Empanadas y paella
When I think of Latinidad, I see colour and flavour. I feel it in making empanadas. Dicing onions while my eyes burn, cutting dozens of circles into pale sheets of pastry, filling each with mince one tablespoon at a time. Latinidad is folding and crimping the edges by hand like Abuela does. Empanadas always taste better when I’ve shaped each parcel with care after standing hunched in the kitchen for hours.
I taste Latinidad in a second helping of paella on Good Friday. Abuela’s paella is vibrant like the rings around each of her careful, wrinkled fingers. Abuela paces the garden, worrying it won’t turn out right, as if her matriarch status teeters on the edge a single grain of rice. It always turns out right. It’s soul food - food that silences the entire table in reverence at first bite. I eat the leftovers for days. When I think of Latinidad, one of the first things that comes to mind is food.
Good Friday Paella
Yo hablo un poquito
I have a Dutch first name, from my maternal grandmother who died before I was born, a Spanish middle name, first belonging to mi Abuela, and an Italian last name, from mi Abuelo. I never knew how to make sense of this growing up. How could a person be a fraction? Maths was never my strong suit, but I’ve always been obsessed with words. In primary school, I could never finish my English exercises because I got distracted reading the dictionary. Now studying writing at university, I devour my weekly readings and lectures. Researching a recent assignment, I learned that Latinos in the US speak more English than Spanish. This terrifies me, that the language I’ve always been ‘too busy’ to learn might one day disappear while I’m not paying attention. The word arroz still does not come as naturally to me as rice. I even struggle to pronounce mi Abuela’s first name, ‘Mirta’, correctly, but I refuse to say it the way her white Australian friends do: murder.
Marianismo
My psychologist says I need to stop using the word ‘should’. She says it’s a guilty word, a word that puts a weight on my shoulders that doesn’t exist. But ‘should’ is a word that I handle carefully, one I inherited from my father when I moved in with him right before Year Twelve. Latinos are a matriarchal culture. This is something I’ve seen up-close for years, but have only just started to understand. The Spanish conquistadores – along with smallpox, sugarcane and cattle – brought with them marianismo: the idea that women should be ‘spiritual family leaders’. Nice, quiet girls who remember birthdays and plan Good Friday lunches. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in belonging.
My parents had been long separated, so I quickly became the matriarch of my father’s bachelor-pad. It was a role I took on dutifully, an heirloom. I found belonging in ‘should’. I should call mi Abuela more often. Women in maternal roles are the hearth of Latin communities, admired for their love and sacrifice. In my own familia, mi Abuela runs the show. Every family function leads back to her dining table. From Christmas Eve dinners to birthday brunches, she is the short-statured and quick-witted centre of our tiny universe. Time and space revolve around her barbecue and garden chairs. There’s power in being depended on.
Villawood
Mi Abuelos, my Dad and my Aunty came to Australia in 1972. Between the four of them, they had sixty dollars and a few American phrases they’d learned from television. My family were part of the first wave of Latino migration to Australia. They stayed at the Villawood Migrant Hostel, 27 kilometres out of Sydney and built on what once was the Leightonfield munitions factory during World War II. When Dad told me about passing the old army huts every time he walked to the deli to buy a loaf of bread, I thought of the stories he told me about Uruguay. How when he was nine years old, soldiers in the streets used to cock their guns at him, and how their laughter echoed as he fled down cobblestoned streets.
Just days after his arrival in Australia, mi Abuelo had a job lined up. He’d met a Spanish priest who knew some Italians in need of an extra set of bricklayer’s hands. Mi Abuelo was a tiler by trade, but could build a house from the ground up. He made one hundred dollars in his first week of work and felt like a millionaire. This is a story mi Abuela tells me with great pride whenever I ask. Twelve months later, mi familia moved out of the hostel, mi Abuelos renewed their vows before that same priest, and soon began the rest of their Australian lives.
Abuela and Abuelo renewing their vows in Australia, circa 1974.
En la mesa
Mi Abuela and Abuelo are the only grandparents I’ve ever known. I spent most weekends in Year Twelve in Abuela’s back garden, which buzzed with green life. I pointed at things and asked her what they were called in Spanish, parroting them back to her to improve my pronunciation. When I interviewed mi Abuelos a few years ago, they told me the story of how they met. A dance hall in Uruguay, somebody’s birthday party, the place humming with chatter and laughter. Latinos are loud, that I know without needing to ask. Abuelo was tall, dark and handsome and part of the massive migration of Italians to Uruguay after the war. Abuelo arrived at the party with another woman (also named Mirta) as his date. Soon after, he introduced himself to mi Abuela. Mi Abuelos danced together for a few songs, before Abuela caught wind that there was better dancing elsewhere. The previous Mirta long forgotten, mi Abuelos won first place in a tango competition together, and the rest is history.
