*Archive, Organized by Chronology*
from box of Old Slides, 1961 – 1971
1. A woman approaches in a high-neck, dark blue and white and pink floral sundress. She is sharp on the side of a heat-waved road. The dark green trees behind her have their crispness too, but the dizzy edges would indicate that the photographer is falling down, losing focus. It’s a beautiful, bright blue and cumulus day nonetheless.
2. The man looks kind and commanding. He is in a gray suit in front of a fountain with a muscular sea god and iron lion sculpture in the distance. Pigeons lie at the man’s feet, waiting, not flying above. The buildings, towers, and old apartments behind him must have been lighter, granite once.
3. A little boy in white shorts, pleats ballooning out of his small body, stands beside and between 5 large taupe Corinthian columns. The image is blurry. It’s ominous isn’t it? The vulnerable boy alone, something shaken about the camera.
4. A man in a gray tweed coat looks out, concerned, pensive, but not disheveled. His white dress shirt is buttoned up to the neck, and he wears a black tie. He stands in front of a three-sided, open wooden structure with flat, one-story houses behind. The ground is dusty and brown. If he were in the desert, the bright light would make sense.
5. The forest behind the woman is lush, light, and dark, light and dark green. What looks like fir and pine make little sense together. She looks steady out at us. It’s a look that confuses whether or not the car is moving because of her eye, softening in feeling like a goodbye, a slow clouding away. The car is navy, a good deep kind of navy. Her elbow hangs out, her hand hangs out, the windows are down. She loves us, and the car shines clean.
6. She looks at him with love. This is supposed to be an exercise in objectivity, in saying what needs to be said, in removing the first person, but that love is hard to exclude even if it’s maudlin. The sun, once more, is shockingly bright. He wears navy and gray and has dark receding hair. She has black-brown, sumptuous waved hair. Her skirt suit shimmers silver in the sun. Her lips are coral. Her necklace, beaded pink baubles. She wears pantyhose and black pumps even in the heat. It should not be neglected (because watches are often important to people) that he wears a watch with a thin brown wristband and a white face, likely analog. His eyes, squinting in the sun, question the camera. The building behind them is brick and has wrought white iron abstraction to act as posts, likely one-story. Perhaps someone will bring them salt as a housewarming present because a new apartment would be the only good explanation for the picture.
7. Blue again. This time at a motel, with a baby? Pale blue rows of rooms with the slightest pink and blue patterned curtains stand above a parking lot. Two cars in the image, reflecting like mirrors they’re so clean, are blue as well. The man in the tan coat steps into a spotless white vehicle. A woman (an older nurse?) stands in the background beside the other car door. She holds a baby wearing white. The man and the baby have tan skin, dark hair. The nurse-mother-grandmother has fair skin, dirty blonde curling hair. She holds the bundle of child across her, its front body facing us. One of the hands dangles, one of the feet dangles. They’re reaching out towards us, wriggling out of grasp.
8. Blue sky in the afternoon, dead trees. A little boy holds onto an ornate painted white iron bench, smiling mother(?) looking on. What’s eerie is that you cannot see their faces at all because the image blurs so much. Perhaps the photographer had shaky hands again. What happened to them? The photographer, the boy, the woman.
9. A baby boy in a pale blue babysuit and a wool, warm, light beige sweater, looks down and smiles a few front teeth at a wooden floor somewhere indoors. An old but not yet frail woman holds up his baby body. She wears glasses and looks surprised yet happy. Does she have three hands to hold him up? No. A man in the picture, with a shaved head, ears that frown out, holds up the little boy as well. The woman’s hand hovers above his. The two of them wear thick gold rings, and their hands and the baby's hand converge in the frame. The man holds a large (a bit taller than the little boy) pale pink and white feline plush toy of some sort. His hand clutches its neck, tied around in a pink ribbon, tightly. Its eyes bulge, and its tongue lolls out. The four of them stand next to a bureau with an unclosed drawer, and a white patch of fabric peeks out.
