Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who’d taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she’d run off with a Mexican guy from… - Victor Villaseñor

“My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!” Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag

My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.

The truth was that we still spoke Spanish every chance we got. And why, because, simply, it felt good to hear in the sound of the language with which our mothers had rocked us to sleep when we’d been little.