Erasure: Lineage

The settlement, or rancheria of mission Indians, after being established was placed in charge of a trustworthy Indian, Hipolito, from whom it took its name of Politana [located in the San Bernardino Valley]. The little mission flourished exceedingly until 1812, which was known as “el ano de los temblores’’ (the year of earthquakes), when the Indians, forgetting in their fear all of the teachings of the good fathers, reverted to their savage superstitions, fell upon the mission, destroyed the buildings and massacred most of the mission Indians and converts. Later the buildings were rebuilt and were occupied for many years, but nothing now remains of Politana, or “Rancheria,” as it was more popularly known, nor of the old burial place of the Christian Indians of San Bernardino Valley.

—John Brown Jr., 1922, History of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties

I don’t claim to know what it is like for others to grow up Indigenous. My lineage is not always visible to others. It bears the weight of colonization, the weight of a government that wants us to disappear. I grew up in San Bernardino in a multitribal Southern California Indian and Mexican family, in a struggling city, in a mostly Latinx and Black neighborhood in the center of town.

I am a descendant of both Father and Mother. Sometimes I confuse all of their relatives in my head. But when I speak of myself as a descendant, it is for clarification. It is to note my lineage from Father. I am clarifying to others, to nonfamily, that I am not enrolled in a tribal nation.

Descendant is not a word we used in our house or family. It is a word of paper work and documents. A word of bureaucracy. A word I used when I applied to college or for scholarships and later for a job at a tribal college. A word to explain how I am both something and not that something.

But as an Indigenous person in the United States, I know my lineage has been documented by the government and other organizations, although not always correctly. My lineage has also been documented in family stories, most oral, but some written. There is also recognition by others in the community.

I am a descendant of the Tongva, the traditional people of Los Angeles. I am also a Luiseño (San Luis Rey) and Cahuilla descendant. The Tongva and San Luis Rey Band of Luiseño Indians lack federal recognition, which complicates tribal enrollment and community. It means we also lack a land base, even though we know where we are from and where we belong.

This is neither the beginning nor the end of my lineage. I have started to wonder if part of the contemporary Tongva experience is this tension between disconnection and connection. Every day we are reckoning with this history.

So unless there is a need for clarification, when I introduce myself, I say, I am. I am both California Indian (Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño) and Chicana.

I say, I am.

I say, I remain.

I say, Let me tell you a story that neither begins nor ends with me.

In Tongva, Wa’aachnga means San Bernardino and Wa’aachvetam means people from San Bernardino. This seems to be the best way to describe myself. I am from a place and I am that place.

If I were asked what part of Mexico Mother’s family was from, I could not tell you. This is the work of assimilation and American progress or the American Dream. This is the work of a history of poverty and migration. This is the work of people who believe they can create and shift borders with a simple mark on a map. What I know is that several of my great-grandparents were born in parts of Texas and California—land that Gloria Anzaldúa says, “was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again.”

It is through their stories that I try to fight against amnesia, fight against the sweet anesthetic of miseducation that tried to turn my brain and tongue docile. This is how I grew up with my homelands all around me, but also out of reach.

My parents have lived in the same house for most of my life. Father selected the house because of the citrus trees and large driveway. It seemed to him like a place where no one would bother him about all the cars and car parts that he worked on. I grew up with the smell of oil and fumes of auto-body paint, the sound of painter’s tape being ripped off and hum of a compressor. Father’s hands are stained, the tip of a finger is missing. The tip of the finger lost under the weight of an engine. I have never known him to have this missing part of himself. When he was not working as a mail carrier, he was creating beauty. He speaks a language of suspension systems, rims, and engines. When I was a child, he painted a Mustang candy-apple red, and I wanted to run my tongue against the curve of the slick red fender.

It was others, people from outside my neighborhood, who taught me to be ashamed of where I grew up. They taught it to me through their words and the distaste in their voice when they talked about the local shops, schools, and people. The way some people turn the name, San Bernardino, into San Bernarghetto.

There is nothing here for you.

This was never said to me, but I’ve heard it said many times to family members and friends.

Look at any comment section for an article or YouTube video about San Bernardino. They say it is a festering cancer. They say, San Bernardino has always been a shithole. They say, There is no saving San Bernardino. They say, Downtown is a ghost town. A shell of what it once was. They say, I’m working on getting my family out of here. They say, I left San Bernardino twenty-six years ago, and I am glad I did. God bless everyone there. . . . Just leave.

