Kiss and Don’t Tell
I almost vomited after my first kiss. The boy was three years older than me and in high school, but came to my junior high school dance in 1982. Cool Latino boys were either Cholos or rockabillies in that era. The Stray Cats were popular then and when their song “Rock this Town” came on over the speakers, everyone jumped to the dance floor.
That night the Virgil Junior High School gym was transformed. The usual bright white fluorescent lights were turned off and the school’s theater lights were placed throughout the gym, casting large circles of red, green, and blue light. A spinning mirror ball hung from the center of the gym, shooting rainbow shapes everywhere, creating walls and students that sparkled. I felt excited. Teachers lurked around but there were no parents chaperoning. Because our school was over 90 percent immigrants, mostly from Latin America but some from Asia too, our parents did not understand the practice or cultural expectation to be a part of the school life. To my Salvadoran mom, the school was a place of learning and she could not understand why the teachers would support a school dance.
My mom had no choice but to let me go. My rage scared her. I had stored up five years of resentments inside my petite body and took any opportunity offered to let it spew out.
“You are not ironing that shirt well,” she said to me one morning a few weeks after my arrival to the US. I shot her a hard, cold stare.
“And who’s fault is that?” I replied in a drawn out staccato, letting the space between each word land on her with the weight of the many long nights I cried after she left me in El Salvador when I was seven.
She had walked into the bathroom, the only place where anyone could have privacy in the single room apartment we shared at the time. I heard her cry and I felt pleased with myself, but also a little guilty. After that, she was careful with her words and even how she looked at me. When I found out about the dance, I just told my mom I was going. The forced separation from her leaving to work in the US had ruptured our parent/child relationship beyond repair. Going to school and learning English had acculturated me to mainstream US society–my mother and her old ways had no chance.
I came to the dance with Carmen and Regina, two Salvadoran sisters who lived a few apartment buildings away from mine. We met because Carmen, the eldest and prettiest of the two, was dating Eulises, a young man on the 5th floor of my building. The sisters would come to our building and hang out. Carmen had been in the US two years, just like me, but Regina had just arrived. My mom liked these girls much more than my previous neighbors–two Chicana girls my mom called “fast.” Regina and Carmen still had “polvo detras de las orejas/dust behind the ears,” a common saying in El Salvador to describe people who came from the countryside. Carmen and Eulises were already dancing while Regina and I stood huddled together against a wall.
We saw each other from across the dance floor. He wore skinny jeans, a short sleeve button down shirt, and platform wingtip shoes. His hair was rolled at the front into a pompadour. I stood in a striped black and white tube top, baggy beige pants with a well ironed crease in the front, and black Chinese slippers. My hair was parted in the middle, with each side blow dried and sprayed into perfect arches. The kids I was hanging with liked to slow dance to oldies, holding each other tight and heads up high, mugging anyone who happened to glance at them. When fast paced rock songs came on, my crew would clear the dance floor. I, on the other hand, have always loved to dance to any music, but I preferred upbeat songs. That night, we danced a few songs together–the rockabilly and the wannabe chola.
Even then I unconsciously knew that gangbanging was not for me. What attracted me to this boy was that he was unlike any other I had contact with. He also welcomed fast paced music and was not shy about moving his body in bigger and more exaggerated ways. At a time when the goal was to fit in and be accepted, his style and way of being seemed to scream–be free. I liked that.
The following week he picked me up from school, waiting for me outside the junior high school. He stood next to the fence many kids would climb to ditch school. As our eyes met, he beamed. I felt nervously elated. Here was a boy who liked me. A boy that offered me the possibility to not conform to the rest of the kids I knew. We walked together, talking fast to work out our nerves. He told me stories about what it was like to be in high school and about the bands he liked. When we were a few blocks away from my family’s apartment, I told him I had to go to the gas station’s bathroom to change my clothes.
“If my mother sees me wearing this, she will kill me,” I said, pointing to my baggy pants.
He nodded agreement and waited for me outside. As I changed into tight-fitting jeans, I worried that he would notice how skinny and flat chested I was. I wondered if my slight frame would be a turn off. None of the other Cholo boys liked me as a girlfriend, seeing me as their little sister. They preferred my friends who were rellenitas, plump as in chile rellenos. Girls who, even at age thirteen, were already wearing C cup bras while I was an A cup; at times I still wore training bras. When I walked out, he looked me up and down and he smiled approvingly. For the first time in my life, I was not embarrassed by my flat chest and skinny legs.
