Or in English: neither from here, nor there. I am right in between—both places, both languages, both worlds making up who I am.

My first semester teaching, I had a student who made me feel like I was looking at a mirror. She was a young woman, a language broker, a first-generation Mexican-American with family who lives in the same state in Mexico where my Abuela was born. She longed for Mexico the way I long for Mexico.

Listening to her speak was the first time I heard someone use the words I often use to describe the place I sit between these two cultures, the place we straddle in between. She had dark hair and light skin, she wore hoop earrings, and her writing showed how much love she had for her family. In class discussions, she was often quiet, but her writing assignments were full of thoughtful questions I wished I had better answers for. I told myself that I wouldn’t have favorite students, so I won’t say she was my favorite. But I will say that she made a profound impact on me. Her presence in my classroom taught me who I want to be as a teacher.

After a conversation with her during student hours where we bonded over our shared love for Harry Styles, I told a colleague how much she reminded me of who I was when I first started learning about our identity. He said, “teach her what you wish you would’ve been taught at that age.”

In that semester, I tried to give her everything I’ve learned, everything I had been deprived of.

I read José Antonio Burciaga often. His words speak value in what I do as a person and now as an educator. I included his essays in my syllabus in hopes that they would speak to my students as much as they speak to me. My student’s reading reflection on Burciaga’s essay on the damaging silence of our culture and language included so many of the words I used to describe his work when I read him for the first time that I wondered if I’d shared all those things with the class before they read it, and then I realized: we all feel like this.

It seemed to me as though she was having the same eye-opening experiences I had when I first encountered the readings I use in my class. After we read “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” by Sandra Cisneros, my student said something about how there seems to be a desperate need to believe in a higher power, and how this is ingrained into the lives of marginalized people. This resonated with the stories of suffering, strength, and survival my Abuela told me.

After class, I spent the day thinking about that truth. Maybe we have to believe in God because no one else is pulling for us. And maybe having faith is really just a hope that things will be better someday. I thought about a story my Abuela told me. Before my Abuela converted to Protestant Christianity, she was a devoted Catholic. When my Aunt Elizabeth got sick and needed surgery as a toddler, my Abuela promised she would crawl on her knees and carry her daughter to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe if she would perform a miracle and heal her. My aunt was healed, through medicine or a miracle, I’m not sure, but my Abuela kept her promise. She walked on her knees to the Basílica and gave thanks for her daughter’s health. My Abuela said that the skin on her knees was gone, and that night she had a fever. But to her, that was a small sacrifice for her daughter’s health.

Later, when my class read “From a Native Daughter” by Haunani-Kay Trask, my students and I talked about how Hawaiian culture was erased because of white historians writing history and how much of Hawaiian culture has only been preserved because of the oral tradition of telling stories. My student pointed out the same is true of our culture. Our history is not written. It is told—passed down from generation to generation, story after story repeated so that we do not forget.

I wanted to tell her I was writing this so that I would not forget. But I wondered if writing rather than telling a story out loud is rejecting the oral tradition. 

There are some professors who, when I stop and think about the way they have enriched my life, I recognize that I would be a different person if I hadn’t had their class. I would be a poorer version of myself. I wouldn’t think or care about the things that I care about. I learned things in their classrooms that completely shifted the way I see and engage with the world. These professors were almost exclusively white men. And their classes rarely, if ever, included work written by nonwhite writers. I spent that semester hoping I’d give my students what I wished I had received. At the end of the term, my student and I got together for one last meeting. I asked her how she felt about the class. She told me all her teachers had been white, and that “after the first day of class, I told my mom and dad about you.”