The Missing Piece: How Writing Middle Grade Helped Solidify My Cultural Identity, a guest post by Ashley Granillo

Music was an integral part of my grandparent’s multigenerational home in Pacoima, much like a couch or a stove. In fact, displayed over the love seat in the living room, was a violin that belonged to my maternal great-grandfather, and below it, my mom’s record console. Papa, my grandpa, blasted banda and Tejano music from his green Ford truck, and often serenaded people on their birthdays with a classical guitar he kept tucked at the back of the closet. In the kitchen, grandma rolled tortillas to the Spanish radio, and if my mom and her sisters were cooking, they would listen to lowrider oldies. Rosie and The Original’s, “Angel Baby,” was among one of the long list of songs my tías would reminisce to. As most children, I didn’t pay much attention to that song or much of my parents’ music— because, to me, it was “old.” But one day, my cousin blared a new version from her bedroom down the hall.

This voice that sang “Angel Baby” wove a spoken Spanish verse into the bridge––English and Spanish together––something I’d never heard before. I took the cassette from my cousin, enamored by the young woman on the cover with her arms confidently crossed at her waist in a black leather jacket. Obsessed, I begged my cousin to play “Angel Baby,” over and over. With my Fisher Price Star Stage toy complete with a mic stand and two pedals that created strobe effects and a voice amplifier, I became Latin pop star, Angelica.

My singing might not have been nonsense, but my Spanish was. I couldn’t tell anyone what Angelica said, and often muttered through the bridge, pretending I knew how to pronounce every word. But clearly I didn’t. At this stage in my young life, my inability to understand Spanish was heightened. On walks around Tamarack Avenue, folks in our Latine/x and Hispanic neighborhood would ask my grandparents why I didn’t know how to communicate in both languages. My grandparents recited the reason in Spanish, keeping the facts hidden from me. In a bilingual school, I became the odd one out, the only kid who learned the Spanish alphabet separate from the entire class, singing her own song––solo!

“Aren’t you Mexican?” was a question that reverberated throughout my young and adult life like an earworm chorus from the worst song you’ve ever heard. I always sang the same lines, “yes, but…” and would launch into the generational trauma placed onto me by politicians,’ and my grandparents’ joint fears that I would never be accepted as wholly American if I did not assimilate, hardships they endured as first-generation immigrants working in fruit fields and attending English-speaking schools. In 1986, A year before I was born, California made English its official language, and so it too would become mine.

Because of my grandparents’ well intentioned decision, I have felt fragmented my entire life. My skin tone tells the world one story, but my language, my Californian, broadcast dialect, tells the world another. Neither story can be accepted into one narrative like Angelica’s “Angel Baby.” I always made a joke of this to offset my discomfort. I’d purposefully speak broken Spanish to my grandparents and they’d laugh loudly at my efforts. The laughter made being “broken” a little easier, the pain less sharp.

As the years passed, and as my grandparents aged, they relied more on the language that their parents passed onto them and less on the language forced onto them. I yearned to communicate with them in the same tongue, to help them feel closer to home. Unfortunately, my grandma passed before I could confidently get through the first unit in Duolingo. To add insult, I was five units into the language app when my grandfather took his last breath. I would never be able to speak to them in Spanish seriously.

Without them, my world was silent. I yearned to fill it with music––oldies, Angelica, Selena, banda, and mariachi. I also yearned to feel whole, to not be afraid of the invitation to be a joint leader of the Latinx Alliance at the college I worked at, to write stories about being Mexican American—my actual experience and not the stereotypical version created out of shame and expectation. So much of what I’d written up to then always had a Mexican American main character, but that label was their only cultural marker and it didn’t feel like that label alone was enough to make anything I wrote worthy of being considered part of the Latine/x canon.

Fast forward to when I began penning my first middle grade novel. Mom was in the middle of excavating family history while she sorted through paperwork we’d inherited from my grandparents, now sold, home. My gran tío Chris, wrote a biography spanning no more than a few pages; his words revealed that my family owned a convenience store and a panaderia in Pacoima. What more didn’t I know? There were so many questions left unanswered. Those questions created the stakes for the novel, but Cruzita needed more than to save her family’s bakery––their legacy––she needed to confront herself and figure out what hers was.

A few cassettes were in the bins of paperwork. Little Joe, a Tejano singer my Papa loved to play for me, that I used to love to sing in spite of my strangled Spanish, inspired the next ingredient. Music became the obvious avenue to explore Cruzita’s inner world. She needed to bear the burden of the false-belief that she wasn’t Mexican American enough, a personal struggle of mine. Like me, she would fail her sixth-grade Spanish class. Yet, unlike me, she wouldn’t say no when her grandma would approach her with that violin that hung in the living room, or at least, she wouldn’t be given the opportunity to say no. She would simply become a mariachi against her wishes. Unlike me, Cruzita would have the opportunity to learn more about herself, her cultural and ancestors before it was too late, or at least before she enters college and gets made fun of by her Chicano Studies professor years later. I wanted to spare her the embarrassment, the shame of not knowing, because for me, those emotions are a challenge to shrug off. Writing Cruzita and the Mariacheros was cathartic for me—a way for me to reimagine my childhood. What if I had done this or that back then? Would that make everyone, including me, not doubt the dual reality I lived in daily?