We kissed between a wall and a 1970s AMC Gremlin in my apartment’s garage. It was a dark place that smelled of gasoline and grease. Each resident had a parking spot and they would line up piles of used oil cans and vehicle repair tools next to their cars. I guided him to a parking spot around the corner from where my stepdad Rodrigo parked. Even though he was still at work, I did not want to run the risk of him finding us. I was standing against the wall and he came in for the kiss. As he turned his head to the side to not upset his perfectly shaped pompadour, I could smell his strong cologne and it reminded me of the cheap Paco Roban cologne my stepfather wore. Then his shy kiss gained force and speed as he pushed his wet tongue into my mouth. I was shocked and horrified by the intensity of having another person’s body part in me. As his tongue dug into my mouth, I felt a strong wave of nausea rise from the pit of my stomach. I pushed him away and ran out without saying a word. I jumped over a pile of oil cans that sat in front of my neighbor’s car and stepped onto the sidewalk. Opening the gate to my building, I felt relieved.
I walked into an empty apartment and threw my backpack on the sofa. Our two-bedroom apartment was on the bottom floor of a building in Pico Union, with a dingy brown carpet and a large brown, black, and maroon flowered sofa bed my mom and Rodrigo would pull out to sleep. All our furniture, house wear, and photo frames came from la Pulga, flea markets where clothes sold for a dollar and you could get even the most expensive furniture piece for under $100. Nothing in the apartment was aesthetically pleasing, but all surfaces were spotless. A floral picture frame sat next to a red and white checker frame on a bookshelf that some child had written a few letters on with a sharpie. Rodrigo’s sisters Maria and Carolina occupied one bedroom. They had arrived from Mexico only a couple of months ago and were undocumented like the rest of us, but because they were gueritas, these “white girls” looked down on my mother, my brother, and me. My brother Rene and I shared the other bedroom. I took a deep breath, looked around and appreciated the quiet. Running into the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and saw a scared little girl trying hard and fast to be a young woman. I brushed my teeth vigorously. When I walked out, I was glad to be alone. I surveyed all the work I had to do in the next two hours, deciding to never do that again with any boy.
My brother was still at school in his afterschool program, where I would pick him up that evening at five. Rodrigo worked at a factory making car parts and did not leave work for a few hours, and my mom never came home before nine. When she finished cleaning houses, she would go directly to the building we cleaned together at night. My job was to cook dinner for everyone, pick up my brother and feed him, and then meet my mother. I got to work.
Almost 20 years later I realized why, instead of feeling pleasure and excitement, that kiss made me sick. That was not my first kiss, which happened when I was eight years old. My aunt’s boyfriend walked into my room in the middle of the night in the Santa Tecla cinder block track housing in El Salvador. The room did not even have a door; instead, a cotton curtain hung at the entrance, separating it from the long and narrow “everything” room. The kitchen consisted of a two-burner stove that sat on a narrow table with a propane tank underneath. A small dining table with four pine chairs was the only furniture, except for a compact TV sitting on a coffee table near the front entrance. This house was so much better than any of the homes my other relatives lived in. Their homes were one room adobe shelters with a round covered porch that held a fire pit and the grinding stones, along with a table for eating. There was no electricity or running water.
I have debated many times if my auntie was aware of what took place. As he knelt beside my bed, he too had smelled of cheap cologne. As he searched for my lips, he put his hand on my vagina. I was half asleep and confused. I could not understand why his mouth was on mine and why it was so wet with saliva. His breath was unlike anyone’s breath I had ever smelled, perhaps because I also smelled his sweat. He too pushed his tongue into my mouth with force and urgency. I held my breath and froze. My body was still but my lips stiffened and tightened. Then I heard my aunt Marina’s voice in the other room, laughing. Marina is one of my mother’s younger sisters who came to live with us to take care of me when I was born. She was my second mother. He heard her as well and abruptly walked out of the room without saying a word.
I laid there thinking, “Did that really just happen?” I never opened my eyes while he was touching me because I was too afraid to face that moment. The next morning, I put it out of my head and never said anything to anyone about it. I knew I was afraid of being physically punished for not being compliant.
There were many memories of what was done to me and others in my childhood that I blocked. I recalled the brutality I witnessed others endure, like my aunt’s beating of my little brother Rene. Rene is developmentally disabled as a result of an infection he survived as a child. He would often make mistakes and she would beat him to force him to change his behavior. I remembered when she tied Rene to the security bars of one of the backyard windows and hit him with a piece of rope. He cried and cried and then got on all fours, crawling under a pila, seeking protection under the cement sink. He stayed there crying until nightfall.
I was not alone in my experience with my aunt's boyfriend. Over the years I learned of six family members who had been sexually molested by their male parent figure or an uncle. One of the sources of greatest tension between my mother and I was my objection to how readily and warmly she has welcomed all the men who have sexually abused children in my family. The latest was Francisco, my cousin who was found guilty and served time for sexually molesting his three disabled children.
“How could little Casandra know how a man smells down there after a day’s work?” my cousin Teresa asked, expressing her own distress. Casandra was the second oldest of the three and the only girl.
