Who Are You? Spring 2018

Dear Mama,             The candlelight is barely enough for me to see the words I’m writing to you right now. It’s late, but I wanted to write you. I know I haven’t in a while—I’ve been so busy. They work us like dogs and I hardly get paid. Since I last wrote you another girl has moved into the room I already shared with three others. Now there’s five of us, all packed in there like sardines. It would be impossible for me to sleep at night if I weren’t so exhausted from the damn long days. I’ve been trying to find something else to do, something that’s not such menial labor, but no one in D.C. seems to want to hire me.             Every day I regret not going further North with you and Papa. I think I realize now how lucky we were before. Lucky that our masters were kinder to us than most. They let you and me work in the house and Papa, along with everyo...

Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you wrote the book you wrote. It’s a step in the right direction for sure. And believe me, I always liked Sally! She was kind, in her little way, and had these watchful eyes. Smarter than she looked if you know what I mean. Oh, c’mon! Know you probably think I’m jealous. Don’t get me wrong. She was good-looking. Really good-looking. Anybody could see that. She was good-looking any which-way you slice it. Some of the other girls (they were jealous) said he liked her just for her skin, the way it fell in that certain shade men (black and white) always are falling over themselves for, but it wasn’t about that. She moved in a certain way, had an openness about her, you know what I mean. Men just liked her. It was the same with her mother. But look, I’m not just writing to you to talk about how good looking Sally Hemmings was. You made that plenty clear in your book! I am writing to say something that maybe is going to have you think that I am je...

Dear Professor Brubaker,   I liked your book a great deal. It was insightful, provocative, and timely. I wonder though that for a book so focused on the liminal, you might have chosen a less straightforward methodological approach. You write excellently. Your style is impeccable and the structure of the book is lucid and easy to follow, but in this straight progression of arguments I found myself aching for something less constrained. As you write about the boundaries, the messiness of individual lives fitting into arbitrary categories, mightn’t it have been useful to approach the writing itself with some of the same intentional messiness? Couldn’t your analysis have chased down your elusive concepts with riffs, and jagged diversions, moments of improvisation, floated thoughts. I felt somehow that you felt the need to tame in your book. You wished to break down, to classify, to give a taxonomy of things that puzzled and intrigued you. But in those constrained abstra...

I came up for the gold you see. In ’49 they discovered it in the Sierra Nevadas. Before folks had heard about gold a little while after they discovered it. In ’49 they had telegrams so BANG, we knew. I was a miner in Sonora and knew what I was doing. I’d been working in the mines most days since I was small. It was hard to tell whether they were telling the truth about the gold finds up in the Sierras, but I had to find out for myself so I decided to take off. I didn’t have much of anything holding me down. I was still young enough to go on an adventure. I made my way up across the border, not that it was much of a border at that stage or any stage when I was alive, and into California. I got there a little earlier than most folks I suppose and started looking. California had plenty of my people in at that time and plenty of Indians too. We had set up camp in the mountains already, when the white men started coming. By the thousands, then the tens of thousands. Soon...

You may have crossed our boarder from rural Mexico, to the great city of  LA But you must adopt American customs if you wish to stay Wives here in the US work very, very hard so do not be lazy or there will be no picket fence around your yard some things you must learn to know: are how to cook, clean, wash, and sew the opportunities here are of the highest grade look you can be a laundress, a service worker, even a maid! Be sure to speak English, and practice good hygiene because no one likes those who are unclean Lastly this is a note on propriety, be chaste if you do not have a ring and to those who are married do not exceed more than four offspring

Dear Mr. Sánchez, I wanted to write and thank you for your scholarship in your book Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. There was one passage that particularly stood out to me about the experience of Chicano people in Los Angeles. You write,   “They were now interlopers on familiar land, even as their labor became increasingly crucial to its economic development and they had begun to settle their families in the United States. Mexican immigrants learned to live with the contradiction, partly because they continued to feel wholly Mexican, but mostly because they could do little to change their lot.” (62) I am interested in the idea of how and why Mexican immigrants learned to “live with the contradiction.” I appreciate how you told the story of the Chicano experience in one part, it seemed, to dispel the idealized Ellis Island immigration experience. Your book confounded the linear, teleological assu...