Day 27: Meditations on a Misty Morning

Excerpt form the FOREWORD to Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature Ed by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

FOREWORD

By Guadalupe García McCall

…It is winter here, in Oregon, and last night I braved the mail aire. I stepped out and inhaled that cold, bitter, drizzly foggy air that my mother warned against and drove myself to the next town in the dark to attend a party given for English majors at George Fox University. Why? Because I love my job? Because I love my students? Yes and yes, but also because I am a nerd! Everyone going to the party was bringing a book in the spirit of sharing great literature. There was no way I was staying home.

Needless to say, I stayed ‘til the end and left the party with a copy of Wicked and a geeky smile on my face.

This morning, I stood in the dark, misty dawning of a new day, holding a computer bag with everything I need to be successful writing professor. The fog was thick in the air, and I took it into my lungs, the way my mother always said I shouldn’t. According to her, we should always avoid inhaling the air at night. Fog is considered mal aire—air that has been sitting too close to the filth and squalor of humanity, air that has touched the sordid nature of man’s evil dreams and nightmares, air that will poison your thoughts and clog your lungs with its impurities.

But I don’t give in to the poison. I don’t allow the evil to infiltrate my thoughts.

All I feel is my mother’s presence in the mild morning mist, the hallowed haze that softens every light crowning every light post in the vicinity, and I am overwhelmed by the love she brings me—the calor she provides even as I stand in 30 degree weather.

“Mira donde ando, Mamá,” I tell her, because even I can’t believe I am standing in a parking lot in the Pacific Northwest in this blessed space—as Assistant Professor of English.

I smile because I know she came to share this moment with me, and I have to acknowledge that she brought me here, to this place. She dreamt this for me, believed it, sacrificed for it—one would say, she lived for it.

My mother left her family too, her mother and sisters in México. When I was six years old, she picked up our tiliches and crossed the border with my father with the hope that her children, me and my seven brother and sisters, would go to school los estados unidos—learn to speak, read, write and love The English, and have a better life.

But her dreams for us started before that, before I was even born. My mother sacrificed for this dream all her life. She scrubbed and scraped pots and pans for the Señoras who lived in the rich houses in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, from the age of ten. She swept and mopped floors, cleaned toilets, and had to make do with two meager meals a day and two square pieces of toilet paper from miserly Doñas all her life so that my siblings and I could have a better life, a decent life, where silent nodding and suppliant smiling wasn’t a job requirement.

Her dreams for me were expansive, enlightened—emboldened by all that she had suffered, all the pride she’d had to swallow as ama de llaves in those cruel rich neighborhoods. My mother gave me the space to read books night and day. She let me burn through them like my eyes were on fire, so that I might learn how to express myself, how to speak out and show the world that my voice mattered, that the dreams God had put in my heart were not worth any less than the dreams of any other human being.

“Te amo,” I tell her, as my husband pulls the car out of the garage and waits for me to get in. I don’t miss her anymore. She is in this space with me. Her dreams for me didn’t die with her. I am surrounded by them. They are the morning mist, the hallowed haze, the soft light crowning every light post in this part of the world. They are in the air. Air that was meant to poison me but which I, like so many nerds and geeks and outsiders, choose to take in and transform into something beautiful.

“I know,” I tell her, as I look at the moon hanging low in the sky to the left of me. “I know. It’s beautiful here.” Because I realize that I am talking to myself again, I hug my bag and laugh.

My mother made that possible. She is that little voice inside my head that says, It’s okay to love school. It’s okay to love reading and writing. It’s okay to follow your dreams!

If I had any advice to give nerdy kids today it would be, “Don’t let the mal aire of our current climate poison your thoughts. Dream! Soar! Let the world hear you roar!”

About the Author

Guadalupe García McCall, author and poet and Affiliate Faculty at Antioch University LA

Guadalupe García McCall is the national bestselling, award-winning author of several young adult novels, some short stories for adults, and many poems. She has received the prestigious Pura Belpré Author Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award, among many other accolades. Guadalupe is currently Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at Antioch University LA. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she is working on the Seasons of Sisterhood series, three YA novels set in the world of Summer of the Mariposas, coming from Tu Books 2025-thru-2027 among many other Super Sekret Projects!

About the Blog Series

The #LatinaLuminaries Blog Series by Somos Escritoras. The series was created to illuminate the wisdom, experiences, voices, and truths of Latina women and girls and the broader Latinx community. The blog series features writing from escritoras (participants) and writing mentors from Somos Escritoras Latinx Writing Workshop. Published Latina authors, writers, poets, and illustrators who presented at our workshop also contributed to the blog series.