Plans and the Fools

Stupid plans. So here is my father, preparing his departure, saying goodbye, in his own way, to a hard and painful life in the States. Resigned, in his own way, to death and dying in the land of his birth. But the dying he foresees is a peaceful one: somehow, during the summer months, when the rain pours down on the corn, and the wind whips the greenery into a frenzy, the dark earth will open up and swallow him whole, reuniting him with his umbilical cord (attaching himself to it once again), and sleeping in death beneath a welcoming, placental soil—an eternal sleep in his native land, without fear or running. This is the dying he foresees.

Stupid plans—My uncle came to see my father a few weeks ago and burst his bubble. Michoacan is overrun with drug cartels. The town of his birth has been commandeered by the Zetas. They have driven out the police, the mayor, the government, any sign of civility and democracy. They have instituted curfews—everyone is to be inside their homes by 8:00 p.m. They collect taxes from the citizenry, from merchants, and will kill anyone who opposes them or their rule. My father innocently suggested that he was an old man and all he wanted was to work on his house and mind his business: “I’m not into that shit. They should leave me alone.” No, said my uncle, they will kill you for the simple reason that you’re returning—to return to is to be done, to have accomplished what you set out to do, to have money! If you have money, you die. This is not the death my father foresaw. This is the death of wild dogs—of animals who don’t know how to die, who eat their young and their dead.

Now he’s stuck. I can sense the desperation and disappointment. And I lack the words. The immigrant has become an exile, and he doesn’t know what that means.

You can’t go home again, I said. We can’t go home again.

Graduations

I’ve been invited to give a talk somewhere around here pretty soon. They want me to talk about this “post immigrant” business I’m trying to capture with the stories I tell. I decided, since the host is an organization called the “Institute for Social Responsibility and Ethics” to connect the post-immigrant experience to higher education. I figure I know a lot about both—or enough to be able to pay for this fancy keyboard and this 10 inch screen!

I was thinking about what it is that I’m going to say—something like: education is sacrosanct for immigrant parents; and my parents always encouraged me to…blah blah. (which they did). But then I started thinking about all of my graduations and the type of experiences these were for them—for my parents.

If memory serves me right, I graduated high school is 1994. My mother was there, but she claims she couldn’t see me. My father was at home, and now claims he wasn’t—that he was next to my mother at the stadium where the graduation was held. But this is a lie, because he was back at the house grilling meat and drinking beer (in my honor, of course!). When we got home, about 6 of my friends were waiting for me (3 died over the next 6 months…gangs). My father let me drink—my friends were happy. We drank and ate meat and drank some more. My father was proud of me; but he was also proud of himself. Somehow, his son had “finished” school. There had been nieces that had finished school, but no sons, no nephews. So he could brag. They couldn’t afford class ring, so my mother bought me a gold bracelet that I still have around here somewhere. It had my name on it (it doesn't have it anymore).

My college graduation came 4 years later. Everyone was there: my father, mother, R, A, P, and Jenny…my niece, and a couple of aunts. My mother insists she couldn’t see me. My father claims he could see me just fine. After the graduation we went to Red Lobster. Both my parents were very proud, but, simultaneously, and I could see this in their faces, a bit embarrassed. They didn’t know what they were supposed to be proud about. It was as though they felt someone was watching them and expecting them to say something like: we knew this day would come. But they didn't. This was not foreseen, planned, expected, discussed, projected....I bought my dad a giant beer and told him everything would be fine. My mother’s smile was uncanny, a mixture of pride, shame, and mourning.

Then I got a Masters. This time, my dad stayed home. My mother came. She asked somewhat mockingly: otra vez? Which, when properly translated means: you graduating again? I thought you were done—when will you be done? We had a quick lunch. I went to my parents' house and my father grilled steak. He asked me what was next. I said I didn’t know. He said: as long you’re happy. I said thanks. He gave me $100 and told me to do what I loved.

No one attended my last graduation—the one with the PhD. I didn’t go, and I didn’t tell anyone there was one. I called home after I defended my dissertation and said: lla! My mother said great and told me that my brother’s car had broken down and my sister had to go pick him up and my dad was mad that no one had mowed the lawn and P and A were fighting over bathroom cleanliness. Finally, she asked if I was coming home now, that I had been gone far too long, and it was time. I said I didn’t know. My father got on the phone and said he was proud of the kind of man I turned out to be, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was that I did. He asked me when I was coming home. I said I didn’t know. Then he said: we’ll be here when you do. I said: you always have been. Then he said: not always, but we’re here now. And, good job, mijo.

I’m wondering if my experience is unique in this respect. I like to think not, for fear of hurting my own feelings with the thought.

El Fil

My father is going back to Mexico to die. His American experiment is over; he says he just wants to go home.


My mother called me, hoping I could talk some sense into the man. If anyone has a chance, she insists, it’s me. “Tell him to get a job—he still has a mortgage to pay!” He’ll listen to you, she says.

She has a point. If my father will listen to anyone, it would be me. I am his oldest son. But more importantly, I am the reason why he’s persisted in this country for as long as he has. Now that I am self-sufficient; now that I’ve gone farther down the well than he; now he can leave, and be satisfied that he did something right--whatever that is: raise me or keep me from dying. He can leave comfortable in the thought that all of it was not in vain.

But he will not listen to me. Not this time. We talked about this moment many times before: I’ve encouraged it! His spirit is crushed, and the only way to repair it is to go return to origins—where there is life and, necessarily, death.

I call him anyway. “What about mom?” I ask. But my father is not worried about my mother. Not that he doesn’t care. He cares. It is just that they have grown apart over the past 35 years—miles apart, even if they still live in the same house. Seldom do they argue; never do they kiss. I have never heard him say “I love you,” nor has she. He knows that my sisters will take care of her—she knows that she will take care of herself.

But the mortgage! My father is assuming that my brother, R, who lives at home, will pick up the slack. Or the oldest of my sisters, A, who moved in this year after her husband deployed to Afghanistan. Or my youngest sister, P, who, in her early twenties, should get her life together any day now. No one depends on Jenny.

