by Diego Alejandro Arias

Here they were, sitting in a car. Miguel looked over at John. He was slapping a hand on the steering wheel. The fingers long, crooked, their skin wrapped around his joints and fingers like rawhide on a drumhead. John held on to the steering wheel and pressed into the black leather. He squeezed it and tightened it against his bones. They cracked. Miguel grimaced when the bones and leather crunched against each other. There was an Elvis song on the radio. Miguel was a huge Elvis fan, often fascinated by the 1968 comeback special that revived his career. Miguel was all about revivals and reawakenings. Like his Abuela, he believed the dead could speak to us, bring us back from the nothingness, career nothingness, relationship nothingness, political nothingness, even the nothingness that people say you can never come back from while you are alive, the sort of nothingness that buries you in Black Mollies or Toe Tag Dope or massive depressive episodes. Miguel had been spending most of his days in and out of drunken stupors trying to stay awake in law school classes and legal aid seminars. He periodically experimented with prescription drugs and other controlled substances when the nothingness took over, when the world outside of his own skull emitted a low-frequency white noise assembled out of fingers on keyboards and vitriolic social dynamics. In a Race and the Law class, where he sat next to several students who argued companies had the right to fire black employees on pure racial grounds, Miguel tended to pop back two or three Percocets just to stomach the professor nodding his head at these types of arguments.
 
John moved his finger towards the radio. “Let it play,” Miguel said. “You like Elvis?” he asked. “Everyone likes Elvis. You’d have to be a fucking numbskull to dislike him.” John smiled nervously. “He put out three gospel albums. I mean, you gotta like a guy like that, right?” Miguel said. He smiled, revealing big white teeth underneath a black, manicured beard. Miguel enjoyed the uncomfortable silences he inspired in his classmates. They saw this big, brown Dominican with a gold chain around his neck as thick as a double braided docking line, dressed in black clothing and white Jordans, and he knew they immediately felt like something didn’t quite mesh. Most of the other Latinos in law school dressed and acted like they were preparing for a diplomatic bilateral between Henry Kissinger and the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance; and Miguel wasn’t with that nonsense. But who was he to hate them? He was nothing but a backpack rapper with a law school scholarship and a literature degree focused on Middle English symbolism. He wasn’t even a first-generation college student, so he didn’t have anyone to blame but himself for his lackluster grades from the previous semester.
 
“You like ‘em, right?” Miguel asked.
 
“Of course, of course,” he replied.
 
“You got a favorite song?”
 
“Uh, yeah, what’s the one song, ‘Hound Dog.’ I always liked that one.”
 
“Yeah, that’s early Elvis, back when he hadn’t made all those ridiculous soundtrack albums. I like the more mature, adult Elvis. Don’t get me wrong, bro, ‘Hound Dog,’ ‘Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ those are some of the best songs ever recorded, ever written. But my favorite Elvis song is ‘Big Boss Man.’ He covered that one in Clambake. It’s not his. It’s an old Jimmy Reed blues song. I just like the take Elvis has on that song.”
 
“I never heard it.”
 
“Give it a shot. It’s as close to socialism as Elvis ever came. It’s a song about hating your boss, quitting your job, and questioning the employer-employee relationship.”
 
John laughed.
 
He wasn’t so bad, Miguel thought. John was a small guy, the type of kid that wore khaki pants with white socks and polo shirts, a sort of Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues type of pariguayo. A pariguayo is a stiff, a square, a guy with no game and no swagger. The term comes from the Dominican Republic. The Dominicans picked it up during the first U.S. military invasion of Santo Domingo. Miguel knows this because he spent an entire semester researching U.S. abuses in the Dominican Republic for a Latin America and Foreign Policy seminar hosted by a professor from Harvard with a stringy beard that always reminded his pupils that President Obama, who he had gone to school with, was not that great of a student. Miguel even had the school pay for a trip to East Santo Domingo where he researched municipal records in a dusty Caribbean basement that detailed gruesome, blood-stained accounts of his people’s persecution.
 
Miguel had originally known some Dominican history because his Abuela had been a scholar of constitutional law in Santo Domingo, but some of the shit he read sounded like war crimes straight from The Hague, like the shit he saw coming out of Ukraine day after day after day. He wondered if the Latin kids at his law school interning at large firms or if guys like John had a fraction of an idea that this sort of nonsense had gone down? That maybe these were the reasons why 10% of the Dominican Republic’s population currently lives in exile, mostly in New York, New Jersey, and Spain. Some of these texts were straight bananas. Bonkers bullshit like Rear Admiral William Caperton, with full support from the Secretary of State and President Woodrow Wilson and their corporate buddies at the National City Bank of New York, threatening to bomb the shit out of an entire country if the Dominican government didn’t comply with U.S. demands. Miguel read through these old archives, using his best legal Spanish and consulting with Abuela when he returned to The Jaragua Hotel in the Malecón, to review his notes and seek some guidance. “Tienes que mejorar el castellano, hijo. No quiero un gringo que se olvida de su cultura haciendo quedar mal a la patria quisqueyana. No te olvides tu sangre, la sangre nunca miente,” Abuela would say. Miguel dived headfirst into that research paper. For his effort, he was rewarded with an A-, keeping his grades close enough to the grade point average needed to maintain his meager scholarship at Newark Law School.
 
The war itself was a personal one for Miguel, one that forever changed his family’s history, altering their trajectory, changing las vidas de todos. That’s how his Abuela’s dad, his great-grandfather Braulio Hernandez, went from being a farmer in Dajabon, a city on the Haitian border, to a bearded guerilla taking shots at invading gringo soldiers from the Cordillera Central mountain range. This was years before Cuba, decades even. Castro was still a toddler shitting his diapers when his great-grandfather was organizing military campaigns across the Dominican Republic. As a result of Braulio’s heroism, the family carried down war stories for generations, sometimes with ghosts appearing in dreams or living rooms or pool halls filled with sweaty tígueres and de los míos to fill in parts of history that had been lost to time, death, or vows of secrecy. Abuela often visited and talked about American jazz and neo-American slavery arriving in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She once told Miguel her inspiration to become a lawyer happened when she learned from her militant father that the U.S. had created a modern slavery system to subdue Haitian resistance to the invasion. Incredible, Miguel thought. Does the law school ever teach that sort of shit to its happy recruits? According to Abuela, who observed Río Ozama and the Caribbean Sea from the window of Miguel’s hotel room, lots of words and concepts got mixed between the clash of cultures. “Eran tiempos diferentes, incluso esto hijo, el Malecón, esto era diferente. Es lindo ahora, aunque lo fue lindo en aquellos tiempos también, cuando los patriotas defendieron nuestra tierra,” she said. Abuela spoke at length about what she called the first insult, the first attack on Quisqueya’s sovereignty. White supremacism from Marines and fox trot and jazz played out in nightclubs across the country, along with marginal economic stability accompanying U.S. military elimination of free press and radio on the island. Local Black girls dated White soldiers plucked from Tennessee and Alabama and brought to Puerto Plata to shell the living daylights out of poor, Black rural communities. That’s where and how pariguayo came about, when the American soldiers would make fun of the guys who stood on the sidelines during parties and didn’t know how to talk to women. They called those guys “party watchers,” except the Dominicans mispronounced it and the mutated Dominico-American term stuck. Sounds better in Dominican, anyway. You don’t want to be called a pariguayo, trust me, it’s a high-line insult for anyone, criollo or gringo. But John was most certainly a pariguayo. He had clammy skin and freckles across his nose and cheeks like God had just dipped his big ‘ole hand in roasted cacao and opened his fist violently in this guy’s face, splashing all these marks on his big Italian head. He had a short, cropped cut and a hair line that was disappearing at twenty-three. He wore thick tube socks underneath chunky New Balance sneakers, and t-shirts big enough to make his arms look like dried semolina spaghetti.
 
