Honduras, 2009
Give my mother a stove, a container of water and ingredients and she can cook you any meal that you want – her specialty are Honduran meals. This is probably why she works with her friends at pop-up stands in our neighborhood in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. So, when she brings me, I decide to wear my favorite pair of jeans and a pink sleeveless flower shirt. I ask the other children who come with their single moms if they want to play. My mom works these food sales to earn extra money, since my dad lives in the U.S. and they’re not together anymore. Like the other moms, there are no jobs for them in Honduras since they didn’t make it past high school, so they work in the dark for our future. All of us are always bored and, luckily, we’re all six years old with nothing better to do. While they light the stove and start slicing through cabbage to make sides for the meal, we grab sticks, leaves, flowers and rocks. We echo the sounds of our moms.
I sit on the ground, letting the grass touch my skin. I grab a plate where we put water, dirt, rocks and mix away. Our dishes are imaginary, but they still taste good. I take our creations and when customers sit at the tables, I ask them if they want to taste my food. They laugh and smile approvingly. That night, all those people feel like new friends. As my mom starts to clean up and pack up the equipment after three hours of cooking and selling Pollo con Tajadas (chicken with fried banana chips), she gives me a bite.
I love the homemade dressings they pour on top. The fresh cabbage with tomatoes, bell peppers and onions give the dish a unique flavor. It’s my favorite meal. Someday I want to cook like my mom. I want to teach my friends what home tastes like; a mixture of love and good comida.
Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport, 2012
The only time that both my dad’s family and my mom’s family ever go to the airport together is when they drop my brother and me off to say our goodbyes. The airport feels like every other time I had been there – big and just one floor, a maze of lines, the smell of fast food and brand-new luggage filling the room.
This time we aren’t running with our dad’s luggage as he boarded his plane to the U.S. This time we are slowly walking with our first suitcases to the elevator alongside him.
I still remember the hug I gave my mom.
“Te quiero hija,” she says with tears and a voice I had never heard before.
I tell her that I love her too. I start crying because she’s crying.
When we get to the first checkpoint, I keep looking back at her as tears just roll down. The lady at the checkpoint looks me in the eyes.
“If you don’t stop crying, you and daddy will miss the flight,” she says.
As a 9-year-old, I don’t know what I am doing and why there are so many checkpoints. I just keep looking back and holding my brother’s hand and then begin following instructions.
My stepmom wants us to feel at home. She cooks pancakes the next morning, after a long night of adjusting to this new house. The floors are not cement, they’re hardwood. The walls have wood wainscotting. In the living room is a picture of me and my brother.
When I walk into the kitchen, I smell heaven. I am really excited for panqueques, but when I
see the plate with three perfectly stacked, fluffy pancakes I panic. I run to my dad. Those aren’t panqueques; they’re too thick. My mom’s pancakes are thin, and she drizzles honey on top of them. He takes a bite to show me that it was okay.
“Lia, prueba the pancakes,” papi says.
I take a bite, and my throat dries. These are a new type of pancake and the honey comes thick and dark from a bottle, no honey at all.
The pancakes don’t taste the same, and soon I would also not be the same.
Galliano, 2018
Moving from Honduras to southern Louisiana is hard. For the first two years, there are only two other Hispanic girls, of Mexican heritage, in my same grade. They are my lifeline. Without them, I can’t communicate. When I go to middle school, I see more people like me, more people who speak the same native tongue. But we never really speak Spanish to each other. In high school,
when all the neighboring towns finally converge, I meet people who like speaking Spanish when they can. It is a part of us.
But while they speak Spanish at home, the main language of my new household is English. I speak English all day with my stepmother while my dad works, and my little sister never learns Spanish. I forget the irregular verbs. My brain commits to mispronunciation. When I call my mom, she teases me over my conjugation. It feels like I will never be good enough for either language.
One of the things that helped me learn English was being surrounded by people who spoke English. In fifth grade, I take up the saxophone, which I play until I graduate high school. With the music comes English, but what’s harder to grasp is understanding American culture – or having others understand mine.
One day during band camp, we march outside, trying to learn our show. I have a friend in my section. She’s also from Honduras and, up until this point, I haven’t really been friends with someone who shares the same birth country as me. We talk in Spanish during our break as our other section friends sit against the artificial turf of the football field.
Dani and I get so caught up in our conversation that I barely hear our bandmate.
“Stop,” he says.
“What?”
He gets up, to join our conversation and I register how tall he looks, looming over us. “I said stop speaking in Spanish.”
“Why?”
“Because this is America, we don’t speak Spanish here,” he says. He smiles, but there is no humor in his voice.
I find myself speaking Spanish less and less at school.
Northwestern State University, Fall 2021
I don’t know where I would go, but college is my dream. When senior year comes, I panic. I
know that I wanted to be somewhere new, but I didn’t know it would be four hours away. When most of my classmates decided to attend a college nearby, I decide to leave with no one.
My first semester at Northwestern State University is hard. I feel like I am back in fourth grade, not knowing how to speak and watching everything pass before me.
