Cam rentsch

An essay that won the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and was published in Vol. 93, No. 2 of the same magazine

After Elissa Washuta

Every morning, I use my grandmother’s coffee pot. 

Wait, no, that doesn’t sound quite right. 

Let’s start this again. 

I still own my grandmother’s coffee pot, a stainless-steel 12-cup electric percolator with no buttons and a cord the diameter of my thumb. I’d say that it shows no signs of slowing down, but I don’t want to jinx it. 

It was bought for my grandparents as a wedding gift in 1964, and now, in 2017, I use it daily. 

These grandparents, my mother’s parents, the ones I find myself writing about often, were white. My other grandparents, my father’s biological father and mother, I never met. They were Mexicans, probably of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. He was put up for adoption at the age of 3, left as a ward of the state in Southern California. 

I own a lot of other things that were my mother’s parents once upon a time. These things were all handed down off that top-shelf of wisdom that my grandfather was always reaching up to for me through my boyhood. A cast iron skillet and pocket knives and flannel shirts and even guns, a proper essay topic for a young male American writer if there ever was one. Inherited guns. 

I inherited a coffee pot, from my grandmother, from 1964, that I use daily. 

–

My morning routine usually looks sort of like this: I wake up and roll out of bed, emphasis here on roll, and walk to the kitchen in my underwear, feet stinging on cold tile. I grind coffee beans by hand, in a cheap burr grinder, before filling the pot with water. On some days I’ll muster up the motivation to go run, but on most I’ll return to my bed with a full cup just before my absence leaves it cold. 

I started drinking coffee in college, drinking it black after realizing how much you had to pay for creamer at a campus market. Anything to save a couple bucks. At the time my grandparents still owned their coffee pot and I had a little 4-cup one from Walmart, and my grandparents were both still alive, and my grandmother would send me care packages of cookies in Pringles cans to keep the post office from breaking them. Those and black coffee were all I lived on for a little while. All I could afford to live on, with no time outside of class then for a job. 

–

It’s easy to talk about inheritance in the form of things. I inherited my grandmother’s coffee pot, my grandfather’s flannel shirts, and his 12-guage shotgun. From my father I inherited the jersey number that we both wore for the same rural high school football team, and the son of the man who coached him coached me. You couldn’t make that shit up, rural and American to the core. Football and fathers and inherited jersey numbers.  

We talked a lot about inheritance growing up in Appalachia. We inherit shotguns, and we kill the animals that fill our freezers with them. We inherit disdain for big government and the EBT cards in our wallets. If you’re lucky, you can inherit a muscle car with faded paint left in the barn, weeds growing around rotted tires. If you’re lucky like me, you can inherit otherness. 

–

Let’s start with Mexican. 

Who do I have to thank for my being Mexican? Well, my father mainly, along with everyone who’s ever called me that, among other names and quite a few slurs. That list goes on far too long to write, and all those names come back up like acid in my mouth. I was certainly called Mexican more than I ever felt it. The only thing that’s really all that Mexican about me is that I think the word pinche translates to fucking and not dishboy. 

For being Mexican, I could also blame the Spanish, or mestizaje, or European gold lust, or Cortez. Smallpox, American one-drop rules, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and casta paintings all certainly played a role too, although how much I can’t be certain. 

–

Casta paintings were oil on canvas, defining and separating the various races and mixtures of them in the new world empire of the Spanish. As it sits now I could probably pass for castizo, one of the higher up positions in catsa. Castizo people were said to be ¼ indigenous and ¾ Spanish, although in practice they had lighter skin but darker and thicker hair and dark-brown eyes. In the summer, when my skin is tanned from long hours outside, I’m probably closer to mestizo. Half of each. Or so I think; I can’t be sure. I’ve come a long way from being called “The little brown boy” in my kindergarten class. The “what” question follows me in a cloud of new meetings, guesses coming unprompted and ranging from Jewish to Greek to Choctaw. 

The word mestizo, if you were to Google it, would be hard to pin down a Webster’s definition for. It was a class of the Spanish casta system, used in Latin America to mean a person of mixed race with one Spanish parent and one Indigenous parent. Of course, if you were un Peninsulare, one of the Spanish born in Spain but living in New Spain, you separated people by color and not genealogy. So, depending on who was looking at me and where I was at, I could be mestizo or castizo or cholo-the different varieties of indigenous and European. Note that all of those terms end with the Spanish masculine-o and not the effeminate-a. 