Back in the car, Miguel looked out of the window. He observed the street’s congestion, its inhabitants, its humid breath just mushing about in the atmosphere, the thick heat rolling around in the ghetto, suffocating the construction workers holding on to jackhammers and scaffolds and public employees picking up litter and tossing black bags into big white trucks that gobble up an entire civilization’s quisquiliarum every morning. Out there, in the naked American summer, beads of water ran down the arms of Indian convenience store owners. Puerto Rican bodegamen sat outside their shops with their hair stuck to their head and damp blotches inking through their shirts, the salt forming through the edges of their sweat marks. Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe sang tracks from Asalto Navideño on stereo speakers, the music filling up the street like an East Harlem summer in 1972. “Vamos a bailar la murga, la murga de Panamá, los muchachos se alborotan cuando la ven caminar…” A large, ginger cat licked his paws and turned around on his back, and a young boy with shaggy hair outside of a Dominican colmado scratched the white tufts on his belly. On a street corner, a shirtless drifter with long hair panhandled and asked a fearful mother to surrender a wrinkled up, wet Washington. She placed a greenback in his hand and turned away. He smiled and bowed to her. She held on to a blue carriage and hurried along. Miguel watched the young mother make her way down Broad Street. She reached a bus stop and stood in line with the rest of the folks waiting for the #59 bus en route to Washington Park in Newark.
 
Miguel pressed his back against the passenger seat’s wrinkled leather. He sighed.
 
“We’re almost there,” John said.
 
“This is awful, dude,” he said.
 
“Why?”
 
“You have no air conditioner. It’s hot as shit.”
 
“It’s bad, but bearable. We’ll make it to Newark in about half an hour.”
 
“I’m suffocating, dog. I feel like I’m being cooked alive, like a Nathan’s hot dog flung onto a grill somewhere in some dude’s backyard.”
 
“Damn, I’m sorry, didn’t know it was that bad.”
 
John avoided taking the New Jersey Parkway to Newark using the excuse that tolls were costly and unnecessary. Miguel knew it was because he had had his car window smashed up during a recent break-in while he had been at a New Brunswick bar. The naked door was still threatening and jagged with little pieces of glass flying off at violent speeds. Miguel could still see small glass nuggets on the floor near his feet, a reminder that John was a hell of a law student but shit for brains when it came to getting his life together. The broken window had other uncomfortable consequences. Going too fast on a highway caused vibrations in their ears. The car had been like that for over two months. It had been broken into once more several days after the black bag was placed over the window. The thieves took a bookbag out of the car and dumped it near a river in Edison. The police tracked John down when they found his mail inside. They returned the bookbag, covered in dirt and river water, on a Saturday afternoon when he was studying for an eminent domain seminar. Inside the bookbag, ironically, there were only some books on constitutional theory and criminal law.
 
“Ey John, maybe we could stop and grab something to eat,” he said.
 
John looked at the clock in front of him. He quickly read the blue numbers in the middle of the car’s touchscreen.
 
“Yeah, we have some spare time. If we eat something now, we’ll have five hours to prepare for this exam.”
 
Miguel had varying opinions on his law school classmates, and they ranged from quiet avoidance to outright disgust at the sort of nonsense they engaged in regularly. Maybe he should have listened to his father, who had passed away while he was still in college, and pursued graduate school instead of his sorry ass attempt at being a lawyer. What he had expected from the legal field was everything he never found, and instead had forced himself to accept that many of his fellow Brown brethren had little to no interest in dismantling the system that had held them back for generations. Lots of kids were just normal students looking for a six-figure salary. None of them felt this weight on their shoulders, this painful, piercing reminder that people still suffered a couple of miles away, in housing projects in Newark, in dilapidated homes in Camden, or in public schools that were falling apart academically and structurally. There was little interest in making a difference in these people’s lives, and Miguel had come to understand that his way of looking at the world did not coincide with the socio-economic interests of his classmates or the lawyers that they admired. These kids just wanted to clerk for a judge that would hook them up with a first-year associate position at a white shoe office. Sometimes they would throw in a gala where someone gave a speech on the need for diversity at law firms and at Fortune-500s. Then they would return to overlook the waiters in the room that could barely afford to send their kids to college, or the guys who would go on to clean up the gnawed-up chicken bones and empty champagne bottles at the end of the “40 Latino Lawyers Under 40” annual awards ceremony.
 
In his class there were plenty of Johns, working-class or middle-class White kids who were trying their best to sort their lives out and kept their distance from people of color out of an unspoken fear that they did not belong or should not belong to ethnic social circles. Miguel didn’t mind these students so much. What are ya gonna do?, he often thought, they’re just a product of their parents’ social-mobility fears. They think they’re being left behind, and they must catch up because life is harder for them now. The modern Western economy has eliminated their union jobs, their high-paying factory gigs, so they blame others when they should be blaming the system that forced them into a grotesque grind-culture, where the American being with three full-time jobs is hoisted upon a pedestal as some sort of king rat, a hero, a modern-day Beowulf suffering from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and frequent aural migraine headaches. Miguel pitied them, but he didn’t hate them.
 
But there were others who just wore him down. Miguel thought of one young White woman at his law school who had run for vice-president of the Black Law School Student Association. What on earth was she thinking? Why do they do shit like that? What gave her the idea to run for that sort of student government office? “This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” Allende once wrote. But it’s no different in Chile than in Montclair or Hoboken or Portland or Santo Domingo or Bogotá or Tegucigalpa. “Así son todos,” his grandmother, who had introduced him to Gabriela Mistral’s poetry and Isabel Allende’s prose, used to frequently say whenever they discussed politics, life, and empanada recipes. “Acuérdate que el propio Cristo fue víctima del chisme, de los chivatos, los vendepatrias, y peor!, los extranjeros que solo buscaban terminar con la palabra del todopoderoso!” she once said to him. And year after year, Abuela’s words became like prophetic passages he would come to revere. They would drink Santo Domingo coffee and she would make quipes and sweet plantain mangú. Hours and hours would go by, stories weaved together from testimonials and passages and confessions. The dead once again bringing him back to reality, reviving his rebellious spirit, his guerilla heart, appearing before him with messages of revolution and legislative advocacy still undone, still waiting to reverse the decades, the centuries, of exploitation. If he could only put the whiskey down long enough to concentrate, he’d be on to something. If only the painkillers and cocaine didn't make everything feel so goddamn bearable.
 
He felt so lonely, spread so thin across classes on property law and trust and estates seminars, shit he had no interest in reading about for hours and hours and hours. It seemed to him that the school’s administration had placed all their eggs into a select number of students’ baskets. Deans and professors had become cheerleaders for aspiring lawyers they had designated as future success stories. Miguel, a drunk, a drug addict, a crazy liberal, was just an eyesore getting in the way of the school’s rising rankings in U.S. World and News. The only reason the school couldn’t get rid of him was because he still maintained enough concentration, as thin as Tencel paper but still enough, to pass all his exams and even score an A and B+ here and there. One of his classmates, the son of a senior U.S. senator, joined the school’s Minority Student Program for disadvantaged pupils his first week at law school. “I’m half-Irish and half-Cuban!” he said out loud, in a surfer dude accent, during an orientation meeting where the professors seemed more interested in the twenty-three-year-old aspiring congressman’s opinions than their own lesson plans or sense of self-worth. Surfer Dude was about as Cuban as a Hawaiian shirt-wearing Al Pacino in 1983 Miami. And he was as disadvantaged as, well, as a U.S. senator’s son sitting in a room full of working-class Latino and Black students trying to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Miguel thought about the way his colleagues brushed off subjects like Brown children in immigration detention centers, families permanently torn apart by men on horseback flashing a CBP badge in frightened refugees’ faces, de facto racially segregated schools, and then the juxtaposition of these issues alongside their frequent racial justice seminars, pro-bono advocacy, and other pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-being-a-good person pendejadas they usually floated around his law school. “This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” Allende once wrote.
 
“Got damn, dog, it’s hot. Let’s pull into this parking lot over here, and grab some McChickens or something over there on the corner,” Miguel said.
 
“Yeah, I got you man.”
 
He felt sweat drip down his neck. His shirt was stuck to his chest. He was too large for the car, way too large for this car. He felt he would grow even larger if he stayed in the Maxima, suffocating until a door opened and he floated out of the car and just flew across the city like a big, sweaty vulture, the gold chain sparkling in the sky like bursts of yellow diamonds. At 6’5, Miguel was a big Dominican. He had muscular, hairy arms, giving him a big enough wingspan to fly across Pico Duarte all the way to Labadee Beach without getting tired. Despite being a child of the Caribbean, Miguel was not designed for intense heat. According to his Santiago de Los Caballeros operating manual, he had been specifically manufactured for air conditioning. Inside the car, he felt he was sitting in an oily, leathery tarp. He looked over at John. The brown beard turned to him briefly and smiled his bright red steak grin.
 
“Diañe, que vaina,” Miguel said.
 
“What’s wrong, bro? Everything alright?”
 
