Ofrenda, or If the Spirits Visited, How Would I Know?

#1. If the Spirits Visited, How Would I Know?

I worried I wouldn’t be able to see the spirits. Grandmothers and grandfathers and cousins I’d never met. I worried I had grown too far from home, that I no longer spoke the language of my last name. Or that my last name was not mine at all. That the peppers and onions and garlic I would mash up in hot black pots bore not the flavors of my heart.

I worried that they wouldn’t come to me. That I was too far lost. That something in me had been taken for good and could not be restored. That when using their index fingers to query the list, the ink on its pages slightly risen, my name would be left out. I worried it was me they couldn’t see. And not me who couldn’t see them.

And if I could see them, I worried, if they entered my home, I might be frightened at their sight. At these strangers. I worried I might take their presence the wrong way. To mean I had sinned, that I had failed, that I had, without my knowledge, broken some bond.

#2. En Route to Dolores Hidalgo

We are an hour from the home of José Alfredo Jimenéz. I know the sounds of his songs — the bellowing trumpets, an erratic baritone of a voice — but not the meaning of them. On nights of too much tequila, E. translates the songs to me between lines.

‘Drink with me this bottle,’ she whispers to me. ‘And with this last drop, we will go away.’

We ask our driver to play his songs quietly as we approach Dolores Hidalgo.

The hills on either side of the one-lane road rise up and then fall, and a soft rain blankets the green all around. I. sits in front of me, staring out the watered window.

It’s unbelievable a place this beautiful exists, I tell her. It’s all just here.

She’s quiet for a bit.

This should be our home, she finally says, still looking out. Look at it all. This should be ours. But they made it impossible for us to live here. They made it impossible for us to ever come home.

Jimenéz continues to sing, Otra vez a brindar con extraños y a llorar por los mismos dolores.

#3. Murmur

When I’m born, the doctor identifies a heart murmur.

The rapid flow of blood from one chamber to another. The sound it makes. An out of place hum.

My mother repeats this fact throughout my life, sometimes over Americanized hard shell tacos with ground beef, marinated lettuce, and cheddar cheese, sometimes over the television, the fifth time through the chocolate episode of I Love Lucy, sometimes while we dust the furniture of the sitting room she never allows anyone to sit in.

You were born with a heart murmur, mijo, she always says. The doctor told me.

I spend most of my life curious enough to wonder what a murmur means but not enough to find out.

Twenty-five years later, and not a single doctor mentions it. I begin to wonder if Madre was lying or perhaps she misheard. I wonder if she used this as an excuse to treat me gently, with caution. As an excuse for me to learn to treat myself the same. Gently. With caution.

To never move too quickly.

During a visit to a clinic that charges only twenty dollars for the physical my new school requires, the doctor holds his stethoscope, hard and cold, to my heart and says, Hm, sounds like you have a little heart murmur. Has anyone ever told you that?

I nod, surprised.

It’s nothing, though, he says. If it hasn’t caused you any problems yet, it probably never will.

The rapid flow of blood from one chamber to another. The sound it makes.

An out of place hum.

Often harmless. The one I have is called an innocent murmur. A functional murmur.

I joke one night to L. while telling this story, It basically means my heart is pumping too hard. My heart is just too much. She rolls her eyes and smiles.

But the truth is, I find — to my comfort — that there’s not much wrong with my heart at all.

#4. What If I Attempted To Rebuild The Spirits Myself?

Maybe I could rebuild them from the memories Madre passes along. The other room conversations I overhear as a child. My sister to my brother. My dad to my Nana.

What if I could paste these all together to make something resembling their bodies? What if I could forge their presence, here in my hallowed loft, at the top of these plywood stairs? What if I could draw their translucent frames from what I’ve been given?

That memory about the gas station. Mom looks out from behind the counter at a man driving a Chevy. That’s your father, Nana tells her. He owns a furniture store.

When she describes him to me, over a dash of whiskey and a cup of water, she says, He was so handsome, mijo. She looks over my head where she must be painting the picture. A run-down Boyle Heights gas station where she works on weekends with Nana. A few blocks from El Sereno, where she would eventually live with her little family: a husband, a son, a daughter. Years before I would surprise her.

He was wearing this beautiful suit. It had no wrinkles. I had never seen him before. His hair was jet black, and he had a thick mustache.

She sips on her mostly water cocktail. You have some of his features, mijo. From what I remember. But he drove off before I could really see.

Or maybe I could rebuild them from the photographs stacked sloppily in the hope chest. The only mess Madre ignores in the entire house. There’s no order to them all. A picture of Nene in her Wilson High School cheerleader uniform– yellow and blue. Thick eyebrows and crooked teeth.

One of me, about four, brooding at something out of frame, a white t-shirt and black tie. My grandfather, Louie, hunched back in his chair with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Bald and aged but with more color than I remember. Dad, his arm hung around me and what looks like a wound around his eye.

A black and white of Uncle Jimmy, mom, and dad. They hold up Madre, smiling. All smiling. Her teeth are still crooked like my sister’s were. My dad’s face is still skinny. My Uncle’s body, not yet see-through.

