Playtime in Carmella’s Room: A Memoir
by Lena Palacios
These fragments are sharp and will make you bleed.
As a child of the late 70s and 80s, Paula often fell asleep in front of the TV and awakened startled to “snow” or static. She would tempt fate by calling on the demonic spirits of the other side of the white noise like Poltergeist’s little, blonde White girl, Carol Anne. Before receiving a response from beyond, she would rush into her twin bed and hide under the covers, barely breathing. But unlike Carol Anne’s, the spirits Paula wanted to speak with were not demonic; they were just Indigenous ancestors on her paternal side who had been forcibly removed from the dominant frame and her life. Through the TV static, she would love to ask them why they had hidden from their descendants their Indigeneity and their position on sovereignty and resurgence. Paula always felt their presence, but had no frame of reference to map out relations or to feel a sense of belonging. The white noise was another empty metaphor for fractured cultural transmissions and scattered memories.
One Elder penetrated the white noise to visit her sobrina via the supernatural hotline; it was to tell Paula that she had died of natural causes, not a successful suicide attempt. A bottle of mezcal with the scorpion at her side and a joint in her hand, Carmella warned Paula that she would bleed soon. Paula woke up from this vivid dream menstruating for the first time. Her mother rushed out to the drugstore to buy her sanitary napkins. When she returned to the apartment, she told Paula the bad news: her favourite aunt Carmella had died in her sleep. Paula remarked casually, “I know, Carmella told me.” Her mother was not surprised, as she too had witnessed Carmella’s powers to heal and hex; Carmella was a bruja, a curandera, and a partera.
Carmella’s ghostly apparitions soothed Paula throughout her adolescence. The undead, deadpan Elder would impart such sage, stellar advice. From “Get over the caca, I am a queer, too, ¿y qué?” to “Don’t drop acid with cats in the room; you will regret it because they know too much.” She would hang up the supernatural hotline on Paula if she got too needy or stupid: “I told you not to mess with that manchild; go steady with your girlfriend Shawntoya instead.” Her impromptu visits dwindled, then picked back up again during emergencies. When Paula was fifteen, Carmella warned her before she knew: “You are pregnant, mija, and you need to decide soon! Go to Planned Parenthood already, pendeja!” Fifteen years later, Carmella would ring again with bad news: “Good news, mija: you will survive this time. Bad news: cancer will kick your ass!” And it did almost kick her ass from the dying fifthworld into her eight Elders’ everlasting one.
When Paula’s father joined his Elders in the ether, all those questions about what it meant to be Indigenous resurfaced. Carmella unsettled sedimented memories. “Do not languish in despair, mija,” Carmella said, “Pick up the fragmented pieces of our culture and do justice to these pieces in our stories, memories, and dreams. Often, that is all that one can do.”¹
1982: Playing Dodgeball
Paula came to know herself as a North American because every time she walked into a room, something died.² She also came to know herself as Indigenous because every time a North American entered a room, her people died.
…
The dodgeball missed its target and Paula dashed for cover under the metal slide as the US Navy’s pride and joy, the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron, hurtled over her elementary school playground. The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornets dropped nukes, obliterating her world, or so she imagined.
Paula knew the “duck-and-cover” school drills were pure fiction concocted by fearmongers intent on keeping the Cold War hot. She had seen the photos of the victims of Hiroshima and watched gruesome films like The Day After. She mentioned this sobering fact in class, which resulted in a one-week suspension: “Duck-and-cover ain’t gonna cover it, like duh, dumbfucks!”
Instead of nuclear armageddon, however, it was the never-ending sonic boom sounding like explosions and thunderclaps simultaneously that disoriented her and the other terrified children burrowing into the sand. She vomited on herself, but a shy girl with a long braid of raven black hair gave her a napkin. She touched Paula’s hand, smiled, and said, “At jun kilaj wixbil.” Paula smiled back but understood nothing; it landed sweetly on her body. When she could regain some semblance of hearing and balance, Paula took stock of the other six children she was sheltering with. They were new to the school. When they spoke, they primarily spoke in Spanish and another language that reminded Paula of when her Elders spoke, not wanting to be understood, even by her. She asked in Spanish where they were from and learned they all escaped from El Salvador or Guatemala—orphans sin papeles. The mystery language of the Guatemalan children was Mayan. Paula never could understand the forces that drew her to these frutos de la guerra (“fruits of war”). She later realized that they shared, however differently—of degree and kind—one thing that made them recognize each other on the playground that fateful day: they had known terror that transcended generations. Although Paula intimately knew violence, she had never experienced blanket bombings nor seen the aftermath of the CIA-trained death squad’s torture of her people.
