From “Para mi family” by Isaac Chavarria

From "Para mi family"
by Isaac Chavarria

Some parents came poor to America
hungry, rewarded by poxo children ashamed of carpenters
unaware of being homes in the Valley

I didn’t know what the word pocho meant until a few years ago. Rolando told me about it when I inquired about some slang in a play I was reading. Ironic, no?

Maybe a month ago, we were tasked to talk about our relationship with citizenship in the past. I couldn’t think of a moment in my teenage life where my citizenship played any role in my life. It never occurred to me that some of my classmates may have been undocumented or come through other ways into this country. In my naiveté, I assumed we all had the same familial history.

Sure my grandparents immigrated to this country, became citizens, and raised an American family (their words, not mine). It wasn’t until I was talking to someone in class and I told him that he feel into the “mojo” clique at school. The expression on his face was one of hurt and anger. He told me what “mojo” was slang for and it hurt me to even think racist to my own people. I had never considered it being any derogatory.

I look back at my youth and I realized I fell into the category of “pocho” (in his poem, poxo), which I’ve come to understand is a child of Mexican descent who has no ties to his family’s ethnicity, ancestry. We are so Americanized that we may as well be white.

Just my thoughts, though.

You can read “Para mi family” in full in the pages of Poxo by Isaac Chavarria.