VANESSA “CUEPONI CIHUATL” ESPINOZA

Excerpts from We The Interwoven

Vanessa “Cueponi Cihuatl” Espinoza was born in Villanueva, Zacatecas, Mexico, and grew up in El Rancho La Hoya, Jerez, Zacatecas, in her paternal grandparents’ home. She migrated as a toddler to the United States and grew up in rural Conesville, Iowa. She obtained her MEd with an emphasis in student affairs at Iowa State University and a BA in Spanish teaching at the University of Northern Iowa. She currently works at the University of Iowa as an academic coach. Cueponi Cihuatl has a podcast titled Confessions of a Latina in the Midwest. Her work with the BIWF explores belonging, traditions, and identity. Her goal is to share testimonios of Latinx immigrants in the Midwest because often their stories are never told.

“We arrived in Iowa in the summer. It was so humid, a different kind of hot that we weren’t used to. We didn’t know anybody. We didn’t speak English. My mom didn’t know how to drive and there was no public transportation like in México. We locked ourselves in the apartment. It was located downtown and had a lot of cockroaches when we first moved in. We had never had cockroaches in our house in México. We lived on the first floor, and in the basement of the apartments lived Soledad, or Chole, one of my mom’s Dominican friends who had two kids around our age. Her Spanish was a little funny and her food was different. She introduced us to arroz con habichuelas and bachata music. She really liked our Mexican food.

The sidewalk and stairs in the apartments were all cracked. We told the landlord to fix it but they didn’t. My sister broke her arm because she fell on that cracked sidewalk. It was only then that they fixed it. There were no animals. The rooster didn’t wake us up. We drank milk from a gallon jug and not fresh from the cow. It was cold inside the house because there was a box by the window that threw out air that felt like a freezer. We cried every day. We missed nature. We missed our casa de adobe.”