When I am asked whether I want to drink chocolate milk or regular milk, I don’t understand the question.
Where I’m from, plain milk is an ingredient, something to stir chocolate into or blend with fruit to make a licuado.
The question feels like a prank, but when I look around the cafeteria, half the kids are drinking from red and white cartons.
Soon I will learn that this cafeteria is technically called a “cafetorium.” I will savor this word for years, thinking it cosmopolitan––maybe the original Latin?––before learning that it is really just a portmanteau for cafeteria and auditorium, a way for public schools to cut costs. My school is full of franken-words like this––cafetorium, spork––and when I learn them I feel second-hand embarrassment, like maybe the U.S. is not the sophisticated place I had imagined it to be.
In Mexico, everything seemed fancier if it came from the U.S. Please, my cousins and I begged our mothers, please make eslopi yos. When my aunt finally did, I struggled to choke down the saccharine saucy meat that I’d so idealized when I saw it in a movie about summer camp where the kids ate at long wooden tables. It’s too sweet to be lunch but too meaty to be dessert, I thought, trying to categorize the flavor of my first sloppy joe.
Fast-forward and here I was, in a real American cafeteria, at my own long table, eating from a squeaky styrofoam tray and drinking chocolate milk from a thin square carton, trying to ignore the taste of paper that came with every sip.
smoothliminal 