There’s nothing I can say. My arguments are formulaic and I don’t feel the need to change his mind. There is no reason for him to stay here. After 40 years of working the fields of California’s Salinas Valley, he has lost his job, his benefits, and at 59 years of age, his opportunity to start over. He tells me that he gave it his all. The blood is on the dirt, he says. En el fil. In the field, scattered in drops here and there over thousands of acres, hundreds of seasons, millions of tons of produce, and billions of dollars, pennies of which he has never seen. I can’t replace the blood or the sweat, he says. But I can spill the rest en mi tierra—in my land. I can’t argue with a poet of his stature, with a philosopher of his depth. So I don’t.

Of course, I’ll miss him. But the Valley wont. He is replaceable. He knows this and feels betrayed, scorned, by the land which took his blood, by his own dreams, by himself! I can see it in his eyes. They’re done pretending.

My Father, the Chef

My father worked at a restaurant for the first few years after I was born. There’s a grainy color picture of a young man standing next to an old man by a large restaurant window; the young man is holding a guitar and the old man has white chef’s hat. “He taught me how to cook,” says my father of the old man. I ask about the guitar that the younger version of me is holding—“sabe!” he says, which means hell if I know what that thing was doing in my hands. The younger me is filled with optimism and completely oblivious to the fact that his replicant would one day be writing about him; naive to my voice calling him “pa,” which is what I call my father. (Not “pah” or “paw”—I say “pa” in Spanish, so it sounds like a dying man’s attempt to say “please,” in English.) Then he starts on the “Chef” story once again…for the millionth time.

From the time I can remember my father has bragged to my mother and I about his days as a Chef at the restaurant in the picture. My mother has always challenged his claim—citing as grounds for reasonable doubt his unwillingness to cook for us. Whenever a meal would not meet his tastes, he would say stuff like: “When I was a chef I could cook that with my eyes closed” and so on. Once (once!) he made burritos for my mother and I: he cooked beans and meat, put them in a flour tortilla with cheese, and other things (chorizo I think), then baked them in the over. I remember my reaction: there was nothing extraordinary about them. My mother laughed. My father blamed the oven and the lack of tools and condiments. I was happy about them simply because they were filling. And those days—we still lived in the famous Gashouse—eating burritos was a luxury!

So in his story, my father is washing dishes a day after he arrives at my uncle’s house from Mexico. The restaurant is in Anaheim, near Disneyland. My uncle, his brother (not the perverted one from my mom's "affair" story), is the cook. One day my uncle gets sick and my father has to take over the cooking duties. He can whip up scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, hamburgers, and burritos like no other; people come from miles to eat his food. People ask for him by name. He loves the job and hopes to one day be a chef with his own restaurant and kitchen. At some point his friends and relatives remind him that without documentos it will be impossible to do those things. They also remind him that dreams don’t feed families, and soon he is forced to leave his beloved restaurant—he’s told that there’s good field work in the Salinas Valley. So he sends my mom and I back to Michoacan for a few years while he goes north, to Southern Monterey County, in the California Central Coast, where we will join him in the Spring of 1985, and where 25 years later he’ll tell me his Chef story for the millionth-and-one time.

And they forced the hand of God…

This is just an amusing story. My mother was telling me a few days ago about how I was lucky to be alive! Not because I survived some horror or escaped a scrape, but because I was not supposed to have been born at all.

After my mother’s abduction and marriage, the next thing was to procreate. My father was to migrate North in the January, so they made a last ditch attempt to conceive in December. The month passed, and my father had to go--after a few weeks it was apparent: God would not ignite me! Frustrated, my mother turned to her mother-in-law, my grandmother, Elodia. Elodia was a thick little woman with white hair and skin made of leather; she spoke with conviction even if she didn’t believe what she said herself. People in town were afraid of her; she was supposed to have made a deal with some Dark forces or to have blackmailed a saint, or what have you. There was a persistent rumor, which I remember to this day, that she could turn herself into all sorts of creatures, like chickens, or birds. There were witnesses. My mother didn't like Elodia; but she had to endure her, since, as my father's bride, there was no other place to go. When, frustrated, she turned to her for help with her difficulties conceiving, she knew what she was getting into.

There was a simple solution to the problem. For nine days Elodia made stew out of possum tails; for nine days my mother had to drink the stew—which she recalls tasted like throw-up. Who knows where Elodia got her tails. But she had fresh tails everyday. The stew was du jour. On the 10th day, my mother says she felt her body reacting. Apparently, the stew worked and before long news spread that she was pregnant. My father wrote my grandmother and said: “I hope it’s a boy,” to which she replied, “It is.”

So even if God didn’t want me here…here I am. But now I feel bad for all those possums I’ve bad-mouthed!

My Mother’s Unspectacular Affair*

We had lived in the “Gashouse” for a few months when my brother was born. He was born in October of 1985; I was 10 years old. We’d been back in the States less than a year. My brother’s an anchor baby! When he turned three, he wanted nothing but to be outside, in the weeds, the dirt, mud, and hazardous materials, poisons, and sharp objects that populated the surrounding area around the house—we lived in the middle of a working agricultural farm, after all. My father was gone most of the day—starting at about 5 a.m.—and he would stop by once in a while throughout the morning just to see his youngest boy. I was at school. After lunch, he wouldn’t be seen until he was off work, at around 7 or 8 p.m.

My mother never left the house. She would take my brother out for walks around the God Trees, but she was tethered to the house by the gas leak. My father’s supervisor, the Foreman, began stopping by the house sometime after my brother turned 2 or 3—he got a kick out of him, his cheeks, and his penguin-like way of waddling about. He would chat it up with my mom and bring them treats…ice cream, chips, sodas. After a while, the Foreman would take my brother with him as he did his supervisory things around the ranch. He would take him to see my dad. My brother would ride on the Foreman’s truck—he loved nothing more! The bouncing and the dirt, the speed—it made him laugh and giggle. The Foreman would bring him back after a few hours and the boy would fall asleep on the couch, exhausted. This made my mother very happy.

