In this entry I really took the opportunity of telling a Dionysian story of an internal struggle that may result from the cultural strife that is being an immigrant’s son with a foreign name. This is the most autobiographical of my two creative works. Like instances in Bless Me, Ultima and Their Dogs Came With Them, the narrator chronicles the struggles  the reader may find themselves troubled by due to the ethnic connotations of the reader’s supposed name. Written in 2nd person, like What You See In The Dark, and inspired my own personal history, I hoped to establish not just a novel outlook on the abject and the Dionysian, but to relay the empathy of the scenarios and provoke sympathy within a reader, as one imagines themselves as a child struggling with what to call themselves.

___

“I hated school. I hated work. I hated boredom. I had no
interests. I had a happy childhood. There was school,
adolescence, growing up, questions about the future. I
was twenty-one. I had no dream …
We grew up in quiet suburbs with protecting parents,
taking tennis lessons, swimming lessons, playing soccer
with sheltered kids. We had favorite cartoons and old toys
that smelled like plastic nostalgia. In college we met
friends for life, got married, set, fucked-up, full of petty
convictions. People said the world belonged to the
children.”

– Anonymous, Manifesto.

An Immigrant’s Son

You were told that when you were born you had been given no name. You were not, however, nameless. Your birth certificate read: “Rivas, Boy #2.” Your mother was saddened that you were not a girl as the baby shower had necessitated one and all your clothes were pink enough to have been manufactured by Mattel anyway.

You have always hated the name you were given. It took you two decades to finally call yourself by your own name, let alone to develop enough resolve to anticipate the squeamish insecurity in hearing people’s mispronunciations, an anxiousness only matched by the incredulous widening of eyes and the thinning of lips when you later began introducing yourself by your own name.

You were “John” because “Jean” was a girl’s name or spelled “Gene,” which didn’t sound like “Jean.” It was a good name. You found enough of a hint of domestication to hide in it. But you knew you didn’t look like a “John” amongst Johnny and Jonathan. So you tried “Pierre” for a while, though mostly at soccer practice as the decade long roots for “John” had already been grown to ostracize your childhood. But the white-Mexican boy, Facundo, called you “Francesco” because he didn’t like your new name either. Sometime after France declined to coalesce within Operation Iraqi Liberation, the morning after being up all night watching the explosions filtered through the green of night vision on MTV, you walked through the school yard only to cut your feet upon the shards of merlot that your classmates’ parents spared from the sewers so that their children, too, may call you a traitor. You then abandoned “Pierre” and allowed those who insisted to call you “JP” because “JeanPierre” resounded too sophisticatedly for the middling threshold of middle class your family inhabited.

One day, you put down your Legos and asked your mother why she named you “JeanPierre” and she asked you what you would have preferred and you answered “Alex,” because although you didn’t know where or what Greece was, there were enough of them around. You mother recoiled, but relented, nonetheless, that she wanted to name you “Henry,” but your father said no. You asked your mother why she had let your father choose and she answered, “porque él manda.” The moment you began to consider her explanation, gender relations were subconsciously realized for the rest of your life. But you didn’t know that until your father raised his hand over your mother’s head. So you asked your mother, Magaly, again, “¿pero, por que JeanPierre? ¿Somos Francés?” Your mother then reminded you that “Henry,” in your household, would have fast become “Enrique” and that implication ensured you would never look back.

One Sunday afternoon with your sweat drenched father lying across the rug at the end of his seven day work week, he explained the bearing of being called by your name and why his own father chose Diederich, if we were not, in fact, German either. “Somos castellano,” your father proclaimed, intoning that you were different from the neighborhood full of “Jesúses,” “Joses” and “Juans.” Your lineage, he proclaimed, was distinct. But you knew your mother was Nicaraguan and that you father himself was born there as well as an immigrant’s son. Yet, your father assured you that esoteric names were reserved for those of us whom could earn them. Instead of inspiring you, this burdened you.

You never felt like yourself because of your name, as though one day you would metamorphosize into a well-liked, well-adjusted boy, but you only learn to master English so that you could forget the language everyone at school called “Mexican.” You had hoped that you would have earned JeanPierre by now, but when you began calling yourself by your own name, at twenty, looming over the precipice of a lifetime of private school debt, you realized there was only yourself left, truly, to detest.