That's not your dad

By Alba Medina

It all started with a photograph. It was June and Father's Day was coming up. The school teacher had had the wonderful idea of killing hours by having us make a picture frame out of tongue depressors. Carefully, I glued the wooden sticks on top of each other until they formed a perfect rectangle. The teacher's instruction was to paint it all with our dad's favorite color. When in doubt, I chose blue. For homework, we were to bring a picture of our father. I got home and took out my album. One by one, I went through the thick, gummed, laminated pages. All the photos showed me: as a baby, lying face down and surrounded by stuffed animals, playing on a see-saw in Chapultepec, in braids and dressed as a guarecita michoacana in the living room, dressed as a shepherdess in kindergarten, riding a burrito at the ranch, in front of a cake and surrounded by my cousins at the ages of five, six and seven, the most recent ones. But none of them featured him. My mother resolved the matter with the practicality that has always characterized her. The next day I returned to elementary school with a picture of my uncle Lupe carrying me on the beach. -That's not your dad," a classmate told me.

Ten years later, while I was looking in a closet for my birth certificate to do I don't know what paperwork, I found a yellow envelope with my name written in my mother's unmistakable handwriting. I opened it and discovered some old clippings from El Heraldo de México. There were five pages, arranged in chronological order and dated between June 30 and July 4, 1979, eight months before my birth. What was contained in that envelope marked me for life and led me to an investigation that years later would become a book.