My grandparents have both looked more or less the same my whole life, but I started noticing that they were getting older. Mi Abuelo was old in the way that, every year, he told me he didn’t mind if he made it to his next birthday or not. He’d worked hard, raised two kids and bought a house. After I graduated high school, I spent my ‘schoolies’ week with mi Abuelos in their retirement village, picking strawberries, making thick red pasta sauces and napping on their recliners. In the evenings, Abuelo told me about how he accidentally made the winning bid at an auction for a block of land in Uruguay and how he had to borrow money to pay for and build on it. He diced mango for me, sneaking a few cubes straight to his mouth from the blade.
Abuelo dicing mango for me, 2018.
Dolor de corazón
Abuelo died a day before his eighty-fifth birthday, less than a year later. The grief was piercing, but felt misplaced in my hands. I hadn’t known him like they did, for as long as they did. Abuela didn’t sleep for a week, her back curving across Abuelo’s hospital bed like she could shield him from the inevitable. Abuelo mumbled through the morphine in furlan, a native language he hadn’t spoken since leaving Italy at seventeen. Later, Dad wept in the hospital waiting room with his sister, my aunty.
¡Venga!
A bus full of Latinos came up from Sydney for the funeral. There were tears and ‘I haven’t seen you since you were this big!’ and then Abuela, looking out the window, entirely stunned. I finally met relatives I’d heard about and ‘liked’ on Facebook. We shared bowls of ravioli and Spanglish filled the air of Abuela’s garden, drunk on grief and memories. I met cousins who looked like me, had last names like mine, ate the food I ate and knew the stories I knew. When keys started jangling and uncles started coughing and checking their watches, my ribcage cracked open. My family would leave, and Abuelo would still be gone, and I would soon go back to uni, back to feeling halfway-in and halfway-out, my throat burning as the bus brake lights got smaller and smaller.
Ravioli after Abuelo's funeral, 2019.
That bus was affectionately nicknamed ‘the Vengabus’. This was something I took literally at the time: a bus driven by my tio who drove trucks for a living, keen to get moving. Three years later, I realised that they were talking about Vengaboys’ ‘We Like to Party!’ It’s a song with Spanish in its chorus, sung by a peppy Dutch Eurodance band, and was probably hummed on the way to an Italian’s funeral in Australia, a thought which is almost as absurd as losing Abuelo in the first place. Its lyrics promise, ‘Hey now, hey now, hear what I say now / Happiness is just around the corner.’ I laughed until I cried when I looked it up.
Peliculas y flamenco
After the funeral, Dad left a stack of DVDs on my desk. He told me that he got really into Spanish and Latino cinema growing up. I like to imagine him around the same age I was, realising there was more in his blood than the Western-suburbs-sausage-sizzle-summers he assimilated into. I memorised the titles like holy scripture: Real Women Have Curves, Raising Victor Vargas, Jamón Jamón, Y Tu Mama Tambien.
Then, it was flamenco. Dad spent nights showing me all his favourite songs, most of which I knew how to sing purely from memory, not understanding. I’d heard these echoing around every tiled house I’d grown up in. I sang ‘Oxígeno’ like ‘Oh, si eh no’ and ‘Confí de fuá’ like ‘Con fee eh fwaaa’ but Dad didn’t care and neither did I. In those songs was a longing and yearning that brought my father to tears. Maybe it’s because Dad loved it so much, and maybe it would have felt better in Spanish, but for the first time, I didn’t mind not ‘getting it’.
Mi Latinidad
Mi Latinidad is wearing my hoop earrings into my law lectures. It’s never taking my gold nameplate necklace off, because I know how much overtime my Dad worked at la fábrica to buy it. It’s respecting mi Abuelos sacrifices made to raise their children and grandchildren here. It’s learning that mi Abuelo worked as a janitor at the same university I study at now. It’s trying to remember to correct people when they pronounce my father and brother’s names like Louis, and not Luis. Latinidad is the sobbing that racked my entire body in a dark cinema when I saw In The Heights for the first time, watching Leslie Grace sing ‘I got every scholarship / Saved every dollar / The first to go to college.’
Dad and I on my birthday, 2022.
Latinidad is being the first in my immediate family to graduate high school, to get into a Law and Arts degree at university. It’s mi Abuela marvelling at my stacks of weekly readings and bragging about my grades to her neighbours. It’s my Dad staying up until midnight with me to check my OP in Year Twelve and both of us crying when it was good. It’s him holding my hand before the interview for the university scholarship that now pays for my textbooks every semester. I hope mi Abuelos are proud even if they do not quite understand what exactly it is I’m doing here. Latinidad is knowing that they are.