NINETEEN
You already know me. I’m the author of these pages.
There is more to the story of me, but this is what you need to know for now: I’ve had borders drawn around me all my life, but I refuse to live as a bordered person. I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don’t exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone that I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends’ fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress us up for every year, making us sit on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn’t wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm.
This assigned status wants you to think of the US government as another kind of parent. The one who rejects you for its preferred child. Sometimes I feel bad for having ever longed for those papers, like who I am isn’t enough. Why should I want to be identified as gringa, reciting the pledge they made me memorize in school before I even understood English, if the government makes it so clear they don’t want people like me here? Maybe that I don’t have the documentation they want is good. It means they don’t own me.
I told my brother we should make a sign to hold up at the airport when we pick up Talia that says WELCOME TO KILL YOURSELF, NEW JERSEY. Nando said she’d get on the next plane back to Colombia and our mom would die of sadness.
It was a joke, but not really. I figured Talia would eventually learn there is no place that can turn a person suicidal with the quickness of a North American suburb. Every now and then someone at school has a go. Usually a white girl, but sometimes a white boy. A few years back a teenager leaped off the Fort Lee cliffs. The town made a big production of its devastation. A lot of the girls said he was a show-off and started thinking of ways to compete with more dramatic final exits, like diving off a Manhattan skyscraper or something retro like lying across train tracks.
Every time there’s a suicide attempt, the school administrators hold meetings for parents to learn how to help their miserable children, and it’s expected everyone attends or your parents will be seen as uncaring assholes. Our mother went once, but when she got home she said she didn’t understand how these kids who had everything they could possibly want in life—nice homes, parents who didn’t abandon them, food, clothing, cars, debt-free college educations waiting to be claimed—somehow had no desire to live. She’s convinced depression is a gringo problem and since Nando and I have Andean blood, we are spared.
She doesn’t know that when I was a freshman who managed to get the second highest grade point average in class, I had a total fucking freak-out in the girls’ bathroom, couldn’t breathe, a crushing in my chest, pierced by an awareness that I was about to die, and ended up in the school shrink’s office.
“You’re having an anxiety attack,” the lady explained. She wanted to tell my mom so she could arrange support, find me a therapist or some crap.
I said there was no money for that. She called home, but Mami was working, so she left a message saying she was concerned about my ability to cope with stress and suspected I was experiencing depressive feelings.
“？Qué dice?” Mami asked.
“It’s my English teacher. She wanted to let you know I’m the best student in her class.”
She was satisfied with this, and the next time I saw the school shrink, I told her my mother said not to bother her at home anymore with stuff I can deal with myself.
There are things I wanted to tell my sister before her arrival. Like that you can love the United States of Diasporica and still be afraid of it. The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into homeroom like a war was won. Hearing cocaine jokes and mechanical hallway insults of Go back to your country was nothing new for me and Nando, but there was new brazenness, like a gloved hand reaching for our throats, reminding us we were not welcome.
I’m our mother’s interpreter when she comes to talk to our teachers or when her bosses can’t make themselves understood with their college Castellano. I can toss around phrases, carry conversations, sing along with reggaetón, but my Spanish grammar is shit and Nando and I probably have kindergarten vocabulary. We didn’t speak English till we started school. They put us in the ESL program for a few years. I did all I could to get out and kill my accent, but Nando slid into the remedial trap, which is where they put the undesirables, poor kids and minorities who aren’t math or science whizzes. Another word I hate: minority. A way to imply we’re outnumbered （we’re not）， and suggest we are less than.