There was a time I too thought I wanted a fresh start, that it would be easy to forget. But I keep coming back.

Brother was proud of this place, of our street. One of his first tattoos was of the street sign. I think he saw our city the way he saw an old or broken car. He was usually full of optimism and could see beyond the damage and imagine the possibilities. He felt at ease here, a place filled with stories of his youth. As youth, he and his friends would send out high-pitched whistles to alert each other as to their whereabouts on the block. Someone dubbed them the “10th street boys.” It was a name they wore with pride, saying they didn’t need a gang because they had each other.

Father and Mother have two children together. Brother and I are four years apart. Mother wanted only one child. She was one of eight children and grew up watching the toll that mothering took on her mother, and she wanted none of it. I was a difficult birth, but not a difficult child. This eased the way for Mother’s agreement for a second child. But it is hardly ever just us. Sometimes cousins live with us, or they move in across the street. Other times Mother’s eldest brother lives with us, or another uncle.

In school we learn about the San Andreas fault line. How it runs down the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. How it forms the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates. We learn to duck and cover and stand in doorways. We are told to keep supplies at home. Put a pair of shoes near your bed. If I had a map of California, I could trace the length of the fault. It begins in the interior of Southern California, at the Salton Sea, Cahuilla territory, where my paternal grandparents would go to get away from the city. It extends across the northern part of San Bernardino, near where I went to high school for a special honors program. It cuts across the bottom of the San Bernardino mountains, Yuhaviatam (Serrano) territory: the mountains where Father took us fishing. It passes through the city, close to the community college, which was once Politana. The fault line continues on upward through Tongva homelands (Los Angeles) and through the state until it lands in the Pacific Ocean.

School teaches me it is the motion of these plates that causes earthquakes. But there are other stories that attempt to explain the way the earth moves, this expression of energy. One involves several turtles, and another, a man growling. These stories are also ways of knowing and understanding.

The region is also intersected by the San Jacinto and Cucamonga fault zones. This is a place with a long history of people converging, so it makes sense to me that it is also a place where tectonic plates meet. Due to a lack of resources, many of the buildings in San Bernardino have not been retrofitted to withstand a major earthquake. In a Los Angeles Times article about the issue, the owner of a downtown restaurant says, “If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die. Maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s an earthquake.” This is what San Bernardino has been trying to teach me my whole life.

In elementary school I watch a hill by my school burn. I tested well, so Mother worked to get me into a magnet school in the north part of the city. She tells me, This is a good school; teachers send their own children here. There are no hills to burn in my neighborhood, but I take the smell of smoke with me when I return home. Sometimes when there is a fire in the mountains, it skips down into the north part of the city. This is what happened in 2003 with the Old Fire.

The Old Fire was started by arson and caused a billion dollars of damage and the deaths of six people. It was fanned by the Santa Ana winds. In Southern California there is always talk about these hot, dry winds. They have been called “devil winds.” I’ve also heard that they come from the mouths of the spirits. In 2003 they whip and turn, sending embers into a whirl. They catch on to the dry trees, and then soon another house is on fire. That year comes to be known as the “fire siege.” I stay at home, watching the news and the smoke as it makes its way to our neighborhood. In the center of the city we are safe from the fires, but ash sweeps into our house. By this time Brother has started his towing business. His friends call for help. They want him to tow their classic cars—their tricked-out lowriders—to safety. These vintage cars with their custom paint jobs, expensive rims, and hydraulics or air-bag systems that lift and lower the cars can be worth as much as a new car or more. The flames come quicker. His phone rings and rings. There is more smoke, and Brother has asthma. Mother wants him to wear a mask. He makes do and wears a painting mask. Brother comes back when the streets are blocked. He tells me that closer to the fires, people are sitting on their roofs watching the north part of our city burn. It takes years for some houses to be rebuilt; they stand out like missing teeth.

My own teeth always seem to be falling apart. As a child, I spend a lot of time at the Indian Health Services dentist. My teeth decay easily— they crumble. An inherited risk, the dentist says. My mouth is small like Mother’s, but my tongue is lazy. It makes words with the letter s sound sloppy. Perhaps this is the seed that grows the quiet inside me. After years of speech therapy, the therapist tells Mother there is not much more she can do for me; either it will click or it won’t. I gain more control over my tongue, learn to say scissor and sesame without my mouth filling with liquid, but I can never lose the feeling that my tongue will betray me.

