Urge for Going
In 2019, I thought leaving the United States was my choice. This is a snapshot of a hope that never arrived at its destination.
By César Miguel Vega Magallón (Twitter, IG)
This is an essay originally written for the zine Winter Tangerine, which was never published and for which I never received the before-agreed-upon honorarium. It haunts my workflow, so I’m exorcising it publicly. My grandfather passed away, the seat remains empty as does his place in my soul.
(A temporary “relief” that brought constant worries.)
I remind myself—when the discomfort of adjusting might lapse into regrets—what life has been like from the day my mother returned from California to Jalisco and took me at four years old to the Tijuana-San Diego border for our first crossing in 1994. I pinion myself to the memory of the relief that came with cutting my work permit in half, with the knowledge that I’ll never feel the weight of that temporary, precarious relief in my wallet pocket pulling me down into hysterias about its inevitable rescission or loss. My rosary prayer: I’m a citizen now, I’m Mexican again.
Muscle memory is a fiendish thing. In the mornings I find myself leaping out of the wrong side of bed, nearly smashing my face against the wall forgetting in my waking dazes that I’m now in my childhood bedroom in Huentitán el Alto. In the evenings I stumble out of bars and walk in the wrong direction, sheer inertia directing me in a different kind of daze towards Gold Coast Bar for a third round; López Cotilla and Chapultepec so much resembles Santa Monica Boulevard and Kings Road with the magnolias and hibiscus framing throngs of people too well-dressed for a Tuesday evening. Decades of feeling like a vestigial person in temporary exile in Southern California slip with ease to feelings of much the same here in Guadalajara. But, this isn’t technically an exile, it’s home. Besides, I chose this.
Returning to Guadalajara has put into low relief the extent to which my illegality shaped my self-identification. In the U.S., I navigated the world behind veils with lies always coming to mind easier than even simple truths. Taking people for fools I constructed elaborate myths about my family history, my origins and identity since childhood. In my mind I constructed elaborate memory-fantasies, half-rooted in reality and half-rooted in dreams of marble floors and talavera fountains on the childhood farm I left behind that never really existed.
(Guadalajara’s Cathedral, where my grandmother would take me to mass as a child.)
Now, I am confronted with the reality of what is left and the personal toll of my migration. “We should have never let him leave.” My grandmother says repeatedly. “We only sent you to suffer.” She always adds for emphasis. My grandmother has aged. I had never seen the woman asleep before and now I nudge her at the dining table when she dozes off mid-afternoon because I worry she’ll fall off her chair. My grandfather doesn’t speak to me, he doesn’t seem to know what to say to me. But, when I leave the house he asks my grandmother and my aunt, “Where is César?”
I don’t know what to say either. At dinner, my eyes wander to the corners of the house and the cracks in the walls and along the ceiling that have emerged after two decades of humidity and the occasional earthquake. In the felted palm that hasn’t been trimmed in years, in the cactus which now towers over the house I see quick flashes of who we might have been if only we could have stayed together. Everywhere is this kind of realization, a dry rot that eats away at the myth of the Guadalajara and the family I clung onto for so many years. I sink into the pink Louis XV chair with its cushion springs worn and its legs chewed up by 20 years of rabbits, dogs and cats. I tell myself I’ll get it reupholstered and restored. I tell myself I’ll fix the house and the farm. After all, I can. This is my patrimony. I am Mexican again.
But, I have never felt more confused about what it means to be Mexican than I am now here in Guadalajara. All those agonizing, hand-wringing years developing an autodidact understanding of Mexicanidad, of Latinidad are useless. The books and journals I’ve read, essays I’ve written, and arguments I’ve engaged in until my voice was hoarse are unintelligible and inaccessible to me now. Without the Anglos and the native-born citizens to contrast myself with, I have no identity and no understanding of who I am. This is the irony of being so firmly rooted in your displacement; this is the rabbit snare of identity politics in the diaspora. I only understood myself in the negative.
What is left is a sense of absolute, terrifying freedom and its echoes—dread. Untethered to the national mythos after 25 years of estrangement and feeling rejected on all levels by the United States, I aim to rebuild myself even though I am afraid of what I might learn about myself in the process.
(Nuestro Señor de la Ascención)
The end of nostalgia has not been the fulfilment of my childhood dreams or revisiting places and people confined to memory, but the realization that they were fabrications. The feeling of being a vestigial person is ever more present, but it’s increasingly habitable. I lean into my enfeebled, battered Spanish and savor the wringing of the phantom limb of language that reaches with futility for the names of peculiar green fruit. I have no shame in my pochismos or the cultural touchstones that mark me as an ersatz being that elicits pity or scorn from Mexicans who were never forced to develop an understanding of what it means to be Mexican on their own. Ni de aquí ni de allá is half-baked bullshit; I inhabit my own place in the floating world of the perpetual exilee, marked by both places yet without allegiances to either.
I choose to think of this double exile as a gift I’ve given myself, a true homecoming. The border and its drain ditches, mangled fences, scarred walls and its roving guards cease to terrify me. For the first time I can put what it is into words: a force which flattens time and distance through the sheer gravity of its tragedies and cruelty, but which still allows light to escape. The border runs through San Ysidro, yes, but also at least as far south as Periférico Norte. The border is wherever I exist as a chimera who shouldn’t; as an accident of history and politics who should have fallen in line or taken their own life a long, long time ago.
That barrier for me is now a bridge to something resembling a future and to someone I am in the process of becoming, undefined by legislative agendas and the insatiable appetite of empire for tragedies to publicize or narratives to hijack. I feel liberated in my bereavement, closer to my friends trapped behind those imaginary lines all the more because we may never see each other again. Leaving México for the first time was not my choice to make. But, leaving the United States was. I cut the Gordian knot the only way I knew how, by leaving everything I had built and what I had known. I made the border work for me.
I left the comfort of suburban Southern California, but I found my will among baroque monuments. I am content and steeled in knowing that the cantera dorada of the cathedral and the government palaces are carved out of the ravines and shaped by Huentitán’s masons; the same earth and hands that made me. I find comfort in the knowledge that the ravines predate us all, that they were here before the churches or libraries, before the border and before the men who erected it. I draw power from the inevitability that they will be here when all borders fall.
(my grandfather’s chair)
In the meantime, I will have the Louis XV chair reupholstered. I will sit in it and understand that my grandfather’s silence is a manifestation of a border, too. And that, when we finally find the words to say, we will have finally crossed it for the last time. In the meantime, we can both ask, “Where is César?”