Mexican Boy
I lived in Pico Rivera when I was eight. I was among hundreds of Latinos that made up the majority of the population. We lived with my Mexican grandmother who grew weed in her garden for her arsenal of homemade medicines. Everything she had was homemade: from her bras and underwear to her skirts, hand-stitched with pockets added so she could carry her money and medicines around. Her brother lived in the shack besides ours, which was badly built by Mexicans with muddy pants and dirty work boots and placed in my grandmother’s backyard. We didn’t have a home of our own. I spent most of my childhood running around my grandmother’s garden and eating the dumpster-dived food my great uncle would fish out of bins while my parents worked.
I remember taking tours of my grandmother’s room as we played around her house. It smelled like vapor rub and incense. Syringes half-plunged were sprinkled on her vanity along with bottles of oil and rubs half-empty. There was also a dirty mirror with pictures shoved into its creases. I would scan each picture, “There’s Carmen with her dad before he died. He looks like my dad. There’s my Tia Chela and Griselda.” I would find all my cousins and aunts, but my younger twin siblings and I were nowhere to be found. I didn’t think much of it then; I was just a kid. It wasn’t till I was much older that I realized that my grandmother didn’t love us because we were black.
My Mexican father—in all his brown glory—fell in love with my black mother at a party in Los Angeles in 1990, three years before I was born. His mother detested his love for my mother and told him so.
But this was my mom’s Mexican boy, and I was destined to exist.
My mom’s nappy hair and thick skin wrote out our future. My aunts and their daughters ran around with their hair flowing down and swaying from side to side, while ours extended from left to right, defying gravity.
It was in the second grade when I discovered that our differences determined our social grouping in school. If you talk to any black person in the U.S. and ask them if they were bullied as children, the answer is most likely yes. One way or another, our skin becomes the target for jokes and insecure white children letting out steam. They weren’t all white, though. I remember my first bully so clearly. His hair was big and red and freckles splashed across his face. He started with “Negra!” I was the only black kid in our entire school. Then it was “Gorilla!”
I thought I was the same as him. We both spoke Spanish, our fathers shared a flag. Then he found the perfect word: “Nigger!” One time he and his friends cornered me during recess and chanted this at me. I cried until I peed myself. I was the one who got in trouble for not having control over my eight-year-old bladder.
Mexican boy, my first abuser.
My siblings and I confused people. Black kids who spoke Spanish. What a concept. My little brother was stopped by cholos on the playground once. They asked him, “What are you doing here?” as if to say his nappy hair and dark skin didn’t belong. This encounter never left him. My little brother got mad at my mom once and blamed her for his blackness. He said it was her fault that he was bullied and that he wished he was just Mexican. Even when we moved out of Pico Rivera and into Riverside, California in our adolescence, we grew up in an all Latino neighborhood with no black people. It was strange when we saw other black people walking around, and even we questioned their presence. My identity was all over the place as child. All my friends were brown, and I didn’t know what to make of myself.
I was sixteen when I fell in love. I let him in one Sunday while my family went to church. He loved A Tribe Called Quest and Thelonious Monk. He had dimples around his eyes and even at sixteen, his beard grew thick and black. With his big nose and dark brown skin, he said people thought he was Middle Eastern. Maybe I was a fetish or a token to this brown boy who loved black culture. It didn’t matter—I was loved. He showed me things about myself I never knew. He would bring up a black movie or artist, and when I would say I didn’t know about it, he would say, “You’re black, you’re supposed to know!” Ironically, he did teach me a lot about being black. We’d sing along to Stevie Wonder and watch Chappelle’s Show on his laptop in his graffiti-covered room. To this day, I am thankful for all he showed me.
Mexican boy, my first love.
Many came after him—brown boys I loved. But their friends laughed at them, their fathers questioned them, and their mothers hated me. The mother of an old boyfriend ignored me for the entirety of my relationship with her son. When I would come over and greet her, she would ignore my greeting and call me “La muchacha,” refusing to learn my name. The breakup was inevitable, yet I kept putting myself through this identity crisis and the heart break that came with it. Mexican boys were all I knew. They didn’t understand the halves that made me whole. As deeply as they loved me, they could never fathom who I truly was. Half of who I am doesn’t look like the half people want to see.
