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Bad Mexican: nearly every award I have received in life has been at least partly due to my heritage. But what kind of Latina can't speak Spanish?

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I'm sputtering down Interstate 10 in a '92 Mazda, en route from Los Angeles to my parents' house in Corpus Christi. Today is the Tucson--El Paso leg. At some point, I veer off the highway onto an isolated farm road curving along the Mexican border and wind up in a desert choked with cactus and brush. The air conditioner has perished, so it is hot as blazes. I roll down the windows and contemplate my thirtieth birthday, which is a month away. My twenties were consumed by my first book, a memoir about traveling around the Communist bloc. During the decade it took to research, write, and publish it, I grew keenly aware that I was living backward, more in my past than in my present. It is time to move on, but where? To what?

When asked this on my book tour, I had a ready reply: Learn Spanish. Despite being third-generation Mexican American (on my mother's side) and growing up 150 miles from the Texas-Mexico border, my Spanish is best described as Tarzan Lite: a primitive vocabulary spoken entirely in present tense. My room faced so much ridicule for her accent growing up, she never taught my sister or me how to speak Spanish properly. I mostly picked up curse words in school (ipendejo!) and opted to learn Russian in college. Studies show that only 17 percent of third-generation Mexican Americans can speak Spanish fluently, but it riddles me with guilt--especially now that I've entered the publishing world. I'm turning down invitations to speak to groups I supposedly represent because I literally can't communicate with them.

A logical life plan would be to venture across this desert and explore the land and tongue of my ancestors. Yet the very notion terrifies me. Ask any South Texan. To us, Mexico means kidnappings and shoot-outs in broad daylight in Nuevo Laredo. The unsolved murders of young women in Juarez. It means...

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