Due to her Elders’ teachings, Paula would also recognize her eight orphaned Elders in the faces of these children. They had also lost their family to anti-Indigenous, racist geopolitics perpetuated by an anti-revolutionary government allied with imperialists. Paula’s people had fled on foot, climbed atop a railway car, and made their way to California, where they hid their Indigeneity and became simply Mexican braceros, wetbacks, and beaners. Anything better than Indigenous and dead.
…
Like her girlfriend Shawntoya, the daughter of Oakland-based Black Panthers, when Paula asked her parents, “Why?” she received an uncensored response. Paula took a bus to the public library to research what her country was doing in Central America. Many of the resources Paula obtained contained photos of what she realized were tiny decaying corpses of mangled children.
…
At her elementary school’s opening bell the next day, she refused to put her hand over her heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Her homeroom teacher was adamant that the child respect the red, white, and blue. She wrestled with the six-year-old until she broke the child’s index finger. This incident would not be the last time a school expelled Paula. Thankfully, Paula kept the full functionality of both middle fingers.
…
Paula kept in touch with her newfound friends, and a decade later, they would be active in the MS13, Barrio 18, and Nuestra Familia. The only protectors the children had ever known. Like her own Elders, they, too, learned the following lesson splayed across the page of every US history textbook: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” And pretended to be anything but Indigenous.
…
Now expelled, Paula looked forward to spending time with Carmella—she would finally teach her, affirmatively, what Indigeneity was, not its negation or what it was not.
Carmella’s room and garden were a land, a sanctuary for Paula. Her grandfather had many addictions, and both her sisters and her father struggled with his internalized racism. Her aunt’s altar honored the dead with fresh flowers, herbs, and candles, her charcoal drawings depicted the ancestors, and her journals mapped out Tepehuano and Náhuatl languages. She taught Paula to pronounce many words. Her cooking lessons taught Paula the sacred and savory power of chiles, maíz, and frijoles. Carmella fought to teach Paula as much as she could, when she could penetrate the fog of deep depression and trauma.
1984: Playing Pilgrims and Injuns
As an adult, Paula could compile an inventory of the history and design of this environment, an inventory without traces. As a girl, it was as if an incomprehensible power had delivered a never-ending series of perilous obstacle course races, unexpected but not always unwelcome.
…
Paula’s parents enrolled their child in a school that her friend Shawntoya attended. It was an all-ages alternative school named after Nelson Mandela and staffed by the benevolent.
During this period, she realized she lived among spirits, those who wished her harm and those who didn’t, but she was wise enough to keep this under wraps with everyone except her mother and her Elders. Religion and spirituality were considered the opiates of the masses for the rest of the Magonista, Communista, and Socialista familia, who viewed unfettered capitalism and white supremacy, not the undead, as the threat.
Paula came dressed in her grandmother’s Mexican (really Northern Tepehuan—but she did not know this yet) clothing for Halloween—the only available holiday to celebrate difference—and no one cared to find out what she was wearing or who she was performing. She also knew very little. One blonde-haired girl dressed as an ice fairy princess came to her and said her costume was ugly, dull, and dirty. Paula punched her in the arm and made her cry. She stole from the girl’s coveted scratch and sniff sticker collection the following week during naptime and called it reparations for land theft.
Her school celebrated Thanksgiving. She and Shawntoya decided to tag team and created a mini- performance with fake blood, pilgrim and Indian outfits, and an accompanying “Unthanksgiving Day” picture book large enough for most of the audience to see. Shawtoya’s mother was Paula’s parents’ proxy while her parents were working. A long-time Black civil rights activist, she encouraged anti-racist militancy in her children and knew Paula’s parents were on board. Having witnessed the two children co-create their presentation, she felt a suspension was imminent. They deserved an education, or better yet, the school with its wannabe progressive politics did. She chuckled as they ran out of her car. “See you real, real soon!”
The good, liberal teachers were immediately annoyed, ready to educate the children that their costumes were not politically correct, like both friends already didn’t know. Two teachers greeted Shawntoya with, “You are Black, not Indigenous, right?”—while pawing at her natural braids.
Following a well-received musical of White children wearing feathers in their hair, whooping and hollering, and doing the “tomahawk chop,” Paula and Shawntoya climbed on stage.
