The Madonnas of Echo Park Read Online Free

comfortable with. Aurora’s chair was empty. Ms. O’Neill asked if anyone had seen her during the break. No one had.
    A week later, her name was no longer called in roll. I asked Ms. O’Neill what had happened to her.
    â€œAurora won’t be coming back,” she said.
    â€œThen how am I going to apologize?”
    â€œYou’ll have to find another way to do it.”
    Twenty-five years later, I think I have found my way, in the book you’re reading now. This is the story of Aurora Esperanza and why she disappeared, told through the people of Echo Park who ultimately led me back to her. And while I’ve changed some details to protect those who drifted in and through this project over the duration of its writing, these are their real voices. I want to add that everyone in this book insisted he or she was a proud American
first,
an American who happened to be Mexican, not the other way around. No one emphasized this more than Aurora. I
am
a Mexican, she said when I caught up with her, but
a Mexican
is not
all that I am.
To my surprise there were no hard feelings, and as we joked about that day (“I shouldn’t have picked a Madonna song!”), she was gracious enough to ask about my mother’s attempts to raise me as someone other than a Mexican in a curious rather than an accusatory way.
    â€œI don’t blame her,” she said. “I must confess—and I guess this
is
a confession—why would anyone want to be a Mexican in
this
country at a time like this?” I understood what she meant. When writingthis book, originally called
Amexicans
, there was such a vitriolic fever against illegal immigration (translation: Mexicans) that it made me grateful I had an Indian last name, and ashamed that I felt grateful.
    Aurora, if you are reading this (it wasn’t clear during our talk that you would), I have a confession of my own: I’m ready to dance with you. I’m ready to lace my still too-small-for-a-man fingers around your waist, ready to smell cotton-candy-scented shampoo in your long, black, curly hair as we sway our close but not touching hips to the beat of a song decades out of time. I won’t offer an apology, because you didn’t want one then, and I’m sure you have no need for one now.
    I’m ready to dance with you, Aurora. I hope you understand why I need to say that to you here, in this way: because a work of fiction is an excellent place for a confession.
    â€”B.S.

1

Bienvenidos
    W e slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours. Those who’d never been here before could at last see the Promised Land in the darkness; those who’d been deported and come back, only a shadow of that promise. Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running,
carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass. We run into this American dream with a determination to shed everything we know and love that weighs us down if we have any hope of survival. This is how we learn to navigate the terrain.
    I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become. In the rolling jade valleys of Elysian Park, my family lost their home in Chavez Ravine to the cheers of
gringos
rooting for a baseball teamthey stole from another town. Down the hill in Echo Park, I lost my wife—and the woman I left her for—when I ran out of excuses and they ran out of forgiveness. Across town, in Hollywood, I lost my job of eighteen years when a restaurant that catered to fashion and fame found its last