Del Amo Scholarship

Junk Yard Girl

I am made of the nuts and bolts my grandparents found in their American street. My Lolo welded my shoulders together with his broken hubcaps and my Abuela carved my legs out of the wood crucifix above her bed. My mother screamed life into my tire rubber lungs during her years of survival. Each vein and bone that keeps my scrap metal upright was foraged in America and soldered with the heritage of my family. 

The food on the table was that of warmth and love. My family grew from metal to skin after years of ingesting floating Vienna sausages and melted wax cheese. Soon we were allowed to cherish our values and speak our language, those that would be understood in small pockets of the neighborhood. Days would go by when my grandparents’ eyes would turn to rust missing their homelands, and I mourned my tissue for the representation of their struggles. Now they are old and frail, still human organs and cartilage but bleeding their original constructions. 

Lolo bleeds fish scales and ube root. He smells of jackfruit and sand. He tells me one day we will leave and travel to his homeland, but we both know that he only speaks about inventions. 

Abuela cried holy water on her last days. Her teeth began to fall out and when they hit the ground they sprouted into dahlias. And even when wires were the only thing beating her heart she still slurred the Spanish songs of my childhood. Together we prayed for my future, that I would upgrade from my borrowed parts and grow into my own. So that I may be skin, and that I may take their sacrifice to places outside of the neighborhood. 

Now I pray alone, but with their words. I pray for adventure and health and that I can make my creators proud. To take their broken fingernails with me around the world so that I may become a human of all creations.
I was made in America, but I am not American-made. 

Lord, please give me the wrenches, hammers, nails, and drills I’ll need to journey to another place. A place where I can reunite with my Abuela’s eyes in the plaza square. A place where I can dance the way I used to on my loved one’s toes. Let me grow into the person I was meant to be, the real person, unobstructed by monotony. Allow me to inherit myself, and to build my hips out of Goya paintings, my ears out of fresh jamón, my jaw out of García Márquez’s words, and my fingernails out of castanets. 

Now I must become my own creator.