MODERN IFIGENIA

To be honest, I forgot this fruit existed. It wasn't until my mom showed up with this baby's bracelet that a bunch of memories resurfaced. We can't really remember its name, but google searches lead me to either kuru, curu, awarra, awara. I am not sure whether those words are Spanish, English, Warao, Arrowak or Carib, but they are a fruit I have never again eaten since leaving Venezuela. This is a fruit for the patient. It tastes delicious-a nutty, fibrous, cashew-ish flavor, but there is little flesh to it, so you have to peel it very delicately, lest you accidentally peel off all of the flesh. It was a fruit that frustrated my instant-gratification self, so only the elders had the patience to feed me this fruit.  It was rarely sold in the markets, so the only time I would have it was when we visited our elders in the more rural/jungle-ish regions outside of the city. I can't even tell you in which direction we went, but the grand aunts and uncles always had lands with...

I woke up this morning to a baby puking on me while smiling unapologetically. For the first time her lack of inhibition worried me. This Mother's Day, I thought I'd be reflecting on being a mother for the first time and jot down some mushy words, instead, I think back to the day I walked in on my mom having greater aspirations for my daughter than she did for me.   My dad raised me to thrive in the world I deserved, my mom raised me to survive in the world I was born into. Needles to say, my dad's parenting was liberating and empowering, my mom's was stifling and suffocating, so of the two parents I always rebelled against HER. She would often say that I was created fighting her given how difficult her pregnancy was with me. She was right, my earliest memories with my mom are of our arguments. We fought like the swords of two warriors: I was driven by a desire to be free and capable, her by fear that I might suffer consequences the patriarchy metes out to misbehaving wo...

 "How do you frustrate a Jew? Place him in an oval and tell him there is a dollar in the corner" ---to my non-anti-semitic mind, this joke didn't make sense-how is lying to someone okay and why would it be unreasonable for them to be annoyed you lied to them? I would come to learn the joke is funny if you already knew that Jews were greedy. In a class of over 20 students, mostly Christian white, this joke made sense. To me, the Indian kid and the Polish kid, it was confusing; to the African American kid, it was obvious.  The man making this joke was not wearing a Klan's hat, he was the very loveable baseball coach at my high school. Everyone liked him, he was a decent man-the respect he received for decent meant that I had to figure out what was wrong with me for not getting the joke, that it was normal to get the joke, and the one African American kid who objected to it must have just misinterpreted what everyone else construed as lighthearted fun. "How do you m...

I often write about my experiences as an immigrant; a series of moments of flux and transition, amusement and discord, complete openness and heavy walls. There is very little that is fixed. As I grow older though, the notion of "home" becomes stronger and stronger, increasingly fixed and solid in some ways but geographically unstable and dispersed. As I grow older and older my pangs of homesickness are sharper-every once in a while I sit and can't stop myself from yearning for people and places that have nothing to do with each other. I now understand that stare my mom has when she is enjoying a very fresh and ripe fruit-she is here eating the fruit, but she is also "there" enjoying it. When I was young it would get on my nerves to see her disappear, but now, I respect her brief moment of meditation on time,  place and belonging. So when I say I am homesick-its not in quite the same way people who are born and raised in the same place speak of homesickness...

This month is Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States. We are in the middle of a pandemic under an administration that loves corrupted institutions, and living with the most brazen police impunity I have ever seen in my life. As someone who is generally opinionated, I have been speechless. feeling trapped by my two worlds-its not that I don't have opinions or words, its that my two worlds collided so seamlessly that I am ALL, AT ONCE. There is no language I command I can use to articulate how I feel and what I think. It is the first time in the United States I simultaneously feel completely FOREIGN and completely AMERICAN; completely IGNORANT and INCOMPETENT, and completely EXPERT and CAPABLE. I feel so foreign because this moment is not about me; it is about the people who physically built this country still not having a seat at the table. I feel so American because it is about how my separation from "whiteness" brings me closer to their very American plight...

I have been hesitant to share this thought. In some ways it reveals my naivete about past relationships, fears I have of future ones and weakness in relationships all around, However, I have had so many similar conversations with women of all ages, that I thought I would just publicize the idea however underdeveloped, because there is a young woman out there making a life decision right now and may be making the same mistake women have been making for millenia.  The idea first came when I told my aunt that I felt weird not being angry at my ex-husband. Everyone wanted me to hate him, but to me he was a "good man" and I couldn't hate him, to which she quickly replied that was the problem. I asked her to explain further. She said something to the effect of: "Look around, we are surrounded by bad men, now I know you love your uncles and cousins, but would you want to date any of them?" I briefly thought about it-the uncle who chased his wife with a machete for...

Many years ago I was teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies course and the class was stuck on the concept of objectification. After trying unsuccessfully to explain and getting ready to call it quits, a Chicano student raised his hand to help and very clearly and concisely defined the term, providing clarity to his classmates. At the end of the class I congratulated him on doing a good job and asked him how he understood it so well. He responded with something to the effect of "I am Texan, in Texas people like me are referred to as 'hands'; we are either 'good hands' or 'bad hands', but just 'hands'. If we are not 'hands', we either don't exist or are a threat to growers. We are never fully people." It was my first time hearing the term "hands" to refer to agricultural workers. I would later hear it when a grower was upset that one of his "good hands" was participating in a lawsuit for unpaid wages. ...