“The heat, bro, the heat.”
 
The McDonald’s was on the corner of Broad and Rahway. Rinky-dinky shops and municipal buildings surrounded it. The Union County Courthouse and the Elizabeth Public Library were across the street. It was a busy section and people came in and out of the place every couple of seconds. John and Miguel walked towards the front entrance. John looked around as he made his way to the door, observing the patrons exiting and entering the building. He looked bewildered. Miguel hovered over him, making it look like he was some sort of local narc hosting a deputy regional officer investigating a new fentanyl lab in the area. This was Elizabeth, one of the oldest cities in America, but also one of its most violent. In the 1770s, George Washington himself had marched across Elizabeth, with a bear fur on his back and a racoon hat covering his white hair, looking to collect the scalps of Royalists and change the course of human history. And now, immigrant families from Central America and Cuba called this land their home. In Elizabethport, the airport community considered by U.S. media as the most lawless two-mile strip in all of America, Ecuadorean and Puerto Rican kids played basketball and baseball in the parks. People like John only came out here if they had a meeting at the Union County Courthouse or at the City Hall Municipal Building to argue in front of some petty judge or to grease the hands of the Irish-American mayor that always seemed to get reelected in a town full of Black and Brown people. New Jersey has more Irish-American politicians representing Brown and Black people than exits on the Parkway.
 
Inside the McDonald’s, they stood in line to order. Next to them, Miguel spotted a young woman standing across from him. She had silver loop earrings and a blue and white top. Her shirt had an exposed midriff, and her hair was long, thick, and white, down to the middle of her lower back. The hair was magnificent, ethereal, something unlike, something not here. It draped over her shoulders as if Jean de La Huerta had carved each strand himself. She turned and looked at Miguel. Her eyes, large and dark and taking up half of her face, glistened. She smiled and turned her attention back to the employee in front of her. “Wow,” John said. Miguel looked over at him. John had become a man stuck somewhere alien, somewhere unexplored. He was off in the Antarctic, 990-pound polar bears and Mirounga elephant seals gathered around him at a watering hole. “Yeah, man, she seems like a nice person,” he responded. Had John been released into the ghetto for the first time in his life? Was this his first experience right here, knee deep in the heart of Latino Jersey, where Cardi B songs play outside of restaurants and Omega’s “Tú Si Quieres, Tú No Quieres” blasts out of black BMWs on their way to Little Colombia over on Morris Avenue? Had he been thrown into the belly of the beast with no parachute? Was he just hurtling, at full speed, towards the bright colors, the Salvadorean flags, the cold horchata drinks like sweet ambrosia at 11:00 a.m. in July, the Puerto Rican salsa filling the air with the smell of pollo guisado and café con leche? Was John seeing this for the first time in his life? Did White people ever visit this part of New Jersey?
 
“Come on, Big Boss Man, let’s sit down over here,” Miguel said.
 
They took their trays and sat down in the center of the McDonald’s dining area. As they ate, a group of panhandlers entered the McDonald’s. They rolled in one by one in an organized line, a sports team on their home turf, looking around the room, sizing up the competition. One of them was an older, handsome man. He was tall, shirtless, and had on a pair of torn shorts. He had broad shoulders and a muscular chest. His hair was pushed back with curls covered in gel and running down his bronzed skin. His hairline began at the edges of his forehead, and he had a carefully trimmed handlebar moustache. He looked about forty, but the other three men accompanying him looked older, perhaps sixty or more. The older ones had a similar appearance. They wore jeans and white shirts that were long and stained with grass and red clay from construction sites. Miguel recognized the younger one as the same shirtless drifter that had been walking down Broad Street. The same man that had asked the mom with the blue stroller for a dollar bill.
 
“Is everything okay?” John asked.
 
Miguel smiled. He finished chewing on some chicken and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.
 
“Everything is okay, baby. Have you not been in Elizabeth before?”
 
“Not like this. I haven’t been in this part of the city.”
 
“It’s okay, just be cool, be cool. No one is going to do anything to you. This is a community, that’s all.”
 
Miguel took another bite of the sandwich.
 
“Big Boss Man, how old are you?”
 
“I’m twenty-two.”
 
“What part of Jersey are you from?”
 
“I grew up in Howell. Down in Monmouth County.”
 
“Ah you’re not too far from the beach.” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Well, welcome to Elizabeth, man.” John smiled and sipped from his fountain drink. He looked over at the young woman with the white hair and the big, almond eyes.
 
“You don’t mind me calling you Big Boss Man, do ya?”
 
“Not at all! Unless you’re calling me a fascist employer. Then we might have a problem.”
 
They laughed.
 
“Of course not,” Miguel said.
 
“How’d you get into Elvis?”
 
“My dad, when he was growing up in the Dominican Republic, he thought Elvis personified the American Dream. He was big into his music, his life, his whole story. Even the eagle suit he designed and danced around like a chicken in during the final days of his thunder. I never met a Dominican so much into Elvis, but that was my dad, he thought if a poor country boy from the Deep South could make it in America, then so could a poor country boy from the DR.”
 
“I think a lot of people feel that way about him,” John said.
 
Miguel had been raised in Elizabeth. He knew the way the people stood outside the front entrance of this McDonald’s and asked for change. He knew that the doors to the bathroom were now locked to keep the homeless from going inside and urinating, shitting, bathing, or paying for blowjobs from local prostitutes. He knew this because he had witnessed all four practices inside of the Broad Street McDonald’s as a teenager. One day, while eating lunch, he met a homeless man that had recently been released from prison. “I paid a lawyer and he fucked up my case. He didn’t give a shit about me. I took some plea deal and ended up in the joint for ten years, brah. So, I studied in there and filed my own appeal, and I learned the law the same way that lawyer learned the law. I read all those free books. I filed my own appeal, man.” Walking alongside Broad Street Elizabeth, Miguel encountered all sorts of characters. Doomed souls with no clear path to sanity, drug addicts looking for the next big score, young students trying to make it out of Elizabeth and join the upper ranks of the occidental middle-class, and working dads and moms who came to America because their countries were overtaken by false prophets and charlatans from the Andes and the Pampas and the Malecón.
 
In the McDonald’s bathroom, the urinating and shitting he saw no problem with, except that the drifters weren’t buying food and the restaurant could reasonably argue that they were loitering. This was particularly concerning to the management when the weather was either too hot or too cold and the drifters refused to leave the place. The bathing had surprised him. At 15, he saw a man enter the bathroom and begin to undress. He was startled. He then saw him enter the stall and close the door, locking it with a violent click. The man hung his clothes over the stall’s white metallic door and Miguel could see the water splashing down onto the tiles. He saw it expand towards the rest of the bathroom, mixed with suds of brownish foam. The man shook his body after each splash of cupped water from the toilet. He wet his hair, slicked it back, and walked out. “What’s good, young blood?” he asked Miguel as he made his way back out into Elizabeth.
 
The blowjobs were another story. That was something dark and primal and carved into his memory for many, many years. He was in his senior of high school, using a urinal, and he saw a young tattooed White man behind the metal door leaning his head back in ecstasy. The sounds of slurps and suction filled the room. The man moaned and cursed. This was an obvious violation of McDonald’s bathroom privileges. While Miguel cleaned his hands, a father opened the door and took off running with his son. Miguel heard his muffled screams after the door closed. He dried his hands and left the bathroom. The manager came running towards the lavatory and banged on the door. “Please get out! Please no do that here!” After the incident, McDonald’s locked the doors, and to use the bathroom, management had to buzz people in. And to be buzzed in, prospective bathroom users had to order from the restaurant. This limited the number of people using the restaurant for other purposes besides standing in line and ordering McSomethings. No more blowjobs at McDonald’s. The golden days at the golden arches had come to an end.
 
“What was it like to grow up here?” John asked.
 
“Interesting,” he responded, “You try your best to be a good student. But there are limits. I can’t really complain though, I made it to law school, and some of my teachers, friends, they’re all a part of that.”
 
“You’re a hard worker. I used to think I’d never leave the farms and the one-bedroom house I grew up in.”
 
“Howell feels like another country from all the way up here,” Miguel said.
 