#5. A Conversation with L. Outside A Boyle Heights Bar

Are we just as bad as the gentrifiers? L. asks as we walk up to a new bar in Boyle Heights.

We talk about the education. The exodus. The return. The ways in which we both did it. Both to New York and then, hesitantly, almost by force, back to East LA.

Ten years before, I packed up my old Honda Civic until its axle nearly buckled. Books and clothing and old notebooks and planners. I lodged a dog bed in between it all where Cocoa Bean could sleep. And D. and I drove from Pasadena to Green River. Green River to Denver. Denver to Omaha. Omaha to Gary. Gary to Akron. Akron to Queens. And I woke up the next morning to start grad school at Sarah Lawrence, writing with almost no one that looked like me. No last names I recognized the accents of.

L. did nearly the same just a few years after and made documentary films with women she adored.

We talk about the difficulty. We wanted degrees. We wanted to make a decent living. We wanted to pay off our student loan debt. We wanted to make our neighborhoods prettier. We wanted to feel comfortable in them, so we would no longer feel pushed away by them. We wanted there to be more restaurants, more bars, more bookstores. We wanted to be more successful than our parents before us.

But then we stop ourselves. And we come to this understanding: what if our concept of success is actually informed by generations of someone else’s desires? Someone else’s measurements?

What if this is why we feel so lost in our own lives?

What would success look like to our grandparents? Their grandparents? Our most distant ancestors in Durango and Zacatecas? Is it possible to rebuild something we know nothing of? Is it possible to reconnect to a part of ourselves we can’t fully identify?

Can we exist, at once, in multiple moments? Here and somehow then? With our hearts and with theirs? With these spirits we wouldn’t be able to recognize?

What do you think they would want for us? L. asks me.

I can’t begin to imagine, I say.

We enter the bar. We shoot a shot of tequila. And drink Tecates with lime until the bar begins to blur.

#6. A Book Room in Providence, Rhode Island

From the air mattress in K. and M.’s book room, I hear what sounds like the opening and closing of drawers.

Open and shut. Open and shut. Over and over.

I wonder if this might be you. If this might be Uncle Jimmy. Grandma Hortencia. Grandpa Louie. If this might be Grandpa Ron.

If this might be those whose names I no longer remember.

It’s probably the wind, I tell myself.

But what if it isn’t? I also wonder.

What if they know exactly where to find me?

#7. The Day I Receive My Ancestry DNA Results, I Begin to Research The Portuguese Empire

Forty-one percent Native American, with origins in Northeastern Mexico and South Texas.

Northwestern Durango.

Twenty-one percent Portuguese.

Seventeen percent Spanish.

Four percent Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples.

The rest, etcetera.

I slide over the map with the tip of my finger. Over the water. From Portugal to Mexico. And I stop in a place that feels right.

What would it be like to stand right there? Where my finger feels that resistance. I wonder if I would feel pain. Or feel nothing at all.

I wonder if a calm would take over me.

I wonder if I might feel held.

#8. At What Point in Time Does a Song Become an Oldie?

At what point in time does a song become an Oldie? Is it when two children, five and four, sit in separate cars driving in opposing directions, almost into each other, on Huntington Boulevard? The curve of the street lined in its middle with palm trees, on its North with a hill of beaten down apartment complexes.

One of these kids — a perfect part on the left side of his hair, curls matted down by cheap gel using a plastic comb — rides in the middle seat, although there is no one else in the back with him. A gray Subaru. He asks his mom on the passenger side if they can go to Target.

The other kid, tight dark brown bangs above sneaky, smiling eyes, sits in the seat where she can see her Tata driving, his mustache firm and not yet graying. K-Earth 101 on both of their radios, Smokey Robinson comes on and belts, A love like ours is never ever free.

The two cars pass right by each other.

Maybe it’s when she’s crying about leaving her middle school boyfriend for the summer. She’s on the 10 freeway. Or maybe it’s when he goes to the swap meet in Santa Fe Springs and walks through aisles of trinkets and used gardening tools. Maybe it’s when they almost meet with their grandparents, possibly in the flower district or the alleys, their grandmothers shopping for cheap toys and clothes, birthday gifts for their cousins; their hands held tight and high, dragged through the loud crowds. Lullabies of Spanish pouring from everyone around them; each syllable sounds familiar but impossible to decode.

Is it when that little girl’s Tata takes her to see A Bowl of Beings when she’s perhaps too young; he plays I’m So Proud on the radio and tells her what Chicano Power means. Is it when that little boy sees his dad high on amphetamines for the first time, his mother drunk on tequila; they dance to The Originals until they tumble to the linoleum; the bouncing movements feel almost like a waltz.