A few months passed. That the Foreman would take my brother and tire him out was routine. My father expected to see him; my mother expected the break. At some point—I don’t know when—the Foreman began the ritual of waiting for my mother to put my brother down and hanging out with her, in the front steps of the house, talking. He was an average sized Mexican man with a Pancho Villa-mustache that made him look authoritative and elegant. He wore a baseball hat and his pants were never as muddy as my father’s. He smelled like Old Spice and Spearmint gum. He didn’t smoke or drink. He later died of testicular cancer. It was the first of many deaths for that group.

They became closer as they talked. I don’t know what they talked about most of the time. I wasn’t there. I would see him leave when I got home from school. I became jealous once and asked my mom about it. She said she was just talking. She seemed happy. Relaxed. She walked with purpose. I had never seen her like that before. When she argued with my father, it was easier to tune him out. She did. He screamed, but she didn’t care. She walked confidently through the terror.

After a night of violence, my mother pulled me into the bathroom and told me that she was leaving with the Foreman. That he had asked to go with him—where, I don’t know—and that she was ready to do it. That she had a real chance at happiness, and she was going to go for it. That I would see her later…when things with my father calmed down. I asked her if she was having an affair with the Foreman. She said no. But that the long afternoon conversations where enough reason to follow him to the ends of the earth. I don’t know what he told her, but it must’ve been promising.

She didn’t leave that night. She never left. But she knew she could…or she believed she could. The Foreman was married. They had no children. He lived in a trailer with his wife. She was pushy and overbearing. He was ready to leave. My mother’s imagination took over from there—anything was possible with the Foreman. My father, whom she had never agreed to marry in the first place, didn’t appreciate her like he did. The spectacular affair lasted months. He never crossed the threshold of the house. He never climbed a step. He just made gestures with words which glided out of his mouth, filtered through his Pancho Villa-mustache, and punctured holes in my mother’s reality.

My uncle, my father’s brother, found out about the affair one day when he was coming to the house to pester my mother. He told her that if she didn’t sleep with him, he would tell my father, his brother, about the goings-ons with the Foreman. My mother said nothing was going on with the Foreman. He cornered her and insisted. I came home just as he was making his move and kicked him out of the house. I think I threatened to kill him. I was about 13, but I think I would’ve tried. Dejected, my uncle told my father about the affair. I corroborated my mother’s innocence and my uncle’s perversions. My father, for once, believed us. But the affair was over. The opportunity had passed. The Foreman died a year later, and so did my mom’s imagination.

*By writing this “memory” down, I am crossing a very thin line that I had drawn for myself a while back. I had deemed certain things un-writeable, and, some, un-recallable. Their sanctity lies in their silence: no one has ever spoken of them before, leaving them repressed in my memory to fester and make me ill. But I near the end of this blog-adventure, and I want to get some things out for myself…just to see them laid out in public, to insert them into the American narrative, if only in this narrative I’m creating and which I’m calling “American.”

Then there's Jenny, Part I

There was something liberating about our poverty. We knew exactly where we stood—what we had, what we didn’t, what we wanted but knew we couldn’t have. We knew that little could be taken from us; that death was a price we would readily pay. Of course I didn’t understand this last part. But I understood the rest.


The violence was necessary. It kept the place loud with voices. It made us bleed. And we knew we were human because we bled. Of course, the resentment was necessary, too. The hate. The terror. And this was normal. So when my sister, Jenny, was born we expected life to continue being what it was. There was something liberating about our misery: it couldn’t get any worse.

The cloud of pesticides that slept in our porch crawled into my mother’s womb and made a nest. There it lingered while Jenny was being shaped into her human form. When she was born in late December of 1989, she didn’t cry or scream. A few years later she matured into a healthy 3 year old; twenty years later, she’s still 3…or maybe 6.

This was different than poverty or terror. My mother asked God to explain this to her; she’s still asking. After all, this would be her burden. Doctors figured out early on that Jenny would not grow up. That she would not reason with us about the things she did or wanted or feared. But Doctors didn’t explain this right; they still haven’t clearly explained what it is that makes her who she is. This means that Jenny is alone in the world; that my mother is alone with Jenny; that to misery and terror we add solitude and insanity.

I don’t know what will happen to Jenny when my mother migrates to those unknown lands that Dante talks about. But it makes me sad. My mother is the only one who understands her burden—despite her resistance and her refusals.

The Point

Offenses like AB1070 invalidate the legitimacy of documents.

Documents

When my father first brought it home, he laid it on the table and stared at it for a few hours…drinking and thinking, maybe praising God (although, as an atheist, his God is the God of his mother, not his own—for if he had a God, He would be the silent type). I walked over to the table to look at it, too. So did my mother, although she had seen one before. It looked like…well, like an ID, except for the holograms and seals and multitude of numbers. It had his name, including that J which refers to his middle name, but which is not really his middle name, but his last name, or the name of his father’s father. It was, of course, green.

Emancipated, situated, defined, constituted: words made relevant for the first time by a document. A piece of plastic with ink, numbers, a picture, and a signature. The signature was his universal seal. It was his document; he had a name; he was a subject. After all of that, he could walk amongst the citizenry without fear. He could demand his rights. He could testify! At least in theory. But he was now different than his fellows, than those who surrounded him, even my mother, whose documents wouldn’t come for another 10 years. This document legitimated his status as a worker, as a legal entity, and, as a man. So long as he carried it, he carried the weight of a matanarrative that said he was not to be fucked with.

The news soon spread. Cousins, uncles, friends, came to the house to congratulate him and take a look at the thing. A cousin took his out and compared it with my father’s: “see,” he said happily, “mine almost looks real!” He had bought his at the Tropicana parking lot, in San Jose. It was then that I saw the document’s real power. Those that heard Cousin say this blushed—they felt sorry for him and his deception. He was a false man, a fabricated subject, an illusion! Sure, they didn’t say this, but they didn’t have to. Cousin’s subjectivity was tied to his lie. He was committed to it—in social spaces, he couldn’t take off his mask even if he wanted to. He was, in fact, still human; but only in fact. As an “undocumented,” he was still on the fringes of humanity—at least in the US. And they all knew it, or believed it. My father, on the other hand, was documented, written into the archives, into the narratives of the just and the free.