The drifters walked around and asked people for money. The manager behind the counter looked over as they panhandled customers. She signaled to the other employees working the cash registers. She pointed at the drifters with two fingers and then back at her own two eyes. She did this twice. Towards the right-hand corner of the seating area, the young woman with the white hair grimaced as the men came to her table. “Hey sweetie, you got twenty-five cents?” the man in the middle asked. She clutched her tray and rose from her chair. She walked over to the back of the restaurant and sat by the windows that faced the sidewalk. John looked at the men. They came up, individually throughout the McDonald’s, and asked patrons for twenty-five cents. Separated across the room, they worked different corners and asked for the same amount. The twenty-five cents were, according to the men, necessary for them to make up for the missing train fare needed to go to Newark.
 
It took about five minutes before someone gave up a quarter. “Thank you, lady. God bless.” After placing the coin in his pocket, the drifter walked over to John and asked him for another quarter.
 
“See I’m short 25 cents. And I got to get to Newark…”
 
“Sure man, take a dollar.”
 
The man bowed and held his fist out in front of John. They bumped knuckles.
 
“You alright man, you alright,” the man said.
 
“Oye, mi pana, y tú que vas a hacer con eso?” Miguel asked.
 
“Vamo’ a comer un poco, ¿qué má’?” the drifter responded. He laughed and Miguel handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
 
“Bueno, bueno, que Dio’ lo bendiga joven.”
 
While all three men laughed together, they saw the manager make her way over to the table. She came up to the group and tapped the man on the shoulder. He jerked his body and turned around. He stared the uniformed woman in the eyes. She was shorter than him. She had a tight buttoned shirt and a pair of brown pants. She spoke with a heavy accent. “Sir, you cannot talk to my customers that way. I’m going to have to ask you to leaf.”
 
“To ‘leaf’? The hell that mean?” The man asked. His tall frame shadowed the woman.
 
“To leaf, to leaf. I am asking you to leaf.”
 
Half an hour later, Miguel placed his books and folders on the backseat of the Maxima as the car started towards the exit of the parking lot. The Jersey sky was beginning to change from blue to the color of a pale purple wine. As they stopped at a red light, Miguel looked over at the corner of the McDonald’s. A group of people had gathered and were singing. They swished their hands and snapped their fingers to a heavy, chilled beat. There was no electronic music — that was coming from the radio station that John was bouncing his fingers to on the steering wheel. It was just the singing of several pordioseros gathered around in a huddled mass of heat and sweat. Some of them were sitting down, looking at the sidewalk but attentive to the voices. Others were standing around joining the crowd as they moved their arms and held their faces out to the words. There was a joy in their song, a tender calm that kept them still.
 
“John, you think we’re gonna ace this test or what?”
 
“I think we got a good shot.”
 
“It’s goin’ to be a long night. Lots of outlines, lots of cases, lots of fact patterns and product liability analysis.”
 
“We got this, Miguel. I feel this Mickey D’s kicking in, and I think we’re gonna rock this exam.”
 
“I’m happy you came out here. That you saw the beauty in this neighborhood.”
 
John smiled. He gave him one of those I-think-we-shared-a-bonding-moment kind of smiles and looked back ahead of the road in front of him.
 
Miguel continued to look over at the people gathered outside of the McDonald’s. They had felt so far away for so many years, and now they were here, in front of him. He could feel hot stinging tears forming around the edges of his eyes.
 
“Dímelo Colombia!” a young woman with cornrows in the crowd shouted. A skinny man entered the middle of the circle and started bopping his head and upper body, initiating the sacred ceremony, entering the holy cypher’s center stage. “En mi barrio soy el hijo de la lucha, del concreto, doy todo por mi cucha, por mi texto, por la santa cruz de mi señor, no hay objeto más sagrado que la luz y el honor. Vengan, come, come on, vamos, vamos parceros!” Miguel looked over at the men and pressed a plastic button upwards, lifting the windowpane. The four homeless men from before were there. Two of the grass-stained wanderers had their backs against the building, moving their heads to the skinny songster’s raspy Spanish. His face was stretched out speaking to the violet sky, the sun falling into the Earth, the faded glow of the moon appearing over the clouds in Elizabeth.
 
As John drove and made his way towards the border in Newark, about twenty minutes from the Law School’s Center for Legal Justice and Constitutional Theory, Miguel grabbed a bookbag from the backseat of the car, opened it, and started looking for a black paper folder with a blank cover. He opened the folder and pulled out some documents. He took a paper out of the folder and tore it in half, then tore the halves in half, and then the halves of the halves in half until all that was left were law school resignation forms turned to black and white confetti. John looked over at him, but then turned and kept his eyes on the road. A Newark police officer mounted on a large horse strode next to them at a red light.
 
“Can you pull over here, real quick?” Miguel asked.
 
“You mean, right here, on Bleeker? There’s no parking.”
 
“Put your hazards on, it’ll be quick.”
 
John stopped the car and parked on the side of the street near a bus stop. He waited until the police officer on the horse crossed the street; and turned his hazards on. Miguel opened the door to the car and ran over to a trash can near a small Portuguese bakery. He threw the torn shreds of paper inside and watched them all fall to the bottom of the container. He took a bottle of pills and dumped them all inside. Miguel could hear it, feel it, in his skull, in his heart, buried deep in there, coming from Abuela, her voice piercing through the nothingness, inviting the dead and their thoughts and their grievances, reminding him of the many voiceless whose flames no longer burn. Before him, in the middle of Newark, he could see them all turning a corner, dead men with bullet wounds in their shirts, their faces bludgeoned by machetes and rifles, naked women with their throats sliced open by military issued knives, children holding hands, wearing charred hats. They carried their scars, their words, their memories kept long secured in graves, mouthing messages to him about bones that never saw the light of day, of all the ones that never made it out because their freedoms were extinguished by the hatred, by the fear, and by the feckless nihilism of human apathy. Miguel took a deep breath. “Abuela, aquí estoy, no me abandones.” He thought about his professors, his deans, the Cuban Surfer Dude. He thought about Braulio Hernandez perched atop a mountain with a rifle taking men out as they ran across the hills. He thought about the coming week, the coming test. He was gonna rock that shit, he fucking knew it, he fucking had to.

Diego Alejandro Arias is a Colombian-born writer from New Jersey. He is a civil rights attorney, former U.S. diplomat, and member of the Latino Coalition in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He served three tours of duty in The Dominican Republic, China, and Costa Rica. He was awarded meritorious honors by the United States government for his part in evacuating Americans from China in 2019, and for a small part in aiding negotiations with the Taliban to liberate Afghanistan families during the 2021 evacuation. His work has been published in the U.S., the U.K., and Colombia. He is a lifelong advocate for civil rights in both the United States and Latin-America, and speaks Italian, Chinese Mandarin, and Spanish. 

by Matias Travieso-Diaz and Eloy Gonzalez-Argüelles

[I want to speak, I want to speak, tell everyone Albertico Limonta is my grandson,
the child of my oldest daughter Maria Elena.]
Don Rafael del Junco’s silent litany in El Derecho de Nacer by Felix B. Caignet

In mid-2047, the Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, or CIRT), received a proposal for a revival of the 1948 radio soap opera El Derecho de Nacer (The Right to be Born) by the Cuban radio writer Félix Benjamín Caignet Salomón. At the time, El Derecho, as it was called, swept Cuba by storm, and then spread to all of Latin America in a run that lasted over fifty years. It was regarded as one of the most influential soap operas of all time, and had been the subject of numerous radio, television and movie adaptations. The revival (in the form of a TV series to be aired in Cubavision) was to start in April 2048 to coincide with the centenary of the original radio broadcast.
 
José (“Pepe”) Cubero, a brilliant movie and TV producer and director, was the proponent and strongest defender of the project. He acknowledged that the 1948 soap opera would have to be modified a bit to make it consistent with the culture and politics of twenty-first century Cuba, but felt the changes would be small and well within his creative abilities.
 
The proposal met opposition from some of the most orthodox members of the Communist Party. They claimed that the original story was rife with the type of bourgeois, capitalistic ideology that had been eradicated after almost ninety years of Socialist rule. Other opponents, more practical, pointed to the chronic economic crisis that bedeviled the island with words like these:
 
“Anything we broadcast must encourage the Cuban people to work harder, make sacrifices, concentrate on rebuilding the economy in the face of the heartless Yankee blockade. El Derecho is a frivolous, escapist diversion that would get us sidetracked from our mission. And it will run for many months, compounding the damage.”
 
