My daughter's language ideologies

The other day Lucero and Rosie were cleaning windows and other random surfaces in our apartment...for fun. This is the second time they've done it-- I wonder how long I can keep up this ruse. I remember how much fun my sister and I used to have cleaning windows when we were kids. It just felt so adult to use glass cleaner.

So Lucero says to me: "Mommy, you pretend we're maids and you tell us what to clean." Uh, okay? Felt sorta wrong, but whatever, I'll play. I ask the girls to clean the dirt off the front door. Then Lucero puts on a rural southern white accent as she says, "Well, ma'am, we cleaned the doors and windas and them thar shelves. Anything else we can do fer ya?" I was waiting for her to start whistling Dixie. I wondered if I was hallucinating the whole thing.

Have I ever mentioned the part where I spent a few years of grad school studying popular language ideologies toward non-standard dialects? So Lucero's little shtick was super fascinating to me. Not least of all because my daughters are Mexican-American, and if there's a stereotypical maid in Texas, it's gonna be Mexican/Mexican-American. So I was grooving on the fact that Lucero was shaking it up a bit. I asked her why she'd chosen the accent she had. She said it was just the first thing that came to her. What did I expect? "Well, mom, I was just having fun interrupting typical expectations about race and language, while reifying the correlation between class and blue collar labor."

Anyway, speaking of race and stuff, have you seen the first season webisodes of Awkward Black Girl?! It's so very awesome. I discovered it while reading about the hoopla over the whiteness of the new HBO series Girls over on Racialicious. Girls is about four upper-middle class white girls living in Brooklyn, leading really privileged lives. I watched the first episode because I love Judd Apatow--the producer and director of Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up, the movie that made me laugh so hard it triggered my labor with Rosie. There were some amusing parts of Girls, but I was shocked that it was such a narrow and already quite well-represented group of people. Plus all the actresses are privileged daughters of mucky-mucks. Yeah, no thanks. I mean, really, there are a lot of untold stories that are going to be interesting to a wide audience. And, something else I found through the same article...have you heard of Stevie Ryan? She's a white actress who does this stereotypical chola shtick called Little Loca. How it is not (a) totally racist, and (b) a crappy chola/chicana accent to boot?

Wildflower highlights

Every single day I think about all the things I want to post here. I want to post about what I think about the whole foofora over supposed French vs. American styles of parenting. About the significance of each of my three daughters' names: Lucero, Rosalía, and Magdalena. About the impending departure of our nephew, Cysko, back west. About Agapito and Lucero's back story. About why, at 35, I realize I still identify with social outsiders and outcasts more than middle-class mainstream America, despite living a relatively conventional life. Starting tomorrow I will have a short break from my academic writing (which includes final dissertation proofs and another article), and then I can windbag away.

This weekend we are taking the girls camping. Fortunately, we're doing it through an organization that provides all the gear, even tents, and we're going with other families from Lucero's Girl Scout Troop. Easy peasy, right? And given that baby Mags sleeps like crap at home, how much worse can it be sleeping on the ground? Famous last words, I know.

 A couple of weeks ago I got my hair done by an acquaintance who needed models in beauty school. I wanted medium brown with subtle highlights, which I've been doing for the last year. Well, my friend's supervisor did the highlights, and they turned out sort of...white. From afar it looked ambiguous between blonde and gray.  So I decided to try "brights," which is basically unnatural colored highlights. I used my old friend, Manic Panic. It had been since my early 20s that I'd used that stuff, and it worked great! We even did a couple of plum strands on Rosie's hair, minus pre-bleaching, so it was sweetly subtle. Unfortunately, hers wouldn't really show up in pics. Here are pics of mine. I used a combo of "violet" which was more indigo, and turquoise.

Easter in The Valley

I have been a crappy poster of late. Magdalena has been sick off and on for a few weeks with a stubborn ear infection, and I was trying to finish an article whose deadline had passed. I finished the article, but now my final final dissertation draft is due on Monday. So this weekend I will be burning the midnight oil while Agapito "enjoys" the company of all three girls solo. Oh, and did I mention we're in the middle of looking for a house? Gulp.  

We went to The Valley last weekend to attend Valerie and Alex's baby shower, and to celebrate Easter with the girls' cousins and grandparents. My favorite part is always the cascarones. They are brightly dyed hollowed-out eggs filled with confetti, to be cracked over unsuspecting nephew's and husband's heads. 

 

The picture below is the girls with their cousins, in the backyard of their grandma's childhood home. This is family related through Vanessa's side (as are all the folks in The Valley).

At this point, Rosie has no awareness that Lucero is "more related" to everyone in The Valley than she is. I wonder if she'll ever have an ah-ha moment, or if it will be something that she doesn't even think about. She's never asked if Grandma and Popo (Vanessa's folks) aren't her "real" grandparents, even though she knows about Vanessa and that they are Vanessa parents. And the girls have never questioned if Nana (my mom) or Grandpapa (my step-dad) are more related to Rosie than Lucero. It's hard to know how they see it, and I don't want to try fix something that isn't broke by probing too deeply. My daughters are just so darn well-adjusted. I'm not bragging. It's really quite puzzling. And I'm not saying it's even my doing. Okay, maybe a little my doing.  Maybe it's because I sit around worrying and analyzing everything enough for our whole family? As Agapito says, I think about everything "6 ways til Sunday."

Speaking of Agapito, here's a picture of him at the baby shower, having just successfully tied his shoe despite the intrusive "baby bump." This is the face he makes when he's accomplished something against all odds, usually with a little skullduggery. For instance, in this case he maneuvered an arm under the pillow, because you know how women are able to just reach through the belly to get to our shoe laces. What I love most is that he looks like he's doing a Greek or Russian folk dance.  

 If I were a rich man, zaddy zaddy zaddy zaddy zaddy zaaaah....