When someone asks me where I’m from, I don’t know what to say. On one hand I am from Honduras, but, on the other, I had now lived here the same amount of time as I had back home.
I’m not an international student from an exchange program, so maybe I shouldn’t say I’m from Honduras. I want everyone to know where I’m from, but what if I don’t appear Hondureña enough? Nothing I can do or say makes me feel like I can claim either of my identities. There are moments when I understand the pop culture references, and feel American. And there are moments when I talk about covering mirrors when a lightning storm comes or not sweeping at night at the risk of inviting bad spirits into the house that make me feel Hispanic. In high school it was easy to explain why I didn’t look like them or speak like them. In college people don’t believe I’m from Honduras or Galliano. I began to
overthink who I am.
Kyser Hall, Spring 2022
I force myself that first year to join organizations and go to events that would make me meet people. The first organization I join is the student newspaper, The Current Sauce. I want to write and share stories that I feel no one else is writing.
For one story, I have to partner with NSU TV. It’s during this assignment I meet Naydu, a Colombian international exchange student. When I see her and hear her switch from English to Spanish with another person, I feel awkward.
Should I try to talk to them in Spanish too? Does she think I’m Hispanic enough?
On the way to our interview, she doesn’t look at me. Her eyes keep darting back to the other person as they talk about how Kali Uchis, a pop singer, is from Colombia, like Naydu.
And even though I knew the lyrics to the song that was playing on the radio, I stayed quiet. Singing in Spanish felt wrong. If I sang the Spanish lyrics, she might think I was trying to
show off. Maybe she’d make fun of my English accent in Spanish.
When Naydu finally catches on that I can understand her, she rants to me in Spanish. She tells me how she changed her major and how she wants to be a multimedia journalist.
“Mira, a mi me gusta hacer estos videos,” Naydu says so fast – waiting for me to respond.
“I like doing these videos too, but I really liked writing.”
She raises her eyebrow and continues to tell me about all her plans she has for her new major.
Still, I’m afraid my words won’t come out the way I want them to in Spanish; I listen carefully, fidgeting and answering in English.
Was it me who thought I wasn’t Hispanic enough?
Friedman Student Union, Fall 2022
In my classes, I am often the only Hispanic. The organizations I’m part of don’t have people who look like me. I want a space to unite us, so I start the Hispanic Student Journalist Association, not knowing if I could actually get members.
The only way I can get members is if other Hispanic students feel a genuine connection to me. I haven’t been home in four years. I’m scared to speak Spanish in case I’m made fun of for my developing American accent. But Naydu helps. She brings them in, and together we bring Hispanic Heritage events to life.
HSJA events are sometimes a double-edged sword. They make me feel at home and yet the sudden wave of nostalgia makes me miss home.
Our Hispanic Food Sale is the first such NSU sale where it isn’t just Mexican food. We have dishes from Colombia, Mexico and Honduras. We announce it very poorly and are scared no one will show up. But the room fills with rows of people, dollar bills are waved in front of our faces, as only three of us serve food. With music playing in the background, tables filled with people eating and enjoying everyone’s company, I’m transported to 2009, watching my mom and her friends at work. As the line eventually dwindles, I’m happy. Not even 30 minutes in, we run out of tortillas for tacos and baleadas (a Honduran dish of
flour tortilla with refried beans, cheese, cream and occasionally eggs).
While I stay to clean up to make sure that they would allow us to do this event again, bittersweetness kicks in. I leave that room yearning to be home. I want to be a kid again, experiencing that one more time with my mom. But instead, I must pick up all the dishes and the crumbs, and stop the music, waiting until the next semester.
Honduras, December 2023
I step outside, into the hot and humid parking lot. My suitcase stands still next to me. I wait for my ride to get here, debating whether I am happy or nervous. Every single time I go back home, I feel different. When a random guy comes up to me, I think about how my American friends would respond.
“Quieres comprar cacahuates?” he asks, proffering peanuts.
I imagine my friend saying, “peanuts in the airport parking lot is crazy.”
But this is normal for me.
It isn’t until I go back to my childhood home, walk inside my house and see my mom that I realize how much time has passed. The floors used to be smooth red concrete, and the couches had a brown grid print, but before me is a white tiled floor, with black couches. The kitchen cabinets are gone. My cousin isn’t the little girl who liked to play with dolls and play-dough, she is now a teenager who speaks Honduran slang I don’t even know.
When I go back to Honduras, I feel how different I look from those I grew up with. I find myself saying “OMG,” or making looks to people when they say something un-American. My family feels frustrated when they cook my favorite meals, because I can’t eat them since I’m now vegetarian. I carry the memories, the stories and the language, but sometimes it doesn't feel like I belong there either.
In the States, I can unapologetically complain about anything. The U.S. has become another home that has shaped my identity.
But will I ever be American enough or Hondureña enough?
In both homes now, there is a wave of familiarity and strangeness – I don’t know which Lia I am, or which Lia I should be.
