A Guide in the Jungle: A Writer's Letter to His Young Son

By Daniel Barrios

"Father & Son Car-Show #oldschoolracing #hamburg" by e-supreme

Dear Hijo,

It’s been sixteen months since I became your father, though those who aren’t parents might say a year and five months. Before I was a parent, I would have.

I’ve become wiser since your birth, but my wisdom did not fall on my lap. I married your mother just after I graduated college with a bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Yikes. I was twenty-four and my ambition landed me a job in education. So much for the bohemian writer’s life. We welcomed you a week shy of our first wedding anniversary. You weighed in at a healthy six pounds and ten ounces. This was pre-COVID-19, and there were no masks worn, except for the medical professionals. The hospital did not provide me with scrubs. As I watched you being brought into the world in my college sweater and former man-bun, I asked myself two things: How will you look to the world? And how will I look with you to the world?

The first question was gratified the minute you arrived. There was a beautiful pungent scent that filled the delivery room. Unlike anything I’ve smelled before. After that smell, I knew I was your dad. You looked like both of us. Her wide eyes. My round nose. Her soft skin. My devious smile. This was blissful confirmation that you were our baby, and we were your padres. The only issue rested in my second question. How did we look as young parents with a baby boy? Did we look like mature twenty-five-year-old adults who knew what they were doing? Or did we look like another young couple who didn’t use a condom, a couple of sinvergüenzas?

Did I have to look a certain way to be a father? And what way was that? Height? I’m certainly no Tyrion Lannister. I’m also not a six-foot gigante. I’m somewhere in the middle. A place where my own high school students sometimes wondered who the teacher was, but tall enough to reach the high shelves in the kitchen for your mom (yes, on my tiptoes but nonetheless). A blessing and a curse. Did my youthful and stature disqualify me from society’s consensus of what fatherhood should be?

Perhaps I shouldn’t care how society views me. Or your mom. Or you. It would be on thing if society was fair and how someone looks didn’t affect how they’re treated. It’s too bad that type of society doesn’t exist. If you believe people don’t judge you based on the way you look, you are as ignorant as the dog who begs for his master’s bones while his own bowl is full of fresh meat.

In a Twitter thread on a goofily masculinized baby “manual” for dads in which infant care is compared to vehicle maintenance from my school peer and Assignment online editor Aaron Calvin, he points out that “the bar for dads is so extremely low, it really sucks.”

I couldn't agree more. Fathers in our society are somehow stigmatized as not being able to care for their newborns the way mothers can. In the manual Calvin references, babies are described like cars so that men can understand how to care for them. It’s silly, but this is a step in the right direction, a great resource.

Que resource?

What about the dads who didn’t receive a baby manual? How are they supposed to navigate the unknown terrain of parenthood? The same way they do anything else: By doing it.

Nothing about being your father has been easy. In graduate school, the workshops don’t teach you how to nurse an overexerted baby on the cusps of turning purple to sleep. They don’t teach you that swaddling and rocking and shushing will not work, as the manual claims, as ways to calm a cranky baby. Babies aren’t one size fits all. Formulas and juices and whole milk won’t work all the time either. You were unpredictable until you weren’t. 

The manual advises to go for walks. The one thing the manual doesn’t say is that if you live in a sketchy neighborhood, you probably don’t want to walk. And if I wasn’t raised in the 10303 zip code, I wouldn’t walk around past 8pm at night either. However, we bundled and shrouded and covered you in your stroller and walked you to sleep every night because there was no other way. The narrow sidewalks and passers-by smoking joints didn't phase me, your mom, or you. After a steady ten-minute loop in the neighborhood, we heard your snores harmonizing with the North Shore’s gusty winds. That’s how we put you to sleep.

Another method the manual suggests is going for a drive. A spectacular idea! What about the parents who do not have enough money for a car and depend on the city bus like your great-grandparents did their entire lives on Staten Island? How do those parents go for a drive when some of them were taking cabs back to public housing from picking up milk and apple juice with limited WIC benefits? Your great-grandparents never owned their own car and did not have the luxury of snoozing your grandfather on the highway when he was a fussy baby. 

“Parenting really just unlocks a whole new level of bizarre interactions with our messed up world,” Calvin said.

I’m starting to understand why your mom and I didn’t get one of those baby manuals. I mean, I don’t want one anyway. I don’t care for cars and see them simply as a way to get from point A to point B. You were born in the same hospital as me. You are Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and American. When you come of age, my only wish is that you become comfortable enough with who you are to accept your role in society. My role will hopefully serve as a guide in the jungle.