The Genius, I

The Salinas River crawls its way through the Southern tip of Monterey County, through the outskirts of King City, avoids Greenfield completely, and heads Northwest just before hitting Soledad. It is a shallow river, filled with more will than water, which surprisingly makes it all the way to the Pacific somewhere by Monterey. This is Steinbeck Country! Of Mice and Men takes place just a few miles from my parent's current home; East of Eden starts off half a mile from where I grew up. Steinbeck’s father claimed to be the first permanent resident of King City. I knew none of this growing up. I learned these things my second year of college, when I first read Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Small towns have this effect: they yank you out of history.

And so I thought I was a-historical. That everything I did was new; that no one had lived like me before. So I did those things which can only be done once; things which could only be done by me. For instance, no one had ever figured out how to grow secret marijuana gardens in public property until I came along. First, I drew a map of places I had found along the river bank where no one had been before; next, I cleared these spots of weeds and rocks, dug some holes in the ground, and planted the tiny plants all throughout the river bank, spread out about 15 to 60 feet. My most ingenious idea was to develop an irrigation system that I didn’t have to monitor. What was genius about this idea was its simplicity: I filled plastic bottles (gallons) with water, poked a hole on the side, and tilted them against a stick near the base of the plant: drip irrigation! I restocked the water supply every 5 to 8 days. About a month into my operation, my father grew suspicious of my late afternoon hikes into the river. He asked my mom what I was doing, and she said, “ask him!” which he didn’t, but I caught him following me in his truck anyway, at which point I took a different route to get him off my tracks and once he caught up to me I pretended to be immersed in nudy-magazines, which I carried everywhere with me anyway; he was embarrassed to have witnessed me spreading out the center-fold in the afternoon air, so he never followed me again, although he never stopped suspecting me of some sort of trickery, of which I was completely guilty. A few months later the plants blossomed. If you looked closely from far away, you could see them radiating green in concentric circles all around them: they were the greenest things around. But, in those days, no one was looking closely. And, besides, I was a genius, and since no one had done this before, no one bothered to look for it. But now that they were ready for harvest I encountered a new problem: how to get them out of the river bank and into my house. My father detested drugs and everything that they stood for. He called them (drugs), “la chingadera esa.” That fucking thing. So he would say things like: “you better not be doing esa chingadera!” Or, “I don’t want you near Ramon; his uncle likes esa chingadera.” He never called weed marijuana or cocaine cocaine…so I was stuck. I was 16 years old, with thousands of dollars waiting for me, and all I had to do was figure out a way to cut it, smuggle it into my house, dry it, trim it, package it, sell it, and not get caught doing any of those things. And I couldn’t trust anyone. Thinking back, if I had put the planning and vigilance that went into this project into my studies, I would’ve been a Rhodes Scholar!

Talking to my father about death, 2

The sadness is spreading. My mother calls at 1 p.m. and says she can’t get out of bed. That she feels like dying. She says my brother feels the same way. What are the dogs doing? I ask, knowing that we know how animals feel by the way they act. My father’s unemployment has run out; he has no job prospects. He gave it his all—he gave it away…he gave it when he had it, and now it’s no longer there to give, so there’s no hope—the work is done. I told my mother I was looking into field-worker retirement communities, where immigrants go to die in peace. She says that you can’t die in peace; that’s what death achieves, not what dying is like. I think she sound philosophical. But maybe I’m looking for wisdom in the sadness, in the helplessness. Maybe there’s none.

Talking to my father about death, 1

I think he’s dying of sadness. He’s unemployed, 59, and paralyzed by the failure of his American experiment. He sleeps all day, drinks till midnight, and dies a little each night before waking to find himself alive and un-recognized by his younger self, the one who dared, the one who sought a something long forgotten. My own successes (whatever they are) only remind him that maybe he already did what he was meant to do, to carry me as far as those lines on the floor which father’s don’t cross, and drop me off and see how far I got before I start seeing the lines on the floor myself. And I can’t accept that: that he had no other ambitions, no other dreams, than to open up paths for me! He tells me that a $25,000 IRA he rescued before losing his last job should buy a casket and the hole in the ground where he’ll be buried. I tell him that we have time to discuss this. But he already made up his mind. He’s resolute in his commitment to the impossible, like always.

Getting Even With Pablo*

My mother's cruelty had its limits. She would, for instance, pray for the sick if they were "really" sick and not just "pertending"--she claimed to have an uncanny ability to tell the sick from the pretenders. She would also defend animals of all sorts when they couldn't defend themselves, but so long as they were not guilty of any crimes against her person or property. If animal or person (kin or not) dared cross the line, her fury had no equal...at least to me. Pablo benefited from her saintly generosity.

Pablo was a baby when my mother first brought him into the house. His mother had abondned him and, my mother said, he would've died out in the cold if she didn't bring him in. As a two-week old he was a small, furry, yellow ball of adoroableness. Because my mother had rescued him from the cold, he thought she was his mother. He followed her around like a normal depenant, although she never sat on him to keep him warm. She baptized him Pablo and loved him like a son.

Pablo grew up fast. He soon became an awkward teenager. His feathers were unevenly distributed, and his color was an off-brown; he looked like a mangled eagle or a recently rehabed vulture. My father came home one day and almost stepped on him; Pablo screamed, my father jumped and avoided falling by holding on to my neck, he chased Pablo all over the house, cursing and throwing whatever he could find in Pablor's direction. Pablo ran to the kitchen and took cover behind my mother's legs. My father yelled: "Let's eat that fuckin animal already!" and "What's he doing in the house?" My mother responded clamly: "Leave him alone" and "you need to watch where you're walking." It was during this time that I realized that he was a part of the family and not just a charity case. More than that, Pablo knew he was my mother's ward. She was his protector.

