Mexicamericana by Eloisa Amezcua: An Honest Reflection of the Hyphenated Identity
For Elfy Arrizon, who is simultaneously my love, support, & inspiration.
Children of immigrants, especially among people of color, live a dual identity. The severity of this 'split' is dependent on the individual's immediate environment. When there is a lack of acceptance and encouragement of cultural exploration, this dual identity can cause stress and confusion. Eloisa Amezcua shares the journey of her duality and reconciliation of her ‘self’ with her chapbook published by Porkbelly Press, Mexicamericana. She confronts malicious stereotypes and provides herself as tribute, laying bare not only the immigrant experience, but the Mexican-American identity through her eyes. Mexicamericana is reassurance to all those with hyphenated identities that their experiences are valid and complete in itself.
She begins with exposition, and Autocorrect: No Sorrows is an introduction to this dilemma, illustrating Amezcua’s dissonance with being neither Mexican nor American. She is la gringa / unable to roll [her] r’s, and she struggles being distant [with] Spanish and her English is relentless. Instead of belonging wholly, she feels off-white. However, she hints at overcoming this divisive perception within herself altering the meaning behind red underlined / incorrect to be- / coming no / sorrows we / us you and I.
She transitions to subverting xenophobic assumptions with When Mexico Sends Its People, They’re Not Sending Their Best. Its repetition turns hateful rhetoric, often used by conservative networks supporting the Donald Trump administration’s stance on immigration, on its head. Amezcua denounces these malicious labels using her family as reference, starting with my father is not a rapist [...] or a bad one. After three stanzas of anger, she concludes with a warning, When America elects a president, they are not electing their best / though they’ve not yet begun to hear me scream.
When one has an unsure grasp of their personhood, it can cause constant peaks and shifts of emotions. She portrays the confusion and contradiction of being a cisgender female dealing with the societal and familial expectiations of the presentation of their femininity. The poem is confusing, as it’s supposed to be; ‘she’ is expected to be not dumb, but not the smartest. [...] Not dark, but not light enough. [...] Not slutty, but not prudish. The last line delivers a resounding, all-too-familiar realization: not a person, but a body is she. This examination of Amezcua and her relationship with her physical self and the external then segways into an analysis of a mother-daughter relationship. Often times, daughters of immigrant mothers are held to a constricting standard. If the daughter is not fully immersed or knowledgeable of their mother culture, then conflicts arise from anything from differences in ideals to choices. My Mother’s Been Trying to Kill Me Since The Day I was Born is a juxtaposition of birth and ‘death,’ in the sense that it is a ‘death’ of the daughter’s self and individuality. It is ironic that the woman that gives her life is also the force that is ‘killing’ her, choking on her / body my noose. Traumas are passed from previous generations, and the trauma her mother experienced in her childhood is explained in There was Nothing to Do But Hurt Each Other in a Place Like That. It is the root of her mother’s self-hate, which she passes on to Amezcua, as shown in She. Because her features deviated from the norm (she blames her hair-the light strands), her siblings threw her in that pit. So while it may seem as restriction of Amezcua’s self, her mother’s intentions are good, and only has her protection and quality of life in mind.
The perspective zooms outward from the speaker’s family and self to criticize the perception of Mexican-Americans by humanizing the experience that is used to vilify and falsely criminalize. Watching Underworld, Inc. Episode 3: Human Cargo accomplishes three goals: it forces the reader to view the consequences of anti-immigration vitriol, to acknowledge these people as human beings, and show the reader the seemingly cyclical nature of this journey through the generations. The reader ‘meets’ a family of skeletons, nameless and alone. The stanzas that follow read as though we are going back in time, prior to this family’s trek. Using first names, history, and a personal account, Amezcua hopes to evoke empathy in the reader. It is as though she is saying, ‘this is what we endure to have what you have.’ She uses imagery to also probe the reader to feel because how can one remain stoic in the face of skin split[ting] / from the burning sun / flesh exposed and open / Nothing can be done once / the breaking has started? And despite being only midway through the poem, there is a tone of finality, as if telling the story of the (now skeleton) family. The reader has to acknowledge their complicitness to this violence and the harrowing similarities of American business moguls and human traffickers, especially when she refers to the women and girls as business, and business is business / and business is good. This very American attitude is reflected to the reader to contemplate: how different are we if evil is still evil? The last stanza brings the reader back to Amezcua and her mother, as though it is a cycle; she lies and tells her mother things are fine the way / she’d say the same to her mother / thirty years before. The trauma her mother faced from moving to America is visible in the daughter, and she is haunted by that for her.
Not only haunted by her parents’ experience, but her identity is still incongruous. In Pareces Blanca, which means you look and act white, as she describes the disconnect between her two identities. She sings her father’s songs in Spanish, accentless, as they harmonize with Juan Luis Guerra’s La Bilirrubina, or bilirubin (which is a compound that breaks down heme in vertebrates), specifically ay, cuando te miro y no me miras, which means oh, when I look at you and you do not look at me. Children of immigrants are susceptible to the scrutiny of onlookers, their ‘selves’ deconstructed and assumed without their consent or any regard to who they are as a person.
As a non-native speaker, I misinterpreted pareces blanca to mean blank walls. With this misunderstanding, it felt like her father insists pareces blanca, as if to say she is able to create herself in her desired image. However, with the correct translation, it is more reductive, rather than encouraging. She is her mother’s güera and rubia, white girl and blond and her Barbie como la muñeca, or Barbie, like the doll. In compliance with her insistence, her father turns up the music, too. She continues this examination in Self-Portrait and her walk between whitebrush and blackfoot. When the world forces one to only exist in ‘survival mode’ (when the only thing / you have left for yourself / is pain), it creates for an unstable emotional and mental state to be unroofed or / left there to dissolve.
And after such a climax, Amezcua brings us to the denouement with Teaching My Mother English Over the Phone, which is a task asked of many children of immigrants. Despite its difficulty, she still attempts to explain the rules of plurality and conjugation in English, which parallels her journey with reconciling her Mexican and American identity. And although [she] can’t put the words in Spanish / how [she] knows the difference. The closing lines hold a bittersweet note, but one can’t help but feel a hint of triumph behind it. Despite not having taught her mother anything, she is sorry to no one but herself.
Mexicamericana may not provide concrete answers, but it forces us to critically examine the institutions in place. How can America be ‘the country of immigrants’ when those who are immigrants face such hardship, exclusion, and othering? Throughout Mexicamericana, Amezcua sought to humanize her community and experience, continuously reasserting that immigrants are people, and we should see them as such. Without exercising empathy and understanding, we are actively harming those who are and come from immigrant families. Amezcua reclaims her power by sharing her narrative and demands we seek to learn and understand individuals from other cultures. Mexicamericana is Amezcua’s personal experience; however, she lays fundamental truths: we are valid, we are here, we will be seen. Together, we can change the world.
Keana Aguila Labra (she/her) is an INFJ, bisexual Virgo who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. She examines literature & media through a cultural and feminist lens with poetry, prose, articles, and CNF essays. Knowing the importance of representation, her work is evidence that Filipinx Americans are present in the literary world. Her book reviews may be found on Medium: @keanalabra.
This article was edited by EIC Kailah Figueroa