At Brother’s school he learns to stop and drop after the police chase a gunman into the schoolyard. Years later his youngest son will learn to crouch under a desk or perch on a toilet in the event of a gunman. In first grade he will need this training because his school is minutes away from the site of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. For a school in the central part of the city, gun violence, like earthquakes, is not unexpected, but there is something about this attack that catches us off guard. I learn about the attack in texts from my youngest nephew’s mother. I’m in a classroom in Seattle and have to excuse myself. I try to follow along with what is happening via texts and social media. Parts of the city close. My phone doesn’t leave my hand for hours. I advise my nephew’s mother not to try to pick up her child before they release him. The culprits have not been captured. Mother tells me she has been texting her friend who works in the building for hours.

A few years after the terrorist attack, a man will shoot and kill his ex-partner and one of her students in a San Bernardino elementary school. Even though I live miles away in another state, for months I will have nightmares of a gun exploding in my face. I will wake up wanting to scream—wanting to live.

At school no one asks about my Native identity, but every year in grade school I bring home a form that asks if I am Native American. Mother marks yes. It is Mother who teaches me we must mark our presence even in the smallest ways.

In school I don’t learn much about the traditional peoples of the region. There must have been the required unit on the mission system in the fourth grade. I have a faint recollection about coloring sheets of a mission and maps of the missions dotting California’s landscapes. I try to color within the lines. Follow directions.

It is not until I am an adult that I began to understand the magnitude of what the Spanish did to California Indians under the guise of molding good Christians. I learn about the monjeríos, the women’s barracks used to control sexual activity. Separated from their families and crowded together in unsanitary conditions, unmarried women were cut off from their cultural teachings—cut off from learning what it was to be a Native woman. They were also highly susceptible to disease and sexual violence from padres and soldiers. The Acjachemen and Tongva scholar Charles Sepulveda argues that monjeríos were the first prisons in California. I think of all the California Indian children like me who in school were told to complete workbook sheets about missions or assigned to build replicas of the architecture used as a tool to control Native people and expand the Spanish empire.

When I am about fourteen, my family visits my cousin and her family one warm summer. My hair is braided into two long braids. Her husband tells me I look Indio. I don’t know if his words are a compliment or criticism. I don’t wear my hair in braids for years afterward.

Another teenage summer I hide from the sun as it stalks me across a dry desert. When someone notices that I have paled to some other version of myself, I feel momentarily victorious. I cannot make myself smaller, but I make myself paler, something more acceptable, and that is a relief. It has taken many years for me to come out of this thinking. It is a reeducation.

I learn to blame the rains in April or May, around the annual Orange Show, on an Indian curse. The first National Orange was organized in 1911 as a way to promote the citrus industry, an “exotic crop” at that time. The records note that it rained the whole day. The Orange Show was rebranded as the National Orange Show Festival, but the carnival today has little to do with the citrus industry that once flourished in the region. These days the National Orange Show Events Center (NOS) is rented out for large raves that draw attendees in the thousands. A local article called the raves a “blessing and a curse” because while they draw in much-needed money to the city, numerous noise complaints come in. I too have grumbled to myself when I am back in town and I forget there is a music festival and I’m in heavy traffic with out-of-town drivers who don’t know where they’re going. The youthful attendees are easy to spot in their skimpy festival outfits. Many of them sparkle or shine as they walk down San Bernardino’s cracked sidewalks.

But these festival attendees are also part of a history of music and concerts in San Bernardino, specifically at the Orange Show. In 1949 the Swing Auditorium, with a capacity of ten thousand attendees, was built on the grounds of the Orange Show. In the 1960s and 1970s it became a popular spot for touring rock bands. Young people would save their money to see bands like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and when they couldn’t afford tickets, they would hang out outside the auditorium listening to music drift their way. Mother remembers attending as a young teen with a neighbor, either to see Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. She wasn’t a fan of this music and fell asleep, but others remember these concerts as transformative experiences, even if they took place in an aging venue.

The ’50s and ’60s had been a time of growth in the Inland Empire, partly brought on by the development of the aerospace industry during World War II. The communities grew with the 1942 opening of Norton Air Force base in San Bernardino. A job at the base brought Mother’s family here from another town in the region. Little Grandpa moved them to a small house on the outskirts, near the base. Her family was one of the few brown families in a neighborhood filled with poor White families.