Teresa stood four inches shorter than me. And that is short, given that at four feet eleven inches I am taller than all my aunts and most of my female cousins. She was furious at her mother Andrea for letting Francisco live with her after he got out of jail.
Teresa looked me in the face and asked in disbelief: “How can my mom welcome that man back into the house? He abused her grandchildren!” But her eyes told me that she already knew the answer. Twenty years back, Teresa had been molested by her stepdad in the US. Andrea, furious, sent Teresa back to El Salvador to live with her grandmother as punishment for “having seduced her man.”
I could imagine how little Teresa must have felt being plucked from downtown Los Angeles and dropped into an adobe house in a rural hamlet. Her grandmother Victoria and my mother’s eldest sister lived there without electricity or running water. When I too was sent to the countryside as a child, I remembered how a feeling of dread would settle over me when the sun went down and the only lights we had came from two kerosene lamps in my grandmother’s house. One lamp sat on her altar in the room where we all slept and the other on the table where we ate our meals. My grandparents, their youngest child David, and my cousins Maria and Jaime lived in this house full time. I only visited during the holidays and summer vacation. The burning wood from under the fire pit would light up the kitchen enough for my grandmother to serve us food from the clay pots that sat in el fogón. Victoria’s house that welcomed Teresa was just like my grandmother’s and that of most poor Indians like our family lived.
After three years of forced exile in El Salvador, Teresa was allowed to return to Los Angeles. At family gatherings, Teresa made everyone crack up with laughter when she told stories of her life in El Salvador after living in the US for so long. The story that got the biggest laugh was the one of seeing a white man at a market in Santa Tecla, the second largest city in El Salvador.
“After two years of not seeing white people, I could not believe my eyes,” she said, speaking fast. “There in the middle of the market was a towering gringo. He was young and handsome,” she continued. “I started to push people out of the way and almost tripped to get to him. All I wanted to say was, ‘Can I come and clean your house? I will do it for free!’”
Whoever was in the room could not help but let out a loud laugh. Never mind that we all knew the reason she was sent back at age thirteen was because her mother blamed her for the sexual assault. My family used humor to face the harsh moments of life without falling into a pit of despair. We had a talent of sharing the most traumatic moments of our lives in jokes. Instead of sharing the pain of having her mother blame her for being raped and then being forcefully exiled, Teresa made fun of herself by her pointing out she missed her life in the US so much that she would even do what we all hated to do as little girls–clean the homes of rich white people.
I have not inherited my family’s humor as a way to release pain. I tend to hold it in and express it in the tightness of my muscles. My partner and I have a standing joke. Sometimes when she kisses me unexpectedly, my lips are “as tight as a statue’s asshole” she says. For me intimacy does not come easily. I need to be rested, feeling emotionally and spiritually resourced, and be the initiator to be open. What I did not have as a girl.
Years before the field of somatics was developed, I experienced a clear visual of where the sexual assaults lived in my body during a body work session. I saw a red, orange, and yellow golf ball sized circle sitting and pulsating on the front of my sacrum. Thin tentacles extended outwards and dug into my muscles, tendons, and bones like an English ivy vine crawling into small crevices. The roots dug deep into my left hip bone, paralyzing me. But I also saw some movement, like the mesmerizing sway of an algae forest in the sea at night. In my heart, I knew I could uproot this injury.
It is not a coincidence that the left side of my body is much tighter than my right. When I sit on the floor cross-legged, my left knee is a good seven inches off the ground. It is my left hip that often bothers me after a long day’s walk. The pain of trauma is less than before. The muscles and tendons that were trapped by the roots of my trauma are rebuilding themselves. One by one they return to being stronger than before, while never forgetting. Sometimes when I am quiet and relaxed, I visualize my fiery golf ball. I drop into the gentle sway of the flames. I stretch my body and take up as much room as I can, knowing the injury is not my life. As my body sways, I imagine its color shift from red to yellow to white to nothingness.
About the Author
Ámate Cecilia Pérez (pronouns: she-we) is a decolonizing Nahuah from Kuzcatlan (El Salvador) and the founding director of Decolonizing Race and the Latinx Racial Equity Project. She is also a race equity and liberation trainer, an organizational development consultant, a social justice warrior and a writer. She works with movement building organizations, non-profits, unions, government agencies and foundations to increase their impact and organizational effectiveness. Ms. Perez has directed multiple national and transnational organizations. Prior to her social justice experience, Ámate worked as a print and radio journalist. Ms. Perez and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980s, grew up in the Central American community in Los Angeles, and benefited from the 1986 immigration reform law. She has a B.A. from UCSD and a master’s in journalism from UCB. Ámate is queer, a martial artist and mother. She now lives in Inverness, CA on unseeded and occupied Coast Miwok and Tamal Indian territory.