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their third-grade year. They look like tiny replicas of their parents, tiny old men in guayabera shirts and women in loose cotton dresses. I’m at my desk in the front, lightheaded from the fumes of the new paint and the adhesives on the linoleum floor. The morning sun is a violent, yellow thing that floods the room undeterred because the fucking school is in the middle of a field and there are no natural obstructions to keep the sun in check, so the windows, when shut, glow like they’re about to blow. The whole thing just made for a migraine.
    I’m there for an hour, and I can’t help but start crying from exasperation. It’s like starting all over again. I don’t know anyone and my Spanish is really, really bad now because I was told that it was wrong to speak it in America, and we are in Texas. I just put my head down and sniffle. After all that work I put into it, I would regress back into speaking Spanish and be humiliated, left behind by my family, I felt.
    After a few days, though, things turn routine and I take a look around. These are tough kids, the sort of ten-year-olds even adults are afraid to correct, and classes are quickly divvied into the kids near the front who are willing to learn and listen, and the kids who don’t see a reason to be here and are waiting to get home to get back to work, in the back. Or they’re here for the two free meals. There’s one white girl from the trailer park and I immediately align myself next to her. “Shannon.” I like Shannon—she’s kind of trashy though she’s just a kid, but we get along fine. We share pencils and paper and write notes to one another and the other kids immediately start calling us “ the gringos .” Not an optimistic launch.
    Eventually things settled down and I made friends with some of the boys, but mostly my immediate peers were the upwardly mobile girls who lived near me, out in the sticks. It was still a tough school; don’t get me wrong—but I learned how to swim in it quickly. Kids got stabbed there, with that little nail-cleaning tool in the rear part of the nail clipper or a stubby pencil. But for the most part, we were kids, doing kid things. We developed a very high-stakes and competitive game of marbles before classes. We played basketball and volleyball in a very organized fashion (I did the organizing). We became ingenious at manufacturing flexible but indestructible pens and pencils, as the game of the day was a sort of “pen smashing” competition, where you’d flick your opponent’s pen with your own, over and over again, until one of them splintered. So we engineered things like pens filled with glue, pens filled with buckshot, pens from Mexico, pens filled with dirt, pens wrapped in rubber bands or tape, and even pens that could write. I was never really good at that game.
    The other thing we did was competitive cursing. This I was good at. Cursing in English, I’ve come to find, is fairly unimaginative and usually indicates a loss for a retort, a failure of description or command of language, so instead the curser resorts to the general and unspecific, to the emptiness of phrases like, “Fuck you, you cock-sucking motherfucker.” Et cetera.
    In Spanish, however, the art form, when it is done well, comes from painting the rudest word picture using anything but vulgar words. Say, for instance, someone is being unreasonably proud of him- or herself. In English, one might say this person’s “full of shit,” or, “up himself.” In Spanish, the phrase would be something like, “… no le cabilla un arroz de punta, ” (“… you couldn’t fit a grain of rice up his ass point first, puckered as it was.”)
    Conversely, if a person is out of luck, in English he’s “shit out of luck,” or “screwed,” or maybe “up shit creek.” But in Spanish, the popular colloquialism is