Is it when that little boy and that little girl sit beside each other on a hill in Whittier, their eyes closed, breathing. They look over a city that, at once, feels like it belongs to them and feels like it belongs to everyone but them. They point out places they recognize. And places they can’t quite see. The pan dulce shop she never went to. The library he only walked by. The market, now torn down, where they may have gone, simultaneously, with their mothers, on a Sunday evening. They list and list what they know now by heart, lyrics and street names and restaurants, and the little girl tells the little boy about her Tata. He was a good man, she says. I feel like I’ve been searching my whole life for another person who loves like he did. Sometimes I convince myself it was never real. The little boy says nothing but rubs the face etched in the marble lodged in the grass between where they sit, then he rubs the little girl’s cheek with his thumb.

They close their eyes and hum off key.

Life can never be exactly how we want it to be, but I can be satisfied just knowing that you love me.

#9. B. in the Classroom

B. says he can’t handle the quiet. He adjusts in his seat and smiles, stares down at his phone. Why they all calm today, Mister? he asks of the other students.

What’s wrong with that? Isn’t it nice for once?

Nah, he says.

He’s been here for a month, with his heavy sweater in the California heat, with his wide set frame, with his heavy stepping pattern, worn out Jordans, slow and steady, always late, pulling up his navy pants as he goes. He’s been here for four weeks with his erratic laugh, sometimes soft and low, sometimes falsetto and exaggerated, his canyon smile. His eyes stuck in shadows.

Each day, I pull a stool next to his corner seat, the desk closest to the exit. Each day, we talk for twenty-five minutes. Each day, I ask him about his family, about how he likes being at a new school that’s, as he puts it, always all in his shit, about his preference for being out in the streets with his friends. Between these questions that some days he answers with breadth, others with one word, I force a pencil in his hand and help him complete worksheets.

Fill in the blank.

Answer the question.

Don’t forget your name, I tell him, pointing.

Why do you hate the quiet? I ask him.

I don’t know. It’s always noisy where I live. That’s what I’m used to.

I tell him about my first apartment in New York. On Metropolitan Avenue in Queens. Below my room was a pizza shop and a well trafficked produce store. At night, every night, garbage trucks would barrel through the streets firing off all sorts of sounds, metal machinery crunching against more metal, or compacting pounds upon pounds of the city’s waste. On windy nights, the pizza shop’s sign would sway outside my bedroom window, ungreased rusty metal sliding. Back and forth. For nights, I couldn’t sleep, but my mind would eventually get used to the ruckus. Used to the late night sirens and horns. Used to the busses pulling over and lowering their doors while beeping.

When I would go home to my mom’s, I tell B, her house is on this quiet block, and my room was sealed off real well from everything, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I tell him how I would toss around in bed. The covers each morning would be splayed like laundry. My eyes would water from the tired.

Yeah that’s how it is, he tells me. If it’s that quiet, I think too much.

What do you think about?

I don’t know, Gomez, he tells me. Dumb shit.

He looks down.

After some quiet, B tells me he wants to leave this school. He says this at least twice a week.

When I ask him for a reason, he says, Mister, I want to go to a school that has a little more — and he pauses. He lets out a small but knowing, quiet laugh. Craziness. A little more craziness.

You don’t like that this place has a little structure? I ask him

I’m just not used to it, he says.

I suddenly feel deeply connected to B. And I could feel a thin layer between us melt away.

My mentor J. always tells me to work for this. To work to humanize the child in front of you. To work to humanize yourself in front of them.

I hate the silence too. I worry what the calm might mean.

B and I talk some more. I cannot convince him to want to stay at our school, so instead I offer to play him Connect Four. He hesitantly agrees.

There is no resolution. In fact, there won’t be. In just a few weeks, I don’t know this, but B will no longer attend our school. I will never see him again.

In this moment, I tell B, We’ll talk again tomorrow?

Sure, Gomez. he tells me.

#10. Cousin Art Waxes Poetic Over Coronas At His Lowrider Shop in South Whittier

The Gomez family.

We’ve got some shit, man.

And I don’t think it has anything to do with us. And I don’t even think it has anything even to do with our parents. Or their parents.

But it’s like something is stuck back there.

And I feel like that’s what I’m constantly sawing through every single fucking day.

Just sawing through all that shit we’ve been given.

Just trying not to pass it on again.

#11. Ofrenda, or What Language the Spirits Might Speak

I wonder, now, if maybe I’ve just lost the language of the spirits. That if I could find their tune, I might be able to return to them.

Or return them to me.

Maybe they’ve been speaking to me all along.

If I could only translate their offerings.

In the soil of Guanajuato.

In the off-key renditions of Volver, Volver.

In the perfect proportions of cilantro and onion in a dirty tub placed on a metal counter hanging off the side of the taco trucks in El Sereno.

In the way L. looks up and smiles at me when she hears the song her Tata would hum to her when she was small. And in the way I dance the same sidestep every time.

In the way I. and R. and M. and E. and I all laugh over homemade carnitas cooked in too much lard.

In the way my mother sips her whiskey and wipes the dust from the unused tables.

In the way the kids in my classroom call me only by my last name.

Hey, Gomez. they all say, sometimes in unison.

In the soft hum of a heart that pumps a little too fast.