small house in Laredo on the U.S. side of the Texas-Mexico border.  She didn’t meet my grandma until she was 9.  As a newborn, she was immediately taken to Mexico to live with her ‘uelita while mi ‘uelita worked in Laredo, Tejas, wrapping egg rolls in a Chinese restaurant.  At the age of thirteen my mother learned English, or what is better known as Ebonics, in a black neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio. She moved to Dallas soon after …

She called me, “Sarita” when she wanted to show me love. “Sara Alicia” when I forgot to pick up my Tupperware cafecito set.  I grew up in Balch Springs, Texas, but I still say I’m from Dallas because no one really knows where Balch Springs is.  I grew up thinking the name of my town was Box Springs because of the way my mom pronounced it.  A lot of English words confused me. So I was taken to Mi Escuelita, a bilingual pre-school that helped me assimilate into a new language because I really thought “frijoles” in English was “free-holees.”  I only knew some words in English, and one of them was “coupon.”  So when it came time to tell Cynthia Torres that it was her fault that the kitchen play set tipped over, spilling our pots and pans, plastic bacon y huevitos, I could only say, “It’s your coupon!” instead of my regular “Fue tu culpa!” before running off.

Sarah-with-an-H

I was eager to practice my penmanship once I got to kindergarten, so I asked my mom how to spell my name, and she said I could spell it however I wanted.  I wanted to spell it like the pretty, little white girl in my class, Sarah Stevens.  She was so lucky because she not only got to sit at the front of the class next to the teacher’s desk, but she also had an extra letter in her name—an H.  I liked the way that letter looked—in lowercase. One really long line and a little hump. It reminded me of a tiny elephant.  The long line looked like an elephant trunk pointed up toward the sky, while its front left leg stood firmly on the ground, hiding its right leg from view. The hump was its body that ended in a tail or maybe it was a back leg. S-A-R-A—little elephant. I liked the sound of that.  Sarah—little elephant.

As the teacher, Mrs. Samuels, came around to check our penmanship, she told me to erase my elephant—I mean my H.  “But,” I whined, “My mom said I could write it however I wanted.”  She informed me that I had to spell it the correct way. And when we were learning our home addresses in case we ever got lost, she told me, in her exacting English, that I lived at 1-2-1-2-5 Duchess Drive and not “twel-twel-fie dooches dry.”  From that point on, I knew my mother couldn’t be trusted. So my name became Sarah-with-no-H, no magical elephant with which to celebrate my name.

Smarty

In middle school, my friends and I thought it would be cool to start a “gang” and give ourselves nicknames.  My name was Smarty because I could always answer questions about algebra and could memorize lists of answers to exams.  Tests that required memorization and I were as tight as could be because I always knew what the teacher wanted to hear, and I didn’t want to look “stupid” if I had to explain my answers.   Memorization comforted me.

My best friend’s nickname was Shorty.  There was also Giggles, Sad Face, and la Green Eyes cause she was the only Chicana we knew with—well, green eyes.  I wasn’t Chicana, they informed me, because I still spoke Spanish. These twelve year-old girls would call me “mojo,”3 the Anglicized form of mojada or mojado for liking Gloria Trevi y Bronco and liking mi “Pelo Suelto” and wanting to dress “Con Zapatos de Tacón” in combination with the music of Jay Perez, Emilio, Selena, Shelly Lares and my parents’ love for Donna Summer and Al Green.  The only way I could be down with my homegirls would be to listen to the rap radio stations to which my mom refused to let me listen; she didn’t want her daughters identifying with the “hoochies” the rappers loved so much.  “But I can listen to Sonora Dinamita con su ‘No Te Metas con Mi Cúcu’?!” I would yell como una loca con ese hociquito I had already started to cultivate. To satisfy my desire for hip-hop and R&B, she bought me a Salt-n-Pepa CD and another by TLC, not knowing the significant effects those lyrics would have on the consciousness of her daughter. My attitude changed and blossomed into one that exuded a None-of-Yo-Business-and-Let’s-Talk-About-Sex-Bay-Bee kind of personality.