10. A mother holds a well-groomed, lovely baby girl with combed black bangs clipped back just so. Her cheeks are soft, and she dresses like a little princess with a light pink dress strung with small pom-poms. The mother looks away because the sun is in her eyes? They have healthy and dark features.
11. A little boy is jumping, seemingly off of or on some playground equipment or another elevated surface given the perspective of the photographer. He is blurred out of focus, and a little girl is looking elsewhere. She smiles but not at the camera.
12. Children dressed in white and black, run around a porch and the grass beside it with white and blue balloons. A tall (relative to the children) woman stands just so a fern obscures her face. The sun seems to be setting, but they are still enjoying themselves.
13. A boy, dressed for an occasion, with his off light brown bangs cut a bit too short and a navy collared shirt buttoned all the way up to the top. He holds a Scrabble for Juniors box. He looks off — bored — like he’s ready for something more. There is a man with his hair combed to the side in a striped shirt with one button undone at the top and a person with long, dark brown hair whose face we cannot see. They look beyond this Scrabble boy who is speaking with someone offscreen. In focus, in the background, a boy buttoned up in green and grey looks downtrodden, towards the ground. Something must have happened. Something always happens at birthday parties.
14. Three children are wearing buttoned up clothes. There are two boys, collared like the rest of them. A girl in white, silk white and patterned scarf around her eyes, is trying to draw something on a poster of a pig. It looks like a ritual because little girls always wear white dresses at rituals like weddings. An older woman and another littler girl off to the left side are directing her as she approaches the white sheet with the pig drawn in a simple black outline, their mouths agape—yelling or gasping.
15. He stands near fir trees in a patterned sweater, hair slicked to the side, and he reaches for or misses a white soccer ball. The shadows hit the ball just so it looks like a whole, pure, perfect circle.
16. Kids are swimming. They are bronzed, and the pool is so very green-blue. We stand on the edge. One girl gasps for air as the boy reaches around her. Another girl, standing on the brink out of water, reaches out to help a third girl.
17. Two children sit under a white gazebo in the distance. A tree, a mangrove of sorts, hangs precariously luscious. The girl is in a red sweater. ~~Their facial expressions are hard to make out.~~
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The girl is my mother. The girl was my mother as a child. The boy is her brother, my tío Carlos. I miss them. I miss them though they’re living. I never even knew Carlos, but I miss him nonetheless. I miss The Questioning Man and The Beautiful Loving Woman (though the personalities may really be inverted) — my grandparents. I miss them living, really living, though they aren’t quite dead yet.
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*Many Little Beginnings*
1965 – 1974, organized by guesses
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I set the mood for these past-time daydreams in a way that feels performative. The lights are off. The slide projector, which I have mastered, glows and sings its fan breath. I play mournful Argentine folklore from Tucumán (though I prefer the folklore chileno, though my abuelos were from the city Buenos Aires). Mom says abuelo would play Los Fronterizos at parties back in Miami. “Adentro,” the men singing tell us, “Inside, come inside.” I dip and duck and flail into the photos I love or the bad, forgotten photos where I can insert myself so that they can be remembered. Does it matter that I am in western Massachusetts and not an urban or rural hub of the Southern Cone? ¿Quién sabe? Who knows? The memories are half-posed to begin with.
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1. Mommy stands in the garden with her mami, with abuela. It’s lovely, eerily peaceful but warm with yellow and red flores all around, a well groomed garden that could be anywhere. I couldn’t tell you where they were for the life of me, but it feels like a painting. Abuela looks like she is about to braid her daughter’s hair because her daughter has been fidgeting with something. Mommy, Lili, has that flat chested jut, the forward stance of children needing attention or assistance.
