Whole Foods Salsa

A common box that I encounter on query forms is a brief biography of the author. There are things about myself that I find interesting — I have two high-quality cats and I have my eye on a Hawaiian dictionary — but the question of who I am is such a big one that it is still under construction, and I suspect will be for the remainder of my life.

I am the daughter of a Southern mother and a Mexican American father. I like music, from jazz to rock and roll. I played the tenor saxophone growing up and maintain my loyalty to it enough to say that it is the finest instrument there is. I have a chronic condition that I have worked hard to live with, and now I am in a state where I can actually apply for jobs that I am desperate to get. I love: Candles, soap, fountain pens, mountains, Rumi, black tea, language, language, language.

And sometimes I feel disconnected from myself, but also from my heritage, as my life in Albuquerque informs everything I write about in the first book that I am querying and this next book that I am drafting. One day, as I ordered groceries from Whole Foods, including salsa, I was quite surprised to find that said salsa was delicious. And yet I was slightly embarrassed to tell Kailee this odd Discovery, because I had the stupid notion that I should like the salsa that I (theoretically) would make for myself because a Real Mexican knows how to do such things, right? Too bad Savannah doesn’t know how to fix her blender. For a long time, I came to the conclusion that I was Whole Foods salsa.

(Then I tried Whole Foods cornbread and came to the same conclusion that the cornbread I make myself should have been better because a Real Southerner knows how to make something other than Jiffy, right?)

I set these gates for myself that I have to reach before I am a Real anything. Talking with one of the women who works at my gym a few weeks ago, we both discussed how we didn’t feel like we have the right to claim our Hispanic-ness because what if we are not enough? What if all the hours I have spent learning Spanish is not enough? Do I have to ask permission? This was a little needle of anxiety puncturing my veins over and over again, until a few weeks ago. I went to visit Abuelita for her birthday. She introduced me to her telenovelas and encouraged me to pick up bits and pieces of what the actors were saying. I followed along. I felt like I was the kind of person who would someday call her up and chat in her first language about how to make tortillas the right way.

My Abuelo died before I was born, and my grandmother told me some things about him on my trip. I knew from my Tia Jackie that Abuelo was close to my cousin and, once as he worked on the roof of his house, tied a rope around my cousin’s waist and nailed the rope to the roof so that my cousin would not go tumbling off the side. People still speak so highly of him.

Two heritages. That is what I have been focusing on in my query letter About Me box. Because I cannot write about myself without writing about my mother (a playwright) and my grandmother (a poet). Everything I do was fed by them, they who told me about haints and my mother who loved Southern gothic literature. One of my ancestors in the South was named Lucky Anne. My mother’s side is a braid of women handing language down the line to the next girl who will grow up to do the same for her cousins or maybe even her own daughter.

I’m exploring all of this in a poem that I am writing called “Quinceañera,” which has two movements: “Mariachi” and “Moonshine.” “Mariachi” refers to my grandmother, who sang this music in her youth. “Moonshine” refers to both my ancestors who made the substance, and my mother, who was writing a teleplay about it. Someday, I will translate “Mariachi” into Spanish and thread in some tenor saxophone music for the background. I may even work with a bowl of Whole Foods salsa and cornbread at my side.

I love doing the things that connect me to my heritage. Even though direct object pronouns still baffle me in Spanish, I find that I am happy beyond measure when knee-deep in my vocabulary lists and my textbook. I remember third grade, when Kailee and I dressed in Mexican sombreros and embroidered dresses for a heritage day at our school. That day I felt so proud.

From “Quinceañera” to the children’s books that will come later, I really enjoy the threads of my past stitching through me today. I tell these stories for my mother, who named me a name she thought a writer would like to have. I will be fluent in Spanish someday. In the meantime, while I fix my blender and whisk eggs into my Jiffy cornbread, I just have to keep being the composite of all these stories that feed me.