Reflective Preface

In the first essay, I wrote about the quiet revelation that occurred while hearing stories from my grandparents in Guatemala. Your feedback challenged me to move beyond description and external symbols (like Bad Bunny’s album) and instead turn inward, to examine what stood in the way of knowing my father in the first place. The comment emphasized the difficulty of writing about this emotional distance without falling into cliché and urged me to pursue a more “unsparing introspection.” In this essay, I removed the album analysis and shifted the focus to the emotional, political, and structural silences that shaped my relationship with my father. I drew on thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and James Baldwin—not just as decoration but as lenses to interrogate masculinity, machismo, migration, and emotional withholding. Rather than resolving the distance between us, this version stays with the discomfort, owning the fact that I, too, contributed to the silence. This felt necessary to answer your core question–what stood in the way of truly knowing him?

What I Couldn’t Ask My Father—And Why

“The wound is where the silence begins.” — Gloria Anzaldúa

Before I knew my father as a boy who loved bridges or a teenager who resisted the civil war—stories I only learned later from my grandmother in Guatemala—I knew him as someone distant, someone whose presence I carefully navigated.

He was tired and quiet, too often elsewhere, even when he sat right in front of me. The kind of Guatemalan machismo he inherited did not thunder; it withdrew. He believed a man proved love through labor, not language. He came home from construction sites with dust in the folds of his clothes and soreness he never mentioned. Six days a week, sometimes seven, he left before I woke and returned long after dark, and I never saw him rest. In my memory, he stays in motion—lifting, hauling, sawing. Whatever energy remained went to reminders: lock the door, keep your grades up, watch the road. Rarely did that energy go to questions about his past—especially not to the kinds of questions I carried.

I understood, without needing words, that relentless motion helped keep us in the United States. If he ever stopped—if he let himself feel—the memories of everything he had fled might overtake him.

It took me years to admit that the barrier to knowing him was not only his work, exhaustion, or trauma. I was a barrier as well. More precisely, the obstacle was the version of him I accepted without protest: a person who existed only through labor, a man who had erased himself long before I arrived. I treated the distance between us as fate.

My father avoided discussing Guatemala–not the war, not the asylum process, and not what he lost. The few facts I knew—about a bridge, about flyers, about leaving—came later from my grandmother, never from him. His silence shaped his story, and I obeyed that narrative without resistance. I assumed his silence was intentional, something fixed, even necessary. Rather than questioning what lay behind it, I treated it as a boundary I should not cross. I stopped asking before I truly began, afraid that any attempt might be met with a refusal—or worse, with something I would not know how to hold.

bell hooks notes that “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is the violence of self‑denial” (The Will to Change 27). My father embodied that denial. He did not dominate; he disappeared. He devoted himself to labor because, as an immigrant and working-class man, he had been taught that productivity was the only acceptable form of value. He withheld emotion because the world taught him that vulnerability was unsafe.

As his child, I failed to see that self-denial. I saw only a man who would not try. I did not grasp how fully he had been made to trade visibility for stability, how he learned to quiet his needs in order to keep us housed and safe. I did not yet understand that machismo, especially in the context of Guatemalan migration and labor, can manifest not only in overt control or pride, but also in the quiet, persistent suppression of the self. It appears in the refusal to speak, in the learned stoicism of working-class fatherhood, and in the belief that sacrifice is the fullest expression of love. I mirrored his silence and convinced myself I needed to expect nothing, ask for nothing, want nothing. Thus, we lived side by side in a shared refusal.

Everything shifted in Guatemala. Sitting on white plastic chairs, I listened while my grandmother described a son who swam in the river, sneaked bread to younger siblings, and argued with teachers. She did not depict a man of silence; she depicted someone with a full interior life—curious, defiant, and full of feeling. Someone who had once been young, tender, and unafraid to be seen, even if such visibility threatened his livelihood.

Shame spread through me, not toward his silence but toward my willingness to accept it. I had mistaken his quiet for certainty and treated it as something fixed, even dignified. I told myself it was respectful to let him be, when in truth it was easier than asking questions. I had allowed his reticence to calcify because it excused my own, because it let me hide from my own discomfort, and because it required nothing of me but obedience.

My father may have taught me to be silent, but what makes me any less a part of the problem if I am also silent and do not challenge what I’ve internalized? How can I expect a relationship to deepen—let alone a history to become whole—if I’m not willing to ask what I’ve been told is impolite, uncomfortable, or too late? My family’s story is not just what has been preserved but also what has been suppressed.

Since that trip, I have tried, slowly, to explore the territory beyond our wall. I ask small questions: the name of his favorite goalkeeper, the songs that blared from radios in the 1990s, or whether he ever imagined work that spared his hands. Sometimes he answers; sometimes he changes the subject. Either way, I stay. I once believed that knowing someone meant collecting their stories. Now I understand it also requires acknowledging the silences we create together. The obstacle to intimacy was less his past, his migration, or his masculinity, but rather hinged on my willingness to treat those forces as immovable—unchangeable facts rather than conditions we might question or move beyond.

James Baldwin reminds us that “love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within” (The Fire Next Time 95). My father’s mask was relentless utility—the belief that his worth lay solely in what he could provide. Mine was emotional distance, shaped by the same fear that closeness would reveal something neither of us thought we could handle. Removing them is slow work—an exchange of tentative questions and imperfect answers—but it is work that matters, especially in the shadow of histories that taught us silence.

I keep asking, not because I expect clarity or closure, but because the preservation of familial history—especially within displaced, migrant lineages—demands it. My father’s silence is not separate from broader structures of erasure. U.S. intervention helped fuel the Guatemalan Civil War that sent him fleeing, and yet here, survival required that he never speak of it. The story of our family, like so many others, was shaped by imperialism and labor migration, and was not simply lost—it was actively dislocated. To ask now is not just an act of care but of repair, a commitment to piecing together what displacement, war, and assimilation tried to sever. I ask not for sentiment, but to recover what history tried to make unknowable.

*Work Cited * Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1993. hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Washington Square Press, 2004.