Writer and activist Demetria Martínez on Chicana culture, politics and poetry.
In the essay "Tortillas To You Too," writer Demetria Martínez discusses book reviewers who missed the issues of Chicano identity in her book of poetry
The Devil's Workshop
because, she suspects, "I did not write a poem about Jesus appearing on a tortilla."
The essay is one of many in her new collection,
Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana
, that mines the issues of cultural identity, as well as politics, poetry and religion. Martínez also is the author of the award-winning novel
Mother Tongue
, based in part on her federal indictment and trial in the late 1980s in connection with the alleged smuggling of Salvadoran refugees into the US. Also the author of two books of poetry,
Breathing Between the Lines
and
The Devil's Workshop
, Martínez is an Albuquerque native and resident active in New Mexico immigrants' rights work and the anti-war movement. This week, SFR presents the title essay of her new collection, as well as an interview with the author.
We're everywhere, and it's time to
come out of the closet: I speak of the tongue-tied generation, buyers of books with titles like
Master Spanish in Ten Minutes a Day While You Nap
. We're the Chicanas with cassettes in our glove compartments; commuting to work, we lip phrases for directing an Argentine cabbie to a hotel or ordering tapas at a bar in Spain.
At home we flip through catalogs of classes offered abroad. We imagine acquiring the language the way we might a wardrobe. But it costs: tuition for language school, tickets to Guatemala, and a pair of Birkenstocks. It costs to be among the linguistic tourists my dad calls "Sandalistas."
Yet how seductive. Total immersion! In a foreign country! So go the testimonies of our friends, long after they've forgotten most of what they learned.
But we know better. We live, after all, in occupied Mexico-and beyond, in every U.S. barrio and 'burb where Latinos reside. We show up with potato salad and tamales at raucous family affairs that make even funerals worth the tears. Here we encounter aunts with names like Consuelo, Elvira, and Maudi, and uncles Bamba, Elfigo, and Juan. After lunch they sink into couches and eat cake off paper plates. They speak a thick and sweet Spanish, marbled with English. Total immersion? No place like home.
Meanwhile, cousins cluster together and renew our vows to work at our Spanish. We grew up listening to the language-usually in the kitchens of extended family-but we answered mostly in English. We refer to our "broken" Spanish as if it were a broken bone and speak of how, when we least expect it, the language "comes back" as if it were a pre-existing condition.
We are ashamed, for something precious shattered under our watch. And we are determined. We want our children to achieve a fluency we still struggle for. After my niece Rachel was born, I repeatedly recited the Our Father to her. Danos hoy el pan de cada día; give us this day our daily bread. I wanted to begin, day one, to open her neuropathways not merely to God, but to the Spanish language.
My own education in Spanish began the first year of my life,
when my father was stationed in Okinawa. My mother and I lived with her parents,
who daily crisscrossed the border between Spanish and English as they talked politics and poker. Later on, my father's parents took me to the church of the First Spanish Assemblies of God. Here, God made his glory known, not only in tongues but also in Spanish, through the voice of a preacher who pointed at the Bible, thundered, and wept. My ears were opened: At dinners afterward, I huddled with my cousin at the edge of adult conversation. We knew what the grown-ups were saying when they switched to Spanish to talk about grown-up things.
At home, on the telephone, Dad breezed in and out of Spanish, his inflections bending this way or that depending on whether he was talking to an elder from northern New Mexico or an old buddy from the barrio. I don't remember my mom speaking much Spanish; an introvert, overwhelmed perhaps by my father's abilities, Spanish resided in her ear and not so much on her tongue.
The children in the neighborhood and in elementary school spoke English, with few exceptions. So did the children on television:
The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family.
Fifth grade, however, brought a surprise:
A girl from Puerto Rico joined the class. We became friends. I flexed my Spanish, she her English; we firmed up our linguistic muscles until, one day, she moved away.
That same year I wrote a paper and used a word my teacher said didn't exist. I'd always earned high marks for writing. Teachers said my comprehension of the English language was advanced for my age-in no small part, I believe, because my mother took me to the local library more often than to church.
I pointed to the word in the dictionary; the teacher concurred. This incident seems important-it is still so vivid. That obscure English word, so obscure I can't recall it, was not only a word, it was a way: Command of the English language and its shadow side-command over others. At the time all I knew was the thrill of having "discovered" a word. It would be years before I would grasp the politics of the tongues in which we speak and witness the privilege heaped upon those who can wield English like a sword.
On weekends I spent the night with my maternal grandmother. She used to draw herself up to her full height and order, not ask, my father, "Déjala, déjala," she'd say, let her-referring to me-let her eat that candy, stay over another night, jump on the bed. Dad shrank in silence. Grandma cast her spell with a Spanish word that signified unconditional love.
