First Teachers

I turned up the flame, turned the chiles in the skillet.

Watched them go from red to dark red to a dark, dark brown, just this side of burnt. The smell of the chile as I add a bit of this, a little of that, does something to my cells. When cooking foods, especially ancient, ancestral foods, I lose myself in time and thought. My mind wanders even if my hands are sure and steady, doing the same movements my Nana, her Nana and all our Nanas before us have done. It’s in the ancient rhythm of this sustenance labor that I often have my most profound realizations. My hands being guided by ancestral knowledge leave my mind untethered. Something that for me, who is always very much in my head, is a gift of respite.

I run the wooden spoon through the ground chiles, making a fine powder while the fire does its work.

It’s hard to be something you’ve never seen. Hard to imagine yourself doing something you have never seen someone like you ever do.

And yet, here some of us are. Teaching. Despite having few or any teachers who had a racial or ethnic or indigenous identity like our own.

While I had some fantastic teachers in my years of schooling all the way through to grad school, ones I will always be grateful for, I only once had a Latinx teacher. One who knew why you couldn’t cook the beans in the rinse water and had a Nana who pinched cheeks and called out ‘¡ Ay que chula!’ whenever you saw her. Mr. Muñoz taught Spanish when I was in 6th grade, so I only saw him that one year and only for one 45-minute class a week. But he looked and talked like my father, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned why even that brief class mattered so much to me.

And as a student, in the rest of the grades, in the rest of my classes, while I was never told explicitly that I should not bring my whole self to the classroom, the message was made clear, again and again, if I wanted to succeed academically, there were parts of who I was that were better off ‘left at home.’

And yet, when I think of who I am as a teacher, I know that what makes me good at what I do, is that I am rarely more fully myself than when I am teaching. It is where I, an introvert with pessimistic tendencies, come joyfully alive.

 I diced the garlic, the aroma bringing me right back to my aunt’s kitchen, shoulder to shoulder with my cousins, learning in, so close to each other I can smell my brother’s Big League Chew, all of us elbow deep in a huge pot as some adult pours hot liquid lard down from above. It burns our fingers, but not for long if we keep our hands moving. We knead the masa until it becomes fluffy and light. Light enough to spread on the husks. Husks that we’ll later fill with meat and chile and fold into a tamale as we sit around the kitchen table telling jokes, arguing, listening to music, and drinking too many sodas, while pot after pot bubbling away on the stove fill the whole house with steam.

Whenever I’m standing in front of my own tamale pot or some frying oil or a bag of beans that need to be sorted and rinsed, any time I am cooking this food, I go even further back. Back through the centuries. Taking in the comfort and the strength that comes from knowing these ingredients, these techniques, these rituals have been passed through the literal centuries, from my ancestors to me to my own children. It’s when I’m cooking that I realize those ancient dishes that take hours to make and minutes to devour, that I know where I first saw myself reflected in a teacher. Not in a classroom. No. I learned to teach from my first teachers. The ones who braided my hair and the ones who were gone long before I was ever born, gifted me with the skills and the knowledge of who I come from. Learning to make these dishes – tamales, tacos, frijoles, chilaquiles, fideos – these are things one must learn through hearts connected, with hands over hands. “Yes, yes. Do you feel that? The softness? That’s how you know it’s ready. You can tell by touch.”

When I teach writing or history or reading, I make stuff.  Students make stuff too. Hands covered in ink, desks scattered with papers, books and blocks and knowledge. All of us together, elbow deep. Hearts connected. Hands over hands.

The lessons I learned at the hands of my family are the lessons I pass on to those I am honored to teach.

Waste nothing.

All of the corn is used. From the husk to the fungus to the silk to the kernels. Every bit of the cow is used. Lengua, tripas, ojos. Every bit of the chile. Cactus. Every bit of everything has a purpose, a use. Everything can be made to be delicious.

Every material can be used as a resource. The store circulars thrown on the stoop become a treasure trove of adjectives and long vowel sound searches. The pipe cleaners and box of transparencies from the veteran teacher whose room I inherited transform into materials for the class makerspace. Every moment can be a lesson. The bee that flies in the window. The lightbulb that pops. The virus that turns everything upside down. The news, God, the news, is always there to be taught and guided through.

You don’t need a recipe.

I learned to cook not by reading but by love and necessity. By palms pressing together. By smell. By cell. Watching first from the highchair near the kitchen door. Always in the kitchen watching. Then doing when I was deemed old enough. Sorting. Washing. Mixing. Tasting. And smelling. And assembling. Then sharing. Everyone sitting at the table to eat the food. The food you made by hand. Everyone oohs and aahs. There is never a meal without gratitude. These are things that could never be written down. Or even if they did, they would be missing something. The size of the blue cup needed to measure with or the sound of the tortilla when it is ready to flip. 

Feedback should be brief and inspiring.

Even if everything was a disaster, you’d never know it by the clean plates. You’d only hear, ‘oh – so good!’ Then a pause, as if someone was having to dig deep to give any scrap of critique. ‘If there was just one thing to do differently – maybe try a bit more salt . . .’  Appreciation and one little tip after each completed dish was all that was required to keep a young cook going. 

Good cooking is dangerous.

I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 when I learned to warm my first tortilla. I placed it right on the burner, the blue flames lapping up the sides. Tiny fingers learning to grab and flip quickly. Knife skills, graters, jalapeño seeds – dangers are abundant in the kitchen.

At an early age I learned there are no safe spaces. This applies to so many things. There is no safe content. No safe tool. No words that are safe to use. There is no way to mitigate all risk. And perhaps, most importantly, I learned what it was to be a kid that an adult trusted. Fire, knives, spices that can burn, needed to be respected and learned. And also books, facts, sentences, deserve the same respect and understanding. And yes, sometimes you can and do get hurt.

As I reached into the deep rice pot, with a large wooden spoon Nana would have approved of, I felt so many things at once – wishing I had seen myself in more of my teachers, grateful more students are now, and profoundly humbled in the knowledge that I was taught first by those who knew and loved me best in ways that allow me to bring my whole and best teaching self to those I am honored to teach.

Dedicated to those who were murdered in Ulvade Texas, and to their families and first teachers who loved them.

This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Roberta Gardner (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog series).