Bearing The Whole Story
My ancestor was denied justice for the wrongful killing of his wife. That single truth carries the weight of generations, though I didn’t learn it until adulthood.
My Great Uncle Joe was my first anchor to that hidden history.
He cooked everything with two-thirds lard. “It gives food its flavour, Mija!” he’d say, mariachi on the radio, a white tank and suspenders his only fashion. I rarely saw him, but when I did, I felt tethered to something older, something waiting to be remembered.
Joe belonged to my mother’s side — the Mendoza line. His brother, my grandfather, Tiberius Maximus Mendoza, left when my mom was seven. A name that sounded like power but felt like loss. My grandmother raised four children alone, working hard, holding pain close to the chest. Questions about him were unwelcome; silence was safer.
For years I tried to map that side of my Mexican family. Records, I was told, had burned. We’re descendants of Indigenous people, an auntie offered. A Mexican coworker shrugged when I asked about our name: “Mendoza is like ‘Smith’ — it’s everywhere.” The trail kept vanishing.
It wasn’t until grad school that I finally began to gather stories and dig deeper: Joe’s wife, killed by a car in Los Angeles while police looked away; relatives lost to childbirth, the colonization of ancestors from European settlers, war. My mom and aunties, were children caught between worlds — too brown for their white friends, too pale for their Mexican ones.
My father’s family told a different story. They traced their roots back with tidy trees and framed certificates, proud of pilgrim beginnings and clean success. German immigrants arriving in the shores of the New York harbour. They were the we-made-it people. On paper, their narrative gleamed — no jagged edges, no shameful secrets, only upward climb.
But beneath the polish lay something far heavier: some of them had stood in Hitler’s army. That history hid behind layers of respectability, a silence dense enough to shape generations. For a long time, I wanted to stand only with their neat victories, but I knew that 1940’s uniform was also part of my bloodline.
I grew up split down the middle — one side carrying the brunt of cruelty and long awaited justice, the other cloaked in power and complicity. I wanted to choose a lineage, to belong to “the good guys.” But ancestry isn’t a menu. It braids everything together: oppressor and oppressed, survivor and bystander, love and abandonment.
The concept of whiteness tries to flatten all of that. It tells us there’s one acceptable way to belong, one story worth keeping. It erases the weight of history — the way trauma lingers in the body, how even babies can inherit a mother’s stress, how silence travels down a family like smoke under a door.
To understand myself, I’ve had to face every ancestor: the ones who harmed, the ones who healed, the ones who fought for justice and the ones who turned away.
I don’t carry their guilt, but I carry their marks — the grief, the triumphs, the hunger for dignity. They’re the reason I stand where I do.
It isn’t easy work. Shame rarely lets you sit comfortably. But when we dare to see the full story — when we hold the cruelty beside the resilience, the shame beside the grace — something shifts. We discover strength inside tenderness. We learn how to extend compassion, not just to ourselves, but to anyone still wrestling with their own inheritance.