I was twenty when I developed an eating disorder. I’d stare at myself for hours in the mirror and wish I could cut all my skin off. The impulse to try to change my body set in one cold day in November as I ran clippers through my hair and watched curly locks fall off my head in clumps into the sink. The Mexican boy who caused this slept beside me most drunken nights. He was so beautiful. His skin was brown like mine, he looked like one of the original people, native to this land. His family didn’t like me. I was the chubby black girl with tattoos and a septum piercing. He barely spoke English, and he saw me through the eyes of my father’s ancestors. We’d listen to Chicano Batman and Raskahuele together. We joked about the names we’d give our children. He liked Ofelia like in Pan’s Labyrinth. He’d press his big lips in the crease between my nose and cheek, and he’d fall asleep with his hand on my naked breast. One night when I came home late, I found him in bed with a white girl. My record player was spinning Led Zeppelin as he held her white body in his brown arms.
Mexican boy, my first heart break.
Navigating my identity as a black woman is strange to some. I speak my father’s tongue and carry my mother’s face. My sister and I got matching tattoos of our parent’s motherland with hearts over the cities they were from. I was stopped by a cholo at Alberto’s one day. He was with his children and he asked, “Why do you have Mexico tattooed on you?” I replied, “Because I’m Mexican.” Pendejo. I always wondered how my dad felt raising three black children. I wonder if my mother understood the layers to her own identity. It wasn’t until I went to Colombia that I understood this for myself.
I traveled for the first time out of this country when I was twenty one, and I went alone. I couldn’t cope with the Mexican boy who made me cut my curls and hate myself. I ran away to my mother’s land in hopes of finding meaning to my identity. Perhaps being among black people who ate my food and spoke my mother’s tongue would sooth my broken heart.
I didn’t belong there either. I was the American girl with tattoos too thick and dark to be on the skin of a woman. At least that’s what my uncle told me. I guess I was a little surprised when I found that racism was just as prominent in Colombia as it was in the states. Except there, discrimination fell on a color wheel and the closer proximity to blackness, the worse you were treated. The darker Afro-Colombians made up most of the people selling food and jewelry in the streets. The poorest Island of Boca Chica was made up of only dark-skinned Afro-Colombians. I saw ads at the malls for skin bleaching. My dark skin uncle told me I wasn’t really black because my skin wasn’t dark enough and my lips weren’t as big as his. All the conversations with locals and travelers alike couldn’t help me find myself. At the airport when I was coming back to the States, a Colombian man in line with me stopped and asked, “You’re Mexican, aren’t you?” That was the first time in my life that someone guessed I was Mexican. He said he saw it in my face, but what I think he meant was that I looked indigenous.
My brother, Jr., is the darkest of the three of us. His hair is nappier, too. Once every few months he has my mom put relaxer in it and asks her to rub a skin bleaching lotion from Mexico on his face and neck. He always tells me how much he wishes he had my hair, because my curls are loose and manageable. I always tell him how much I love his skin. I clung to my blackness while my little brother pushed his away. I remember giving my mom a lesson on cops shooting black men in America and how we had to be careful with Jr. She was defiant at first; she said, “Pero Jr. no es negro!” She thought cops only shot African American boys. She used to get braids put in by my niece’s mom, and whenever we went out, black men would hit on her. She would always joke and say, “Los negritos me quieren.” She didn’t realize it was because she was black too.
It took me a long time to not care about what either side had to say about who I was. I don’t understand people’s obsession with being ‘purebred.’ I actually feel lucky now that I get to participate in so many cultures. I started embracing Mexican traditions like Dia De Los Muertos, and enjoying Mexican food. I embraced all parts of me, those visible and those not. I embraced words like negra, nappy, and ghetto. I wore the colors that made my skin pop that I avoided before, like pink and yellow. I stopped straightening my hair and let my curls stretch themselves around my head. I let the Mexican flag bleed onto me and intertwine with my curly hair and thick skin. I was both negra and Mexican, wearing Frida Khalo shirts and blowing out my curls with a Black Power fist afro pick.
When I was twenty-two, I fell in love again with a true Mexican boy who grew up on his father’s farm picking up chicken eggs every morning. His grandmother flattened homemade tortillas and would even cook pozole outside over a brick fire. His sisters’ dark hair flowed down their backs. His grandfather tended his garden every morning, raising squash and herbs. I loved every meal at his house. His grandmother would cut the flowers from the squash and cook with them. There was always fresh cilantro in the kitchen and buckets of dirty eggs. He and I spent our evenings playing on his Xbox and watching Marvel shows.
