American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood
Marie Arana
Language: English
Pages: 309
ISBN: 0385319630
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.”
Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.
gaps. It begins with her going to a Catholic priest on a Sunday, she tells me. She asks the holy man to marry them, but after a short conversation, he turns her away. When she reports to my father that the priest has refused her, she doesn’t tell him why. The next morning, they find a justice of the peace who agrees to do it. He takes down their information, tells them to return with their documents. They come back another day, ready to make their pledges, but there are unexpected questions on
steady blue eyes and nodded her silvery head. Her thumb and fingers were tilting her glass back and forth, as if she were seeking balance in a violin bow. “You’re asking me about the marriages?” “Yes, I am. Yes.” She put down her wine, knit her fingers. “There were three before your father,” she said simply. I was flabbergasted, amazed. She was talking without any hesitation, coolly, frankly. As if we were talking about rooms in a house. “There were three.” She had three fingers up now, and
marveled at their chatter. It was the first I’d heard Quechua, a language I didn’t understand. They patted my knees after that, smoothed my dress, pinched my cheeks, gave me a strip of wet sugarcane from a bucket in the corner. When I thanked them they laughed merrily, and then they squatted like stones, watching me suck on the cool, sweet stem. On another occasion, I tagged along after my friend Margarita and her mother, the Lattos’ cook, following the two all the way home before the mother
Club de Bowling, the one with a white arch leaping over the door—the best one—was ours. WITHIN A DAY, Cito had commandeered all the furniture into place and was spread-eagled on a club chair poolside, throwing back pisco sours. I could see his pale forehead and lanky figure from my bedroom window. It was the lookout on Cito that gave me an indication of how different a vantage Paramonga would offer me. This was no inward-looking house like the one I had come from; no tall walls shielded us
and sucking on rum at night. Until one fine day when he began to drool, drop things, and spin through the rooms with his hands on his head. They took him to a hospital after that. “Nerves,” they whispered, “something to do with his spine.” Then they brought him back to the house beside us, and he was all fixed, shiny as a new steel tool. But one afternoon George and I looked up from our cowboy wars and saw the gringo flinging tables and chairs through his second-floor window, wriggling wildly,