Knowing, Not Not-Knowing
Marie Anne Arreola | Nonfiction, Spring 2026
There are no instructions for growing up between languages, only the slow bruise of realizing that fluency never guarantees belonging.
You spend years peeling versions of yourself like old paint, hoping a truer grain will show through. But the mirror keeps its bargains in fractions. It returns a face that answers to two names, a sentence that falters mid-thought, a self stalled at the hinge between worlds. People rarely notice the leaving. They see a still body and assume certainty, not the flickering exit of someone slipping through the cracks of translation. And when they do catch the hesitation, they call it doubt instead of what it was: a tactic of border survival. Because choices, when they arrived, never arrived alone.
Every door opened twice; every instinct came split down the middle. Two tongues clashed over the story, two loyalties tugged at the same rib.
By the time you realized that choosing was optional, the choosing had already happened inside you—quiet, improvisational, in the half-light of Spanglish. That hybrid, a way of thinking from the middle space, where knowledge is not divided but braided, and contradiction is a tool rather than a wound.
Memory, too, took on the posture of a checkpoint: stop, declare, proceed. Belonging felt like a passport whose ink never quite dried—always smudging at the edges. You didn’t know it then, but the hush you carried; the swallowed words, the suspended breaths, the micro-pauses of self-correction, wasn’t emptiness, but method, almost an epistemology of knowing-not-knowing, where uncertainty isn’t a deficit but a mode of truth.
____________
If an answer exists at all, it never arrives dressed in explanation but in heat, as the dim, enduring warmth folded into accents and untranslatable phrases, an ember keeping the fault lines from splitting open, neither beam nor shadow but a traveling pulse moving in two directions at once, a soft rhythm of sí and yes, ni modo and maybe, knowledge and its echo drifting side by side through the same quiet breath.
Eventually you learn to move through the world unsure which language carries the truest past. You write dusk as crepúsculo and feel the word lengthen into another kind of evening entirely. Some days stretch only as long as the pause between customs lines—the body learning to measure time in anticipation, not hours.
At dawn, a farmer leans into the strawberry rows, reading the soil. Beyond him, the border fence gleams, less a barrier than a text carved into the land, legible to migrants long before any map. Above them, the moon hangs bilingual, offering light in whatever language morning can hold. There is a peace in not choosing. A fragile one. It comes only when you let the land itself translate.
I learned this on a desert ridge. She walked ahead; he drifted behind her; I moved between them, studying their gait with the attention of a novice ethnographer. The desert held a specific quiet. We’d been told curiosity answers to two names—one for home, one for school, and the trail repeated the lesson.
Behind us, the valleys blurred in the soft confusion of memories the body hasn’t filed yet. The path cinched tight. At the crest, we expected a summit; instead we found a mesquite tree, its branches lifted like an invocation. Its leaves spoke in the grammar of thirst and shade, a syntax older than any boundary drawn in steel.
The children recognized it before we did. They approached it as if each step were a syllable in a language still forming behind their teeth. The roots twisted under their soles like cursive—unofficial, unstandardized, but authoritative. The land revealed itself as a system of signs: canyon angles carrying memory, heat radiating its own archive, wind whispering footnotes from travelers who passed long before us.
When the children raised their faces to the view, the vastness stilled them. In that suspension, grief found no foothold. Awe, correctly placed, is a border too, one that denies sorrow crossing privileges. It makes the body briefly opaque to pain.
____________
Later, I replayed the moment the way an anthropologist reconsiders field notes; listening for what I missed. I let their wonder graft itself onto my own memory. The mountains began speaking in a code I realized I had always known—not metaphor, but semiotics. The desert wasn’t scenery; it was archive, ritual, interlocutor. Nature doesn’t erase borders, it outlasts them, it exposes them, it shrugs at their impermanence every rock cradles a version of history every shift of light unfolds, like a lesson each gust carries the faint residue of someone’s crossing brushing against the world, as if to say all lines are borrowed and temporary all edges are stories waiting to be read.
There are other names for this way of knowing.
I could gather dichos, refranes, small petitions left glowing in doorways, epistemic breadcrumbs carried through generations. But eventually I understood that walking was method enough. That listening was fieldwork.
The oldest trees spoke in the interval between breaths—in the dialect of endurance you hear only if you’ve survived in-between spaces.
When the rain came (always late afternoon), it carried the scent of mesquite and the memory of hands that shaped the land without ever being allowed to claim it. The sky cleared only when it had finished speaking. And when morning arrived—sharp-edged, blue, astonishing, you could see how tender the city had become, translated. As if dawn leaned down to each rooftop and whispered an alternate version of daybreak.
____________
More trees appeared, half-memory, half-mirage, and the mind could not help but add more, knowing and not-not knowing bouncing like a ceaseless ping-pong game going; sensory details thickening the imagination until it swelled, lush and borderless, daring enough to bloom in unpromised places, which brings us circling back to the question that shadows all border epistemologies—is this acknowledgment stitched from thresholds, or is it the oldest truth of the borderlands, that understanding is born precisely where categories refuse to settle, where the edges dissolve into their own quiet insistence, and the mind learns to breathe in the spaces between?
______________________________________
Marie Anne Arreola is a cultural journalist, editor, and writer from Sonora, Mexico. She is a 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominee and the founder and editor-in-chief of PROYECTO VOCES, a digital magazine amplifying emerging voices across art, literature, music, and design. Her work—featured in Latina Media Co., Hypermedia Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and other outlets—explores identity, memory, and grassroots cultural practices throughout the Américas. She is the author of the debut novel Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us Back in Woodstock (Foreshore Publishing, UK, 2025). Writing across journalism, poetry, essays, and hybrid forms, she is committed to fostering inclusive, transnational conversations that honor community histories and cultural transformation.