In a year, Pablo was clucking his way about the house with his chest out and his long tail-feathers, beutifully colored, fanning the air behind him. He fuckin annoyed me. He was a cocky little cock (actually, he was a fighting cock who had never thrown a punch). But my mother wouldn't kick him out, even though he was already full grown. He slept in the porch, in a box with blankets and water. He'd wake everyone up at the crack of dawn, which sucked for everyone but my father who had to go to work, and for my mother who packed my father's lunch. In other words, it sucked for me.

At some point, Pablo realized that I was his competition. He'd stand outside my bedroom door and murmur some demonical verses in his own chicken language. I'd throw my shoes against the door to scare him off; I could hear my mother: "stop that!" and "you're gonna break that door!" and "don't make me come in there!" Fuckin Pablo. I'd get up at about 7 and get ready for school. Pablo would charge me and pick a fight. I'd rush right at him hoping he would't move so I could kick him in the face. But he would run and find my mother, who would tell me to sit the hell down and eat my breakfast. I'd get my backpack and walk out the door. Pablo would walk me to the stairs and watch me leave. We would stare at each other and wish each other ill.

My guess is that he was good company for my mother, who from lack of papers had to stay home and avoid dealing with the inevitable existential boredom which pervades all of Being. Pablo lived with us in the Gashouse for what now seems a good lifetime. One cold December morning it was the silence that woke everyone up. My mother walked to the porch to find Pablo frozen stiff in his luxury box. The cock was dead and I could't help but feel...exhuberant. My mother, I can only guess, was sad about the tragedy. My father, who had come home to pick up a jacket, grabbed him by the tail feathers on his way into the kitchen and put him in a pot of boiling water. By 7 a.m. he was defeathered and cut to pieaces, soaking in a pot with carrots and squash. When I got home from school I had chicken stew. Pablo was tough; his leg muscles strained my jaw muscles. The meat was dry. I asked my mother for his heart and ate it with a bit of salt. It was chewey and tasted like blood and vengance--or maybe life and ipseity. Fuckin Pablo.

*Thanks for the title, Jeremy W.

Illegals, Entrepreneurs, and the Free Market

I grew up in a town where 90% of the people were farm workers; another 3% were unemployed; and 7% owned the farms where the workers worked.* Nowhere was this division clearer than in school, where 60% of the students were the children of the 7%. When I graduated high school—because I did, after all, graduate—all my friends, who had not and could not graduate, were not allowed into the stadium were the graduation was held (because of their respective “affiliations” and their status as unwanteds). The stadium was filled with the 7%ers and their children, friends, and others; my friends, dozens of them, leaned against the chain link fence which kept the haves inside the stadium—they cheered when my name was called. My friends made up the 3%, above.


The 90% (mostly illegal aliens who immigrated from Mexico) were hard-working people who had been coming and going for decades, working the garlic and tomato harvests, paying taxes, supporting large families back in Mexico, all the while struggling to raise their children according to American customs which they didn’t really understand. Those that failed made up the 3%, who, confused and marginalized, took to gangs, drugs, and guns to assert their role in American culture, even if that role was the one reserved for those who justify police presence and prison funding.

Ultimately, the 90% kept that town alive.

I heard Rafael Anchia speak not too long ago. He’s an impressive politician from Texas—a Democrat from the 103rd district. Some have high hopes for him. He called illegal immigrants “entrepreneurs” who must raise “venture capital” (the money it takes to cross the border) in order to fund a “start up” (the journey to find a job) which they hope will thrive in a difficult and risky economic environment where death is very much a possibility. Speaking to a large group in the Silicon Valley, Anchia’s message resonated with everyone there. He asked: in these times, wouldn’t it be better to have more entrepreneurs rather than less?

Republicans, when they stop inhaling glue long enough, have begun to see the economic benefits of illegal entrepreneurs. They question the value of less illegal aliens on the very foundations of our free market system. I hope this kind of thinking continues. But there’s a lot of glue!

On the Road

I'm taking this show on the road! I'll be presenting a paper on all of this nonsense (the theme of the Blog, that is) in Oregon (Society for Philosophy and the Contemporary World) in two weeks. Here's the "Outline"--the paper itself is long and more nuanced, with arguments and such.

"Philosophy and the Post-Immigrant Fear"

Introduction

• The specific purpose of this paper is to explore and then expand on Jorge Gracia’s reasons for the apparent lack of Hispanics in US philosophy (i.e., in his 1999 book: Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective). I will narrow my focus to a specific sub-group of the philosophical Hispanics Gracia considers, namely, “homegrown” US Hispanics. This group, Gracia says, are entirely missing from the “established” ranks (Gracia mentions 6 established Hispanic philosopher in the US, all foreign born). Introducing a first-person phenomenological perspective, I propose an explanation which I think captures my experience as a homegrown US Hispanic, one which has given rise to a sense of identity which I can only describe as “post-immigrant”; those who share in this identity, I suggest, desire but hesitate engaging philosophically with their own experience as post-immigrants, particularly when the post-immigrant is one who is also a degree-bearing member of the philosophical profession. The reason for the absence of homegrown Hispanic philosphers who are also willing to engage issues related to their circumstance as Hispanics boils down to what I call, “the post-immigrant fear.”

Section 1: From Marginalization to Avoidance: Gracia on Hispanics in US Philosophy

• Of 316 philosophy programs surveyed in 1992, the number of Hispanics who are either full or part-time faculty members is 55; in 1995, there are 68 full time and part time Hispanics in those programs. Generalizing to the number of programs represented in the American Philosophical Association, this means that in the mid-1990’s, 2.2% of all philosophers teaching in the US are Hispanics; the Hispanic population in the US at that time is roughly 10%.

