Memorias from a Border Crosser's Notebooks on Wandering (excerpts)

I was a born a Mexican in the United States.My parents crossed the border a few months before my birth.Hecho en Mxico, born in the USA.My childhood was spent crossing borders, from the U.S./Mexico border whenever I went to visit my abuelos and parientes in Mexicali, to the linguistic borders as I switched between ingls and Spanish and back again.Growing up in a small farming community in Northern California, I spent a lot of time in the company of the sizable Mexicano community there.We were all products of migration; some came before, others later, often pulled by family that had settled there.Those of us born of migrant parents, we also carry that mark of migration like an invisible tattoo etched on our skin.As a child of Mexican immigrant parents, I was born and raised in Northern California, with frequent excursions to visit relatives in the northern Mexican border city of Mexicali.Though the drive took between 12 and 14 hours to complete, it was nothing for my young parents who found gas inexpensive and the pull of family to be stronger than 12 hours down the center of the state.In those frequent migrations from north to south and back again, we traveled through the borderlands that connected my family and made me a hyphenated Americano.English came into my life when I started school: I then became a Mexican American.My summers were spent in Mexicali, and my school year was spent in Northern California.Crossing borders was all my siblings and I knew.In my teens, my life was further upended when my parents got divorced and my sister, Santiago Vaquera-Vsquez is an unrepentant border crosser, ex-DJ, and Xicano writer.