We were driving down Harwin when we saw them.
Two jerseys* hanging outside one of the stores, moving in the wind the way everything on Harwin moves, like it’s trying to get your attention. One had the Virgencita on it. The other had Chicharito as a santo.
We lost it. All of us in the car, completely gone. The specific kind of laughing that happens when something is so perfectly, specifically yours that it tips over into something else. Not just funny. Recognized.
We kept driving. Got to Reliant. Found our seats.
Four rows down, someone was already wearing one.
Of course they were.
El Ruido
This was June 22, 2011. Gold Cup semifinals at Reliant Stadium in Houston. A Wednesday doubleheader, US vs. Panama first, then Mexico vs. Honduras. We stayed for both.
There is no English word for what that stadium sounded like.
Loud doesn’t do it. Passionate doesn’t do it. You can say electric and you are still describing something smaller than the actual thing.
Cielito Lindo rising out of a sold-out stadium isn’t a sound. It moves through your chest before it reaches your ears. It’s every family party you’ve ever been to and your abuela’s kitchen and something older than both of those things, all arriving at once.
Houston was home in that particular chapter of my life. Inside that stadium it felt like a different kind of home. The kind that doesn’t need to introduce itself. The kind that asks less of people who spend most of their lives explaining where they belong.
When I see the red, white, and blue on the field, I’ll cheer with all my might. I’ll be sad if they lose. These colors don’t run, like the saying goes.
But that conviction isn’t at the same level as what I feel for la Selección Mexicana. I love that team the way I love Doctor Simi. Completely, unreasonably, with my whole chest, no explanation required.
If Mexico goes out, it’s not sadness. It’s grief with a side of betrayal. It’s no era penal twelve years later and we are still not over it. I cried for three days when the Undertaker lost his streak to Brock Lesnar, a part-time wrestler, at WrestleMania. That’s the register Mexico losing lives in. You weren’t supposed to see that. Some things are just supposed to stay undefeated.
Mexico broke through in overtime and the entire stadium became one sound. My brother high fived me so hard I nearly fell out of my seat.
The person in the Chicharito santo jersey four rows down was on their feet.
So were we.
Before We Got There
On the way to the game we stopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods on Post Oak.
I was wearing my Mexico jersey.
We came out and a Univision camera was just there on the sidewalk. Already pointed at exactly what we were. A group of people in green on their way to the match, on American soil, in an American city, wearing the colors of another country and not confused about it at all.
I don’t remember if they asked permission. I just remember suddenly being interviewed. Someone treating our presence on that sidewalk as something worth recording. Worth including in the story.
We never saw it air. Don’t know if it made the cut. For all I know it’s sitting on a hard drive somewhere, thirty seconds of us being exactly who we are, seen by nobody.
It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now.
What mattered was the camera finding us at all. In those jerseys. On that sidewalk. Not confused. Not complicated. Not asking us to explain ourselves.
Just, these people, right here, are part of this story.
Diego Luna
We were watching the opening match of the 2026 World Cup when the commercial came on. Diego Luna, in the Nike ad, the one they’d been running for months.
My dad didn’t even look away from the TV. “He was so good,” he said. “And they didn’t even pick him.”
I asked him why.
“Porque ese pinche viejo cree que se ve como un narco.”
Because that damn old man thinks he looks like a narco.
He said it with real disgust. Not sadness. Anger, on Diego Luna’s behalf, at a coach who looked at tattoos and bleached hair and decided he already knew everything he needed to know.
Diego Luna is twenty-two. Born in Sunnyvale, California to parents from Michoacán. He said it himself, on the record: I’m Mexican-American. That’s how it is. My family, proud Mexicans. I was born here in the States and I’m a proud Mexican-American.
He chose the US when Mexico was always the other option sitting right there. Chose it again in 2024, after the US left him off the Olympic roster completely, when he said himself he hadn’t closed that door. He stayed anyway.
