Category: El Testimonio
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The Uncle Who Kicked My Salvadoran Ass
My great Uncle Paco was a pain in the ass. He had been all his life. In the 1930’s, he had joined with the Communist movement in El Salvador, during the rise of a dictator they called El Brujo, the Warlock. They had planned for an uprising of the poor against the corrupt and bloody…
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The Rules of Racism: You Can Only Speak One Language (and it damn well better be English)
In class, I teach how creative writing can rouse memory, strong emotions, sharp images, and that, if a student keeps writing, she will surprise herself with her words. Something will come out that she hadn’t planned, an insight, the true emotion over whatever it was she wrote down. She might cry. She might bang the…
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Learning Spanish? Fear Not the Subjunctive!
When I threw myself into Central America, after having lived a monolingual childhood in Tennessee, I attacked the subjunctive. It’s the conjugation that twists up the English-speaking mind. You first learn that “I talk/you talk/she talks” is Yo hablo, tú hablas, ella habla. Simple enough pattern to memorize. Then along comes the subjunctive, takes the…
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Escaping the Monolingual Cage of America
According to the above photo, I’d been out drinking the night before. I don’t know what my first Spanish word was, but I do recall an image, ever so slight, of me on the toilet, yelling, “Mamá, I just finished caca-ing!” My mother has assured me that I could say much more than caca, that…
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When Our Children Die
I don’t know if Martita is still alive. If so, she’s thirty. But I have my doubts. At the time, her hair, once Guatemalan-black, had turned a dry, dirty-straw color. It was starting to fall out. Her stomach, held in place by weakening muscles, had gotten more distended in the weeks following, crammed with worms,…