Under Casta, I would not be pardo or mulato or zambo, indigenous and African, and certainly not a peninsulare or a criollo, just Hispanic, just “white” as I’m often left checking on surveys or applications that couldn’t be expected to offer me a complex system of terms to identify myself with, or even a general one like mixed-race. That might confuse somebody up the corporate food chain, or the person responsible for making sure I get the financial aid and scholarships I need to finish the college degree I’ve been told I need.  

What casta paintings did, most of them done by people we would now call Mexicans, was cement the white supremacy of the Spanish. Natives could become European by mixing with them. If the Natives mixed with Africans, however, they plummeted to the bottom of the list. Mestizos sat somewhere near the middle, neither white nor black nor indigenous, meaning maybe an answer for me when I’m left confused by people telling that I’m almost-white, as if whiteness was this goal I was working towards in the womb and didn’t quite reach by the time I was born.  

Most of the words from casta now mean different things; cholo can mean up to 60 different things in Peru, but if you go to barrios in LA you can see cholos and cholas walking down the street together. Mestizo, if you were to use it now in Mexico, means an indigenous person who has left behind their culture to assimilate. It has a negative connotation, the way indigeneity does through most of Mexico. In that sense, I don’t think it applies to me. Don’t think it even can apply to me. I’ve been tempted and told to say that colonization stole the culture I would have had to leave to become mestizo, but that doesn’t seem right either. And how could I ever know the culture stolen? I could take a DNA test, but if a DNA test told me I was Rarámuri, should I feel obligated to drink tesgüino and pinole and wear huaraches? Would my professors and employers suddenly give me time off por una tesgüinada? 

I say these things with my tongue in my cheek, sure that if I showed up en las montañas Sierra Madre mañana the Rarámuri would just ignore el gringo loco. But whenever this comes up I remember seeing a picture of a Rarámuri boy in traditional dress on the website for the Ultramaratón Caballo Blanco, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t look just like I did at that age. The gapped-tooth smile, thick black hair over wide ears, and bright dark eyes. And when I say mañana I have to think of Jack Kerouac writing that he thought the word meant heaven when he was living like un campesino, trying to fuck his way into a sense of peace and oneness he assigned to migrant workers, except with no fear of la jura y la migra. 

–

When I was a boy I used to devour books about the Great Plains tribes and other indigenous groups. I was particularly mesmerized by the bravery of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, trying to make bows in the Lakota-style and hunt with them. If boys had been allowed to have long hair, I’m sure I would have grown it out and put it into braids. Americans like filling in the blank spaces in their ideas of indigeneity with stories about Plains Tribes, about using every part of the buffalo and the wisdom of Chief Joseph. I know better than to do that now. I’ve done the research, I know how complex the continent was in 1491 – I just don’t know where I fit into all of it. 

Later, when I did grow my hair down past my shoulders, I stuffed the thick curls up inside of baseball caps and buns and hardly showed them to anybody, much less braided them and let them hang on my shoulders. 

Maybe before I even realized that I have Native ancestry I knew in some way, and that’s why I was like that. Yet I still feel uncomfortable saying that. Check in my mouth for shovel-shaped incisors, test my blood for the 9 repeat-allele, and despite any results you might get I’m not on any tribal roll, I couldn’t tell you where that heritage comes from. Nothing about me really feels native. And what heritage is it if all I know about it is that it’s there, buried someplace in the desert or the mountains? I don’t speak Mixtec. I don’t speak Zapotec. I don’t speak Nahuatl. And Spanish has always been weird for me. My dad taught me todas las palabaras malas cuando fui un niño; I called people a pinche puta before I ever asked anybody ¿como estás? I took classes in it all through high school and Ohio State offered me a course for “heritage speakers” with the tagline “Did you ever want to write to your abuelita?”, but I’m still not fluent. I know just enough to know what I don’t know.

Most of the time, I speak hillbilly English. It gets worse if I’m drunk. 

