My Empanadas Have Raisins in Them

The first time I spoke to my abuelita in clean, crisp Spanish, she told me my pronunciation was very good. I didn’t have sufficient words to tell her I had learned that part from her, that even though she never taught me las palabras, I trained my ears to the rhythm of her words. She had taught me nothing more than that.

For years, it has been my dream to string more than two words together in Spanish. People stop me on the street and start speaking Spanish – the language that should have been ours – and connect me to a family that I was never tethered to. But I could not answer.

When my abuelita, Elita, came to the United States in the late ‘60s, she knew English. But she was ashamed of the accent she spoke with – one she never lost – and so she closed her mouth. She relearned English from television and spending time with others – with my grandpa at the department store where she worked, outside of her house where she and her brothers lived.

She didn’t want to come to the United States. In Chile, she was engaged, had a life and a future. But when her mother asked her to visit her brothers in the U.S., she agreed. Her mother left her here. So, my abuelita married my grandpa – and stopped speaking Spanish.

I learned Spanish because I wanted it for myself. I know las palabras (the words) now because I wanted the language and culture that comes with it to be mine, to reclaim what my abuelita cast aside and what my family lost. So, I did.

I went to school this summer, in Middlebury, Vermont, and I learned. I wasn’t allowed to speak any English while I was there, and I immediately felt the communication barriers rising. I found myself wanting “Spanglish” because I knew that the people around me would still be able to understand me.

For my abuelita, Spanglish would not have worked when she first got here. Nobody but her siblings would have known what she was talking about, and even if they did, they would have scoffed at her. It was the pinelands of New Jersey in the 1960s. There was no chance. So, when I found myself faced with the language barrier, I felt what she had felt, and our connection strengthened.

To learn my culture from her is damn near impossible. What claim do I have to something that wasn’t taught to me? I look the part. I’m short and have dark eyes and dark hair and olive skin and a fast-paced, chatterbox speech pattern. But I don’t know the language. I didn’t know the language. So do I have the right, now, to discuss the history I taught myself in the language I learned from a textbook? Do I have the right to do anything but slave over my stove, crushing dough between my palms to make the empanadas I grew up eating?

My empanadas have raisins in them. That is how they are made. I cannot count how many people who have never tried them have said to me, “That’s gross. Take them out.” I cannot tell you how many people have said that they, “don’t like Mexican food because it is too spicy,” when I say something about my heritage.

In no language am I able to explain that, when my ex-fiance’s white mother made us tacos, he sat next to me while we ate them and said, “You know what would go great with these tacos? Empanyadas,” just because he knew it would hurt me. Just because he knew it’s not how it was pronounced. Just because I had asked him to stop. I was too tired and afraid to repeat myself.

My culture is not my own. It is a weapon.

My culture is complicated; I want it back.

I watched my abuelita at my grandpa’s funeral last December stand across from her brother, stuttering over her Spanish words. It was like watching this culture die before my eyes.

I do not want this culture to die with my abuelita. But it feels strangely like that death is what this country wants. My abuelita assimilated. She succeeded in giving this country what it wanted, the homogeny that strips color and light from our land, until we all fade to red, white and blue – which, ironically, are the colors of the Chilean flag.

Now is a bad time to get that culture back, to reclaim what was lost and what I refuse to replace. Now, when I’m watching families being torn apart, people being deported and wondering if they will come for my abuelita, it seems like a bad time to be writing this. But maybe now is the time that I need it the most.

If the enemy is not the culture that I search for, but instead the people who carry it, then I will always be an enemy. If the goal is to crush this culture, to take the raisins out of my empanadas and spit mis palabras back into my face, I will have realized the goal of those who took the words from my abuelita’s lips when she came here all those years ago.

I will not be the generation of homogeny, the twinge of “exoticness” that is just “exotic” enough to be fun and cute. They will not take the raisins out of my empanadas and cut the roll of my Rs from underneath my tongue. They will no longer use my culture as a weapon against me.

It is mine again. It always was.