I am muddy waters and clear skies, river currents and desert winds. Not Mexican. Not American. Only both and neither. Like a lava lamp, always in motion, a mixture of language and culture and perspective perpetually separating and coming back together but never entirely. That is the flow of my life.
In 1967, the Vietnam War was underway and my dad was in the Air Force and stationed at Laredo Air Force Base. He met my 19-year-old mom at a dance and a few months later, my little zygote self came into being in the Colonia Guadalupe, government subsidized housing where my mom lived with her grandmother and six siblings.
Laredo on the southern border of this country sits at the northern banks of the Rio Grande. My father was born in Detroit, at the country’s northern border. His mother was a school teacher, his father a northern Irish immigrant writer and radio man who was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for unionizing workers at his radio station in Detroit. My dad might have been a mixed-up border, too, though we never discussed it before he died.
I sensed from an early age that I straddled worlds: Mexican and American; brown and white, poor and privileged. I think about it most days. People have accused me of performing my identity, other times they’ve asked me why I try to pass as a white girl. These are people who’ve never stared very long at lava lamps.
Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about the joys and compensations of being a mestiza. In Borderlands she tells us that “[t]here is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being ‘worked’ on.” I feel the joy but also the discomfort. A border can be a lonely line.
In a matter of weeks, I’ll be on my way to Ireland for the first time, the country of my father’s father and where I am a citizen by birthright. I have no real itinerary, only a loose plan to stay with my cousin and visit with friends. I imagine a country determined by a complexity of green, rolling hills with rustic cottages, tiny villages, and rain clouds that slip from the sky. Ocean-spray and stone castles. Seas that beat against the chests of giant cliffs.
I will write about it all, wondering what it feels like to be an island.
(Dini McCullough Amozurrtia was raised in Laredo, Houston, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including The Más Tequila Review, Kweli Journal, Bartleby Snopes, The Butter, Literal Magazine and PANK. Her short fiction is anthologized in Abundant Grace, and her story “Amalia on the Border” was a finalist in The Texas Observer’s 2013 Short Story Contest. In April 2017, her story “Elsa & Segundo” placed second in the annual Bethesda Magazine Short Story Contest. Read more about her and her work at Substack: @thequietkitchen)
