How I Crossed the Border Back to Myself

When I was a teenager, my Puerto Rican mother forbade me to cross the border into Mexico, my father’s country. “Mexico is nothing but trouble,” she said.

The border city Tijuana, a short drive from our house in San Diego, was seeing a surge in cartel violence fueled by U.S. drug demand and U.S. firearms flowing illegally into Mexico despite that country’s strict gun laws. It was the early 2000s, and American newscasters framed it as a Mexican problem. After my parents split up, my mother sometimes did, too. It was her way of grieving my father, who had started binge drinking and doing drugs, depressed and angry that she was outearning him as a National Health Service Corps physician after he lost his job at a meatpacker. She wanted to draw a hard boundary severing me from everything he represented.

But I didn’t want to be ruptured. I wanted to be whole. For years, our family had driven south across the port of entry to eat seafood and explore. I missed those trips, which had ended when I was 6. So on weekends, I rode the trolley to the port of entry and walked through the rotating metal gates. There were no border guards for southbound travelers, so I crossed undetected. In Tijuana, I drank tequila, rode mechanical bulls and danced with strangers. I was 17, but nobody asked for my ID. At a house party, I met a cute local boy who offered me his bedroom because I was too intoxicated to find my way back to the border. We slept fully clothed and made chocolate chip pancakes in the morning. A part of me was seeking trouble, but I never found it.

During these clandestine trips, I was trying to form a fuller understanding of who I was. I don’t think I strongly identified as a Latina. I sometimes said I was Hispanic, the more common term then. But even that felt ill fitting, like a very small coat. More often I called myself Mexican and Puerto Rican.

I knew that Latinos were divided among themselves, too contradictory to be bound by a single label. My mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, my father’s cousins campaigned against his relationship with a “gringa.” (Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.) And whenever I misbehaved as a child, my Puerto Rican grandmother blamed the Mexican in me: “That’s her father’s blood coursing through her veins.”

I recall reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and filling the margins with hearts and exclamation points. His words elated me. “To be in any form, what is that?” he asked. He wrote that “I contain multitudes.” “I too am untranslatable,” he proclaimed. As a child of the border, I related. I knew many labels applied to me — girl, American, Hispanic, millennial, gringa — but I liked to think of myself as untranslatable or too complex to be reduced to any of them.