Stolen Party Dear Senora Ines, it Has

¶ … Stolen Party Dear Senora Ines, It has been over a decade since we last spoke, and although I have grown from an impressionable child to a confident woman, I find myself thinking about you more often than I would like. Luciana and I drifted apart during high school, as children tend to do, and that has never bothered me a bit, but there is simply something about my last experience with you that has never left my mind in all these years.

You may be asking yourself right about now, "Who is this person?" And I wouldn't blame you in the slightest, as you never really knew who my mother and I were anyway. My name is Rosaura, and my mother Herminia worked as a maid for your estate during my childhood.

I don't suppose that would ring any bells either, as you couldn't even be bothered to attend her funeral after she devoted thirty years of her life in your service, but I thought it important to remind you of who I am and where I came from. I loved my mother more than anything in the world, but it was you Senor Ines, it was you who had the most influence on the eventual course that my life would take.

Not every little girl grows up at the age of nine, but thanks to you I came to realize how this world worked well before my own quinceanera. Speaking of birthday parties, it was on Luciana's special day that you managed to shatter my childhood innocence, not with overt actions but through the subtle power of words. I look back now and laugh at how excited I was for her party, how grateful I was for being accepted by Luciana and her friends.

Except for that snotty blonde girl with the bow in her hair, everyone treated me so nicely that I almost felt like it was my birthday, and as it turned out I did grow up a lot that day. My mother warned me about social status and my place as an employee's daughter, but in the foolishness of youth I dismissed her caution as mere envy, the result of an old woman who simply did not understand the world today.

A few words by you, however, showed me just how little I understood the world as it really is, and I've never forgotten that lesson. Even as I attended college and landed the job of my dreams in New York City, the memory of you paying me for working at a party, one I thought was the best in my whole life, has never left me.

In that moment, I learned that some people will never look past the shortcomings they see in me, either as a woman, as a Latina, or as the daughter of a maid who toiled in silence her whole life to make your life easier. I'm not sure why you chose to teach me that lesson in the.