Paula commences with a psychopathological analysis of Pilgrims, Puritans, and Protestants and educates the school about the genocidal nature of settler colonialism in North America. Due to the Pilgrim’s penchant for serial murder, Paula diagnoses the founders of the US as serial killers. Shawntoya ignores the audible gasps from the audience and compares the hierarchical, patriarchal, and anti-egalitarian society of the European colonialists to that of the Mashpee Wampanoags. Paula writes “matrilineal” on the board to assist her friend. The school’s principal attempts to interrupt the performance ten minutes early, but Shawntoya and Paula whip out fake blood and douse themselves with it, screaming, “We do not give thanks to 500 plus years of ongoing genocide, and neither should you!” and “Why celebrate overcooked, dried-out turkey stuffed with Kraft Stove Top?”
Expulsion. Implosion. Explosion. Again.
Shawntoya’s mother agreed to deal with the fallout and decided to homeschool the girls. She brought both children to the annual Indigenous People’s Sunrise Ceremony to honor the occupation of Alcatraz Island. The three met with Native participants and other allies and boarded boats from Pier 33 before dawn. The fog was impenetrable, the foghorn was mournful, and the Bay air hung like a damp you could cut. At dawn, in the courtyard of what was once a notorious federal prison, Paula felt the hungry ghosts pressing against her. Yet, she expressed joy as various tribal nations performed songs and dances in prayer and as acts of collective solidarity.
Past, Present, Future: Playing in the Garden of the Elders
Paula was finally ready to remember what her Elders had forgotten by a “choice,” not theirs. But she was worried that this act of remembrance was akin to being traitorous. She scribbled a poem about the accident of getting lost and the “choice” to remain lost. Was there a lost art of being found?
I am Here
Child of blue-collar labourers,
Pink-collar secretaries,
Indigenous peoples hidden
In plain sight
Failed revolutionaries
In retreat
Elders were Northern Tepehuáno
But pretended Mexicano
Papa passed Siciliano and tíos, Grecos
I saw through that pretense soon ‘nuf
Became a Chicana mala, no auténtica
Nothing worse than Mexican-Indian
Elders marked as Black
Must breed that darkness out in Two generations
Manifest Destiny got a hard-on
On sunny California beaches
We are a beached
And bleached people
Bleeding upon shattered seashells
Black, Brown, and Red Skins all wore White Masks.
The burden weighs heavy
Berta and her seven siblings fled post-revolutionary violence in Mexico, hitched a ride on top of box cars, waded across the Río Grande, hit up “East Los,” and eventually called San Francisco home. Berta was a beautiful woman who tried to make it in Hollywood, mistakenly thinking she was Dolores del Río and there was a Golden Age of Mexican Cinema north of the border. Instead, she was cast as a Black maid in over ten films. She resembled a cross between a “Stormy Weather” Lena Horne and Billie Holiday with gardenias in her hair. Sadly, she would never have taken such comparisons to Black women as compliments. Being a Black Indigenous woman in 1930s’ AmeriKKKa equaled a certain death, whether physical or psychological.
She eventually dropped out of Hollywood, continued to be an off-screen maid, and decided to marry a Mexican “Anglo” man with German ancestry. She told her siblings to do the same, and half followed suit. In a type of robotic succession, Paula’s Elders—all except three—married “White.” Was it only her grandmother’s anti-Black racism that motivated her to produce “not-quite-White” sons successfully? Paula’s father (who is not “quite White or right”) passed as a dark-skin Sicilian for most of his young adult life. Berta directed Paula’s father and his brothers to marry “White.” Berta claimed victory when Paula was born. According to her parents, Berta approvingly held a newborn Paula and exclaimed, “She is not Black!” However, Paula’s day in the sun was short-lived, as her uncle and his Icelandic bride produced two twin boys with pale skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. All of Paula’s cousins are cleanly divorced from both their Mexican and Indigenous heritage.
Fortunately, Berta left Paula clues about her hidden life before her death. She and Carmella often took Paula to “the cuts” to have birria that made her breathe fire. Carmella chatted with her lovers and Berta with her friends in a language little Paula knew was not Spanish. She would also tell Paula stories about Durango before “the land was invaded again and again” and how their people had a history of being fierce warriors who killed off genocidal Spaniards and Jesuits, starting with the bloody Tepehuán Revolt in 1616. Now they have to fend off Canadian mining companies killing the environment and narcotraficantes who are murdering Indigenous leaders and stealing their mountainous lands to produce opium. La misma mierda, diferente día. Before her death, Berta gave Paula a photo of her pre-Revolutionary War family harvesting corn with guns strapped to their backs. She laughingly called them “Los Moros” (“the Blacks”). Her anti-Blackness was deeply intertwined with her internalized racism as an Indigenous woman surviving an apocalypse.
…
Paula takes a break from taking inventory to write a disjointed poem honoring those Elders who did not marry or marry White to assimilate—props to those who didn’t sell out but suffered more for it.