The orange groves began to disappear to make way for housing and factories. These communities were springing up, but they were distinct from Los Angeles. The rock ’n’ roll shows of the early ’60s paralleled the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific rail routes, but by the late ’60s the tours were making their way to the suburbs and into the Inland Empire. The very detailed rock blog Rock Prosopography 101 notes that “Just as the railways had extended their reach from big cities in order to create suburbs, rock tours followed the same map.” It made sense that a band playing a show one night in Los Angeles would play the next night in a nearby city. It all ended when a twin-engine Cessna crashed into the Swing in 1981, damaging the building so deeply that it had to be razed.

There would be a significant downturn in the economy after the closing of Norton in 1994, which followed the closing of Kaiser, a local steel mill, in the ’80s. In 1992 San Bernardino saw the Santa Fe Railway move most of its employees to Topeka, Kansas. The railroad industry had been a major contributor to the area’s economy. Many who lived in the Mexican barrios in the west side of San Bernardino were employed by the Santa Fe Railway. The ’90s were my teenage years. I had a vague sense of the impact of these closings, but the vibrant San Bernardino of the ’50s and even the ’70s, when San Bernardino was named an All- America City, already seemed far away. I was caught up in my studies, but it was impossible to ignore the concern and tension stemming from an increase in gang activity, blamed on members moving in from Los Angeles.

I don’t remember when I ate my first piece of citrus fruit. They seemed to be always accessible and at times a nuisance. In the backyard we have several orange trees, a lemon tree, a grapefruit, and a tangelo tree. There is no need to buy lemons from the store for morning menudo— just grab a few from the tree. Cleaning up after the fallen fruit is one of the chores I always try to get out of. It is not until I move away for a few years that I begin to miss the trees. Some years we have more oranges and grapefruit than we know what to do with. We collect them and give them away.

My body is uncooperative. This is one of my few rebellions, along with wearing my hair down when my mother wants to put it up or away from my face. I’m a good girl but don’t care enough or have the dedication to make my body conform. I don’t ask it for much. I want to live in my head. My body seems to shrink and expand on its own.

In one of my thinnest years, Little Grandma pulls out Mother’s prom dress. It is a cream classic beauty sewed with Little Grandma’s precision, but it will not zip up on me. Mother is careful about how she talks about my body and my skin, which is darker than hers. But I know it is important to her that her children appear clean and put together. This is why she didn’t let us eat chocolate and ketchup in public when we were young. This concern has its own legacy. Her children are a reflection of her, but I know it is more than that. It is about the times it was made known to her that she or her culture were not palatable, that even with her lighter skin she was something not completely assimilated. She never says it, but I think she fears someone will call us Dirty Mexicans or Dirty Indians.

It was the Spanish padres who first brought citrus seeds into what is now called California. They were planted on the grounds of the missions. The largest orange orchard was at the San Gabriel Mission, with about four hundred trees. This too is a part of my lineage. It is impossible to untangle the thread of colonization. With all the trauma of the missions I will claim the sweetness of citrus. My paternal grandfather supported his family by being a caretaker for a white man’s forty acres of orange groves in Rialto. Next to it, Grandfather owned, with a partner, five acres of grapefruit trees. When Grandfather sold this property, he used the money to build their family a house in San Bernardino, in Meadowbrook, a small barrio in the center of town. Grandmother also worked those groves. She was known for being good at irrigating. This was before my time. I have to imagine her this way—the seventy-two- hour process, spending the night in the camper truck with Grandfather to make sure the trees were given the proper amount of water.

These groves are where Father spent his childhood, learning to love these globes of sweetness. This is a happy place for Father and his two brothers. There are bikes and a tire swing. Sometimes they shoot cottontails with a shotgun. They learn how to drive their father’s work truck, how to irrigate. In college, to make a little extra money, Father takes over from his mother, irrigating a small grove near his childhood home. He fondly remembers most how much the owner would feed him.

Father’s childhood home in the orange grove was owned by a rich man who lived in San Diego. The owner would drive to the property in one of his nice Cadillacs. He’d pay Father for each gopher Father caught in the groves. The gopher holes caused problems with the irrigation. Father would show him the tails to receive payment. A woman at my grandmother’s funeral told me many stories. Her father also worked in the citrus industry. She said, with what I think was a mixture of bitterness and sadness, “Those rich white men built their fortunes off of the backs of the brown people. What would it have cost them to pay a few more cents?”