The more I integrated and studied mariachi music, it made me consider if I too should do some kind of method writing. “Should I take mariachi lessons?” I asked my mom. Her answer was an enthusiastic “yes.” However, much to my dismay, the only mariachi school nearby was in Pacoima, and while open to adults, the school still required folks to audition in Spanish. I doubted my ability to sing “Tu Solo Tu” or “Sabor a Mi.” The melodies float through my memory, but the words never rolled off my tongue as light. Balking at the thought of imperfections, of being “found out,” or of being told my hometown could never be considered Pacoima, I never called them. But I visited the website often, wondering…

Cruzita’s character arc evolves from not believing she is enough, to understanding she is so much more than labels and stereotypes forced upon her by her friends and outsiders of her community. Thanks to her friends, Cruzita is able to cultivate a loving and accepting community that does more than tolerate her existence. They love Cruzita unconditionally and wholly, however imperfect her knowledge of mariachi and Spanish is. All they ask is that she be herself, and be open to learning. As she defines for herself what it means to be Mexican American, her journey, in turn, helped me define who I am.

At the Pico Branch’s 10^th Year Anniversary celebration this past weekend, I sat in the company of the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra Mariachi Group before my scheduled reading of Cruzita. A young girl with braids fumbled through her violin parts, mumbling in Spanish. She was both Cruzita and me, shedding tears over the anxiety that she was not good enough. It was difficult to watch her discomfort, but it solidified why I wrote about Cruzita’s journey––our journey–– because kids like her need to know that learning the language of music, language and culture is challenging, but not impossible. 

After the mariachi youth played, I signed my books. Adults still approached me with the same expectation they had when I was a child.

“No hablas español?”

My 40 plus units completed in Duolingo granted me one thing: I can understand what they’re saying, si. But the flip side is, I can also understand their disappointment, too. I know, I should know…I’m still learning Spanish and how to work through my insecurities.

A man roughly around my age, whom I falsely assumed was a teacher for the mariachi group, approached me for an autograph. I inquired about how he liked teaching young adults mariachi, but he said he was as a part of the group as the kids were. That he grew up having never learned mariachi and wanted to now as an adult.

“But what if you don’t know Spanish?” I asked.

“They teach you,” he said. “You can learn whatever instrument and they’ll teach you everything.”

The mariachi school in Pacoima echoed in my memory. Cruzita’s first day in Jaime’s class was there too. A part of me still hesitated. “I think it’s too late for me,” I said.

He smiled. “It’s never too late. I hope you join.”

“It’s never too late,” the new chorus resounds like a tender ballad. It’s never too late to piece yourself together, however slow it is to assemble your history and your identity. It’s never too late to embrace yourself, fragments and all. Every part makes up a whole, and makes you enough.

Meet the author

Ashley Jean Granillo is a Mexican American writer and educator hailing from the San Fernando Valley. She has her BA and MA in Creative Writing from California State University Northridge and holds her MFA in fiction from the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert. She is also a member of Las Musas, a collective of Latinx authors whose gender identity aligns with femininity. Her short story “Besitos” was featured in Where Monsters Lurk & Magic Hides, a Latine/x short story genre anthology. Cruzita and the Mariacheros (Lerner Publishing) is her debut middle grade contemporary novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/missashleyjeanwrites/

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Ashley Granillo’s Website: https://www.ashleygranillo.com

About Cruzita and the Mariacheros

Cruzita is going to be a pop star. All she has to do is win a singing contest at her favorite theme park and get famous. But she can’t go to the theme park this summer. Instead, she has to help out at her family’s bakery, which has been struggling ever since Tío Chuy died. Cruzita’s great-uncle poured his heart into the bakery—the family legacy—and now that he’s gone, nothing is the same.

When Cruzita’s not rolling uneven tortillas or trying to salvage rock-hard conchas, she has to take mariachi lessons, even though she doesn’t know how to play her great-grandpa’s violin and she’s not fluent in Spanish. At first, she’s convinced her whole summer will be a disaster. But as she discovers the heart and soul of mariachi music, she realizes that there’s more than one way to be a star―and more than one way to carry on a legacy.

ISBN-13: 9798765608500
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/02/2024
Age Range: 10-14

Filed under: Guest Post