ALMAS
Alfredo creates recetas from the ether with haunting habañero, scalding tirades, scorching my boca, soul
Lupe, kind to babies and kittens, was astro-traveling with the peyote before she drowned in the ocean
Margarita married in Church decked-out in red flipping-off priests; love of mezcal cut her down early
Assimilated survivors wore masks, hit up Carmella’s mota gardens, binged watched las telenovelas
She spills ink trapped in the dying fifth, the spirits swoop down and hold her in a warm, forgiving embrace
…
Carmella was a “curandera,” a healer steeped in Indigenous medical knowledge and healing modalities. Her room, kitchen, and garden reflected her identity and commitment to curanderismo. No commercial pharmaceutical drugs could be found anywhere in the house. When Paula was sick, Carmella would create a concoction by visiting her wild mountain garden and singing to the plants before extracting them. She would awake refreshed one or two days later (depending on the ailment’s severity and the medicinals’ power). Even her marijuana plants in the garden, used “mostly” for pain relief, mirrored her respect for plants, herbs, insects, and many other forms of life, including her favorite: domestic and wild cats. The garden rose into the mountains where Carmella allowed Paula to play and where she imagined herself faced with mountain snakes, black bears, coyotes, and mountain lions.
California is still in the US Southwest, violently separated from Northern Mexico by the border formerly established in 1848. Could the land Paula played on be seen as a natural extension of the territories of the Northern Tepehuanes (Ódami), Tarahumara, Zacatecos, Xiximes, and other Náhuatl speakers? Or were her Elders only visiting a land—traditionally of the Hopland Band of Pomo and the Ohlone Tribes—that was not theirs? Paula believed that Carmella embraced these contradictions of being both Indigenous and a visitor and fought against the grief and internalized racism that plagued the rest of her family. Carmella, however, had attempted suicide several times when living in California, most likely because she was violently removed from land-based healing on a land base that has been intentionally spiritually cultivated, honored, and respected. However, attempting to recreate her tierra in her dreams made it possible to recreate it wherever Carmella went. The land on a continent with murderous borders separating Indigenous peoples is why she survived. “It is this place that holds our memories,” Carmella said. “This is the place that made us.”
Paula’s Elders are dead, only capable of transmitting culture through an increasingly malfunctioning supernatural hotline. Her ancestral language was “critically endangered,” yet she had to learn another colonizer’s tongue. The Jesuits left the descendants “The Lord’s Prayer” in Ódami starting with Dai gïr oigïldañi xïïxkadï soimaaxi ibuadagi aatïmï. Kaxkïdï tudu aatïmï ïpï oigïdai odami ix makïdï soi gïr buidadagi (“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”). The “Sword and the Cross” had killed off all the curanderas and shamans and distorted Indigenous peoples’ sociopolitical and spiritual systems. Durango is now a warzone controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel. Paula would be unrecognized, just another stupid tourist dodging bullets and machetes on a colonial, gastronomic holiday sampling asado de bodas y gorditas duranguenses.
Paula now waits patiently for her Elders’ instructions via the supernatural hotline. Before falling into that despair one cannot escape, she grabs her latest anthology of Indigenous futurisms and a stylish pair of “Loc” sunglasses. Paula takes public transit to see her friends dancing at the Pow-wow in Kahnawà:ke. Her sneakers do not set foot on her traditional lands; she neither feels the desert heat nor smells the lemon scent of cacti flowers. And that’s cool; our unceded lands’ dirt nourishes our soles wherever we walk. The sun’s warmth and the moon’s pull gravitate slightly in both territories. And, all the children native to these lands are fighting against the white noise of grief to recreate and retell stories from fragments that slice their fingers and make them bleed. The blood, in turn, nourishes our kin, the land, and the hungry spirits. Who were we? Who are we becoming?
¿Carmella…?
Soy yo, Paula.
¹ Inspired by Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2012).
² Inspired by Noor Hindi’s poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” (2020).
References
Hindi, N. (2024, March 11). “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi. Poetry Magazine.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft- my-people-are-dying.
Miranda, D. A. (2013). Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday: Berkeley, CA.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Lena Palacios is a queer, disabled, mixed-race Chicana with Tepehuana and settler ancestry surviving/thriving in Tiohtià:ke. They play with their cats/muses, Sonny, Sher, and Kimchi, when not writing on the run. They are in First People Studies (Concordia) and will begin a Master’s in Information Studies (McGill). The ultimate goal is to become your badass local librarian and anti-colonial archivist. Born on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, they grew up picking up seashells on Ohlone and Pomo lands.