The Weight of Shadows Read Free

even listen to them anymore. I know what they say. They’ll all be from my mom. Hijo mío, she says by way of opening, not mi hijo, her very syntax re-creating the process of a mother embracing her son. Placing the word for
son
first, she then grabs urgently with what follows:
of mine
. The interplay of these words evokes the rush of possession, the physical pull of amother who hasn’t seen her son in a long, long time. And then, following this, always a question or statement about eating:
Have you eaten yet? What did you eat today? I hope you’ve eaten. Have you been eating good? I just deposited money into your account so please eat something good
. Since moving out of my parents’ home it’s become easier to forget that the question of where meals were to come from wasn’t always so readily answered, easy to forget the evenings when, telling me they’d already eaten at work, they would simply sit and watch
me
eat.
    I press seven and seven and seven again because I don’t even need to listen to know how, in a lowered voice, as if someone were listening, she will end by saying, “Cuidado—I love you,” and know that one of the things she wants me to be careful about is la migra.
    Each long Monday afternoon, her day off, my mother sits in her kitchen drinking black coffee, watching sparrows dart by the feeder outside the window. She’ll turn on Noticiero Telemundo on the small television under the cereal cabinet and watch Pedro Sevcec while she dunks Marías in her coffee, trying to get them to her mouth before they liquefy and plop into her cup. It would be easy to attribute her news preference to language, but as soon as the reports are done she changes the channel to watch US sitcoms. Years ago it was
Family Matters
,
Silver Spoons
, and
Dinosaurs
. I have no idea what she’s watching now.
    If she chooses Telemundo over the English news broadcasts, it’s mainly to avoid the US media’s endlessly broadcast images of Latinos hopping fences, depicting us as a unified deluge without end. On April 14, 2005, for instance, had she been watching CNN, a network that purports to be “the most trusted name in news,” she would have caught an episode of
Lou Dobbs Tonight
titled “Border Insecurity; Criminal Illegal Aliens; Deadly Imports; Illegal Alien Amnesty.” Within the first minute she would have heard host Lou Dobbs assert,“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans.” A few moments later she would have heard CNN correspondent Casey Wian follow by asserting that “almost a half-million fugitive illegal aliens are loose in the United States today” before relaying ICE’s plan to outfit low-risk “illegal aliens” with electronic monitoring devices.
    â€œHijos de su puta madre,” my mother would have said, the María stopping halfway to her mouth, the portion she’d already dunked plopping back into her cup of coffee and spraying the front of her shirt.
    Looking up at her screen she would have read “BROKEN BORDERS” and “DEADLY IMPORTS” across the bottom. She would have taken in the great Lou Dobbs sitting in front of his own large screen that also read “DEADLY IMPORTS” amid a foreboding blue smoke and a slanted caduceus—the staff carried by Hermes into the underworld, a staff entwined by two serpents, topped with open wings. This was a mistake, probably on the part of a production designer, and yet it’s apt enough: the caduceus, often erroneously used in place of the rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine and healing, is in fact a symbol of commerce, theft, deception, and death.
    Dobbs—US flag pinned to his lapel—introduced his segment by reminding us that he’d “already reported here on the tremendous burden that illegal aliens put upon our national health care system,” before segueing into talk of the