many institutions and leaders whose policies harm Latinx families. Here is how I held the student’s question: How do you experience love when the world can be such an onslaught of pain?

Every memoir has an unseen twin—a book that, if it were written, would chronicle the people, places, and books that made the pages of the memoir possible. Before I could write this book, I had to see love. I had to see other Latina women write their books. I had to see and join undocumented youth protesting for their lives and their families. I had to find the friends to whom I could disclose my secrets and my shame. I had to hear an elder Latina tell me: I will love you until you can learn to love yourself. And I had to meet the queer writers and women writers who told me to experience love by reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years.

After this memoir was published, readers showed up in bookstores and libraries and over social media to tell me that I had written their childhoods. The readers were Chinese or Haitian, or they were Dominican or Colombian. While I had written to love the family that had made me and the girl I had once been, readers told me that this love was not private at all but part of a larger narrative about language, migration, and colonialism. It has been readers who have reminded me to lean into love, into writing more books, especially when the morning brings only more news of fascism, detentions, and bombings.

After this memoir was translated into Spanish, I traveled to speak at a public library in Cali, Colombia. A queer youth in the audience asked me about love: Why is it so difficult to be who we are? Why don’t people accept us as we are?

I knew from my own experience that being seen is a powerful way to be loved. You are right, I said. It should not be so hard. It should be easier.

To this, I added that for many of us who live in between, who are queer, who are treated as expendable, it is absolutely necessary to create chosen familia, to find those who can care for us and show us new ways of being in the world. Books can be a part of this chosen family. Sometimes, we read books to experience love, and sometimes we write them for the same reason.

–Daisy Hernández Chicago, 2023

*

The author Minal Hajratwala has written, “Perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents’ risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.”

By the end of kindergarten, my mouth is full of fruit, and as each year arrives, I stuff myself with more English words. I memorize nursery rhymes and numbers, and I sit on my bed with vocabulary books, committing to memory nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, while in the kitchen, my mother hollers, “Llegó Walter!”

Walter Mercado arrives on the television screen. He has blond hair that has been set with hairspray into the 1980s look of being eternally windswept. Thick layers of foundation coat his pale face, and a deep coral lipstick shapes his lips. He sports elegant suits and over his shoulders capes studded with glittery piedras that look like rhinestones, diamonds, and emeralds. Each cape is said to be worth ten thousand dollars.

But Walter is like us. He speaks Spanish. He looks directly into the television camera and into our hearts, lifts his right hand, and, quickly and authoritatively, proclaims our daily horoscope. We can expect a gift. We can expect the doors to open. We can expect good health.

Walter Mercado is normal. White women are a different story.

*

We move, as Mami would say, al Norte.

In 1982, this means about five miles north of Union City and four miles from the George Washington Bridge. I am seven years old, and Papi has found the two-story house with no basement or closets. Our own home, and in the front yard, a tree. A few blocks away is the factory where he works nights. A block away is my new school. Into the large shed in the yard, Mami squeezes her two sewing machines and plastic bags of telas and extra bobbins and scissors and fat spools of thread.

Fairview is a quiet town, a white town, an English-only town. The neighbors bring us tomatoes. “They think we’re Italian,” my mother giggles, as if she has snuck a puppy into her parents’ house.

In Fairview, white women teach at my school and shop at a place called Macy’s. They go to Florida in the winter, even though they have no cousins there. They have aunties who do not live with them, and they are not like the white kids in my class whose grandmothers speak Italian and walk them to school in the mornings. The white women’s grandmothers are dead. When they mention Poland, Ireland, or Germany, it sounds like they are talking about a sock they lost in the laundry. They are white now. American. They have no history, no songs, no past.

But they do have power.

They have the sharpness of chalk, the sting of chemical cleaners for the blackboards, the clean earth smell of sharpened lead pencils. They have the respect of my parents. By virtue of their English and the light color of their faces, these teachers determine the words that creep into my dreams at night.

I envy them. I want what they have. I want my words to matter.

*

My mother’s sisters come and go over the years, but finally they arrive, one by one, to stay. No more back and forth. They have no children and no husbands in Colombia. Their mother is dead. Their father, too. They are three pieces of thread cut from the same spool.

Tía Dora. Tía Rosa. La Tía Chuchi.

The three were school teachers in Colombia. Tía Dora is the youngest, a piece of silk hilo. In Jersey, she scrubs toilets for a white lady down the shore and later is certified to teach Spanish. Tía Rosa is the oldest, with hair like black cotton and tacones with thick heels. She cleans up after a white woman in the city. Tía Chuchi wears lush red lipstick to church every day and has stories better than the Bible’s. Like my mother, she stitches sleeves to women’s blouses at the factory. When the three aunties are home, they dote on my baby sister and work on me and my Spanish.

