(Dear Friends, I’m still learning! This was published yesterday, with edits pending. Here’ the final copy. Enjoy! And pass on. DM)
A day later a package arrives: flash cards for Latinos who grew up hearing the {Spanish} language but not speaking it; the tongue-tied who ace classes but can’t ask for directions to the nearest Laundromat; the guilt-ridden for whom Spanish is a preexisting condition that flares up when ordering food at a Mexican restaurant, then recedes when the margaritas wear off.
–from my novella, The Block Captain’s Daughter
July 31, 2014. Dateline, Havana. White garments drip on clotheslines. A black mannequin, her hair in pink rollers, models a flowery dress, circa early 1960s. A yellow cardboard ’57 Chevy sparkles on a grassy patch. A living room boasts two black and white T.V.’s, a sunken couch, a small table and one lamp. Elsewhere a tiered altar seems to tower over the city. Black and white Marys don white gowns and carnival beads; wicks wilt on dozens of white candles sheathed in glass; beer bottles bristle with money; African deities in European garb pose as Christian saints; and sprinkled everywhere are photos of the well and the ill, the living and the dead. I can’t imagine leaving this country, this exhibit, a creation of Cuban artists on the backstage of Santa Fe’s Museo Cultural. I must see more. One way or another I’ll make a trip to the real Cuba. Despite my Spanish.
Next stop, the main exhibit hall where Museo director Maria Martinez asks guests to join her at a table. Besides myself there are Myrna and Mario of Chihuahua, and my buddy Mara from the Coalition for Prisoners Rights. I eye a photograph of a Brooklyn train track and listen to the sweet patter of Spanish. My grasp of the language plateaued some years ago. But the military industrial complex has everyone talking and I’m angry enough to get what is being said. It’s the war on drugs that galls me the most. Cops target poor neighborhoods. Latinos and blacks are disproportionately represented behind bars–even though whites commit crimes at roughly the same rate. I’m about to say this in Spanish. But the words melt in my mouth. The old voice won’t let up. Be quiet. You’re not as good as the others.
Around age fifty I made a decision. My my life is moving at hundreds of miles per hour. I don’t have time to stop and pick up conversational Spanish. But there is something about a good night’s sleep that makes me susceptible to epiphanies. The day after my trip to the Museo I drove to Mara’s house. The tiny adobe is anchored to the earth by a table teeming with Coalition newsletters that go out everyday to prisoners around the country. Mara and I exchange abrazos and sit down. I deliver the verdict: Enough is enough. I must learn to speak Spanish. Then, without a word of warning, Mara switches over. El espanol ya está adentro de tí. Tienes que practicar, no mas. The language is already inside me. I just have to practice. We talk for 45 minutes. Words I didn’t know I knew ping-pong across the table.The winner? Passion. Outscoring shame a million to one.
That was August 1st. Since then my brain circuitry has been lighting up like an exploding star. Spanish words buried for years surface as I ask friends to speak to me in Spanish. Everything unlocks my memory: reading Los Santitos by Nicaraguan novelist Maria Amparo; listening to an interview about microcredit for Honduran women; chuckling at slang (nel for no) in Spanish Lingo for the Savvy Gringo by Elizabeth Reid; and feeling my mouth water while chatting with a Guatemalan shop owner about móle, and tamales swathed in banana leaves. Then the unfathomable happened. For a split second I blanked on the English word for the plums I placed on the kitchen windowsill beside a St. Jude candle.Then I snapped. Ciruelas! That’s it. St. Jude has taken on my once hopeless cause of fluency. Plums.
On August 10, my Dad, Ted Martinez relaxed in a chair in his Albuquerque home as my friend, Jim Morrison, set up lights and cameras. We wanted to know about my grandpa, Luis Martinez, a court-interpreter and composer of corridos. The ballads, Dad explained, eulogized men who died in World War II and lionized candidates running for office. In the early 1950s, New Mexico Senator and civil rights champion Denis Chavez asked grandpa to write a second corrido, this time for his re-election campaign. Grandpa took dad (his first train trip) to Los Angeles where the acclaimed Mexican musician Tito Aguizar performed “Corrido de Denis Chavez” in a recording studio.
Dad recited the refrain, his eyes cast down as if reading the words.
Chavez, Chavez, Chavez/ Otra vez de senador./En noviembre votarémos/Y otra vez lo llevarémos/ Al senado triunfador.
Then he retold grandpa’s story in Spanish. Each word rose and bobbed like colored balloons; I grasped every one of them. Y sus impresiones de Los Angeles? I ask. Our eyes lock. There is so much more to say. It’s at the tip of my tongue. I am a corrido, remembering itself, singing itself. I’m fifty-four. And it’s still early.
