It was 1994 and my mother wanted to move from Washington Heights to Harlem. We lived in a place Uptown Manhattan called, “Little Dominican Republic”. She wanted a bigger apartment and more space for my siblings and I. What I remembered most from the previous apartment, (which I don’t remember much because I was four years old), was one particular item that my mom always had displayed on the main wall in our living room in Washington Heights--los sombreros. I remember always being curious about the hats and wanting to take them down to try them on. I was always curious about why my mom had them on the wall and never tried them on. The memory etched in my stream of consciousness was a high conical or cylindrical crown with a saucer-shaped brim, highly embroidered and made of plush felt. There was one that was black and the other one was a deep wine red.
When we moved to Harlem, my mom had decided to take Los Sombreros with her and display them on our new living room wall. I wanted to try them on. After two-years living in our apartment, I waited for my mom to go out to run errands and decided to take one of the hats down to try it on. I really enjoy the color red, so I took the deep wine red Sombrero down the wall. It was very heavy or at least it was heavy to me. I was only six-years old. It fit me big and loose around my head. It tilted like earth during its rotation cycle. I heard my mother’s keys clinking from outside our apartment door, so I rushed to put it back on the wall. As I was trying to reach the nail to display it exactly how she left it before, a piece of paper fell out of the sombrero. My mom walked in and asked, “Porque tienes esa cara?! Que estabas haciendo?” I responded, “Nada, Mami. Esperando te.” Luckily, I wasn’t caught and she didn’t see the piece of paper on the floor. As soon as her back turned, I picked up the paper. It was old. The color of the paper had changed from white to yellow and the ink seemed to have faded away a bit. Only two words were on the piece of paper. It was a place that mom had gone to before I was born. It read, “Ciudad Juarez”.