I call the carpet la carpeta, and Tía Dora shakes her head. She lifts her thin, fairy-like hands. “Se dice alfombra,” she says, and then slowly pronounces the word for me: al-fom-bra. Carpeta is the word for folder.

My mother tells me that my new friend has called. When I reply, “La voy a llamar pa’ tras,” Tía Maria de Jesus, better known as La Tía Chuchi, puckers her bright lips. In Spanish, she lectures, “You never say, ‘I am going to call you back.’ Eso es del inglés.” The verb, she declares, is devolver. “Voy a devolver la llamada.”

If Tía Rosa is there, she comes to my defense, wrapping me up in her arms, the top of my head smashing into her large bosom. “Leave the girl alone,” she says to her sisters, crooning like a bird at her nest. For a moment, I believe this auntie will call a cease-fire. But no, Tía Rosa thinks the war is over. “Stop bothering the girl. She’s Americana.” She pats the top of my head hard, as if I were intellectually disabled.

My mother is different. She believes in truces, neutral zones, even treaties. Together, we stick the Spanish “el” or “la” before English nouns, producing words like el vacuum, el color purple, la teacher. We say, “Abra la window,” “Papi está en el basement,” y “Ya pagamos el mortgage.” This is not easy. It takes time, negotiation, persistence.

In the morning, late for school, I call for my mother, alarmed. I can’t find mi folder.

“Tu qué?”

“El folder,” I answer, panicked. “Donde pongo mis papeles pa’ la escuela, Mami.”

“Ah, el folder,” she says, quietly repeating the English noun to herself.

*

I begin resenting Spanish.

At first, it happens in small ways. I realize I can’t tell my mother about the Pilgrims and Indians because I don’t know the Spanish word for Pilgrims. I can’t talk about my essay on school safety because I don’t know the Spanish word for safety. To share my life in English with my family means I have to give a short definition for each word that is not already a part of our lives. I try sometimes, but most of the time I grow weary and finally sigh and mutter, “Olvídate.” Forget it.

This is how Spanish starts annoying me.

I suppose it’s what happens when you’re young and frustrated, but you can’t be angry at the white teachers because that would get you nowhere, and you can’t be too upset with your parents because they want what they think is best for you. Spanish is flaca and defenseless, so I start pushing her around, then hating her. She’s like an auntie who talks louder than everyone else, who wears perfume that squeezes your nostrils. I want her to stop embarrassing me. I want her to go away.

That’s how the blame arrives. I blame Spanish for the fact that I don’t know more words in English. I blame her for how bad I feel when the white teachers look at me with some pity in their eyes. I blame Spanish for the hours my mother has to work at the factory.

“If only I knew English…” my mother starts, and then her voice trails because none of us, not her, not even La Tía Chuchi, who knows everything about everyone, knows what would happen if only my mother knew English. I am the one who is supposed to find out.

But to make that leap, to be the first in a family to leave for another language hurts. It’s not a broken arm kind of hurt. It’s not abrupt like that. It’s gradual. It is like a parasite, a bug crawling in your stomach that no one else can see but that gives you a fever and makes you nauseous.

Because I have to leave Spanish, I have to hate it. That makes the departure bearable. And so I never learn to read or to write the language. I never learn more than the words my family and I need to share over the course of a day—pásame la toalla, la comida ya está—and the words spoken on the nightly news, the telenovelas, Radio WADO, and Sábado Gigante, which all combined leave me with a peculiar vocabulary of words in Spanish about dinner foods, immigration law, romantic fantasy, and celebrity gossip.

As I become more immersed in English, I also start to distance myself from my family through unconscious gestures. I walk around the house with headphones on my ears and a book in hand. I speak only in English to my little sister. I eat my arroz y frijoles while watching the TV sitcoms Diff’rent Strokes and Facts of Life. The two shows—centered on children who don’t have parents and are being raised by white people—make sense to me. I begin to convince myself that I am like my white teachers: I have no history, no past, no culture.

My father, however, still worries that I might become like him.

Sitting in the kitchen, slightly drunk, mostly sober, he grabs my arm. I am nine at the time, and he has my report card in his hand with the letter F in social studies.

“You have to study,” he says, his brown eyes dull and sad. “You don’t want to end up like your mother and me, working in factories, not getting paid on time. You don’t want this life.” His life. My mother and my tías’ lives. And yet I do—though not the factories or the sneer of the white lady at the fabric store who thinks we should speak English. I want the Spanish and the fat cigars and Walter Mercado on TV every night. To love what we have, however, is to violate my family’s wishes.

Years later, the author Elmaz Abinader smiles knowingly at me. “You betray your parents if you don’t become like them,” she tells me, “and you betray them if you do.”

*

If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you.

They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.

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Excerpted from A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Daisy Hernández. Copyright © 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.