She-Ra

When we got to high school, Shorty decided my nickname Smarty was just too nerdy.  My fuck-you attitude merited a more chingona name—something like She-Ra.  I wasn’t blonde, blue-eyed, and voluptuous, but I was ready to kick ass physically, mentally, and verbally, even if it was only with a metaphorical Sword of Protection rather than the Sword of Power He-man got to sport.  Home was different during the She-Ra years, and I needed that sword.  I developed a phobia of that space, which I later learned through another Tejana, Gloria Anzaldúa, could be termed homophobia—or a fear of going home.  The woman who was going crazy, who hated me because I interrupted her plans to be something great, that woman who called herself my mother called me, “puta,” “ofrecida,” “ho,” and “slut” among other ternuras because I began to listen to my body’s yearnings and not religious dictates.

I couldn’t wait to get out of her house, so me puse al tiro.  I had to move out of that peach little house in Balch Springs, Texas, where white kids kept my sister and me out of their yard, blamed us for breaking Barbies, and spit out the candy we brought back from Mexico to share.  I had to leave that space where my dad came home drunk and drugged and my mom would cry and beg him to come home early not for her but for his girls, las mendigas huercas que la estaban volviendo loca.  I stopped skippin’ school because my African-American English teacher told the class that the only way she was able to leave her crazy mother was to go away to college.  That would be my way out.  I had to prove to my mom that I was more than una huerca caliente, that her sacrifices had not been in vain.

I started “applying” to the community college a few exits down the road, but the typewriter ran out of ribbon.  Then, someone in South Bend, Indiana, made a mistake, and I received a recruitment brochure from Notre Dame.  I convinced my parents it would be best for me to go there because they have la Virgen Maria atop a golden dome watching your every move. My dad was SOLD. And because we never got ribbon for the typewriter, I applied electronically to Notre Dame only.  It was the farthest place from home I could think of.  If I didn’t get in there, I’d try again for community college.  In December, I received notice that Sarah Ramirez4 had been accepted to ND.  She-ra would stay in Balch Springs that next summer while Sarah left with three boxes to Indiana.

Back to Sarah

When I received my dorm room assignment, I was excited to learn that I would be staying with four other young women, including one from San Antonio.  Surely, the white girls up north couldn’t be like the white girls down south, right?  Y claro que, someone from San Antonio, the Tejano music capital of the world, with the last name Garza would be down, right? Wrong.  Each of them was ridiculously privileged.  Two of their fathers were surgeons.  The other two were anesthesiologists.  When asked what kind of doctor my dad was, I joked, “A car doctor.”  My attempt at humor was met with sour faces, and I rephrased, “A mechanic.  A car mechanic.”  To each of my four roommates, no matter how white-washed I tried to act through my newly recovered name, I would always be “ghetto” for listening to rap and hip-hop and knowing all the lyrics to Salt-n-Pepa.  Too Mexican for the “Hispanic” from San Antonio, who had mastered Spanish, she boasted, not at home (like me) but in a Spanish class at a private school.

I found other Mexican-Americans, who like me, weren’t fitting in.  They were mostly in my pre-med classes because as first-generation college students, the only great money-making career we could imagine then was in medicine.  But I was ostracized from that community as well because I supposedly looked like a white girl and had a white girl first name.  Plus, they noted, I didn’t go to Spanish mass—or any mass—to repent of el desmadre I’d make on Saturday nights.  By my fourth year, I felt like I had to run away again but time wouldn’t allow me to run fast enough.