As I reflect on my own shortcomings, I know I’m always learning how to live in this society, accepting my role while learning its definitions. A millennial who had to choose between a wedding or a house. Mom and I made photos of the wedding for you. We’ve got uncle Yordan eating everything. Your mom’s parents are singing and dancing. Your dad with a devious smile and a blue suit. We are still saving for our future house, trying to create some semblance of an American Dream.

My russet skin does not dictate who I am or what I will become but our family’s culture does to some extent. As you settle into your own skin, and understand where your father came from, do be consumed with anger at this unjust world as I once was. Instead, Hijo, let’s rejoice. When you were born, I had questions. As we grew older, I began to think less about my questions and more about what your questions will be.

Con amor,

Always and Forever,

Papi

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.

My Hispanic Characters Should Be Allowed To Speak

By Daniel Barrios

“"The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes." by Sebastián-Dario

When I applied for an MFA in creative writing, I was living in the projects. I didn’t think about student diversity, I didn’t research faculty, and I wasn’t reading. I was living in my grandparent’s two-bedroom apartment with my six-month pregnant wife.

What I did think about was getting out, about not taking up too much space on the twin mattress my wife and I slept on. Some nights I slept on the floor to keep us all comfortable. Keeping the crumbs off abuela’s counter and stalking Zillow’s web listings for studios under one thousand on Staten Island.

With those things in mind, I mindlessly applied to only one MFA program.

That was it.

When I received an acceptance letter, I realized my son wouldn’t have to grow up in the projects like me.

Today’s much better. We live in a one-bedroom basement of our own and our boy is swirling across the kitchen tiles. We’re still in the same neighborhood, but we’re happy. I’ve been reading a lot and winter residency’s workshops kicked my ass.

Having to gently remove my son’s hand from my fingers, I checked my phone and saw the peer workshop list. I didn’t think much of the names and got to reviewing their work in between bottle feeds and diaper changes. One of my mentors once told me “the game needs more of us!” and I didn’t know what he meant until I was the only brown person in my workshop. Including the workshop facilitator, everyone in the workshop was white.

I wouldn’t have cared but the piece I submitted for the workshop was spelled with Spanish. And up until my third residency, I didn’t think much about how language affected the text. I wrote what I knew. Many expressed how they had to look things up. Que bueno, I thought.

The overall consensus was that my characters didn’t need to speak as much Spanish, or instead of speaking the Puerto Rican dialogue, just write in exposition. Others thought the Spanish worked well. Mitad y mitad.

Okay, I almost said, but remembered I had to stay quiet the entire workshop.

So my Hispanic characters aren’t allowed to speak? I said to myself as I bit down on my tongue. I felt silenced.

Around the same time as my manuscript was being probed, I was reading Hemingway. Specifically, The Old Man and the Sea. Cool, I thought. A Spaniard protagonist named Santiago who lives in Cuba and fishes. A white man writing about Hispanic culture. As I kept reading, I found Spanish. If I weren’t a native speaker, I would have needed to look up every Spanish term that Hemingway employed. As it stands, I looked up one.

On the first paragraph of the first page, “Salao, which is the worst form of unlucky,” is used to characterize Santiago. We understand that Santiago’s Cuban culture will be utilized to give him his identity. Outside of the Cuban context, this word translates to “salty.”

As the plot advances, we are in an epic shark scene with Santiago: “Ay,’ the old man said. “Galanos. Come on galanos,” Galanos are mentioned three times on this page. The repetition is indicative that this language is essential to the character. This is his world.

On the final page, after Santiago has returned to shore, a tourist asks about the remnants of his catch. “Tiburon,’ the waiter said. ‘Shark,”. Hemingway makes it clear that people in the environment use Spanish just as the protagonist does.

This novella won Hemingway the Pulitzer for fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. If a white man from Illinois was allowed to use Spanish to develop his characters and the Cuban Gulf Stream, I think a brown kid from New York should be allowed to use as much Spanish as his characters’ lives demand. Another mentor once told me to “know my audience.”

I’m stilling wondering who makes up that audience, exactly. If you do read my words, I appreciate you. What I do know are my characters, the worlds they inhabit and the lives they live. I know that Spanish is part of their being, and without it, they would not be human. To this effect, my stories reflect a humanization that is often ignored or overlooked. Latinx people, as Hemingway was rewarded for recognizing, are worthy of writing as fully human.

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.