English-Only is a Lie

When was he to learn English?

Perhaps during his two years of grade school in the campo 

or after school, when the nuns cared for him and the other children while his parents labored in the fields.

Surely it could not have been expected of him when after those two short years in the schoolhouse he left

to work beside his parents, a U.S. citizen slipping in beside hard-working Bracero mama and papa
Or when they sent him back to Mexico to live with his abuelita for a few years, rather than shuffle him across the Southwest through Texas, Colorado, and California with the agricultural seasons
where he learned to be a welder on the street - a skill that did him well when he returned to his native land, and worked for the same company in the Rio Grande Valley for more than three decades, and continues to work well into his 60s

It's not being born on the US side of the border that gives him his work ethic, his caracter humilde, his perseverance in the face of family loss and bureaucratic injustice
But you can bet that the mere fact of being born on these soils -  in a Texas border town, while his parents were Mexican nationals toiling on US soils and in US homes, in a region where those sharp distinctions between "us" and "them" become muted in daily life
gave him the chance to chase that American dream, to be an owner of a well-worn home, to lead his life in a region of the country that still speaks in the various tongues of its modern history and undergoes a fraught and frenetic and constant intercambio with its southern neighbor.

Reading articles on a Sunday in bed

after an overnight drive back from Austin with love + company
that felt like an escape back to the Valley, back to home

once the early-morning stretch blended into bedtime at dawn, and lazy dreams that stretched into the early afternoon
feels like the greatest luxury of all.


Because the hipster out-posts and scrumptious bites of the music city are a treat to the senses, and the drop of metropolitan life from this 24-hour window must feed my veins for another few months
when I'm nostalgic for the big apple above all

Forsaking the day's To Dos for an hour
feeding off  personal essays from salon.com and IHT in a cozy home back in Brownsville,
pleasantly full of pancakes and coffee can't be beat.

things

My landlord is kind
and 100% cranberry juice is delicious, but so damn expensive
I'm going to a training with a bunch of attorneys  - seasoned, hip, and sometimes both
Not sure why I'm invited, but I'm excited for the chance
Sometimes I miss the confidence of leading my own classroom,
and I surely miss the thrill of merging different voices, theories, interviews, into something tangible
(as tangible as an academic paper can be)
the feeling of having something important to say, and saying it - there is the problem of readership (it's not accessible to the ones who might most have something to say, or it's not supposed to be accessible given the way that academic work must be written, but maybe that could somehow be partially bridged)

But shit, it feels good to be able to listen to people and their problems, that they really do not deserve, and to know that their reclamos could actually be heard
and they could get back the money they're owed, or the money that can't quite pay for the suffering they endured - but it can help
but that process is long, and hard to see the end of when you're just helping to gather the facts

I want to keep a foot in that intellectual corner where I feel so alive
and do this job well, where I also feel alive and in a different way and less removed