White Space

Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing

Jennifer De Leon

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781625345677
• eBook ISBN: 9781613768211
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way.

Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

Contents

Author’s note

Part I: Before

Mapping Yolanda

The White Ceiling

Round Three

A Pink Dress

The White Space

Part II: Guatemala

The First Day

Guatemala Notebooks: Little Black Notebook

The Mountain

Guatemala Notebooks: La Voz Popular

Los Monólogos de la Vagina

Guatemala Notebooks: Life in the Campo

Volcán Tajumulco

Guatemala Notebooks: Child Workers

Lucky Woman

Guatemala Notebooks: Guatemalan History

A Map of the World

Part III: After

Work

Happy New Year

Gyms

The Story of the Letter from My Father

Mother Tongue

Bridged

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

I grew up surrounded by stories. Yet it wasn’t until the eighth grade that I began to keep a journal. It may have had to do with the fact that during the summer between seventh and eighth grade my family and I traveled from Massachusetts to California for a family reunion with my father’s five brothers and two sisters and their kids and their kids’ kids, along with my father’s mother, my abuelita. In preparation for the trip, I pulled photographs of myself as a baby, a toddler, a small child, from all our photo albums at home and created a “Jenn album” which I showed off to relatives I’d never met. It was a wonderful trip in so many ways. Until the end. With my uncle’s truck loaded with our luggage, we stopped at a souvenir shop in Los Angeles on the way to the airport “just to get a few things” for our family back in Boston. When we made our way to the truck, the back door hung open like a tongue. All our suitcases had vanished. All our clothes, personal belongings, my sister’s Walkman, my dad’s camcorder, my mother’s jewelry, all of it—gone. My parents hugged us tight and anxiously looked around, as if the robbers weren’t done taking what they wanted. My uncle then rushed us to the airport with only the clothes on our backs. “These are things,” my mother said. “Things are replaceable. Thank God we’re all okay. We’ll be okay.” It was then I realized that my photo album was inside my suitcase. And where was my suitcase? I would never know. Maybe this is why I began keeping a journal. I would spend my life making up for the family fotos that had been ripped from me in a matter of minutes.

The stories here are my own interpretations of events, told through my mind’s eye and my memory’s reach. The individual essays can be read separately, out of order, or sequentially, as a whole. In any case, my hope is that you, dear reader, are able to find a mirror or a window, or perhaps both, in this photo album made of words.

White
Space

Part I

Before

Mapping
Yolanda

ONE FRIDAY NIGHT THE winter I was twelve, tío Erwin showed up at my grandmother’s apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. They’d met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didn’t weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing teeth so white they looked like they would glow in the dark. She was short like tío and had fluffy, frizzy hair, and her skin was the same color as the outside of a loaf of bread.

“This is Yolanda,” tío Erwin said. Underneath the buzzing fluorescent light in my grandmother’s kitchen, he draped his arm over his bride’s shoulder. They practically purred.

When I kissed Yolanda’s cheek I inhaled her scent—a combination of incense and floral perfume. She tickled my chubby middle and giggled when I stood back, startled. My mom tore the lid off a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and set it on the table where my aunts sat, their elbows resting on the green-and-white checkered tablecloth. “¡Niños!” she said, “¡váyanse para la sala!” We were banned from the kitchen so the women could get to know Yolanda.

The living room was crowded with mustached uncles, including tío Erwin, and my dad, who said, “Mija,” and pushed his lips toward the kitchen. “My daughter, you should go play with your cousins.”

Kids were forbidden from playing in the bedrooms too, so we were left with the linoleum strip of hallway. We cousins ranged in age from six-year-old David, a fan of Ninja Turtles, to sixteen-year-old Erika, with her feathered bangs and Guns N’ Roses T-shirts. Unlike most of my cousins, I adored Barbies and Pogo balls and puffy-painted tops. My sisters, parents, and I lived in a neighborhood where the only nighttime sound was a recycle bin rattling down a driveway.

My parents agreed that education was important. It was the reason they had left their homeland of Guatemala and, later, Boston. They believed the suburbs meant security—good schools, organized sports, a library down the street. My mother pushed the idea of college on us before we could write in cursive. We took elective classes in French and read chapter books for fun. Many of my cousins, on the other hand, lived in Section 8 housing and changed schools often. But when we were all together, in the pocket of Friday night, we were the same. We played checkers and compared our favorite scenes in The Goonies. We played Go Fish with a sticky deck of cards. Eventually, we would teach Yolanda how to play too.

From where I sat that first night, cross-legged in the hallway next to the kitchen, I could see Yolanda’s round face, mischievous grin, and nostrils wide as dimes. My grandmother sat closest to Yolanda, who was eating a Boston cream doughnut. Yolanda wore a long cotton skirt and a Celtics jacket. From my aunts’ head nods and thick fingers raised in the air, it seemed someone was making a speech. I leaned closer and snatched what I could: “Uno nunca sabe . . . tiene que cuidarse.”

One never knows what? You must take care of yourself. They hadn’t said, “Be careful.” That was something we constantly heard. Be careful riding the scooter and don’t go past the yellow house where the Chinese family lives. Be careful swimming or you might drown like Monica almost did one summer. “You must take care of yourself” implied a further concern. If you don’t take care of yourself, then . Whatever filled that blank space, I wouldn’t know for years. Cuídate, “take care.”

That spring we celebrated my birthday with a barbecue at Larz Anderson Park. Surrounded by shades of green, my cousins and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted without downstairs neighbors calling the cops to complain about “them spics.” I was thirteen, so I was too old to play tag. Instead, I sat at the wooden picnic table and licked the salt off Cape Cod potato chips. I placed one on my tongue and let it dissolve like the wafer at Mass. Tío Erwin showed up again, this time without his teenage bride.