• Gracia: “First, why is it that there are so very few Hispanics who have become established in the profession in the United States? Second, why is it that those few who have become established are foreign born? Third, why are there so very few Hipsanic Americans in the profession at all? Fourth, why is Hispanic philosophy ignored in the philosophy curriculum? And fifth, why is it that Hipsanics-American philosophers are not attracted by, and perhaps even avoid, areas that have to do with their identity as Hispanics, whereas African Americans and women do not?”

• For ease, I call the first question the establishment question; the second question is the foreign vs. homegrown question; the third is the numbers question; the fourth is the curriculum question; and the fifth is avoidance question.

• Gracia: “My suggestion is that one reason behind all these facts is that Hispanics in general are perceived as foreigners; we are not thought to be “Americans.”..[Moreover] Hispanic philosophers are marginalized in the profession, and Hispanic issues and philosophy are regarded as alien to the interest of American philosophers.”

Section 2: Homegrown Hispanics and the Post-Immigrant Experience

• The concept of “post-immigrant” refers to individuals who are not themselves immigrants but for whom the immigrant experience itself is a historical, epistemological, cultural, or in any way existential reality. That is, a post-immigrant is the son, granddaughter, niece, or brother of immigrants who were born in Latin America, suffered the migration North, and settled as immigrants in the US. Thus, post-immigrants will usually be the children of immigrants, and not immigrants themselves who have somehow overcome their situation—thus, a post-immigrant is not a person who was once an immigrant and has left that label behind through the proper legal procedures, and is now a citizen or resident.

Section 3: The Post-Immigrant Fear

• The post-immigrant fear is the fear which keeps homegrown Hispanics in the profession, especially those who have come north and have crossed the socio-economic lines which define our immigrant experience, from writing, speaking, and teaching about Hispanic issues or Hispanic philosophy—it is what justifies our “renunciation” of the possibilities of such engagement. It is the fear of disenfranchisement, of exclusion, of arrest. It might be unconscious, or not something of which we are always aware, but it structures our very experience. Some of us will not admit the fear, since the admission says that we lack the intellectual courage which philosophers require in order to pursue truth to the bitter end.

Section 4: Conclusions

• The situation which Jorge Gracia described in 1999 has not changed much over the past 10 years. According to the National Science Foundation, 103 Hispanics received a doctorate in some field of the Humanities in 1988; this number doubled in 2008 to 206. These numbers are slightly higher when compared to Asians, African-Americans, and Native Americans. However, they are dismal when compared to Whites, who received 2564 PhDs in 1988 and 3009 in 2008. This means that just a couple of years ago, in 2008, Hispanics made up only 6.8% of all PhD recipients in the Humanities. The numbers of Hispanics who received a doctorate in philosophy are much lower. According to the same data, out of the 401 philosophy doctorates awarded in 2008, 10 went to Hispanics—that’s 2.5% as opposed to 2.2% almost 20 years ago! So, 10 years after Gracia published those alarming numbers, Hispanics in philosophy are still largely underrepresented in proportion to the numbers in the overall population.

Diet

Menu—September 3, 1987


Breakfast: 3 white-powder doughnuts; tall glass of milk.

Lunch: Cafeteria food, Santa Lucia Elementary School (Chocolate milk was surely involved)

After school snack: hot-dog franks with ketchup, cooked over the stove flame, burned, and cut into pieces for dipping in ketchup.

Dinner: beans and tortillas with Tapatio sauce while watching tv in the living-room, waiting for my dad to come inside the house; he’ll be out until the beer runs out or he gets hungry.

I was thinking about this last night because I’ve come to the conclusion that I have horrible eating habits. I blame my chilldhood. But I would’ve starved without this menu. It’s not that my mom was neglectful; we were just poor. We had nothing. The powdered-doughnuts were a luxury, but they were still cheaper than cereal. I was lucky I went to school—at least there I would get to eat a stale hamburger with soggy fries and green jell-o. My mother would try to make with what she had, but she only had what we could afford, and hot-dog franks were cheap and, if I ate a bunch of them, very filling. Sometimes, when we had eggs, she’d mix them in to the franks—delicious! Other times, she'd mix them in with nopales (which is a slimy green cactus plant), which I hated and never ate. On these occassions, I coocked my own and drowned them in ketchup and had a feast.

I’m trying to eat better these days, but everything is harder and less tasty than hot-dog franks with ketchup.

Finally!

This is awesome! http://www.takeourjobs.org/

Story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100624/ap_on_en_tv/us_immigration_take_our_jobs

Just a thought.

Cauliflower!

Cauliflower is beautiful to look at. It tastes great, too. If you boil it, cut it to pieces and put some salt, lemon, and chili powder all over it, you have a great snack—tons of fiber and absolutely delicious! You can also eat it raw. My father taught us how to eat the stem raw. Just peel off the thick, green, skin and sink your teeth into a sweet tasting vitamin bomb. He said that if we only ate the stem, everyday, we’d live to be 200. And we had a lot of it. Our house, the Gashouse, sat in the middle of a hundred acres of cauliflower fields. My dad was the guy who watered it. It greened up the world. I saw nothing but green from my window. And on windy days, all you smelled was green—it even ate the gas leaking from our stove.


Before the “flower” blossoms, the bugs are killed off. My father would drive around the fields putting up signs with a skull and cross bones that said: Peligro! This meant that we were not allowed to go into the field. A helicopter would wake us before sunrise: I could see the guy’s goatee from my window. He would spray the Peligro over the green. The Peligro was a white mist that smelled like….it smelled like meth! After a few days, my father would take down the skeletons and we were free to roam the fields and cut stems.

As soon as the white head of the plant grows bigger than a fist, it is wrapped up in its own leaves. A rubber band keeps the head inside its leafy cocoon. Illegals do that part of nature’s work. Bees are overly qualified. Days later, another crew of unwanteds comes and cuts the head off, wraps it in a plastic bag, and sends it to your kitchen. After all the heads are gone, a tractor comes and razes whatever is left. The next day the sun cooks whatever is laying on the ground. The air smells like rotting flesh. But it is not overbearing. It is a comfortable smell of death. It became familiar to us, like the Peligro and the green.

