Close, yet Alien.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I begin with a bit of prose.

But I once knew a girl who reminded me of sage and mesquite, yet tried to always cover it in a musk of pink roses. Some days, the roses were white, though I could always see their browning edges. She wasn’t like those soft, tame petals that were as silken as filly noses. She wasn’t covered in dagger-ish thorns blatantly worn, nor did she flirt with elegant strangers decorated in pearls.

She pretended, of course, with all her will and finesse, though I’m not convinced she ever did cast us away. She was not afraid of going home, but of being forced to stay there. She expected its rejection, its confirmation that she would be nothing (as well she should be) and that was something she could never forgive. But she was never quite able to forsake that smooth, dark smell of wilder places that were so uncouth in her circle of rosy friends.

She broke my heart.

What is so wrong with our sagebrush and mesquite that pearls and roses can destroy them? Why did embracing the wilderness mean being tamed? Couldn’t we be wild in this wild place and still be loved?

We met a small borderland of our own, my family being from New England and hers being rooted in the Texas hill country. When we first met as children, she couldn’t speak a single word of English and I certainly didn’t know Spanish, but we managed to figure out hide-and-seek with little effort. I suppose we each wanted what the other had, too. I thought she was exotic, mysterious, and I couldn’t fathom why she would ever want what I had. She wanted the American Dream, whatever that may be: a normal, nuclear family with a very cushioned lifestyle. She wanted to be normal. I didn’t.

In retrospect, neither of us had ever understood the other, and that ended in a pile of broken glass.

We both had Catholic families. We both received the same messages that La Frontera discusses. The three, possibly four choices women have as they drift through this world. That men are like children, like animals, even when women are portrayed as carnal, too (17). Why did we see each other so differently? She thought I had a perfect, calm life, I thought she had a perfectly adventurous one. What we didn’t see is that we were stuck with the same cultures swirling in and out of each other, where commonality seemed to be alien.

The article was frustrating. It was frustrating because I don’t know Spanish, forcing me to seek out an old friend to ask desperately to help me understand. It was frustrating because it told me about repressions I already feel, from a destiny of a mother and wife to being told that my entire nature is not appropriate for this world. It was frustrating because it made me feel like I don’t belong to this land, that I don’t belong to Texas or a movement or a plight. It made me feel very close and very alien. The same feeling I always had with her. Close, yet alien.

In one swoop, one quote illustrated all of these frustrations for me. “For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.” (page 19)

Is it only the lesbian of color who can rebel in this fashion and with such atrocity to her native culture? What ‘ultimate rebellion’ can the white (?) lesbian make? Is all of this perhaps closer to religion, region, class which cultures perpetuate along racial lines, along borderlands? Can we ever accept each other?

Who are we, anyways?