One year Grandfather is involved in demonstrating the picking and packing process for the Orange Show. When Father is young, he gorges on so many oranges that he becomes sick, but that doesn’t keep him from loving them.

The orange trees that Grandfather tended to and that are planted at my family home have a different origin than the first trees brought over by the padres. These other orange trees, navels, have a specific parent. In 1848 California was annexed through the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and due to the completion of the railroad that connected California to other parts of the country, in the 1870s there was large-scale migration to Southern California. Eliza and Luther Tibbets were among those settler families who arrived in Riverside in 1872. Their former neighbor sent, by rail and wagon from Washington, DC, two or three starter trees whose lineage was from a monastery garden in Brazil.

During this time, as the influx of settlers were demanding land for themselves, California Indians were being forced off land they had tended to for generations because they did not have legal titles. My paternal family was relatively lucky. Through their connection to prominent colonial families, at least one family was able to acquire land that had once been a part of Rancho San Bernardino in San Timoteo Canyon, also known as the village of Saahatpa by local Native people.

Navel oranges are seedless and easy to peel. The little belly button that I love to savor is a mutation—a conjoined twin. Because these oranges are seedless, in order to replicate them, their sprouted buds must be grafted onto a tree, making every navel tree a clone of the parent. It is these sweet winter fruits that father tells us not to juice. When we have a particularly good crop, he advises us to eat them whole, to take them as they are.

The Tibbets exhibited these sweet globes at small agriculture fairs, capturing the attention of the public. One of the trees has survived all these years, but the sister tree that was transplanted to the grounds of the Mission Inn in 1903 died. I wonder if I should feel a loss for the death of this sister tree? Sometimes I am conflicted about my nostalgia for the citrus industry, a colonial introduction that allowed my grandparents to support their family.

I am less conflicted about the Mission Inn, an historic downtown Riverside hotel built in the Mission Revival style used to increase tourism to California. It is meant to allude to an authentic and distinct California history, but one cloaked in fantasy. Customers are not supposed to enter the Mission Inn for a spa day, brunch, or wedding, and think

about Native enslavement or genocide. Even as a California Indian, I might be tempted to enter this fantasy, but the one time I stayed there for two nights, every time I walked through the hallway to get to my room I felt claustrophobic and had an intense desire to flee. It was not unlike the visceral experience of being triggered by men who remind me of Brother’s killers, the way I want to shrink or run sometimes when I see the slow movement of a man with his face partially covered on a dark night.

During the summer, as preteens, Brother, kids from the block, and I play war. Boys against girls. My two friends on the block are sisters who live next door. I am over at their house a lot. I watch their mother use a hot comb on their hair, and I learn there is a difference between what I expect from a perm and what they expect. Our brothers spend hours together.

The sisters are a year or so older than me but not yet too old to play this game. This is one of the few times when my friend group crosses with Brother’s. We collect the fallen fruit and throw them at each other. Sometimes they land as thuds, and other times they hit their targets as splats. My aim is not good. We climb atop a roof. We drip sweat and get sticky with citrus juice. These are the easiest days of the block, with our mouths so full of joy. In this memory, my body is barely budding as I lick the tangy juice from my forearm as if no one is looking.

For most of my life, beauty seemed so far away from me. Mother told me how her stomach never flattened even when she was a teen and she severely restricted her calories and worked out constantly. And Father’s belly was always rounded even when he was a sinewy slip of a man who wrestled competitively. My adolescent body didn’t want to conform to teen-magazine dimensions, and I didn’t have the energy to make it. Mostly it was a relief—to not be hideous nor pretty. To be something in between, to be someone who can easily disappear. It is safer here.

Because I was young and myopic, I thought I would never look back at pictures of my youth, like my mother does, with regret. I thought I would never sigh at my own beauty and the loss of something intangible. But I was wrong.

Half of my extended family is various shades of deep brown. Little Grandpa, my paternal grandfather, was a short ruddy nut of a man, while Little Grandma is fairer and even smaller than Little Grandpa. I imagine that if she hadn’t lacked a formal education, had a Spanish surname, hadn’t become mostly deaf as a young child, then become a young mother, that she might have been able to pass as something other than Mexican, someone whose lineage did not have roots in these Americas.