Those fields are our killing fields. I’ll tell you how later, even though it matters little to question the methodologies of death.

Landmines?

Fences. Rivers. Minutemen. Deserts. Guns. Deceit. Arizona. And now Landmines. I don’t know what to say about this. A patriotic American in New Mexico wants to put landmines on the border to keep "illegals" out and American greatness in. Obviously, this guy lacks the imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship of those he's trying to blow up. I'm sure there's a guy in Tlazazalca, Michoacan, right now working on a teletransporter.

Anchor Babies?

So now Arizona is aiming to pass a law against “anchor babies.” These are the children born to undocumented aliens in US soil. They are called anchor babies because they are used by the undocumented alien as an “anchor” which ties her to the US—it is also argued that those with anchors “have hijacked the 14th amendment.” Anchor babies would—if this law passes, which I’m confident it will—inherit their parents crimes, and as illegal, would be born felons.

It is a matter of time before Meg Whitman, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and the rest start the propaganda mill about anchor babies. If life begins at conception, as some believe, then these same people should call for the immediate forced abortion of all anchor embryos; immigrant illegals should be kicked in the stomach if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’re carrying along anchors. They should put something stronger in the pesticides that are already killing and deforming children of immigrants—the hijackers should be gassed.

The logic of subjectivity is tricky. How do I navigate this new designation? I am one of these “anchors,” but I’ve always thought I was a citizen, and I tried to behave as such. How do we define ourselves when we have no “place” of birth? Or when our birth-place is no place at all, but a prohibited zone? What if we are born while our mother’s are trespassing? Don’t we belong to the master of the plantation at that point? Are we not “his” property? A strange anonymity shows up as a possibility of self-definition. Without a place of birth, things are not born. Are we, then, unborn? Yeah, it’s best to gas these vampires before they contribute to the prison population or the educated elite.

Dialectics

I was pretty upset about the whole anti-immigrant sentiment going around these days. Until I talked to my father about it. He reminded me that things like this happen all the time; that once in a while, history repeats itself, and immigrants are the first targets of hate and discrimination because they are non-citizents, which means, he said, they are “como perros”—like dogs. But, I said angrily, dogs in the US have rights; immigrants don’t. But, he insisted, maybe this is a good thing. Hate has a tendency to wake people up. Maybe something will come of this. My father’s a Hegelian.
I don’t know if I agree with my father-the-immigrant. But maybe he has a point. Maybe racists and xenophobes give us an opportunity to grow. In one of his earliest pieces, Karl Marx, speaking of the complacency of his own people, says:

“The point is not to allow the Germans a moment of self-deceit or resignation. We must make the actual oppression even more oppressive by making them conscious of it, and the insult even more insulting by publicizing it…So as to give them courage, we must teach the people to be shocked by themselves.”

Maybe it was time, again.

Dignity and Other Requirements

My father’s life as a mojado was negated by the persistent migra who kept on sending him back. Once in Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, he was just another Michoacano who had gotten caught. He wasn’t a mojado when he drove into town at 3 a.m., drunk and full of life, singing and yelling for my grandmother from the other end town. He was just her son, who’d come home. The migra’s negations had their limits. It would’ve been another matter completely had they kept him here, in prison, without a phone call, a Sunday visit, or his dignity.

He was caught for the last time in Greenfield, CA., in the fall of 1971. He was stuffed in a green van, with other luckless mojados who couldn’t outrun the dogs, and bused to Oakland. There, he was searched and stripped of all his belonging, except the $100 that they all carried in their wallet for just this occasion. The $100 was their ticket home—the migra allowed it, out of human kindness. He was thrown into a cargo plane with the rest, and they were flown to Nuevo Leon. They were escorted out of the airport and told to go home…wherever that was. He had to make the money go a long way, so he only bought what was necessary: a new pair of boots, a sombrero, a new shirt, a belt, a bottle of tequila, and a ride back to Acuitzeramo, some hours away. If he’d been beaten by the gringos, he wasn’t going to show it—and besides, he wasn’t beaten at all. He still got to make his elegant entrance back into town like a returning World Cup champion. Sure, there would be no parades and no banners, but his mother would know he was back and if anyone would be awakened by his singing at 3 in the morning, they would be impressed by his shiny new boots and the proud and elegant catrin wearing them. The next day, he'd start thinking about the trip back up North…in 6 to 8 months.

The Skunk

My father made arrangements whenever he could. These arrangements guaranteed a roof over our heads, food, and work. The arrangements often involved a roof and food in exchange for work. It was clear that we would not be moving on up.

The trailer was located under a giant tree on the banks of the Salinas River in San Lucas, CA. It was old and had holes on the roof and on its sides—the fiberglass insulation stuck out of the holes, and often my mother would yank it out so as to patch up the holes with duct tape; often fur-less baby mice would fall to the floor and squirm and make a high pitch squeak before Mother-the-Hun would crush them with her heel. One of these holes was so big that they had to wrap a large piece of tarp onto it, and glue it on or tape it with the duct tape. It is through this hole that the skunk got it.

My father was outside with his friends drinking beer and tequila and listening to music when I went to bed. My mother stayed in the living-room/kitchen/hallway watching the 13-inch black and white tv and waiting for my father to come in and eat whenever he felt like it. The smell of burned tortillas woke me up later that night—my bed was right by the stove. I got up to go to the bathroom and saw my father standing still by the door with a shovel over his head. My mother was behind him on top of the couch covering her face with a sheet. Before I put things together, my father hammered the ground with the shovel and hit the skunk right on the head. The skunk lay motionless by the garbage door and my father hit it again. It sprayed me right in the face. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. My skin burned. My lungs filled with skunk fumes and I could taste the diesel-rotten onion stench on the top of my palette. It went into my brain and stayed there for years.

