I’m a grafted flower that didn’t
take, a Mexican without being one, an American without feeling like one. So begins the English translation of Raquel Valle-Sentíes’ most widely published poem, “Soy Como Soy, y Que,” or, “I am who I am, so what?” Valle-Sentíes, 82-year-old artist, poet and playwright, lives in Laredo, Texas, — the state’s tenth-most-populous city and the busiest truck crossing on the U.S. – Mexico border. The city is about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio and 210 miles northeast of where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. For a brief period during an 1840 rebellion, it was the capital of the Republic of the Rio Grande. Ninety-five percent of Laredo’s population is Hispanic or Latino. Valle-Sentíes’ home is awash with various collections: A glass cabinet in the living room is devoted to Marilyn Monroe figurines of various sizes, while another is home to “Gone With the Wind”-themed plates and little Scarlett O’Haras in various positions of swoon. Frida Kahlo self-portraits peer down from multiple prints and Valle-Sentíes’ own oil paintings and watercolors cover most walls. She lives here with a small white dog Angel, who has cataracts, and her son Juan Manuel, her second-oldest. Valle-Sentíes has lived and raised her children in both the United States and Mexico, and like so many who live at the border, this binational community helped form the core of who she is. Yet she said she has never felt “American” nor “Mexican,” but an outsider in both cultures. Her unease with national identity has fueled paintings, poems and plays. But Valle-Sentíes’ other muse is Laredo — where she grew up, then left for Mexico, then returned to — this third culture that feels somehow more than the sum of its two parts. A place where she feels her two inherited cultures find symbiosis. But throughout her life-long love affair with this place, she admits Laredo has changed. Tourists are more rare. The international bridge to Mexico is slower and more difficult to cross. She recalls Laredo as a cocoon in her youth: a largely homogeneous community, where all her friends had proud Mexican heritage but didn’t think much about race, ethnicity or national identity.
“Race, even the word, was alien to me,” she said. “I had never heard of that in Laredo. I knew absolutely nothing about anything except Laredo.” She distinctly remembers how that changed when she began studying art at Texas Woman’s College in 1955. She says it wasn’t a hostile or unfriendly environment, just noticeably different from the small swath of Texas she had always known. “I enjoyed being with Anglos because we were all Mexican here,” Valle-Sentíes said. But she would soon drop out of school and move to Veracruz, Mexico, after a whirlwind romance and marriage to the Mexican baseball player Juan Manuel Sentíes, a lefty who rarely stayed with a team more than one season. She fell for him in high school. “When he came to bat I could see him. He was gorgeous,” she said. “I heard them announce his name and fell in love.” Weeks later, she saw him hanging out on the sidewalk with other Laredo Apaches players while she was walking around with a friend from school. She recalled her friend saying, “Raquel, we can’t talk to strangers.” Valle-Sentíe’s response? “Well I can.” After back-and-forth letters she married him in 1956 and moved to his hometown of Veracruz where he had started playing for the Rojos del Águila de Veracruz, or Veracruz Red Eagles. She would live there for the next 23 years. It was in Veracruz where she began to write poetry. It was the first time she felt like an outsider, the first time she really thought about identity. In the United States, she felt Mexican. In Mexico, she says she was in “culture shock.” She felt lonely in a new house, in a new country where her husband was often away for games. She writes about her wedding day in the poem “Repercussion”: ...I walked out of Holy Redeemer Church into the warm September morn, smiled for the camera, left the border and entered into exile. Her first son was born in 1957. Valle-Sentíes has five sons and drove more than 700 miles to give birth to her last three children. But it wasn’t so they would be United States citizens. She made the journey because a miscarriage in Veracruz after second son Juan Manuel had been born left her terrified. They were twins. But she didn’t know that at first. After significant bleeding, her doctor sent her home and told her she’d be fine. “But then I was washing myself and I felt feet,” she said. “It was a little girl.” She felt safer delivering in the United States. She stayed with her parents, who still lived in Laredo. Her father was a U.S. Customs inspector for most of his career. She moved back to Laredo with her sons in 1978. Her children had to learn English. She had to make ends meet. With a push from her husband, she opened the city’s first appliance-rental store — tractors, mowers, things like that — and kept it going even when it became clear their separation would be permanent. Her husband never joined his family in Laredo. She says it was a bad marriage but avoids talking about specifics. She divorced her husband in the late 1980s, but their wedding photos still take up a large section of green wall in her home. The return to her Laredo was Valle-Sentíes’ renaissance: She began taking art and writing classes at Laredo Community College, and when professors encouraged her to submit work to regional contests, she won. She writes in English and Spanish, often mixing in the same work, “because that’s the way I talk,” she said. After 18 years Valle-Sentíes left the rental business to focus on her art and has now authored three plays, one of which won the Chicano Literary Prize from the University of California, Irvine in 1990. Her poetry has been published in three anthologies and her art has appeared in group and solo shows in Laredo, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; La Mesilla, New Mexico; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and elsewhere. She was inducted into the Laredo Women’s Commission Hall of Fame in 2004. Valle-Sentíes is still writing poetry. It’s still about Laredo, ever-changing Laredo. “Soy Como Soy, y Que” finishes with this homage to contradictions: Soy la contradicción andando. En fin como Laredo, soy como soy y qué. I’m a walking contradiction. In other words, like Laredo, I am what I am. So what? |