My father was elected to the Albuquerque school board in 1969, the first Chicano to hold this position; this in the wake of the passage of a landmark piece of legislation, the Bilingual Act of 1967. My father would enter the great debates of the day, debates that have never ceased. One camp saw the use of Spanish as a mere stepping stone to mastering English. The camp to which my father belonged envisioned the classroom as a place where a child would achieve fluency in two languages.
Dad insisted I take Spanish when junior high and high school rolled around. I aced my classes. "Your accent is perfect," my teachers purred. In college I studied more, having tested into an advanced class.
After graduating, I went on to read the great Spanish-language poets, from Gabriela Mistral to César Vallejo, in long ecstatic stretches every morning on the plaza of Old Town, Albuquerque. I listened to the gossip of the viejitas as they emerged from morning mass at San Felipe Church. I yearned to ask them how long they'd lived on this eighteenth-century plaza, how life had changed. But the tide of spoken English was too strong. By the time I translated what I wanted to say in my head, they'd moved on.
Yet with time, that yearning has gotten the better of me. I go longer and longer periods now conversing in Spanish, forgetting I'm "not fluent"-which may be one definition of fluency.
One afternoon, I found myself in the orange groves outside Phoenix; here Guatemalan refugees lived under the trees until they could get a ride with a coyote to Florida. Churches brought meals. A mobile medical clinic rolled in. Exhausted women lined up. A nurse handed me a clipboard. We're short, she said, can you do intake? My lungs filled like sails. I asked the women when they had their last period. I asked them about their journey. My tongue was untied.
Another scene comes to mind: I am walking through Harvard Yard with a poet from Vietnam. "Beautiful night" is about all we say to one another before we fall silent. Then he turns to me and asks, in Spanish, "Do you speak Spanish?" "Yes," I answer, "where did you learn yours?" "In Cuba," he says. We talk on. Our words are like pieces of a child's puzzle that we put together to make a picture of our lives.
In 2001 the Salvadoran novelist Manlio Argueta invited me to his country for a conference on testimonial literature after the Salvadoran civil war. He asked me to talk about my novel,
Mother Tongue
, which tells the story of a Salvadoran refugee and his Chicana lover. The book is set during the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, when U.S. citizens defied immigration law by opening their homes to Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees.
I wrote out my presentation in Spanish, no problem. The legacy of the tongue-tied is that the unsaid often rushes, with a weird ease, to our hands and then to the page. Those years of in-class writing assignments surely helped. Yet as in the orange groves outside Phoenix and in Harvard Yard, a yearning to connect had me fumbling, joyously, for the right word, or even the next best word. Yearning cuts through fear of the next best word, of imperfection. And it cuts through guilt and shame.
Guilt crops up when we tell ourselves: I'm Latina, I should be fluent. Shame follows when we're around the fluent and afraid to speak up. So powerful are these emotions that it does no good to know that much in our history has conspired against fluency, English Only movements being but one especially virulent manifestation. Who hasn't heard a story, recalled by elders or even contemporaries, of punishments meted out for speaking Spanish in school, from mouths washed out with soap to placement of Spanish speakers in classes for the mentally handicapped?
And some of our own are our worst enemies: The more-Chicano-than-thou and more-Mejicana-than-thou intellectuals and activists who look down on the rest of us-perhaps because we reflect so explicitly their own struggle to find their voices.
Once I participated in a panel at the Smithsonian with Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada and Claribel Alegría of El Salvador. A woman in the audience stood up and accused: How dare we speak as Latinos about Latino literature-in English?
I have long maintained that Spanish is a father tongue, that of the conquerors. Our true mother tongues are indigenous languages, many wiped out in the genocide. I dream of a day when we Latinos are trilingual, or at least studying a third tongue. Quechua, Tewa, Yoheme, Diné, Nahuatl-the roads to recovery are legion. I managed to convey something like this, even as I felt a sword had been aimed at my throat.
One of the protagonists of
Mother Tongue
is Soledad, godmother
to María, who is the lover of José Luis of El Salvador. Soledad smuggles Central American refugees into the
United States and dispenses advice to María about everything from life outside the law to home remedies. When she gets wind of María and José Luis's love affair, she counsels, in a letter to her goddaughter: "Mijita, if you must lose your head over that boy, at least apply yourself and use the experience to shore up your Spanish. How do you think I learned English? Remember that good-for-nothing first husband I once told you about? Well, we were young and in love and what he said when we were together needed no translation. Falling in love with a man who speaks another language, you develop a third ear. First, you struggle to understand what he says. Then you begin to hear what he means. Then the relationship falls apart. But you're the better for it." She ends the letter, "Write soon-in Spanish. If you don't know a word, make it up."
Awash in the music of Spanish, my generation grew a third ear. We fell in love with what we heard. That love drives us out of our solitude. "I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning," writes Aimé Césaire in
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
. "I want to say storm. I want to say river." We tongue-tied possess the secret of great speech and burning. Tempestad, río. Word by word, we're making our way back home.
