Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia (year 2 reading books .txt) 📕

What I am trying to say is that we told jokes back then, at the detention center. We laughed in our little cot until the other women shushed us. We told jokes about our situation that were funny enough to muffle the dread inside.

Almost a month. That’s how long you laughed in an industrial playground, how long you sat bored in a class full of “babies,” how long you forgot the taste of your mother’s cooking. You can count yourself lucky because on the television now they talk about all these kids locked up in cages. Like it wasn’t bad enough they separated adult family members, sent them to opposite sides of the country. I didn’t think it could get worse. You have childhood memories that are not policed by a guard standing just off the frame. For this, I am grateful.

I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from, so there they left us. Said, Find your way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican. It was all very disorganized. I don’t know how to reach the nuns of the center for deported migrants that fed us that night and gave us a place to sleep beside all the other dazed faces. If I could reach them, I would say simply: Thank you. If only for one night, you kept us safe.

There are three choices for people like us in Mexico. We make our way back across the border and risk even harsher punishment if we are caught, because then we are “repeat offenders,” for us, a second time. We make our way back to our original homes, places we fled once because hunger shadowed, death shadowed. Or we stay with the others like us here, a hard choice too: here, where we’ll be chased and harassed, cash out for yet another outstretched hand in uniform to escape yet another van to yet another unknown. And I just kept thinking of how much harder crossing had become, kept thinking of all those bodies turned skeleton in the desert, all those bodies stacked atop one another in the morgues; so many bodies, too many bodies. Bodies washed ashore. Names we’d never know.

I opted for the last choice, to stay in Mexico, and I hope you will understand someday why I did so.

I know it was hard for you. You couldn’t even write in Spanish since you’d spent nearly all your life studying in English. The water made you sick because your stomach wasn’t used to it. You cried for your old life every day. You begged to go back to Florida and how could I explain it to you, you so small and full of hope still? That the place you called home had never considered you hers, had always held you at arm’s length like an ugly reflection?

I realize someday you may ask why we embarked on any of this in the first place, why I didn’t keep you breathing mountain air in your first home, water the color of a peacock feather, the sound of a guitar in a cathedral plaza, why I didn’t keep you in a place that never called you foreign. I guess the time has come to tell you about my pregnancy, though I have avoided it all these years.

I don’t know his name, Ana. I don’t even know his face. I remember, most, his hands, cracked and dry. How his nails were long and underlined with muck. How he tasted of stale smoke, smelled of grass. I knew he was a marero because of the 13 on his forearm. There was a portrait of the Virgin Mary extending up from the numbers, and I kept my eyes on hers, pleading up; they seemed to know there was little worth seeing in the earthly realm. He was just a teenager, Ana. This fact made it easier to forgive or at least spread blame. The war made a family out of orphaned boys. So did a country that didn’t want them either. Deportation. Mara, 18th Street, these were the parents who wanted them. If this makes you think to hate the country that birthed you, to hate yourself, remember that the guns bore US seals. That the last man your grandfather saw before a bullet to the face had just returned from a Georgia training camp.

The man who made you, and undid me, came as a warning. Your uncle, my brother, had a little store and he paid dues. But then there were some rough months. There was no money. He’d missed two months of payment. When they came the third month, they beat him up. I was the only warning left.

You are not of the man who raped me. I decided this as soon as I knew I was pregnant. I don’t believe a person is a person until they’ve arrived, announced themselves as such. I believe family is whoever we point to. I did not just have you. You did not simply happen to me. I chose. I saw the possibilities and I chose and I would not judge the woman who chooses differently. I decided I would be your mother and family, and you would be of me. I tell you this story but I do not call him your father.

Did I tell you about the day you were born? You were a month early, not too early for the doctors to consider you