Even though my love for my relatives is not based on their skin color or weight, I have always been more critical of myself. Growing up, I learn to measure myself against whiteness. Beauty is fair skin and thinness. Little Grandma is always reminding us to stay out of the sun, lest we get too dark. She fears we will darken, brown to earth, the color of struggle that arches into a hunched back. I think of her small hand laboring into my own hand that will never have to pluck cotton or grapes from a vine. Never will I have to depend on my hands to complete factory piecework like Mother or Little Grandma.

Little Grandma hands me an umbrella. This shade might stop the clock. Perhaps I will turn into a whirl of white-blue cloud and marry good and white. Pass through that open door she tries to prop open.

There were years that my body seemed to be its own curse. The start of my menstrual cycle in fifth grade. The memory of a middle-school summer: I am at the lake with my family. I see one of my schoolmates from elementary school. I swim over to say hello. I’ve barely spoken when I hear her brother say, “Wow, you have gotten fat.” My classmate says nothing, and I swim away. The year of my growing pains when my hips and thighs would ache. Some nights I would wake from pain and cry, wanting to disconnect from my body.

Sometimes people say the curse is because orange groves were planted on top of the cemetery used by local Native people. I didn’t realize until recently that rumor was referencing the settlement of Politana. Many Cahuillas and Serranos lived in Politana before violence in the settlement caused some to move to Saahatpa.

Most of the time, the rumor was that the Orange Show happened on actual burial grounds. Other times, the curse was blamed on the gen- eral mistreatment of local Native peoples, particularly the Yuhaviatam (Serrano) people who in 1867 experienced a thirty-two-day campaign by the militia. During that time they were shot and killed on sight.

Rain is not the most vengeful curse one could invoke on a place, especially on a place like San Bernardino with its dry valley. The curse was one of the few times I heard people talking about Native people while I was growing up. We were acknowledged as existing, but only in the past. We were the cause of both guilt and blame. We ruin a good time. I don’t think of my ancestors as being vengeful, but now I think, so what if they were? What is a curse but a last-ditch effort for justice and balance by calling upon the spirits?

My first impulse is not to invoke a curse. I keep no maledictions handy, but there are times when I’m overwhelmed by the totality of my grief. I’m reminded of Eldest Nephew’s smile that does not return easily. And then I think of the possibility of Brother’s killers being happy, and my insides curl up. After all these years, the pain comes back quick and ripe, ready to split. The enormousness of the loss comes in waves, and when I catch my breath, I want to break something outside of myself. I want them to know what they have taken, but that is an impossible task, that is the unsolvable.

I am not ashamed of my anger or my grief. But I do not let myself go often to that murky below-place. I will push it away for many days, weeks, and months if I can. That deep lake in me is such a slippery place. Some call it survivor’s guilt. But that seems too minimal. Others call it post-traumatic stress disorder. And that seems like something external from me. I am grateful to be past the first few difficult years when my mind replayed the night over and over again and never once could I save Brother. But sometimes there is something in me that shakes like an earthquake, and all my preparation and mantras do not work. And I become a soil too wet to sustain my own structure. Liquefaction turns what I try to keep steady into quicksand. It is in these moments that loss and guilt feel all consuming, and my desire to trade my life for Brother’s is most bright. And there is no one who can convince me that he wasn’t a better person than I can ever be. He would have surely forgiven his killers, whereas I cannot.

I know I am not the smartest at my school. But I try to hold my own. Brother and his friends call me schoolgirl. It is not meant as an insult. No one bullies me for it. I stay at home and out of trouble except for some school activities. Always so cautious. Brother and I balance each other out. It is as if he and his friends are determined to wring out all of the fun that can be had from this city, in case they blink and suddenly there is no more life to live.

Sometimes I think that someone from my neighborhood will call me stuck-up, but it is never said to my face. An aunt calls me spoiled. A cousin tells me, You are so lucky, after my mother takes me shopping for school clothes. I understand that I am lucky, and I know that she means more than the clothes. She means that I have two parents in the same house with jobs. She means I have food in the fridge, my own bedroom, and parents who will not blame me if I am molested; she means all that and more.

While I am in college and Brother is in high school, he tells me how one of his teachers said to his class that no one from our neighborhood will amount to anything. Brother was never one to cause trouble in school, but he let his teacher know that his sister went to an Ivy League. When Brother tells me this story, what surprises me is that he even knew the significance of those words. I didn’t think he paid much attention to the details of my leaving. He will never get a chance to visit me while I go to school in New York or New Mexico. But the distance doesn’t break us. We always have home. This is the beginning of my leaving and Brother staying.

Read more from Issue 17.2.