Tomas

PENCILS LIKE DAGGERS

Tomas

It starts with a story:

My grandma, worried that her 3-year son had not spoken a word yet, had him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused and scared, he did. She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since she says and smiles thinking of her now 50 year old son talking his time away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.

This is not make believe. This is how we find our voice. This defines our language.

Here is my story. Or the start of it. My name is Tomas Ignacio Aragon; everyone calls me Tom. This I know for sure. I come from families of lies, of stories to deceive you, to deflect discovery. As a bicultural child, I was not comfortable in nor completely accepted by either side of my families. In the white world of my working class mother, I was the visible mistake, the dark stain on the family name. White working class military folk, dealing with the daughter who runs away to find her place, to save the world in the late 60s, and comes home struggling to save herself and feed her two year old son. With her, I was raised to avoid declarations of race, of difference, trying not to discuss my brown skin and brown hair in a family of blondes and blue eyes, forgetting my Spanish, speaking English only. I hid my shame with my silence.

On the Chicano side, I was the product of typical male weakness, the sign of my father's co-option and ultimate demise by white women come to save the poor, the natives. He was seduced by her presence, her education, her future. And those things he loved about her, she used to leave him when he found his place in el pinto, the typical educational facility for poor Chicanos in New Mexico. His anger at her transferred into his abandonment of me. No letters. No contact. Silence. The escape in silence. My father running from the law, running, running, knowing the inside of a cell more than his son.

Wait. This is not a story. This explains nothing, so I create my own explanations.

I started writing to find my color, saying on paper in black indelible ink what I couldn't to my classmates, to my first few lovers, to my mother and members of my own family: I am Mexican. I am white. I am.

'Fight one bean you fight the whole burrito.'

I remember this saying as a warning white kids said about fucking with Mexicans in Ventura, California. I remember them on the school bus, slapping hands, laughing, all building a solidarity of whiteness or non-brown-ness when one kid calls out 'smells like beans' as a group of brown kids walk down the aisle to leave the bus. At 15 I couldn't stand it any more. I stood up and hit the kid in front of me with my backpack breaking my connection to them. I wanted to be the burrito. I am Mexican; I am not white. But in the end I was wasn't welcomed. I am the one who had to find trouble rather than it finding me. It has been the same ever since. I walk the borders of cultures, the too white to be brown and too brown to be white. Sometimes hassled by both sides and sometimes passing into each. Sometimes seen as one of the boys, sometimes the affirmative action product. I entered college deciding to claim, to rename, to embrace and revel in my contradiction, my displacement, my ambiguity, my absence of certainty.

Mechistas in college scoffing about my lack of Spanish and my complaint that meetings were in held only in Spanish. “Chale, man. What's up with you?' Because I was raised by an English speaking white mother. Awkward silence. My teacher asking why the absence of Mexican American writers in a California literature class bothered me. Because I am one. Awkward silence.

This is the only way I can speak to you. I am an academic and I am not afraid to talk that talk - the hybrity of myself causes these contradictions that I embrace like old lovers knowing how to sooth each one, how to excite and comfort. I was freed in theory and abstraction finding voice in books by Moraga, Anzaldua. Finding fathers in Acosta, Reechy. Finding heart in the radical acts of violation and violence like Tijerina at the New Mexican courthouse, Murrieta's refusal to bow his head, Los Crudos' demand for an uncompromising politic, Rage Against the Machine's connection to difference and abhorrence of authority. I became a bicultural, Chicano with no respect for authority, no time for lazy assumptions about race, culture, politics, class, sexuality. I found myself in the refusal to singularly define myself.

Wait. This is a lie. These words. Stories.

How do I claim myself: how to separate what I feel as a Chicano, as a male, as a person of privilege. How do you claim anything when you can't claim the authenticity of your own voice? Remember: speak clearly, be careful if your pronunciation is off, if your skin fades too pale in the winter, embody your color in your movements, your clothes, your lovers.

In a world that wants singularity, I choose both. In a culture that wants uniformed sexuality, I choose to embrace bisexuality. In a society that denies authentic autonomy, I found myself in anti-authoritarian histories, in the romance of clandestine organizations. I was seduced by the pen and the gun, by non-monogamist lifestyles, by radical, dissident Chicano nationalism, by the feminist rhetoric to reclaim our selves, our lives, our sex, our religion, our consciousness. This has defined me and hurt me. I tend to be the problem, the one who asks too many questions, who is never comfortable with the way it is. With the way I am.

But now I refuse to be silent or shameful or half or half-hearted.

Let me tell you a story:

At 20, I hitchhiked from Las Vegas New Mexico down the highway to see my father face to face. To try to find some answers. He tells me he fucked up. He should be out there with me, working with me, living life with me. Because, he says, I realized I'm a slave in here. And now I can only fight against other slaves. Out there, when I realized I was a slave, I coulda done something, I coulda fought back at least. Somehow. In here, it's just fucked up.

My father explained that in jail, pencils are like daggers, you can write and you can stab. Mira, he points to his arm, here are the pencil tips that I cannot get out.

This is not a metaphor.

This is a warning.

Tomas is living, writing, loving, teaching and parenting in the east bay.