The matter was kicked upward to land on the lap of Miguel Diaz-Canel, who had been President and First Secretary of Cuba’s Communist Party for almost thirty years. He was in his mid-eighties and getting ready to step down, so he was in no mood to mediate in ideological disputes. He ruled:
 
“Let Pepe Cubero come up with a proposed screenplay and give it to the President of the CIRT and the Minister of Culture. Let those guys decide what changes to the screenplay are required to render it acceptable, make those changes, and run with it. Don’t bother me with this shit again.”
 
The Minister of Culture, Haydée Alonso, who had studied in Paris, quoted Sartre, and prided herself on being open-minded and liberal (within the ideological bounds of the Party), was enchanted with the idea of a revival of El Derecho, so she was inclined to give Cubero a relatively free hand. This was good news to Cubero, although no one else liked Haydée. No one forgave her for her unpatriotic preference for smelly Gauloise cigarettes that stunk up the studio, and that she did so “in the land where the best tobacco in the world used to be grown.”
 
The CIRT President, Danylo López, was an old, dried-up bureaucrat concerned mainly with toeing the Party line and avoiding controversies, and was not amenable to letting Cubero get away with much. Torn between polar extremes, development of the new version of the soap opera proceeded in painful fits and starts.
 
The first bone of contention was the character of Don Rafael del Junco, the villain of the story. Everyone agreed that Don Rafael, a haughty unscrupulous landowner, was a proper embodiment of the pre-Revolutionary capitalistic class. However, at the end of the original 314 episodes, Don Rafael reconciled with his daughter and grandson, and ended up being presented in a somewhat favorable light. “We have to change the ending” argued Danylo. “There can be no redemption for the enemies of the people.” Cubero reluctantly agreed to modify the end of the series so that Don Rafael got his comeuppance. He was hoping against hope that by the time the last episodes were filmed Danylo would have changed his mind.
 
Then there was María Elena, the daughter of Don Rafael and mother of the hero of the series. Again, everyone agreed that she showed courage in refusing to have a late term abortion and insisting on giving birth to her illegitimate child. However, in the original series she sought shelter for her grief in a convent, where the nuns and other members of the community treated her with compassion and understanding. Danylo was loath to include any episodes that praised religious people. “Religion is the opium of the masses, and the State must not condone it in any manner.”
 
Cubero had to change the script to have María Elena become a sort of hermit, seeking solace from the apparent loss of her child on a deserted shore. That in itself was problematic, since Cuba had implemented an internal passport system that was rigidly enforced. In the new Cuba, there was nowhere to hide. At the end, this discrepancy was allowed as poetic license, hoping it would not be noticed by anyone who had the power to object.
 
In the original El Derecho María Elena leaves her newborn baby boy in the care of her once wet nurse, the black María Dolores, who saves the infant from being slain on orders from Don Rafael, manages to give Don Rafael the false impression that she and the baby are dead, and escapes with the infant to a remote village. There, she raises the boy as her own child, naming him Alberto (“Albertico”) Limonta.
 
One salient and recurring problem was the relationship between “son” and “mother,” due to the fact that María Dolores claimed he was her son, even after his infancy. Yet, the actor chosen by Cubero to play Albertico, Ontario (“Guapito”) Ledesma, was white. Very white. Blondish. On the other hand, the lady portraying María Dolores was black, as stipulated by Caignet in the original soap opera. Coal black. No one seemed to find the discrepancy odd except for Haydée, who said that the role of María Dolores seemed taken out of Gone with the Wind. Her remark was met with a deadpan silence, for nobody in Cuba remembered or cared about old Yankee movies.
 
The racial disparity problem did not fully surface at first, because the boy who played Albertico as a child had a darker complexion that made his relationship with María Dolores more credible. But later on in the show, when Ontario assumed the role of 25-year-old Albertico, María Dolores’ claim that he was her son began ringing hollow. Different suggestions were considered: darkening Ontario’s skin with blackface make-up like Laurence Olivier in Othello, other things of that nature. Haydée opposed them all, because, she said, it was not impossible that Albertico could still be María Dolores’ biological son. So, things were left unchanged. There was one scene, however, when the script called for older Albertico to run up to his mother and say, “Mamá, I love you so” as he hugged the black woman. The scene had to be redone many times because the crew in the studio—and later on, even Albertico and María Dolores—could not control their laughter. In the end, the scene was filmed as it was and prompted sarcastic comments among the viewers once aired.
 
Much was done in the original series to highlight the discrimination and ill treatment that both María Dolores and Albertico endured on account of her race. Danylo liked that and wanted to accentuate the criticism of the racist society that existed in the country before the Revolution, but was opposed by Haydée, who warned not to overdo that aspect of the plot. “Remember, Danylo,” she said, “there are still people left in this country who believe blacks are inferior, although they won’t openly admit to it. There is no point in rubbing their noses on our commitment to equality among the races.” At the end, Danylo carried the day. Albertico, who was white, would be repeatedly abused and discriminated against for having a black mother and being a mulatto.
 
In one scene intended to bring more “realism” to the story, a classmate of Albertico has a fight with him and calls him an “hijo de puta” (a bastard), not an uncommon insult in Spanish. Danylo objected to the use of such foul language, as it was not in keeping with Socialist morality. Haydée replied that this choice of words was used by ordinary people and prude sentiments to the contrary were a bourgeois atavism. A heated debate ensued and, at the end, Haydée seemed to say that the language in the series should not be controlled by a “partido de hijos de puta,” which many people took to refer to the Communist Party. Haydée, however, swore that she had not said “Partido” but “partida,” meaning “bunch” or “group,” without any political connotation. Since no one could produce a definitive argument, the matter was dropped, along with the entire scene.
 
Many episodes later, thanks to María Dolores’ innumerable sacrifices, Albertico manages to make it through the university and becomes a famous doctor. In the original version, Albertico gets to be rich and lives in comfort with his aging “mother.” Both Danylo and Haydée objected to this turn of events. Cubero was required to rewrite that part of the story to have Albertico live modestly, see indigent patients for free, and travel to Haiti to help treat the victims of a devastating earthquake. In the rewrite, Albertico returns to Cuba with a newfound social conscience, alert to the inequities of the capitalist society and committed to fighting them.
 
Later in the series, Albertico is doing night duty at a public hospital’s emergency room when several injured people are brought in after a traffic accident. One of them is an old man who is bleeding to death. The victim’s blood type is AB negative, the rarest type, which is unavailable at the ill-equipped public hospitals of pre-Revolutionary times. Albertico, AB negative himself, gives a transfusion that saves the man’s life. The victim, who is no other than Don Rafael del Junco, recovers and as he convalesces, he invites his savior to come to dinner and meet his family. There Albertico meets Isabel Cristina, daughter of María Elena’s sister Matilde, and a budding romance blooms between the couple, unaware that they are cousins. Danylo was not in favor of retaining potential incest as part of the plot, and Cubero had to add another twist at the end of the story where it is revealed that Isabel Cristina is not the natural daughter of Matilde, but only an adopted one, eliminating another potential offense to Socialist morality.
 
Don Rafael, now fully recovered, is one day taking a stroll near an outside market, when he spots an old black woman that he immediately recognizes as María Dolores, who he had written off as dead many years before. He follows the woman, overtakes her, and confronts her. María Dolores acknowledges that she and Albertico are alive and well, and rebukes Don Rafael for his cruelty. Cubero is asked to add language to the confrontation scene wherein María Dolores lists once again all the aristocrat’s misdeeds and concludes with a stirring pronouncement: “Beware, for your days are numbered. The people soon will hold you accountable for all the crimes you have committed against your family and against society.”
 
Staggered by these revelations, Don Rafael returns home, where he promptly suffers a stroke (“derrame cerebral”) (a common mishap in soap operas) and falls into a coma. In the original version, Don Rafael stays in a coma for many months, burning with desire to impart the crucial news of the existence of his missing grandson to his wife and daughter, but is paralyzed and unable to speak. Here, however, science rather than politics interferes with the progress of the story. By 2047, a process had existed for years by which an artificial intelligence (AI) could accurately decode words and sentences from brain activity. Using only a few seconds of brain activity data, the AI can guess what a person is trying to say and translates it into a voice recording. The AI was commonly used throughout the world, including Cuba, to help people unable to communicate their thoughts through speech, typing or gestures.
 