“Is Yolanda here?” he asked out of breath.

My mother ripped apart a head of iceberg lettuce and arranged the leaves onto a ceramic plate. “No.”

Tío massaged his temples with his palms.

“She was gone when I woke up.”

Later, we found out that Yolanda had been sleepwalking. I imagined her black jelly shoe sandals swishing past the triple-decker apartments, down the concrete hill, reaching Hyde Square, and headed to the supermarket or church. These were the only places she’d find someone to speak Spanish to, someone to tell about the baby kicking against her expanding belly. After that, tío Erwin put newspapers on the rug next to her side of the bed so he’d hear if she got up in the middle of the night. Who knows where she would have wandered. My mother seemed especially concerned for Yolanda. Maybe it was because they had grown up in neighboring colonias in Guatemala. Or maybe she knew more than she would admit.

After the baby was born, Yolanda’s mother, doña Consuelos, arrived from Guatemala to help take care of her new grandson, Jonathan. Weeks and months stretched between family get-togethers—at least for me. Most weekends I earned money babysitting, spending nights in wealthy people’s living rooms. While their children slept, I tried to figure out the complicated remote controls to watch movies and eat endless snacks—Chipwiches in the freezer, Halloween candy in the cupboard all year round, pizza. I preferred the cushy tan couches, where I would talk to friends on the phone, to the crammed apartments in Boston, where my parents and younger sister still spent weekend nights with family.

The minute I turned sixteen I started working at the Gap. I learned to fold jeans diagonally at the knee. I could explain the difference between a classic and a relaxed fit. The store manager called me Maria. “Oh, sorry,” she’d say, looking over my head when I corrected her. With my employee discount I could finally afford the preppy styles displayed in the storefront windows. I could fit in with the rich Jewish kids at my high school. My cousins started to call me white girl.

We branched out in different directions. Some of the guys took up weed and basketball or started having sex, and my girl cousins found love in the form of serious novios. Or they gained weight. My sister fulfilled my mother’s lifelong dream and became the first in our extended family to go to college. I followed soon after, attending a small liberal arts school two hours away. College was like another country. They served food I’d never heard of (hummus), students wore clothes I didn’t have (Patagonia), and professors encouraged us to call them by their first names. At least I could speak the language—the middle- to upper-class, white, privileged vernacular—or at least I could fake it by throwing in the word vicariously now and then. A friend “couldn’t believe” I’d never heard the song “Stairway to Heaven.” I couldn’t believe he had only two cousins. I had thirty-eight.

Once, in World Politics, a student in the front row with a blond ponytail and high-pitched voice declared that it was unjust for ATMs in America to offer Spanish as a language option. “Why don’t people just learn to speak English?” The hardwood floors and ceiling-high windows closed in, and I could feel eighty eyes on me. What did I have to say? Me, the Spanish-speaking representative in our classroom. I raised a shaking hand and said, “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the word Florida means ‘flowered’ in Spanish and that Colorado means ‘red’ or ‘colored.’ These are words in Spanish because the Spanish were actually here before the English. I’m just saying.”

When it became too much, when I simply grew tired of having to explain where I’m from, or when Mexican night in the college dining hall failed to soften my homesickness, I called my mother. Cell phones had not yet infiltrated campuses, but she had a special long-distance plan that allowed unlimited minutes on the weekend. Usually she spoke in Spanish, and I used a mix of Spanish and English. When I didn’t want my roommate to understand, I stuck to Spanish. My mother would ask about my classes and my friends, and she would listen with enthusiasm. She’d catch me up on the family, almost always sharing news of a pregnancy, a separation, a scandal at church. One day she called to tell me about Yolanda. I was sitting on my twin bed propped up by cinder blocks. My feet dangled off the edge, and through the window I could see that autumn had set the tops of trees ablaze in reds, oranges, and yellows.

“Listen. Yolanda called the cops on your tío the other night. She was screaming, acting crazy. Tore at her own clothes, clawed her face with her nails. Sí . . . And she told the police that your tío did it. They were going to arrest him but one of the police checked Yolanda’s hands and found blood under her nails.”

“Oh my God!”

My roommate walked in wearing a bathrobe and holding a dorm shower caddy. “Who’s pregnant now?”

“I’ll call you back,” I told my mom.

That winter tío Erwin, devastated, moved from Boston to Framingham with Jonathan, who was now in elementary school. No one saw Yolanda for a long time. If the adults still talked to her, I didn’t know. Eventually, we lowered our heads at the mention of her name. She became hazy in my memory, nothing like the girl who tickled my middle in my grandmother’s kitchen seven years before.

If I were to draw a timeline of my parents’ lives, I could see that after they came to the United States in the seventies, their lives dramatically improved. They worked hard, saved money, and in the early eighties bought their first house. My mother learned to drive. We spent nearly every weekend visiting family in Boston, but we always returned to our house in Framingham on Sunday evenings in time for my sisters and me to finish our homework. But moving to America wasn’t enough to guarantee a better life for Yolanda. It just wasn’t that simple. She hadn’t immigrated as we had. She had disappeared.

College came to an end. Classmates left for law school, medical school, fellowships, travel abroad, or jobs in New York City. I moved across the country to work as a teacher. I could have found a position in Framingham where my sixth-grade teacher still worked and still wore a beehive. Instead, I chose California. Deep down, I wanted to experience the feeling o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents