From the Editor

¡Bienvenidos! Welcome to Issue #3, which means PUENTES has now officially lasted longer than my diet, my bangs, and my brother's band. Ya somos de veras.

For anybody new: I'm Kristin, I'm 19, and I'm a sophomore at a community college here in El Paso, where I'm going to finish my basics and transfer and someday teach high school English. Last spring, in my comp class, we read a lot of good writing, and none of it sounded like my house. In my house we talk in English and Spanish at the same time, sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes in the same word. My grandma will ask you if you want más coffee and tell you to put on a sweater porque you're going to catch a cold. Nobody here thinks that's strange. It's just how we talk. So I started PUENTES to have one place where writing could sound like that, and also like the people who only write in English, and the people who only write in Spanish, side by side, crossing back and forth like everybody does here every day.

This issue we got 41 submissions, from six states and two countries. That's more than Issues #1 and #2 together. Gracias a todos. I couldn't take everything, and that was the hardest part of this whole thing, harder than learning HTML in the computer lab at school with a librarian standing behind me going "mm-hm."

In this issue: five poems, from a sixteen-year-old who crosses the bridge to school every morning to a seventy-three-year-old who doesn't need a measuring cup. A story about a boy translating for his father at the bank in 1959, which made me cry on the bus. And an essay about the sayings our grandmothers used on us, which made me call mine.

Two of the poems are printed in Spanish and English side by side. The writers did their own translations. Everything else is exactly the way it was written. No translation needed, no translation given. Si no le entiendes a algo, ask somebody. That's half the fun.

Con cariño,
Kristin

In This Issue
Puente Libre / Free Bridge — Carlos T., Ciudad Juárez
Masa — Rita M., El Paso
Two Rooms — Sarah O., El Paso
Lluvia de julio / July Rain — Janice T., Albuquerque
Ocotillo — Glenn C., Tucson
El Intérprete (a story) — Stephen R., El Paso
Lo que decía mi abuela (an essay) — Heidi C., El Paso

Puente Libre / Free Bridge
Carlos T., Ciudad Juárez

Masa
Rita M., El Paso

Seventy-three years
and my hands still know
how much water,
cuánta manteca,
a pinch of salt, no, menos,
without a cup to measure.

My granddaughter wants the recipe.
She has her pencil ready.
I tell her, la receta está aquí,
and show her my palms.

She laughs and writes down palms.

So I make her do it.
Too dry. Más agua, mija.
Too wet. Ahora sí, a little flour.
¿Sientes? Soft like your earlobe.
Así.

Now she knows.
Now it's in her hands too,
and she can throw the pencil away.

Two Rooms
Sarah O., El Paso

My tongue is a house with two rooms
and no door in between.
In the kitchen it's Spanish:
mija, ven, prueba esto,
y no le digas a tu papá.
In the living room the TV talks English
and so do I, back to the TV,
getting the Jeopardy! questions wrong.

At school they want me to pick a room
and stay in it.
Pick one, they say, like it's a major.

But I was born in the hallway,
where you can hear both,
where my grandmother says
"ay, qué cute,"
and my father says
"ándale, let's go,"
and nobody has to translate
nada.

Lluvia de julio / July Rain
Janice T., Albuquerque

Ocotillo
Glenn C., Tucson

Most of the year it looks
like a handful of dead sticks
somebody shoved in the ground
and forgot. The new people
next door asked me
if I wanted it hauled off.

Wait, I told them. Espérense.

Then one night in July
it rained an inch,
and by Thursday
every gray whip
had put out leaves
small as a baby's fingernails,
the whole plant shivering green
like it was laughing at them.

My father planted it in 1961.
He used to say
la paciencia no es no hacer nada.
Patience is knowing
what you are.

El Intérprete
a story by Stephen R., El Paso

In the summer of 1959 my father decided to buy a truck, and because I was twelve and had the best English in the house, I went with him to the bank.

He wore his church shirt, the white one, ironed by my mother that morning so stiff it crackled when he sat down. He had his papers in a manila envelope: nine years of receipts from the six families on the hill whose lawns he mowed and whose sprinklers he fixed, and a letter from one of the señoras saying he was honest and never late. He had shined his shoes. I had never seen him nervous before, and I didn't like it.

"Tú nomás dile lo que yo te diga," he told me on the bus. Just tell him what I tell you.

The man at the bank was named Mr. Pennington. He had a desk fan and a cigarette going in a glass ashtray, and he didn't get up when we came in. He looked at my father's shoes, then at the envelope, and then at me, and he talked to me the whole time, as if my father were a piece of furniture I had brought along.

"Ask him how long he's been doing yard work."

"Dice que cuánto tiempo lleva trabajando en las yardas."

"Nueve años. Dile que tengo los recibos."

"Nine years. He has receipts."

Mr. Pennington went through the receipts with one finger, the way you'd look through somebody else's laundry. "These people usually don't have receipts," he said. "Does he understand what interest is? Tell him slowly."

I felt my face go hot. I looked at my father, sitting straight in his crackling shirt, and I said in Spanish, "He says the bank charges interest, and he wants to make sure you know how much."

My father nodded. "Sí. Dile que sí."

It went on like that for twenty minutes. Mr. Pennington said things, and I turned them into other things. When he said, "I'm taking a chance on him," I said, "He says the bank trusts you." When he said, "Make sure he knows we'll take the truck back if he's one day late," I said, "He says if you have a problem with a payment, come in and talk to him." I was making up a whole different bank. I was making up a whole different Mr. Pennington, a nicer one, who didn't look at my father like that. I don't know why. I just couldn't bring myself to carry the real one across.

Finally Mr. Pennington wrote out the papers and turned them around on the desk. "Can he even read this?" he said.

"Dice que si lo quieres leer antes de firmar."

My father took the papers. He put on the reading glasses he kept in his shirt pocket, and he read every page, slowly, with his finger under the lines, while the fan turned back and forth and Mr. Pennington smoked and looked at the clock. On the last page my father stopped. He took the pencil out of Mr. Pennington's cup without asking, and he worked something out in the margin, very small, the way he did the grocery money every Friday. Then he turned the paper around and put his finger on a number.

"This is wrong," he said, in English.

Mr. Pennington looked at him for the first time that morning. Then he looked at the number. Then he got out his adding machine, and pulled the handle a few times, and his ears turned red. He had figured the monthly payment two dollars too high. Two dollars a month for three years.

He fixed it. He initialed it. My father signed his name, the whole thing, slowly and beautifully, the way the nuns had taught him in Chihuahua. Then he stood up and shook Mr. Pennington's hand, and Mr. Pennington stood up too.

Outside, on the hot sidewalk, I didn't know what to say. My father put the reading glasses back in his pocket.

"Ese señor dijo otras cosas, ¿verdad?" he said. That man said other things, didn't he.

I didn't answer. He put his hand on the back of my neck.

"Mijo, entiendo más de lo que hablo," he said. I understand more than I speak. "La próxima vez, me dices todito. Quiero saber con quién estoy tratando." Next time you tell me every bit of it. I want to know who I'm dealing with.

Then he bought me a raspa de tamarindo from the cart on the corner, and we waited for the bus.

He drove that green Ford for nineteen years. I have been a court interpreter for twenty-two. I translate every word.

Lo que decía mi abuela
an essay by Heidi C., El Paso

My grandmother never gave advice. She gave dichos. If you told her a problem, she would listen to the whole thing, nodding, and then she'd say one sentence, usually something about shrimp or the devil, and go back to her crossword. It took me about fifteen years to figure out she was answering the question.

When I was in middle school and started hanging around with some girls who were, let's say, not a good influence, she watched them come and go from our porch for a month. Then one afternoon she said, without looking up from her crossword, "Dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres." Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are. I rolled my eyes. I also stopped walking with them, about three weeks later, after something I won't put on the Internet. She never said I told you so. She didn't have to. The dicho said it for her.

When I procrastinated, which was always, it was "Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente." The shrimp that falls asleep gets carried off by the current. I heard that one every night of my senior year. I can still hear it at midnight during finals, in her voice, and it still works, sort of.

When I thought I knew more than her, which was also always, it was "Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo." The devil knows more from being old than from being the devil. That one made me so mad when I was fourteen. Now I think it's the smartest sentence in the Spanish language.

When my grandpa lost his job at the smelter, and everybody was scared, she said "No hay mal que por bien no venga," there's no bad thing that doesn't bring some good with it, and then she got up the next morning and started selling tamales out of the kitchen. She sold tamales for eleven years. She paid off the house with them.

And when people said ugly things about our family, or about Mexicans, or about her accent, she would say "A palabras necias, oídos sordos," to foolish words, deaf ears, and keep walking with her head up, and pull me along by the hand so I would keep walking too.

My grandmother died in March. At the rosary, everybody who got up to talk about her quoted a dicho. My uncle quoted the shrimp. My cousin quoted the devil. The neighbor lady, who had bought tamales from her every Christmas since 1985, said, "El que nace pa' tamal, del cielo le caen las hojas," and the whole room laughed and cried at the same time, because it means that what you are born to be, the world will give you what you need for it, and my grandmother was born to make tamales and to make us, and she did both.

I've started writing them down on index cards, every one I can remember, with what she meant and when she said it. I have fifty-eight so far. My mom keeps adding more. I don't know what I'll do with them. Maybe nothing. Maybe someday I'll say one to a kid of my own, without looking up from my crossword, and she'll roll her eyes, and fifteen years later she'll get it.