During that time though, parts of Sara peeked through.  I met my first self-identified Chicana feminist my senior year.  Her name? Professor Teresa Delgadillo.  I introduced myself for the first time in school as Sara Ramírez.5 I sensed she would understand.  Esa mujer divina—like a sorceress—placed books in my hand, characters in mind, an English glittered with Spanish and Nahuatl on my tongue, and with a wand disguised as a Bic mechanical pencil, summoned the Chicana feminist within me to erupt onto paper.  I shed the Sarah Ramirez hardened by four letters, by epithets, by not being able to be a Sara dusted with iridescent specks of silent Hs - Hs that, once grown, looked like two vertical lines fulfilling mi destino, two beings standing tall, facing each other with arms outstretched pressing fingertips to fingertips as if staring into not a mirror but a part of the self that has been split off.  Professor Delgadillo encouraged my feminist tongue that sprouted from a brown place back in Balch Springs, Texas.  She made me understand through the literature of Latinas in the U.S. why I listened to Mrs. Samuels who convinced me there was a “correct” way to do things, who taught me that my mother’s brown voice could “never be right.”  This professor taught me que habia otro camino, otro lado, that a Chicana could demand respect.

By my last semester, I had a decision to make: medical school or Chicana lit. por vida? Human bodies or the voices of those bodies?  What everyone back home expected or what I wanted?  I couldn’t leave behind another little elephant.

Sara A.

It’s harder to write about my present self, the Sara plus my middle initial A. This part of my narrative asks me to reflect on who I am today, now, right now, right now-right now.  Professor Delgadillo encouraged me to seek out her mentor, Sonia Saldívar-Hull.  And I found her.  I found Sonia beneath las estrellas de San Antonio—that place my family and I would drive through to get to Monterrey each summer—that place where they played what I called San Antonio music and others knew as Tejano music— a city with a small-town feeling—where murals hugged the walls of panaderias and piñata shops.  So I went to this profesora, esta hija de Coatlicue, who was the first to respect me as a Chicana, a woman, a thinker and call me by my first name, Sarita.

San Antonio was my new home. I met other Chicanas and Chicanos who like me loved to read and to interpret, to decolonize. I found, Ben, ese professor who emits the spirit of Shango. Dr. Norma Cantú, who taught me to cloak myself with colors and got me hooked on locura.  There, there was no competition, no “friends” to call me “mojo,” no having to explain that Sara is Sarah in Spanish, no feeling like no one had my back.  No.  Lori, Christy, Patricia, Alex, Roberto, Larissa, and Marco were like me.  We were all fucked up in our own ways.  Yes.  San Antonio was my utopia, but I spiraled into a deep abyss of depression.  I went crazy because I couldn’t figure out who I was anymore.  Who was I if I wasn’t resisting like I had my entire life?  Who are we when we’re not talking back but talking with?6

When I graduated with my master’s in English, I left San Antonio for a piece of a paper they call a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at Berkeley.  “In order to come back,” they said in so many words, “you have to leave.”  I’m sure that statement will one day be significant in so many other ways.  So I left the place where my soul took shape, clasping hands with my little selves, esas niñas whom I had birthed: Sara, Sarah-with-no-H, She-Ra, Smarty, Sarah-with-an-H, and Sarita. Shattered and reassembled so many times, I’ve gone crazy.

* * *

1 This narrative was first presented at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies annual conference in 2009 under the title “Going Crazy: A Testimonio by a First-Generation (?) Tejana.”

2 Throughout the narrative, the name “Sarah” is pronounced in English (sair-uh), while “Sara” is pronounced in Spanish (sahr-ah). The middle initial “A” is pronounced in English (ey).

3 Pronounced as Moh-joh

4 In this instance—as in all instances before I came to consciousness as a Chicana—I pronounced my last name the way they pronounced it: ruh-mih-rehz.

5 I pronounced my full name in Spanish: sah-rah rah-mee-res

6 Six months after writing this statement, I realize that we are always resisting.

* * *

Sara A. Ramírez is a descendant of a long line of locas y brujas. This Tejana is currently attempting to stay "sane" as a second-year doctoral student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.