–

The general term for a person with Mexican ancestry born in and living in the United States is Chicanx, sometimes spelled Xicanx. An important tenant of Chicanismo es la mestizaje, the mixed-races. There is la raza unida y la raza cósimca y la nueva mestiza and as many names as you can think of for us, or as our thinkers can create. In most aspects, I am a Chicano, and want to be a Chicano. Support systems exist for Chicanos, there are Chicano academics and authors, Chicano barrios. Just not in Appalachia, where I needed them to be. 

Chicano was a term originally used disparagingly for rural and poor Mexican-Americans and appropriated by students during the social movements of the 1960’s, generations after courts ruled that people of Mexican origin were “white but not equal”, subject to Jim Crow segregation, and not under the purview of the 14^th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The California State Constitution called us “half-breeds”. We didn’t have the intelligence to be real Americans. Chicano is the word that is the closest to what I’ve come to understand that I am, but there’s still a gap. It’s not perfect, another round peg trying to fit into a square hole. 

–

In Appalachia, there used to be a word for mixed-race people who didn’t have exact identities: Melungeon. Melungeons were said to be “tri-racial”, thought by most to be runaway slaves mixed with Choctaw or Shawnee then further mixed with those earlier hillbillies and Daniel Boone-era frontiersmen. To avoid segregation, these people generally claimed to be Moors and Turks who somehow made their way to the other side of the Cumberland Gap without ever passing through the East coast. What a Melungeon really is was never totally decided, and it’s unclear if anybody ever self-identified as a Melungeon. But it’s another option for me, one among many, one that just won’t make its way onto any survey I’m likely to fill out soon. There I’ll still be White Hispanic, looking below the box for White-Non Hispanic, looking for something truer still. 

–

I once had a classmate tell me that everything I wrote about rural Ohio reminded her of rural South Carolina. Addressing people as Sir and Ma’am prompts questions on whether I’m from the South myself; my skin and hair prompt questions on “what” I am. At times I’ve said I’m a Chicano hillbilly, which is close, but not totally right. I’ve heard that other people use Rural Chicano; I guess that asks for a little more respect, but is it honest for me? 

–

There were times when it seemed that my family pretended that we weren’t mixed. Pretended that my father didn’t so neatly fill the bitter stereotypes in my mother’s mouth. You know the ones, that all wetbacks and beaners are lazy, jobless, wife-beaters. I wish I could say that my father wasn’t at times all of those things. Wish that I could bear machismo as some ruddy manly pride and not a stain left on the couch where he slept after the DUI arrest, after dragging my mother through the house by her hair. I wish I had counted how many times my mother had used the phrase “wife-beating spic” to me so I could make that banal comparison to money. For having three kids with him, she sure has venom in her mouth when she says that phrase, and as both a man and a spic I feel damn near complicit in my father’s abuse of her. Maybe some of that venom is because her being pregnant with my older brother robber her of that storybook romance she’d wanted, her first husband’s .44 magnum in her face and a mixed-race kid in her belly. Her and my father got married at the courthouse, her several months pregnant now, and while I’m unsure if anybody was there holding a shotgun, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found pictures like that in the attic. My mother’s father had quite a few shotguns, and he knew how to use them. I should know; he’s the one who taught me.  

She likes telling me that my father is exactly like his “real father”. I can tell that his Mexican-ness and his abuse of her cannot be separated in her eyes. I wish there was something I could say to change that, but I know better than to try at this point. I just grit my teeth and remember that I’m a spic too.  

–

Of course, you inherit more than race from your father. His masculinity, su machismo, his sense of place and purpose. We didn’t ever really speak Spanish, just throwing some words in every now and then that I could repeat to confuse kids at school. He used to tell me that things like eating spicy food or drinking beer would put pelo en mis huevos. How insecure I am about how my voice lists into y’alls and ain’ts keeps me from speaking Spanish aloud most of the time, just letting it scatter through my thoughts. He wasn’t from this place like we were, brought there at an age when I’d already learned how to kill dinner. My hometown has more bars than stoplights, and all those bars are just a stone’s throw away from the churches. His was a place of fear I can’t quite imagine. Hills roll on in my hometown and there lies a last vestige of unironic denim workwear; all the men wear mustaches or goatees or beards or beer bellies, myself included. The soft peaks are green and socked in with sky the color of our blue jeans-faded, with work. Everywhere that isn’t hills is feed corn and soybeans, damn near perfect deer habitat. There’s more of them now than in 1491, and we were let out of school to kill them, stacking them like firewood in truck beds, tongues grey hanging out and noses wet black with blood. 