I was afraid to show my face at his family events. So many times before I had been rejected by the family of a lover. His uncles stood tall with dark mustaches and Coronas in their hands while his aunts sat around the kitchen table breaking breads painted pink and yellow. The older women would stare and wonder about me until I opened my mouth and let out a quiet “Hola! Me llamo Yoselin. Soy la novia de Brian.” Their eyebrows would relax and they’d let out a subtle smile and return my greeting, “Mucho gusto.” I could tell they had a sense a relief when they knew I spoke Spanish. And occasionally one of them would say, “Pensaba que eras negrita,” and to which I would always happily reply, “Si soy!” As confused as their faces looked, they smiled and agreed.
As time went by, I knew his family loved me. I’d have my own present under the Christmas tree and a homemade cake on my birthday. Pictures of Brian and me were framed and placed in bookshelves next to pictures of grandma and grandpa. He would joke and say that his family liked me more than they liked him. I still felt out of place with them—as none of them looked like me—but they accepted me. That’s all I could ask for in a community that didn’t quite understand my existence. I eventually moved in with them. I’d wash off the dirty eggs in the morning and fry them over a skillet lubricated with butter. I’d eat the eggs with fresh tortillas and the vibrant green salsa they always had sitting on the table. For Christmas, instead of turkey and ham, we ate blood red pozole with diced onions and cabbage, accompanied with cokes in glass bottles.
I became pregnant our third year together. We weren’t trying to get pregnant and at one point, we doubted I could even have a baby because of my health issues and medications.
His family cried tears of joy when we told them we were pregnant. Brian and I were happy, too. Three years together, and I was just now solidifying our love with a child after doubts and lost hopes of ever raising my own family. But there I was, seven weeks pregnant with a cherry-sized embryo sharing my glow with his family and mine. As my belly grew, so did our love. This Mexican boy with thick black hair, with eyes as big and dark as rubies, with skin the color of Mazapan, and big bushy eyebrows that said, “Hey! I’m Mexican!” was in love with me. It was a love so pure, I thought it wasn’t real. He understood me. Eventually, he started talking about black lives matter and issues in the black community more than me. It was great to be with someone who tried to understand the other half of me. Everyone else only acknowledged one half, either the black or the Latino. Brian embraced both.
The baby forming inside of me would be half of me and half of him. I wondered, as his unborn face began to take shape, who he would look like. Would he be allowed to say nigga? My black friends asked me that at my baby shower jokingly. We all laughed as I said, “Probably not.” I wondered if he would at least have my hair or my nose. I spent so much of my time clinging to my blackness, and I started to wonder if my own son would understand and relate to me. Would I be able to read him the children’s book that empowered little black kids, and would he understand? What culture would he relate to, and most importantly, what race? All these years, I wanted to find people who might relate to me. Even the baby I so painfully grew and birthed might not even relate to me. I’d squint at ultrasound pictures to find evidence of me in this little human barely taking shape.
On January 28th at 11:02 p.m., they sliced my womb open and pulled my baby out. He weighed seven pounds and nine ounces. We named him Lino June. They took him away as they closed my wound. Brian went with him and met him before I did. I waited thirty-six weeks for him to be born and five more hours while they put me in recovery and Lino in the NICU. I was dazed and bloody, I still couldn’t feel the bottom half of my body. At 4 a.m., a kind nurse woke me up and placed my baby on my chest. The epidural left me feeling lost, and the shock of having a human cut out of my womb hadn’t passed. I stared at him and couldn’t believe he was mine. His eyes were closed, and he was tightly wrapped in a white blanket with blue and pink lines on it. I examined his face to see who he resembled.
After we all slept and the drugs wore off, I got to know him more. He opened his eyes and looked right at me. His skin was soft and the color of Mazapan, and his eyes were big and round like his father’s. His nose was short and round like mine. He didn’t cry the first night. He would just stare at me. I laid his naked little body on my naked chest and watched him see me for the first time.
Bringing him home was surreal. As he grew before my eyes, I could find nothing wrong with him. I would stare at his fingers and toes and not find a single imperfection. His hair grew straight, thick and black, like his father’s. His facial expressions and clear joy to be alive filled my heart in places I didn’t know could be filled. I would stare at his little face and cry with joy. He was perfect. I fell in love for the fourth time with a Mexican boy, but this time, it was my son.
Mexican boy, I’m here to raise you.
-Yoselin Saucedo
Yoselin Saucedo is a 25 year old, queer and disabled mother. She spent her early college career as an English major until she decided it was the writing aspect of English she liked the most. She also spent her early college career traveling and building her portfolio with articles published on Blavity.com. She is now a third year creative writing major at University of California Riverside and lives near campus with her partner and son.