Check the Box

by Valen Laura Coronado Aguilera

Check the box that applies to you:

🔲 White

🔲 Black

🔲 Asian American

🔲 Hispanic/Latino

🔲 Native American

Subtle questions to dissect a person’s culture. To spill themselves on a political survey. How likely is she/he to be poor, educated, or independent? Spill yourself, dissect yourself, quickly and neatly because politically and statistically these boxes are all the same. Hmmm dissecting like a loading screen. Loading and dissecting a description of the person I am, the people I represent. So, in my head I process within seconds but it loads my history like data. Imagine if it could load the absolute truth. More than just Latino/Hispanic

My childhood, 1996, a little girl in a poofy white dress dancing and running around to the tunes of Selena. The DJs blast cumbia after cumbia as women with sparkly dresses and men with polished boots twirl and spin around the dance floor. I am the muñeca to the now woman, a symbol of the childhood she must now learn to leave behind but more than likely wont. Quinceanera’s, large halls with an 8 tier cake decorated with lighted waterfalls. Where both my grandmas know the same strangers as they drink and swear with the women who perm their hair. Ill fall asleep on some pull out chairs while my parents dance the night away to cumbia’s twirling and spinning on the crowded dance floor to Mazz’s Laura that was my lullaby.

Dissecting...

Childhood. Grandpa was a rancher, a poet, and a fighter. El Tornado! He boxed his way to the golden gloves. A man’s man who did not die young. Vincente Fernandez , John Wayne, and Sunshine Love. Blood as hot as fire, soul as pure as gold. We belted ‘Yo ya Me vo’ when they laid him in the ground.

Spilling and dissecting...

Fresh tortillas on a gas stove and a white box on the kitchen counter with pan dulce. The smell of burnt Folgers coffee brewing and the sound of a spoon scraping a mason jar with no salsa left. The flies swarm around the brightly lit window seal that shines on to the ceramic chicken that held the sugar for the coffee, the tea, and the bread.

Spill my culture and I hear my father singing corridos, echoing through the cemeteries and the catholic church that smell like holy water and my grandmother’s perfume’s. Where single mothers and lost brothers and sisters alike go to repent in synchrony. So many saints yet they have little sanity.

Dissecting… is it culture?

Sick with a cold, with a headache, with a pain and the cold egg meets your head. CROSS+CROSS "Sana, Sana, Colita de Rana" My Culture is " how do you say?" and the "baddaspirits" and the racing whispered godly scripts to cleanse the rotten out.

Its running through the rugged overgrown bush in the alley to steal a t-shirt full of Chinese plums and feeding the birds and the stray cats with my grandmother. Its burns healed with sávila picked from the front yard and grabbing a beer for my uncles who smoked in the broken down patio while George Strait blasted from their beaten down rancher trucks.

Spill the culture...

Stories as distant as my Native American blood. The makings sound and move like Spanish but the blood is thick. A thickness that lived through whore houses, fight clubs, guitaristas, fishmongers, poets, brujas, and bastards. Horses, ranches and men, who only wear boots. Evolution is single mothers, loud music and cheap beer. Its playing cards with the devil every Sunday after church and the loud colors that live in the gardens with the coffee tins that are filled with peppers and herbs. Its singing pain at the top of your lungs so that the dead hear the vibrato because you are supposed to feel their presence tingle in the air. It séances at the Rio Grande and fishing in the Gulf. Spill My Culture and you spill TEJAS. Dissect my Culture and you find TEJANA.

I suppose for political purposes I am to be sectioned for only a tiny portion of what I am.

I check Hispanic/Latino

Inside I know exactly what blood lies beneath, how deep the ink. The land of my people from bandito to scholar. I am the what is modern Tejana, Latina, Mexican, Texan.

After thoughts

Survey’s cant spill culture that cannot dissect truth, they can subtly remind us of what fragments make up who we are. My father used to say “Un alma que canta no puede ser capturada, asi que canta mijita, con ganas!” He said this when we were afraid to jump, when we were afraid to stand up for ourselves, when we did things without effort, and when he had me harmonize corridos and funerals.” You make sure they hear “them” the dead” “your voice is their spirt talking to everyone here one last time.” This is what I was taught. My culture spilled, downloaded,dissected.

Born and 95% Raised in South Texas. The other 5% was spent in Tucson Arizona. Currently a San Antonio Native. She is mother, a millennial and wife. A seeker of novelty, soul, and color in all forms of expression. New to writing but eager to express herself.