What did I inherit from my father? On a faded and sunken couch, he told me with a laugh that I was just Mexican enough for scholarship applications. How did he think I was going to react to that? It’s all well and good that his parents dropping him off on this side of the border just to leave him with a name he would soon lose made him hate them. Hell, I’ve grown to hate them to. But what’s a couple more Americans who hate migrant workers? 

Should I speculate on my father’s trauma, or just inherit it? The violence born of it certainly left its mark on me. 

But what would he think of all this even? We don’t speak enough for him to read my work, and of all the things he called my mother I never heard him call her a puta, no matter how many times she called him a wife-beating spic. 

–

My dad being adopted left our last name as Rentsch and not Jaramillo, as his was when he was born. But Jaramillo itself is just covering a native name so long forgotten and erased that I can’t imagine ever finding it. But what does that matter-I’m as far away from belonging to that name as I am living in Tenochtitlan. How can I claim to feel as othered as I do when it seems there is only a drop of blood in me that has people calling me a spic and a beaner? I’m constantly reminding myself that people just like me born a little further south have it worse. Identity isn’t a thing they get to research and think about it; they have to live it. Shot and killed or starved in the Sonora. Tienen el miedo de la jura y la migra. Ignorant of how American economic and drug policy turned their country poor and violent then shuttled them into the desert to die, but dying nonetheless while crowds chant “Build that Wall” as if there are no ladders. Chicanos in la migra ripping children from their arms, rosaries from the hands, spitting on them and telling them chinga tu madre. How quickly we forget who we are. 

–

I believe my grandfather, my father’s father, was named Luis Jarmaillo. I know that before he was adopted that Jaramillo was his last name, and that both of our middle names are Luis, so that’s where I’m getting that information from. My other middle name, William, comes from my other grandfather. Based on other things I know, like my father being born in 1969 and me knowing that he had older siblings, leads me to believe that Luis Jaramillo may have come to the United States as a part of the Bracero program, which ended in 1964. The fact that three years later he was nowhere to be found has me assuming that he came over illegally and was deported. If he was a bracero, then he probably came to America from Oaxaca, a Mexican state where people were mostly mixed-race with their indigenous heritage coming from Zapotec and Mixtec groups. 

But to what extent is any of that true? It can’t be, just more wistful myth-making from a young man trying to unshatter the history of his violent little family and maybe find a little pride in it. 

Maybe I should be proud of the name Jaramillo even though I know Sam Rentsch did more for my father than Luis Jaramillo ever did. Jaramillo men have been boxers and baseball players and the leaders of revolutionary armies. But I can’t bring myself to that. Jaramillo is not the sort of name people have much pride in, not the sort of name that comes with a family crest. Anybody coming to this country on the bracero program would have been a farm laborer, and Jaramillo men generally claimed one of three professions: farmer, laborer, or farm laborer. The women didn’t do much better; they could choose from “keeping house” or “cleaning house”. 

– 

We learned about labor early in Appalachia. We learned about bootstraps early too. They exist, so easy to grab on to, told we’re holding them before we even realized they were there. American poverty is unique; everyone always trying to question and qualify it. People particularly like to remind you that other people have it worse elsewhere. The great American myth is that we’re all middle class somehow, nobody poor and nobody rich. When I was a boy my father used to tell us about homes with dirt floors in Mexico; if he was preempting comments we might make about our situation I don’t know, and when and where he was in Mexico to see those houses I don’t know either. 

I look around my college classrooms and try to see if anybody else has grabbed on to actual bootstraps, before dawn, pulling them up over blue jeans and underneath eternally-dirty bib overalls. I can’t be the only one at this university who has seen a Monday morning, the November chill not aided by the two pairs of socks to make the too-big boots fit, with the schools shut down for the start of hunting season. The boys and girls would be in the woods today, shotguns loaded with those green and brass Remington slugs that jingle like loose chimes in the bottom of pockets.  

