by Michelle Cacho-Negrete

My mother’s sixth-grade diploma from 1923, held together with scotch tape the color of age, a dirty fingerprint on its edge like a place-marker of time. My mother’s sixth-grade diploma from a school on the Lower East Side, a corporeal remnant of her determination. Her own personal artifact of survival. Her women had conquered sheitels, pogroms, domestic violence and fashioned my mother into resilience like a piece of silk. These women were their own neighborhood, carrying loss – country, language, identity – acquired across the ocean from a left-behind world where higher education meant danger, stealth, fleeing. They constructed an architecture of the families once carelessly disposed of on New York City asphalt between pushcarts hawking a slowly discarded past. Everywhere a scarred tower of babel later joined by an infinity of tattooed numbers, an epic account of what was stolen. It was a continuing apartheid there, barriers of tenements protecting the true Americans. My mother’s sixth grade diploma, conviction rising above failure, evidence of success in 1923 for a girl child considered debris by those in Ellis Island who yawned and named her what they wanted. But then, a treasure to those prophetic women who soothed “soon, soon, soon – yes, yes, yes.”  It is now a hundred years – 2023. What is the value of a scrap of ephemera? My mother’s sixth-grade diploma held in her great-granddaughter, Micaela’s, hands, alongside her own college diploma. Cameras, nonexistent at my mother’s triumph, record the day.

It is 2023, two diplomas, one hundred years apart, bridging past and present, and I see my mother’s shy smile in her great-granddaughter’s own, and I think that one hundred years is both an eternity and no time at all.