In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

Image credit: Family Picnic by Chris D’Errico

Cosa Nuestra

By Diana García

I watch as my father balls up his fist and hits my mother in the face in the kitchen. Moments before, they were yelling at one another, but now she is stunned and silent. A scarlet stream oozes from her nose to her chin.

Terrified, I scream and run. From the kitchen to the dining room. Through the open sliding glass door and onto the back patio.

Cinder block walls separate our house from the neighbors, and all I can see in front of me are my mother’s hanging orchids.

“Mina!” my father yells after me.

My parents’ fighting is not new. Through open windows raised voices carry, but it’s understood in Costa Rica: You mind your own familia’s business. What happens behind closed doors, es cosa nuestra. Except this time, the vecinos call the police.

Is it the sound of a little girl’s horror-filled voice?

In just six weeks, I will be seven.

Eventually, la policía knocks on our door, and my father answers. He holds me in the crook of his left hip and flashes the officers a charismatic smile.

“¿Todo bien?”

Scared, I peer at the strange men beneath the cover of my long brown hair and stay mute like I know I’m supposed to.

They come inside, and one of them asks my American mother if she wants to file a complaint. She says she does, so she goes with them to the police station.

While she’s gone, my father takes me to my aunt and uncle’s house, where we will stay the next two weeks while my mother files for divorce. Nervous and afraid of losing me, my mother questions every move she makes because she is only a resident and not a citizen in my birth country. She has no family here to help and no longer believes her in-laws when they say they will persuade my father to bring me back to her.

One day, desperate to see me, she comes to school just before it lets out.

I am relieved but also nervous. Papi will be here any minute, and who knows what might happen next?

Should I take her or should I not?!? Mami wonders.

My father arrives fuming, so we let go of each other’s hands.

Is this the moment he decides to abduct me? Or was that his plan all along?

On September 14, 1978, he extends the expiration date on my Costa Rican passport. On September 18th, he walks me across the Panamanian border, and two days later, puts us on a flight to Ecuador, where he went the last time my mother filed for divorce.

I spend the next four months crisscrossing South America—sometimes staying with extended family in Ecuador and Bolivia, sometimes not. Flying over the Andes, the stewardess gives me crayons and paper. To me, the clouds look like snow.

In a hotel room, I play with paper dolls and eat tuna from the can. Where and how we celebrate my seventh birthday, I can’t recall. During this time, I suffer from bouts of dissociative amnesia. Weeks of my life disappear into a black hole.

In January, when Papi can no longer extend our visa to stay in Quito, he takes me to California using my U.S. passport. I do not see my mother again until the spring of 1979, when my father “decides” it’s now time for me to live with her.

The exchange happens at LAX. When I see Mami at the end of the long passageway, I run to her and she to me.

“What happened to my chubby little girl?” she asks, as she scoops up this skinny version and swings me in her arms. She holds me close for as long as it takes Papi and Grandpa to catch up from opposite ends of the hall.

Surprised to see his American father-in-law, Papi does not linger.

“I have tickets to see The Price is Right,” he tells my mom and takes off.

A year later in our rented Texas apartment, she asks, “Hija, por qué no me hablas en español?”

“Because I don’t remember how to, Mom. I don’t remember how.”

Diana García (she/her) is a writer of mixed US/Costa Rican heritage, and the author of Paradise Loss: A Novel. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Wimblu Magazine, and she is currently at work on a second novel and memoir. After completing a master’s degree in library and information science, she spent most of her career working in the information systems division of a nonprofit research hospital in NYC. She currently resides with her life partner, Matthew, and rescue cat, Bella, in San José, Costa Rica.