History Lessons
by Jeannine Marie Pitas
My Not-Daughter
I try to become your mother by signing on a line. First, I must cross two languages. Ixil is a coat that surrounds you, protecting you from the white walls' coldness, the waiting rooms, and questioning eyes. It guards you from strangers who, though bringing milk and good intentions, don't understand. Nor do I. Your own mother is now a face on a screen, a photo by your bed, someone you hope to see again. Someday. I nurture you in my way, buy you jeans, correct your spelling, drive you to dental appointments. You make me tamales, plant tomatoes and beans on a bare patch of land beside my house.
Yes, I will sign. I promise to give you a bed, a roof. I offer to hold onto your hand, though your mother I cannot be.
The Dishwasher
I walk into the restaurant where you work and ask for you: Magdalena. The hostess stares at me blankly. “Magda-who?” “Maybe she's at your other location?” I persist. “No one with that name works here.” “She's a dishwasher,” I say. Her eyes grow clear. You emerge from the kitchen, apron over your T-shirt and jeans. 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. The hour when you should be studying for a math test, not scraping bits of fake-egg into the garbage, not loading heavy trays into a machine. Not meeting a lawyer who seeks to help people who've crossed imaginary lines remain in their chosen home. It's snowing in April, sleeting ice. The first blooms have frozen. Spring hesitates. Your papers, late. Snow falls. You wash dishes. You've worked for a month, back in the kitchen where customers don't go. None of the servers seem to know you.
How the Other Half Lives
“Translate it for me,” you command. It's for your US History class. Shining September; you live with me and go to school. I tell you about tenements crowded with cigar workers, wives and husbands and children up from dawn, working late into the night. I tell you of wealthy landlords who lived in posh neighborhoods and didn't say where they got their money. I tell you of my Polish great-grandparents, their journeys over the sea, how they, like you, came here without money or English, how they, like you, swept floors and worked in factories. “When was this written?” you ask. “1890.” A century and three decades compress; I may as well have said “last week.” I go on about people, twenty packed in a house. “It was horrible then,” I say. You look to me and smile. “At least they knew they could stay.”
1898
You hand me the paper. This week's lesson: the Spanish-American War. “This was the moment when US imperialism firmly took hold,” the textbook states. I show you a map. You label Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico. Point to your own country. Seventy years later, it too would feel my ancestors' talons. Could it be that your own journey across borders also began in 1898, with Hearst and Pulitzer, “Remember the Maine,” with Rough Riders galloping through Cuba, with betrayed Philippine nationalists shaking their fists? The United States of America, once a freedom-fighter, now a self-crowned king, sets millions running from bombs and pesticides. Its victims come to the door, demand to be let in. You, one of them, look at me with a question: “Can I really count on you? Are you here for me?” I made a promise; I signed my name, but you know that my life, like my country, is full of bullion and debt, Times Square and vast deserts. Weapons. Once I said I wanted no children; I tried to build a wall. Your brown eyes hold a question. “Will you let me in?”
Saving Private Ryan
Neither of us can believe that Mr. Simmons has made you spend four class periods watching it. You look at me, disturbed, puzzled. Forget D-Day... How to explain World War II when I haven’t helped you with your homework on World War I, when you're an 18-year-old with a sixth-grade education who grew up in a village of five hundred, when a big part of you just wants to work day and night and buy some land back in your country. But your lawyers say you need to sit in a classroom and learn these truths. I do too. The Jews — you've never heard of them. “They were the first to believe in one God. Jesus was a Jew,” I explain. You nod. “In the 1930s, in Europe, a group of people decided they were bad and all needed to be killed.” I say the word – genocide. Your eyes flash; you lower your head. “Like my country in the ’80s.” you say. Clarity appears. You know more history than I do.
Graduation
Last week I drove you five hours to immigration court in Omaha and feared I’d be coming back without you. We crossed the land of the Ho-Chunk, the Báxoje, the Ponca. You hail from the land of the Maya. So many transplants to this land, immigrants like me, truly believe that a blonde-haired judge has the right to declare whether or not you can stay. After five minutes she pronounces her decision: denied. One last appeal remains. Your lawyer pledges to keep fighting. You keep silent the whole ride home. But today, you don a lilac dress, new leather shoes; the satin blue gown adorns you. I wish that judge could be here, sitting in the bleachers alongside hundreds of families; I wish she could see the siblings and cousins who have come from other towns to clap and cheer for the first person in their family to graduate from high school. I wish she could see you cross that stage, shake the principal’s hand, pose for the picture I take alongside other proud parents. “Magdalena!” I call. Your eyes blaze. You lift them at the sound of your name.
Jeannine Marie Pitas is a teacher, writer, and Spanish-English literary translator living in Iowa, where she teaches at the University of Dubuque. Her first poetry collection, Things Seen and Unseen, was published by Mosaic Press in 2019. Her favorite poets include Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Delmira Agustini.