The existence of the AI technology rendered a crucial portion of the original version of El Derecho vulnerable to ridicule by the viewing public. There was no way Don Rafael could linger, speechless, for several months. Cubero and his creative team struggled with the problem for weeks and finally had to come up with a lame solution: Don Rafael suffers a “derrame cerebral,” but recovers almost immediately and, instead of bringing the existence of his grandson to the attention of everyone, has a change of heart and continues to cover up his earlier nefarious crimes by accusing María Dolores of theft and charging Albertico with complicity in the black woman’s schemes.
 
Isabel Cristina, whose love for Albertico has not been diminished by Don Rafael’s accusations, alerts her boyfriend before the police can seize him, and Albertico escapes to a bitter exile in Tampa, where his mulatto identity subjects him to additional discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of the American imperialists. Meanwhile, María Dolores lingers in jail and ultimately dies of sorrow.
 
From that point on, the plot of the revival diverges entirely from the original radio show. Albertico becomes a revolutionary hero and travels back to Cuba to take up arms in the mountains against the corrupt government. He alerts Isabel Cristina of his whereabouts and she joins him to continue, together, their fight for justice. Through one of his comrades, who knew Isabel Cristina’s parents, it is revealed that Isabel Cristina and Albertico are unrelated, whereupon the couple is chastely married in a civil ceremony conducted by a rebel leader. They are enjoying a brief honeymoon when they learn that Don Rafael has been killed in a terrorist attack against the Presidential Palace, where he was attending a reception. Albertico and Isabel Cristina kiss and hug each other, relieved at the evildoer’s death, and the series ends.
 
As the first six episodes were filmed, José Cubero had increasing misgivings about the product he was going to set before the public. Technically, the series was as good as he was capable of putting together: photography, score (instrumental renderings of Cuban ballads going back to the 1800s), sound effects, customs, editing, were all first class. He had assembled a cast of experienced actors and actresses, with a famous Spanish TV personality in the role of Don Rafael. Much of the series was shot in locations selected for their beauty or historic interest.
 
Artistically, though, Cubero felt he was doing a disservice to—actually, betraying—Caignet’s original work and regretted all the compromises he had been forced to make to get the project approved. As a way to hide his guilt, he made sure of the destruction of all copies existing in Cuba of the audio, TV and movie versions of the series, be they from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela or Mexico. Cuban censorship saw to it that no written materials describing the 1948 series were available to the public.
 
Since there was nobody alive who had listened to the original broadcast, Cubero felt confident that he would not be confronted by critics of the savaging he had been forced to perform on the original. Still, he went to bed the night of Tuesday, March 31, 2048 with a heavy heart, in anticipation of the premiere of the series the following evening. He tossed and turned in bed all night and, in the few minutes of actual sleep, was accosted by the image of a dapper slim man sporting a trim moustache and a mane of black pomaded hair, who appeared and disappeared before him making menacing gestures and repeating incessantly a single word: “Why!!?”
 
The first episode of the new rendering of El Derecho de Nacer was shown on Cubavision at 9 p.m. on April 1, 2048. The show ran, Monday through Saturday, for 310 episodes, the last one playing in the spring of 2049. While initially garnering much public attention, interest in the series wore off quickly, so that the last episodes were seen by almost nobody. Many concluded that much of what was shown and said in the series was predictable and no different, except for its excessive duration, from other political indoctrination efforts by the government.
 
José Cubero finished producing the last package of ten episodes and sought and was granted permission to take a short vacation abroad to recover from his massive effort. He was last spotted taking an Iberia plane bound for Madrid on April 15, 2049.
 
He was never seen again.

Matias Travieso-Diaz was born in Cuba and migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. He retired and turned his attention to creative writing. Seventy of his stories have been published or accepted for publication in paying short story anthologies, magazines, blogs, audio books and podcasts. Some of his unpublished stories have also received “honorable mentions” from a number of publications. A collection of some of his short stories, The Satchel and Other Terrors, is scheduled for publication in February 2023.

Eloy González Argüelles was born in La Habana, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1961. His studies culminated in a PhD in Romance Languages at the Ohio State University. He taught at Wheaton College (Norton, Massachusetts) and the University of Massachusetts (Harbour Campus) before moving to Washington State University (WSU), where he taught Spanish literature and literary criticism for 38 years. For ten of his last twelve years before retirement he was Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures at WSU. His output includes a novel, a book on the chivalric novel, and articles in scholarly journals and conference presentations. Upon retirement he became an Emeritus Professor at WSU.

La mulatta Guadalupe López came to her new employment at the honorable house of the Alvarado Rosedale e Ibarra Betancourt family, on a thirteenth of March in the year of the Lord, 1967. It was a sweet-and-sour day for the missus, Señora Rosabella, who was on her eighth month of pregnancy. Sweet for the impending, and unbearable pregnancy, was soon to end, thank God and all his Saints; but sour, because she was on her fourth servant in the short time of her marriage, a year, to the very distinguished, Don Monce Alvarado Rosedale e Ibarra, Esq.
 
The loss of so many maids, (her own mother had had Lucinda in her service for over forty years), was not due to Rosabella’s temperament. Of that she was sure, temperament, pure nonsense, a fabrication of evil-tongues, jealous tongues. She was not temperamental. Far from it; in fact, she was indeed a saint. Like her favorite, Santa Rosa de Lima, who destroyed her beauty with bitter lime and pepper to abate all her admires, (this pregnancy had distorted all her features, even her nose was wider). It was part of what she needs to suffer, for she, like Santa Rosa de Lima, had asked God to increase her suffering in turn to increase God’s favor for her. But this expansion of abdomen, feet, and nose was ridiculous. To top it all, she had to be in bedrest for a month. A month! And if that was not enough suffering, that insulting doctor said she had an incompetent cervix. Incompetent! She was so offended. Calling her cervix, whatever that was, incompetent right in front both her parents and her dear beloved Monce. She felt so ashamed, the stupid doctor was talking about her female parts with all of them as if she was not right there in the room. She wanted to throw her pillow at the ugly doctor with his ugly words.
 
If anyone was incompetent it was those good-for-nothing girls that came to be at her employment. How hard could it be to keep her house, not as grand as her parents, but only two people for now lived here. It was only a matter of washing the floors, doing the laundry, ironing, making dinner, and making sure she was comfortable in her bed. ¿Was that so much to ask? The problem with all this incompetence, was the fault of the industrialization of the island by that idiot of a Governor. It was his fault that the pharmaceutical companies had settled on the island. Opening their doors to all kind of riff raff to do labor work at minimum wage—a salary that was outrageous for the fine families, who had Christianized this jungle into civility—minimum wage. ¡What a ridiculous idea! Too much money for those people, if anyone cared to ask her. But no one did, not even her sweet Monce. Rosabella, times are changing. You should not worry your pretty head with those things. Leave politics to the politicians. You just take care of our baby.
 
That governor and his idiotic impositions to pay such an unjust and outrageous fee just to wash floors and clean windows, etc. Of course, they could afford to pay more than Eli Lilly, but that would set the wrong precedent, wouldn’t it? And then where will they be? On the road to communism, that is where this would lead. If this continued, the governor would have the servants riding the Mercedes and the people of class, la crème de la crème, would be riding donkeys.
 
The island would turn to another Cuba, God Forbid! Equality for all. Just thinking about it made her tachycardia worsen and her ‘incompetent cervix’ go into spasms. She crossed herself, and tightened the grip between her legs. This baby wanted to be born too soon, and a suitable maid needed to be found sooner. This situation was making her first year as bride quite bitter.
 
La Guadalupe came well recommended. The Soler family, a family of pedigree, if not of great wealth, times had been hard on them, sent a lively recommendation letter on behalf of Guadalupe. In it they extolled Guadalupe, who preferred to be called Guadalupe—this should have set off all kinds of bell alerts—which Rosabella hadn’t noticed, her mind was elsewhere, consumed by the expansion of her belly and the unsightly bellybutton pushing out like a doorbell. It was a hint she missed; she likes to be called by the full extent of her name. Instead of the usual Lupe, a perfectly suited name for a woman of her class. In the letter, the Solers extoled La Guadalupe’s virtues; She is very clean, hard-working and efficient. We have noticed that she is even quite intelligent. She would do very well indeed. She could even be of great help in taking care of your future little one. Love, blessings, etc., etc. That was enough for Rosabella, who hired la Guadalupe on the spot without even seeing her, without the required interview.
 