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2. One of my favorite pictures of my mother shows her sitting in a hedge of some dark and green foliage—a floating cloud of baby pink and black-black hair and two chipped front teeth from when she fell on stone stairs in the park back in Albuquerque. The teeth are endearing and make the smile unforced though the outfit certainly was because my mother hates pink on principle. The knotted ribbon in her hair is the most honest part of the picture. Her nose slopes up just so I want to pinch it and mother my mother, which I only do every so often. I am old enough now to chide her when she complains about how much wine she drinks because she is sad that her parents are sick, when she doesn’t even try to find a therapist, when she doesn’t exercise and then complains that Dad doesn’t look at her.
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3. Is it wrong to find the younger old beautiful? I have found so many old slides of my abuela that doubly prove what my mother claims about her loveliness. In this frame, they must have just moved from Buenos Aires to Richmond, Virginia. Mom said they went on a cruise on their way over (or was it for their honeymoon?) and won Queen and King of the the ship. They must have taken a quick trip to the capital, not la capital, but Washington, District of Columbia. The sun sets orange, and it’s very romantic. She looks to the side, fingers caressing each other, interlaced, wind sweeping her hair only the tiniest bit. She sits on top of concrete, and the Capitol building fades far behind her because she, in her pearls and her baby blue dress, is all that matters. There’s a line in a poem that she allegedly wrote in one morning where the narrator, speaking about how she embodies Latin America, calls herself beautiful and tells you to look at her. She is beautiful, and I look straight at her. I sound like a catalog, but maybe it’s just my poor projectionist skills making the pictures glow tangerine. Maybe it’s my wild nostalgia.
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4. Mom, just turned ten because it’s October ’74, sits in a little white boat and looks back at whoever holds the camera, mami or papi. A topless likely pedazo de hombre (like abuelo would say in a deep, sarcastic voice) rows the little white boat. She sits at the helm, because she is la chiquita, and my uncle formerly known as tío Carlos looks off brooding. A boy in red sits to his ~~white~~ right. I can’t help wondering why the white turtleneck mom wears hasn’t gotten dirty yet. Where are they? Las Pampas? Are they friends of the family or relatives? Abuelos didn’t know. Mom asked me if I knew who he was, as if I’d know better than she would. Mom has such an excellent memory for those times, and I can barely remember my childhood except in pictures from trips, but even then I can only recall moments. Why? It must not have been so bad. In fact, it was a good childhood, but I am still a bit bad and wrong but better than I was, say, two years ago.
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5. Mom sits in ridiculous plaid pants and somehow flattering bangs. (I wonder if the fashion is what makes the past prettier?) She holds a knife and a mallet to carve a chopped log. Wood chips sit beside her, a colorful lawn chair to her back, and someone reads a comic called INODORO PEREYRA. They have a ring on their finger, and so does she, but she is 10. Of course, her ears are pierced by that age. When mine were pierced for the first time, I once wore an old pair of hers and put them on too tight. We were in the Hamptons (a rich beach space utterly absent from wood carving or mountains or asados), and I tried taking off those flat silvery studs and began to bleed. It took me four years to pierce them again and then another small piercing on my left ear. Then I got two more piercings in my cartilage (against mommy’s wishes) that closed up because they pained me. She's told me multiple times that she doesn’t believe in, “No pain, no gain,” especially when it causes ugly, grape-sized keloid scars on the backs and tops of my ears.
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6. Carlos saws at a thin log with a compact blue saw. The macho topless man in curious white swim trunks looks on from the other end of the small piece of wood with pride, impression, and a loving smirk. Carlos is dressed and dressed fancy at that, button up shirt, dress-pants, but there’s still something very American looking about his sneakers. I wonder if they felt all that American as second-generation kids. I wonder why I try and feel less all American as a third generation kid. For material?
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6.5 I suppose the other guy didn’t get cold. He begins to assist the boy, so he didn’t do the adult task of letting a child believe he’s stronger than he really is. Carlos bites his tongue like my brother would when exerting effort or thinking. His muscle (the man’s, not the boys) bulges, and he wears a white watch.