In January 2025, fifteen minutes into a friendly against Costa Rica, an elbow caught him square in the face and broke his nose. Blood ran down to his chin while the team doctor packed cotton into both nostrils. Pochettino asked if he was okay to keep going. Diego didn’t hesitate. Please, coach, let me keep playing. He went back out there with blood still drying on his jersey, conviction written all over his face, because the last thing he wanted was to let his team down. Less than a minute later he threaded a pass through the Costa Rica defense and set up a goal.
That’s the player they were deciding whether to keep.
Nike doesn’t put just anyone on a billboard for the World Cup. They invest in players who are clearly good enough to stand on the world stage, and they invested in him. He posted the new jersey* on Instagram with the caption: They never plan for the wild card. Espera lo inesperado.
Everyone was anxiously awaiting the roster on May 26th. No one more than Diego Luna, I imagine. A kid who bled for this team, who begged to stay on the field for it, waiting to hear his own name read out loud.
Pochettino didn’t let the track record do the talking. Sixteen of eighteen matches. Four goals. Three assists. A broken nose he refused to leave the field for, a broken nose that never once controlled his destiny. Something else decided that instead.
No explanation given. The coach said it would be disrespectful to discuss players who didn’t make it.
But if we’re honest, there isn’t one to give. What’s actually disrespectful is turning a blind eye to talent the entire world saw. Turning a blind eye to a loyalty and a commitment a kid proved three separate times, in that exact difficult hyphen battle bicultural kids have to fight over and over in their lifetime, only to watch the door close anyway.
His only public response was one line. Gracias a todos los que me apoyaron. Thank you to everyone who supported me.
We don’t know Mauricio Pochettino. Never met him. Never want to. But for a lot of us, the feeling was instantly recognizable. That look that decides who belongs before anyone opens their mouth.
The colors don’t run. It didn’t matter. His nose still bled.
That’s the hyphen. You choose. You prove it. And somehow the belonging is still conditional.
Lo Que Ya Sabemos
I’ll be honest. The divided loyalty question used to feel complicated.
There were years when rooting for Mexico felt like I was refusing to fully claim something that was also mine. Like I owed this country a cleaner answer.
I don’t feel that way anymore. Not because I figured out how to be fully one or the other. You don’t. That’s not how the hyphen works.
I reshared a post about the president giving away her ticket to a fan, someone I thought represented Mexico well. Someone responded by sending me a video about serious things happening in Mexico right now, the kind of things that genuinely matter, like I needed reminding that the World Cup wasn’t important enough to care about in the middle of everything else.
I do care about what’s happening there. I just don’t accept that caring about one thing cancels out caring about the other. You’re allowed to hold both.
My tía posted her own thing about the World Cup and got her own version of it. Tú ya no vives aquí, tú no sabes lo que está pasando. You don’t even live here anymore, you don’t know what’s going on.
She was born there. Raised there. Mexican before she ever set foot anywhere else. And leaving was enough for someone to try to take that away from her.
Some hyphen kids have lived there too. I have. Some never have. Doesn’t matter which one you are. There’s a version of that same wall waiting for you either way.
She lives here now. She watches every game. She still pays Mexican taxes and Mexican bills back home. And somebody decided none of that earned her a voice.
That’s the whole hyphen. Somebody always trying to make you choose what you’re allowed to care about, or deciding you’ve lost, or never had, the right to belong at all.
Mexico won that semifinal in overtime.
That entire stadium became one sound. My brother’s hand was still stinging from the high five.
It didn’t matter which passport anyone carried. It didn’t matter whether the country you were born in had decided what to do with you yet, or whether the country your blood came from still considered you one of its own. For those ninety minutes, none of it was up for debate.
That’s the only place the hyphen ever goes quiet. The inclusion lasts exactly as long as the clock does. The second it hits ninety minutes, for a lot of bicultural kids, the way it did for Diego Luna and his World Cup dreams, la pelota no rueda más.
The ball stops rolling.
¿Y tú? When the first goal goes in, do you know which team lives in your chest? And do you know how long you get to keep that feeling before the clock runs out?
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