La Guadalupe announced her arrival the following Monday. She was punctual. At precisely 7 o’clock sharp, that was a good sign, but it was a few minutes before Monce, her devoted husband, departed to his work. But even the remarkable precision of her arrival did not reduce the tachycardia and migraine that Guadalupe’s physical attributes precipitated on the delicate Rosabella when she entered the private marital bedroom, on account that Rosabella could no longer get out of bed and walk the few feet it took to get to the office, a more suitable place for greeting her new maid.
 
The Soler family had failed to mention the mulatta’s physical attributes. Tall as a Fichus tree, with a figure that even another woman would admire, this very appealing woman’s visage ended on what they called these days an afro! Rosabella took immediate offence to the hair and to the letter of the Soler’s which, undoubtedly, had not mentioned this point on purpose; therefore they must have intended some malice. Rosabella could imagine all of the Solers having a great laugh on her behalf. But the house was full of dust motes, the laundry piling in the laundry house, food lately had been just cold cuts, and her feet were the size of breadfruits. She was truly in need of someone to put order to her home and take care of her. Maybe I am not meant to be a mother, maybe God indeed had answered with impunity for the increase of her suffering.
 
Rosabella had been turned down by her own mother. Mama please, let me have Jacinta. Her mother had sighed with deep and sincere pity, but unfortunately, this was the season when the social calendar was so full. Ay, querida, this too shall pass, you will see, you will see. Have to go now, the Sotomayors are calling. Bye, besos, muah. So Rosabella swallowed her significant discomfort and allowed the magnificent afro headed bronze statue in front of her to proceed and begin to work for the day.
 
At the end of that first day, Rosabella gingerly stood and walked, against the advice of her doctor, to inspect. She was sure La Guadalupe’s work would be slovenly and she could terminate her on the spot. At least, that was her hope. She would rather tell her she was not up to snuff, instead of having to talk about the offending hair. These days the help was so uppity. Refusing to wear uniforms or living in the homes of their employers.
 
But here were no dust motes hiding in corners. The beds were made with precision. Clothes ironed and placed in good order. Indeed, the rooms were impeccable. And then, La Guadalupe had served her dinner. She tasted the dinner, with trepidation. Gandinga. Normally she did not like liver, but the baby apparently had been craving it and she had asked La Guadalupe to make this dish. A dish not even Jacinta could do well. This was the best gandinga she ever tasted.
 
It was Monce’s favorite dish, and she worried this would totally bind this La Guadalupe to his liking. Rosabella’s shoulders sagged. She knew she would find it near impossible to fire this maid. La Guadalupe had played her card well, ¿is that what the Solers had meant, that she was intelligent? She was forced to play her own pawn, that damn afro.
 
“Yes, everything is satisfactory. Here is your payment for today. But please, let me tell you, if you are to proceed to stay with us…,” Rosabella swallowed hard, times were changing, thanks to the idiotic Governor, and now these days even the help was hoity-toity. “tomorrow, when you come, you need to do something with that maraña. That tangle cannot do in this very proper home.”
 
La Guadalupe did not even blink. From her height, which really was considerable, for La Guadalupe stood close to six feet tall, she smiled at Rosabella in a smile that seemed quite petulant.
 
“I am sorry, Señora, but the hair stays or I won’t be back tomorrow.”
 
The affront was so unexpected, that Rosabella did not have a chance to react. No servant of hers, or anyone she has ever met, had ever spoken to their employers with such…, well, for a lack of another word, frankness. These new times, and their changes, were going to be the end of her. It was all the fault of those hippies, and of course the Governor. These new ideas of equality and commonwealth were going to be the end of their peaceful and quite satisfactory small island. The idiotic governor and his moronic followers were unsettling what needed not be stirred.
 
The next day, La Guadalupe was in the house before Rosabella had even awakened, and in fact, was awakened by the delicious smell of brewing coffee, an aroma that always made her feel the island in her bones. La Guadalupe walked into the bedroom armed with a tray she placed by the nightstand table next to her. The statuesque Guadalupe filled her a cup in plain street clothes, no uniform. Tall, clean, and with a cloud of black hair shaped as a round lollipop on her magnificent head.
 
“Here is your coffee, Señora, ¿do you like milk and sugar?”
 
Rosabella nodded, but could not stop looking at the halo of black hair that surrounded La Guadalupe’s face. A delicate face, she noticed, quite pretty, for a woman of her class. She reminded her of one of those black singers she had seen in The Ed Sullivan Show, ¿what was her name?
 
“Here are your eggs and toast. If you want anything else, just let me know. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
 
“You can make yourself breakfast too, Guadalupe, your dishes are in the left cabinet, marked for the service.”
 
La Guadalupe looked at her patrona squarely in the eyes, producing a cup already filled from the same tray she had brought the dishes. One of the porcelain cups from Mama-abuela, and in defiance began to drink from it.
 
“I guess, you did not hear me Guadalupe, that cup you are using is for the family only, servants use plates and cups from the cabinet clearly labeled in the kitchen.”
 
La Guadalupe smiled, finished her cup in a manly gulp, and left the room closing the door with care. Rosabella stared at the ceiling of her bedroom. ¿How was she going to deal with this impossible woman? The baby in her belly gave her a strong kick.
***
In the weeks that followed, Rosabella and La Guadalupe fought an incessant tug-of-war about the dishes, which bathroom she was allowed to use, and the infernal hair. Rosabella gave La Guadalupe a hair net, which she found later in the wastebasket of the master bathroom! The porcelain dishes from Mama-abuela were continually used, she found them washed and rinsed on the drying rack, the bathroom door to the guest bathroom locked during intervals. She was living the life of Santa Rosa de Lima, this was her insufferable passion. These things were so aggravating, making the baby in her womb kick and her incompetent cervix contract continuously.
 
Her mother visited her weekly, but she was no help. On the contrary, always praising La Guadalupe, as if she was some kind of hero. Oh my! This rum cake is better than Lucinda’s. Your house is so perfectly tidy, Bella mi niña, you should be so happy with this girl. So they talked about things she could not talk about with Monce. At least her mother was also obsessing about the damn war; the disgusting hippies on television, the idiotic governor, the horrors of the American television programs. Like The Ed Sullivan Show! Always showing blacks in his program. Once, she saw Mr. Sullivan kiss a black woman entertainer. Monce thought nothing of it. He liked the show, so she had to sit and watch with him. The world was changing, and they were witnessing the crumbling of the aristocracy.
 
And it was not only the television. Just last week, her mother called her on the phone crying. Telling her that Carlos, her own cousin, was powerless to use his last name to stay out of that blasted war. He too had been drafted. ¿Can you imagine? Drafted just like a common man. Not even offered a ranking.
 
Rosabella felt that no one was listening to her in this time of need. Not even Monce, who was still working, going on for ten or more years, on the case of those horrific revolutionaries who had bombed Congress. And doing those infuriating pro-bono cases for the women who had been sterilized without their knowledge. He was so distant now, so preoccupied with his work. She hated pro-bono work. Monce, por favor, at least just work on the cases that pay. He had smiled at her but left her in the bedroom going to his home office instead.
 
She felt abandoned and alone with this sirvienta, who was the best cook, but also an insolent and confrontational monster that was making her suffer. Every day now she suffered from more tachycardia, migraines, and contractions than ever before, and these were real, not just to get a little attention. Maybe God was punishing her for using those conditions before as an excuse to keep Monce and her Mother by her side.  
 
The Solers were not answering her calls, they were probably in Spain. It was that time of year. It would have been her first trip to Spain with her Monce, but then the pregnancy happened and all that dream evaporated. Rosabella was also resenting Monce’s favor for La Guadalupe. He was loving La Guadalupe’s cooking so much, he reminded her every day, “That one is a jewel, make sure you keep her, we can’t let this one go.” Rosabella wanted to hold a frying pan over his lovely head when he said that, especially when he had that wink at the end of his sentence, and patted his stomach, that indeed looked like he had gained some weight from all the lovely cooking. That made her angrier even for all the charm he was putting in his words.
 
The sharp pang of pain was as sudden as the evaporation of the midday dream she was having in the many siestas that now seem to consume her days. The baby was coming. The doctor had said to still stay in bed, but the big danger was past. She reached for Monce; of course he was at work. No, not at work in his office. With dread she remembered he had flown to Washington the day before yesterday. Mother and Father were out of town too. They had joined the Soler’s trip to Spain. Don’t worry, dear, you will be just fine, we will be back in time for this little one’s birth.
 
¡Nooooo!
 
The pain was coming every ten minutes and as she stood to fetch her phone off her vanity table her water broke right on the brand new Moroccan carpet, a gift from the Solers for the wedding.
 