Knowing, Not
Not-Knowing
Marie Anne Arreola | Nonfiction, Spring 2026
There are no instructions for growing up between languages, only the slow bruise of realizing that fluency never guarantees belonging.
You spend years peeling versions of yourself like old paint, hoping a truer grain will show through. But the mirror keeps its bargains in fractions. It returns a face that answers to two names, a sentence that falters mid-thought, a self stalled at the hinge between worlds. People rarely notice the leaving. They see a still body and assume certainty, not the flickering exit of someone slipping through the cracks of translation. And when they do catch the hesitation, they call it doubt instead of what it was: a tactic of border survival. Because choices, when they arrived, never arrived alone.
Every door opened twice; every instinct came split down the middle. Two tongues clashed over the story, two loyalties tugged at the same rib.
By the time you realized that choosing was optional, the choosing had already happened inside you—quiet, improvisational, in the half-light of Spanglish. That hybrid, a way of thinking from the middle space, where knowledge is not divided but braided, and contradiction is a tool rather than a wound.
Memory, too, took on the posture of a checkpoint: stop, declare, proceed. Belonging felt like a passport whose ink never quite dried—always smudging at the edges. You didn’t know it then, but the hush you carried; the swallowed words, the suspended breaths, the micro-pauses of self-correction, wasn’t emptiness, but method, almost an epistemology of knowing-not-knowing, where uncertainty isn’t a deficit but a mode of truth.
____________
If an answer exists at all, it never arrives dressed in explanation but in heat, as the dim, enduring warmth folded into accents and untranslatable phrases, an ember keeping the fault lines from splitting open, neither beam nor shadow but a traveling pulse moving in two directions at once, a soft rhythm of sí and yes, ni modo and maybe, knowledge and its echo drifting side by side through the same quiet breath.
Eventually you learn to move through the world unsure which language carries the truest past. You write dusk as crepúsculo and feel the word lengthen into another kind of evening entirely. Some days stretch only as long as the pause between customs lines—the body learning to measure time in anticipation, not hours.
At dawn, a farmer leans into the strawberry rows, reading the soil. Beyond him, the border fence gleams, less a barrier than a text carved into the land, legible to migrants long before any map. Above them, the moon hangs bilingual, offering light in whatever language morning can hold. There is a peace in not choosing. A fragile one. It comes only when you let the land itself translate.
I learned this on a desert ridge. She walked ahead; he drifted behind her; I moved between them, studying their gait with the attention of a novice ethnographer. The desert held a specific quiet. We’d been told curiosity answers to two names—one for home, one for school, and the trail repeated the lesson.
Behind us, the valleys blurred in the soft confusion of memories the body hasn’t filed yet. The path cinched tight. At the crest, we expected a summit; instead we found a mesquite tree, its branches lifted like an invocation. Its leaves spoke in the grammar of thirst and shade, a syntax older than any boundary drawn in steel.
The children recognized it before we did. They approached it as if each step were a syllable in a language still forming behind their teeth. The roots twisted under their soles like cursive—unofficial, unstandardized, but authoritative. The land revealed itself as a system of signs: canyon angles carrying memory, heat radiating its own archive, wind whispering footnotes from travelers who passed long before us.
When the children raised their faces to the view, the vastness stilled them. In that suspension, grief found no foothold. Awe, correctly placed, is a border too, one that denies sorrow crossing privileges. It makes the body briefly opaque to pain.
____________
Later, I replayed the moment the way an anthropologist reconsiders field notes; listening for what I missed. I let their wonder graft itself onto my own memory. The mountains began speaking in a code I realized I had always known—not metaphor, but semiotics. The desert wasn’t scenery; it was archive, ritual, interlocutor. Nature doesn’t erase borders, it outlasts them, it exposes them, it shrugs at their impermanence every rock cradles a version of history every shift of light unfolds, like a lesson each gust carries the faint residue of someone’s crossing brushing against the world, as if to say all lines are borrowed and temporary all edges are stories waiting to be read.
There are other names for this way of knowing.
I could gather dichos, refranes, small petitions left glowing in doorways, epistemic breadcrumbs carried through generations. But eventually I understood that walking was method enough. That listening was fieldwork.
The oldest trees spoke in the interval between breaths—in the dialect of endurance you hear only if you’ve survived in-between spaces.
When the rain came (always late afternoon), it carried the scent of mesquite and the memory of hands that shaped the land without ever being allowed to claim it. The sky cleared only when it had finished speaking. And when morning arrived—sharp-edged, blue, astonishing, you could see how tender the city had become, translated. As if dawn leaned down to each rooftop and whispered an alternate version of daybreak.
____________
More trees appeared, half-memory, half-mirage, and the mind could not help but add more, knowing and not-not knowing bouncing like a ceaseless ping-pong game going; sensory details thickening the imagination until it swelled, lush and borderless, daring enough to bloom in unpromised places, which brings us circling back to the question that shadows all border epistemologies—is this acknowledgment stitched from thresholds, or is it the oldest truth of the borderlands, that understanding is born precisely where categories refuse to settle, where the edges dissolve into their own quiet insistence, and the mind learns to breathe in the spaces between?
______________________________________
Marie Anne Arreola is a cultural journalist, editor, and writer from Sonora, Mexico. She is a 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominee and the founder and editor-in-chief of PROYECTO VOCES, a digital magazine amplifying emerging voices across art, literature, music, and design. Her work—featured in Latina Media Co., Hypermedia Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and other outlets—explores identity, memory, and grassroots cultural practices throughout the Américas. She is the author of the debut novel Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us Back in Woodstock (Foreshore Publishing, UK, 2025). Writing across journalism, poetry, essays, and hybrid forms, she is committed to fostering inclusive, transnational conversations that honor community histories and cultural transformation.