Mago is a nickname for Margarita in Spanish, as Jim is for James and Liz for Elizabeth in English. But my name has many possible nicknames, and I think I’ve been called all of them at one point or another: Mago, Maga, Marga, Margot, Márgara and even Margarota since the “ita” ending in Spanish is a diminutive. But for my family I’m just Tita. Back in my school years, if you phoned my house and asked for me, you would surely have gotten my mother (I’m named after her). Since her entire life my Mom has been Marga, my papi decided from the beginning of my life that I would simply be Tita. Many of my relatives believe that it’s my legal name and would never dare call me Margarita.
You would think that I’m about to ‘fess up to having multiple personalities, but no. Actually, it’s a rather sad memory of when I was twelve years old. How to begin? It has to do with discrimination and the healing effect of the human touch.
During my elementary school years in California, I was a sad kid, I had no friends, nor did I know how to go about making some. So there you have me: quiet, obedient, wanting only to please, chubby and Mexican. As kids would be (I know now), they would pick on me precisely because of these characteristics: I tended to get good grades, I was chubby and Mexican. I guess it’s understandable, something you can explain now, but if you’re seven or eleven and lonely, with no skills to take care of yourself, and you’re being followed everyday by a red-headed, freckled-face, chubby boy named Mark, calling you names that have to do with your nationality and your food, you immediately start wondering what can be wrong with you, until you decide that there definitely has to be something wrong with you. There just has to; otherwise, why would Mark bother to walk by your side every day calling you names while still sitting on his bike, and you keep walking home, head stubbornly down, face burning red, pretending he’s not there?
Of course, I know I can’t and I must not tell my parents. Why create confusion? At home I’m the silly one, the one that makes others laugh. The lovable home clown. So I learn to separate my family life from my school life. And my beloved parents cannot even fathom the reality that I was living at school.
Like the visible upset of my fith grade homeroom teacher because I had the number one spot in her multiplication tables contest. Like the kids behind me at the water fountain saying “yuck” and running off because they could not bring themselves to drink from where I had drank. Like Cathy and Jeff getting mad at me and bringing up my nationality because I said no to taking a puff from their cigarette. Like not being able to make friends with Ruth Sandoval, based exclusively on the facts that we both were Mexican and spoke Spanish, in spite of what good-intentioned teachers might have wanted the outcome to be.
Then, after several years, I’m sent back to Mexico for sixth grade. I was enrolled in the Catholic parochial school “San Agustin de la Rosa,” just a few blocks from home.
There I discovered friendship and the wonderful warmth that comes with the acquired sense of belonging without really having to do anything special except be yourself. I make my first best friend, Baudelia. I hang out with the girls in my class. And forgotten is my sadness. I’m still too young to analyze or make comparisons. This is simply the way it’s here, different from how it is over there.
One sunny day, I’m just standing there when a classmate, Sergio Hernandez, whom we all called “El Negro” (literally “The Black One” because his skin was noticeably darker than the majority of brown skinned kids). But calling him El Negro to his face was not a criticism, but an endearment, something that said that though he looked different than the rest of us, he was completely included and accepted. As a matter of fact, El Negro was an extremely popular kid in my grade. The same happened at home, I call my sister La Flaca (the skinny one, though she's not, unless you compare her to me); she calls me La Gorda; we have an extremely tall uncle, and every one calls him El Pequeno (the small one). All these nicknames happen within the circle of family and friendship.
Anyway, I’m standing there, I see El Negro running towards me. He stops right in front of me and touches my forearm saying “Oye, Mago…” (Listen, Mago). Whatever followed is totally erased from my memory. This is all I have left from this brief encounter with a classmate with whom I was not even close friends.
And honestly, this is all that matters. I remember looking at his dark hand on my arm, and then he is gone. I’m left staring at my arm with one repetitive thought going round and round in my mind. “I’m touchable. I’m touchable. I’m touchable.”
Told you that it was about the healing effect of the human touch.
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