My kindergarten classroom was a patchwork
quilt of countries woven together with the thread
of Spanish: Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia,
Guatemala, Venezuela, Honduras, and Spain,
my patch at the center, la Madre Patria. Older,
assumed-to-be wiser, I was their teacher,
a still-childless mother of twenty-eight kids.
Soon their fabric began to bridge across
the pattern within our quilt. Corn, my maíz and
their elote; peas, their chícharos and my guisantes;
I swam in a piscina, while their pool was an alberca;
the lawn guys mowed my césped, which was also
their zacate. You teach us your Spanish; we teach
you ours, Eliseo loved to repeat to me, dimples
forming in his cheeks. I was more reluctant to learn
a new language. They called it Tex-Mex. Their Andrés
me ha eskipiado; Fermín no ha flochado el toilet; olvidé
mi lonche en mi troca; me duele mi ear became bad stitches
I had to undo: skip is colarse; flochar el toilet doesn’t exit.
To flush is tirar de la cisterna; lunch is almuerzo, and truck,
camioneta; either my ear hurts or me duele el oído. Don’t
mix languages. My purism? The latent bias of the colonizer.
After eighteen years living in Houston, I find myself asking
my son, has checkado la backdoor? Está locked?