–

How am I supposed to speak as Mexican, speak for and identify as Chicano? Written out, my life history sounds as American as apple pie; if I ever publish a book I shudder to think that it’s existence might get people talking about “class mobility”. 

Are there Chicanos born this far east of Aztlán? I’d ask my dad, but he was born there. His parents? Well, somewhere on the other side of The Wall all my old football teammates want built. Tacos al pastor seem as foreign to me as deer heart would to them. My boy-self saved my change for the ice cream man and not an elotero, played baseball and not soccer. 

My identity known, they’ll look to me in class when the undocumented come up, but I’m not undocumented. Hell, I don’t even know anybody who is undocumented. Maybe they’ll ask me to speak for both cultures. To put on a coat and tie my tie and push up my glasses and say, well, with Chicano culture and Appalachians you have, uhh, well. 

Well. 

–

What did I inherit? In the end, confusion and a special kind of cheap-liquor soaked and violent American poverty that leaves me feeling guilty for spending an extra dollar on whole bean coffee and not pre-ground. 

Of course, this coffee comes from la gente y las paises who live in the history of Spanish colonialism and the structural violence of casta, the more intense poverty of their home countries. And when I stumble to the kitchen each morning I should remind myself that, in their eyes, I’d be un otro pinche gabacho before I would ever be like them. 

–

Maybe it sounds like I’m angry. Maybe it sounds like I’m confused, that I’m bitter, that I’m making something out of nothing. If I’m being totally honest, I’m am all of those things. There are times when I’m very angry that I have lived my life under the guise of reappropriating slurs used against me by everyone from people who have claimed to be my friends to football coaches to my own mother. What can I even do with this anger? People tell me holding onto anger is like holding onto hot coals, but I didn’t pick up the coals in the first place. There are times when I wish I didn’t have to justify every little thing I do to myself, wish I didn’t have to sort and parse through the million terms I’ve had to identify myself with because none of them exactly fit. How are you supposed to have pride in your identity when you have to shift through a bilingual dictionary to find it? 

Then again, the languages in that dictionary are the two languages that colonized this continent. And if this process is going to be worthwhile, why am I still using the colonizers’ terms to define what part of me was colonized? Audre Lorde said it best: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. 

–

I guess what I really inherited was lack, the lack of money, lack of total whiteness, lack of straight teeth and straight hair, lack of color in my eyes, lack of creamer in my coffee, lack of any semblance of the normalcy I’d wished and worked for, and I took back to the woods of my boyhood like a deer in flight from headlights. Trail running has brought me a peace I can’t quite put into words, a return to the happiness I remember having before my life was this way. All these things don’t need to make much sense in el monte. 

I remind myself as I write now that el monte isn’t hope for mi gente but a trap. The United States has a policy called “Prevention Through Deterrence” that shuttles migrants toward the Sonoran Desert, un lugar muy hermosa that has killed more people than can even be estimated. You might think that’s an unintended consequence, but that was actually the plan. If you litter the desert with corpses maybe the coyotes will look for another line of work. The self-styled patriots that patrol this desert with assault rifles don’t much help, but la migra certainly appreciates their work. That way they don’t have to leave their air-conditioned trucks. 

A Chicano came up with that plan, and the Democrats passed it into law, in case you’re curious. 

– 

I hope I’m sounding wise here, or at least like somebody who did the research. I find it hard to fit my burgeoning middle-class identity as a first-generation college student into what little security I have in my racial identity. Like I said earlier, Jaramillo es un nombre por los campesinos, and my mother’s father was the first in his family to work in a factory and not in a farm, the first to be born in the United States. 

I do pull-ups not to keep in shape, but to keep my hands from getting smooth and soft. The bar builds up callouses on my palms and then rips them off. I carry my father’s disdain for weak handshakes and smooth-handed men, and whether that disdain is Appalachian or Chicano in nature I can’t decide, or tell, or figure out, or even let matter. I just won’t let my hands get smooth. I can’t do it. 

I haven’t yet inherited any physical things of my father’s, but I do have that. And, I know that I’m going to make coffee in the morning after I wake up.