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7. Strangers or then-friends of the family sit in a circle in early afternoon. The boy in the red shirt bends and curves his spine, chopping at the log Mom had been tinkering with in an earlier frame. A slightly balding man who is nowhere near as balding as Abuelo whittles at a smaller piece. Two chairs closer to me in the forefront sag with the weight of normal women’s backs. We cannot see their faces. One dresses more extravagantly. She wears tall shoes and a top covered in a diamond pattern. Though, I cannot look away from the round ridges that form in the back of the red chair as the other woman's a white sweater bleeds through.
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8. Mommy and Carlos stand in front of a mountain and a building that looks like a ski resort. They wear brown leatherish coats like good Argentine children and Latino patterned renditions of Christmas sweaters in red and navy wools. Carlos has on his primary blue American slipper sneakers. The sun is bright, and they look off screen because, who wants to pose for their parents? Mom, the younger one, usually looks slightly more excited to take pictures than Carlos who splays his legs and seems tired and sticks out his tongue in many of these. She didn’t know he was a stoner for a while, and it’s so strange how these patterns repeat across the brother-sister, mother-father dyads in my family. There’s an interview with abuelo where he says, in Spanish:
*We have two children who I’m going to say marvelous things about. A man, Carlos Martín, who is a doctor, not a nephrologist (my abuelos were nephrologists), of infectious disease and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cornell University and works at New York Hospital. He does very well, he’s part of an important study that tries to diminish AIDS in the African world. He has already done three trips to Africa, in Niger. He has two children, a man and a girl of eleven and nine years. My daughter Liliana Karen is a lawyer, works for the poor, for a group that tries to watch out for what happens for the health of the dispossessed, the immigrants. It seems very good to me. She also has two children, an eleven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy.*
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Anyways, I wonder where that mountain is. I want to find a photo of them in the same places I went to in Argentina because I love those little coincidences. They must have been there in July, the Southern hemisphere time for when it’s as cold as it gets, because there is a bit of snow on the mountain and they’re bundled up. It’s hard to focus the image and to focus within it.
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9. Mom was a ballerina, but she’s not wearing a tutu in this photograph. Imagine if they called her Liliana (her name and her mother’s name) la Ballerina. That would’ve been so nice and alliterative. They actually almost named her Vanda Vaamonde after her abuela, my bisabuela / middle namesake Vanda, but then they thought that sounded like a stripper. Mom is not wearing fine baby pink, the pink she wore as a baby, because in this photo she is nine. It is 1973, and she is posing as if she is about to dance in her light grey outfit that looks like Shakespearean dancer armor. She looks uncomfortable in many photos, but in this one her body knows even though her face squints in the sun. The edges of the Kodachrome MADE IN USA photo are red and orange and yellow, like they started to burn, but maybe they were just poorly developed. She says she ended up quitting ballet because, “My boobs were too big,” and then she’ll explain that she just didn’t really like the lifestyle.
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10. I would refer to them as disembodied children because there are so many in the photo, but I recognize their childlike hair at this point. Mommy and Carlos sit in a spinning white and blue teacup at where I guess is Disney World because there are some earlier photos I didn’t mention here that show them and abuelo smiling in front of a castle. Mommy giggles and looks giddy, while Carlos leans forward and seems like he's trying to focus his body in the cup's rotation. These days, Mom is mad at Carlos because their relationship is transactional, reduced to taking care of parents. He takes care of their medicine because he’s a doctor, and she deals with the mail, the catalogs, the bills. He doesn’t make an effort to spend time with us, and not smothering one another is a classic crisis for my family. We still celebrate holidays like Navidad together, though the kids on both sides have been Bar and Bat mitzvahed, but we don’t celebrate it at night because the abuelos are sicker and sleepy so early. But for then, mommy and Carlos are likely nine and ten, and they are sitting in spinning teacups. I don’t enter this frame.
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