She sat with her legs pressed tightly and between contractions screamed.
 
“¡Guadalupe!”
 
The maid with the bouncing afro raced to her side, stepping right over the wet rug.
 
“¿How far apart are the contractions, Señora?”
 
“No sé, ¿maybe ten minutes apart? Call doctor Gustavo, he will come right by.”
 
La Guadalupe looked at her as if she had said monkeys live in the sea.
 
“Mire, Señora, I will take you to the hospital myself. No need to worry.”
 
“In what, ¿a taxi?” Rosabella felt a terror as another contraction crawled all the way up her spine.
 
“I’ll bring my car to the front of the house, don’t move.”
 
As Rosabella gripped the back sit of her vanity stool, she was astounded that a maid could own a car. Good God, in heaven, let it be something that won’t fall apart.
 
Guadalupe was back quite fast, she must park in our garage, and helped her off her settee. Gingerly, Guadalupe placed her left arm under Rosabella’s back helping her with each step, and had the presence of mind to grab the hospital bag she had helped her packed weeks before, you can never be too ready. Rosabella’s face was resting on a patch of fluffy afro as Guadalupe helped her into an orange Volkswagen that was still running, the passenger door open. ¿How can she afford this car?
 
After Moncito was born, Rosabella found she needed La Guadalupe more than ever. Those first nights, Monce moved to the guestroom so he could have a good night’s sleep, and she was left with the care of Moncito all by herself. This was too laborious a task for someone of her delicate constitution. Rosabella asked Monce for a night nurse and he solidly refused the request, “Bella, Guadalupe, can take care of Moncito while she is here during the day, and you can then rest all day if you want to.”
 
Rosabella fell into a deep sadness she could not shake. Moncito, darling Moncito, with his perfectly fine little nose and blond-red curls was a monster, wanting to be fed every few hours. Rosabella’s face was puffy with dark circles under her eyes, she felt so ugly. Her breast were finally without milk, and their shape was coming back, but all those bottles during the night would be the end of her. She needed that nurse at night, she would have to pay her from her own dowry, if she must. She decided that La Guadalupe needed to stay with her full time. Afterall, it made sense, Moncito already was familiar with La Guadalupe.
 
During lunch, she put Moncito on the beautiful Moises that Doña Claudia had made them, and asked La Guadalupe to sit on the balcony with her, not to share the meal, of course not, but to stand with her as she sat and ate the delicious crab pastelillo. La Guadalupe stood next to her, frozen as a statue.
 
Rosabella stated her request in a very civilized voice, modulating it so there was no hint of desperation. She celebrated Guadalupe’s virtues as a maid and did not mention the insufferable hair, not all the peccadillos of impertinence. She instead exalted the extremely capable maid. And after much discourse, without begging, of course, La Guadalupe answered a simple, “No.”
 
“¿Pero por qué no?” Rosabella was astounded.
 
“Lo siento mucho, Señora.” La Guadalupe answered in an unaffected voice, “but nights are my own and I am not giving them up.”
 
That night Rosabella did not sleep, and not only because Moncito demanded five feedings. There was this horrible certainty of why La Guadalupe did not want to work nights. Rosabella was certain that La Guadalupe was one of those women. ¡Good Father in heaven, that is how she could afford a car of her own! She had let a woman like that in her home! That Guadalupe had even eaten food, and had drunk, from the porcelain dishes of Mama-abuela. She needed to voice her concern with Monce. And the Solers would hear a good talking to when they came back from Spain. ¡What betrayal!
 
Early that morning, before Monce left for the Roosevelt Inn Restaurant, where he took his breakfast with all the members of the cabinet that were working on that horrendous case of the disgusting revolutionaries, she went to the guestroom to talk to him.
 
“Monce, mi amor. I think I have discovered something horrible about La Guadalupe.”
 
Monce was tying his tie and looked at this wife in the mirror, “Mi Bella, you are not trying to find a way to fire the best maid we ever had,” he said this smiling at her in that mirror, a wedding gift from the previous governor. Rosabella withheld the vision of the frying pan over Monce’s head. She took a deep cleansing breath, put her face in her hands, and began to cry.
 
“Yes! she might be wonderful to you!” her voice was not the modulated voice she liked to hear herself use, but her nerves were shattered. “but as much as you might think SHE is, there is something horrible, lurid behind that Guadalupe, and not just the hair.”
 
Monce sat on the bed and coaxed his wife to sit beside him.
 
“There, mi amor, tell me what is bothering you.”
 
Rosabella felt like she used to when she was little, and her father consoled her. Father had this wonderful, if a bit supercilious, way to soothe her. Monce did the same now, and she felt better but also annoyed with his patronizing voice. Still, it was nice to have someone that cared for her feelings.
 
“I think La Guadalupe is a woman of the night.” Her voice sounded small even to her own ears.
 
“¿Por qué you think that my love?”
 
“I asked her to work full days and nights with us and she refused! ¿And do you know she even owns her own car? I even offered giving her minimum wage like they do in the pharmaceuticals, and this very room for her to stay, so you could move in with me in our bedroom. But no! She said her nights were her own. What else do you think that could mean? It has to be something improper. Imagine the horror to find this out, she has cradled our Moncito in those hands!” Again, she covered her face with her hands and felt as the bed bounced slightly up as Monce stood. He let out sigh that made Rosabella feel so incompetent, just like her cervix.
 
“Amor, it is time for you to face that times have changed,” Monce was standing in front of her, and she did not like, or understand, the look in his eyes.
 
“Bella, Guadalupe, is studying. She goes to school in that new community college in Turabo. They have a night program for nurses.”
 
Rosabella’s head snapped. She looked at her husband and saw a stranger. How had she not noticed the changes in him. He no longer wore a fedora, true, but the hair at the back of his neck was touching his shirt. And those sideburns! Those hideous fuzzy caterpillars obscuring his features, ¿when did he let them grow? ¿Could he possibly have been listening to the idiotic governor’s ideas? ¡No! She refused to accept that; she could hear Moncito crying in his Moises in the living room. Then she heard Guadalupe’s voice soothing him with that sing-song voice of hers.
 
“Calabó y bambú. Bambú y calambó. El Gran Cocoroco dice: tu-cu-tú. La Gran Cocoroca dice: to-co-tó.”
 
Where had she heard those words before? It was in ‘El Show de las 12’, yes, that was it. That terrible television show from the island, not one from the States, that showcased the music, humor, talent of the common people of the island. Yes, those words were the horrible lyrics by that poet, ¿what was his name? Oh, sí, Palés Matos. That is how they get you, her Monce, the village, the island. ¡Clever! The idiotic governor and his mouthpiece, the television shows, putting the world’s axis on its ear. First, the pharmaceuticals, then the miniskirts, now the afros. Behind Monce, in the mirror, she saw La Guadalupe, no, Guadalupe, cross the hallway with Moncito in her arms, still repeating part of that poem, “cru-cru-cru.” Her afro a wide umbrella floating over the curls of her infant son, and she wondered if Moncito felt that cloud as a soft comfort on his face, just like she did that night. ¿Guadalupe, studying to be a nurse?
 
She looked at her Monce again, and he was quietly smiling at her, she could not read his thoughts, but she could see, she was standing on a plane different from his, there was a door and a threshold she needed to cross. The displacement took her by surprise. Like suddenly standing and feeling faint, but at the same time there was familiarity in it too. It was as if all along she had known this was coming. During her pregnancy, all the signs had been there. From the news on the TV, to her dear Monce’s refusal to stop doing pro-bono, and the streets with more cars than people of high breed. She had not been willing to see them. She was being left behind, like a maid with a higher education than herself.
 
Maybe, just maybe, she could get used to Monce’s new hairdo. His sideburns were not as bad as she had first been shocked to see there as he soothed his casual blazer on his shoulders, she stared at her husband and noticed that the sideburns looked good on him after all.

Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger has written poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants. She began writing poetry at age three, dictating poems out loud to the adults in her life who wrote them down for her. Amelia continued writing poems and short stories throughout her life, while working as a high school science teacher. In 2015, her first book of poetry, Speaking at a Time, was published by Redbat books. A second book of poetry, Learning to Love a Western Sky, published by Airlie Press 2020, and poetry chapbook, Fossils on a Red Flag, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Presently, she and her partner reside in Summerville, Oregon with two dogs, two cats, and too many chickens.