Once my father took the animal outside and buried it, he came back in and I was given a quick shower. The smell wouldn’t come off, but my mother said it was only because we were immersed in it; that once we went outside, in the morning, the smell would come off. She was wrong. In the morning she woke me up and said I was going to be late for school (I was in the 3rd grade). She put my clothes out and made my breakfast. I protested, saying that I stunk and I didn’t want to go to school, since everyone would make fun of me. She said that we didn’t come to this country for me to stay home and do nothing just because of a little skunk. She insisted, forcefully and with the broom, that a better life wasn’t going to be given to me…that I had to earn it--and you earn things by going to school. I said that I was in the 3rd grade and that I didn’t want a better life; I just wanted to stay home, ‘cause I smelled. We had a starring contest and she swung the broom at my head, told me to get out and go to school—“and you better learn something” she warned. The bus-stop was a few miles away, so I got on my bike and slowly began to pedal. I stopped a hundred feet from the trailer. She stood there with the broom and swung her hands about, telling me to get going, pointing at her wrist and yelling that I was late. I wanted to be late. But I wasn’t. On the bus, the driver sat me in the back and moved all the kids to the front. All the windows were opened. When I got to class, they told me to sit outside the entire day. I told the teacher that I had to learn something or else my mother would be upset. She told me to practice my handwriting. So I did. I took it home and showed it to my mother. She didn’t look at it, but told me she was glad I’d gone. We didn’t come to this country to be sitting around doing nothing. Later I took a bath in tomato juice and some of the smell came off. It lingered in the trailer until we moved…8 months later.

Oh, Arizona!

So two different Bills will hit the Arizona Governor’s desk any day now--both are staggeringly stupid and both are expressions of a White Supremacist will to power that is alive and well in our America.

Bill 1 encourages racial profiling and outright racism—it is not even moderately disguised. The gist of it is that if you're brown, speak with an accent, or look the least bit "Mexican" (i.e., any brown-skinned accented person) then you might be detained, arrested, and sentenced with a "state crime" if you do not have the proper documentation at the time of the arrest.

Bill 2 allows the good people of Arizona to carry guns without permits, training, or background checks. This means that any fool that is not a "Mexican" will be allowed to carry a gun and, since this fool will more than likely be a fool,  he will consider it his Constitutional right to uphold the the Law of Bill 1 by shooting "Mexicans."

Of course, "Mexicans" will now find it necessary to carry guns themselves, since they know that the fool has his and is willing to shoot him...on the other hand, if the "Mexican" is illegal, he knows that carrying a gun is one more charge on top of the State crime of being an "illegal", so he'll carry a gun to protect himself against the fool...my guess is that there will be a lot of "self-defense" murders in Arizona, or outright massacres.

The thing

with the post-immigrant experience is that our possibilities of mobility are determined by the conceptual world of our immigrant parents. In order to break free, to overcome, those determinations, there must be a rapture—an event which breaks us free and hurls us into the unknown. But once hurled into the unknown, there is no roadmap, no memory to help us along. Our parents can do so much. Mine could only encourage me and doubt me. They encouraged me to do what I needed to do; but doubted that I was doing anything productive. They had no eyes to see ahead of me, so they assumed I wasn’t going anywhere. When I moved away to college, my father entertained the idea that I was living as a pimp in the “big city.” A pimp! Since no one in the clan had gone away to college, no one could imagine what I could possibly be doing so far away from the farm. So rumors started circulating that I had been spotted in San Francisco selling dope on California Street by the Red Light District. This rumor turned into a more robust conception of my travels: I was not selling, but collecting! The news got to my father, who had a violent reaction to the idea. It didn’t help matters that I had a scholarship and didn’t have to work. My mother called and asked for reassurance that I was, in fact, reading books somewhere and not sinning against all she believed in. I was irritated that my father had actually believed it. But what did I expect? This thing I was doing was not something that was done. I had to deal with it: I eventually brought my dad to see the University, to walk around it, to smell the grass. I don’t think he forgot about my pimping until I graduated for a second time. By then, he was satisfied to know that at the very least I knew my way around the darkness.

Profilin'

I bought my 1979 Cutlass Salon from my cousin Rick when I was 16. It was a few inches from the ground, with 13 inch, silver spoke, rims; a brown metallic paint job, with pin stripping on the sides; the interior was a plush red; and, what gave my car its umph, T-tops! My cousin Rick sold it to me for a couple of thousand, but I think I only gave him a grand. He wanted to get rid of it because it was a magnet for car thieves. This was evident from the ignition switch: it was fully exposed, so that you had to turn it on with a screw driver.

I was the king of the parking lot when I first drove it to school. The girls loved it; the guys wanted it. It was a teenage dream come true, except for two things: the T-tops kept flying off when I drove on the freeway and I kept getting pulled over for “not wearing a seatbelt” or “not signaling” or “your music is too loud” or “is your headlight broken?” or “do you have hydrolics?” or “whose car is this? Can you prove it?” or, my favorite, “we got a tip that….”

I never got a ticket, but they searched and prodded every single time. The fact that the ignition switch was exposed didn’t help, either. Phone calls were made…I kept them busy. But, I kept on driving. After a year or so they stopped harassing me. My father hated it. He thought it was unsafe—it was too low to the ground, he’d say. He was pulled over once. The cop didn’t ask him for any proof of insurance or registration; in a broken Spanish he told him that my friends were criminals and I should watch my back. That was a weird reversal. I think he was the only honest cop in town.

Of course, my father was expecting something else when the lights went on behind him. He’d been there before. He fully expected to get arrested for being Mexican, so he was smiling from ear to ear when he came home and told me to pay more attention to my acquaintances and find out more about myself.

Once I went to college my father sold my car without telling me. Now that I have a garage, I wonder how good the Cutlass with T-tops would look in it.

This scary story from Arizona got me thinking about car—since by the looks of things, the last thing a cop in Arizona would give my father now is advice.

Runners

Most immigrants are expected to return home—there’s an implicit promise of return attached to every departure.  This promise doesn’t seem to be implicit in exile.

In Acuitzeramo, I awaited my father’s return, since departure was never permanent. I grew anxious as October approached, I anticipated his arrival, his gifts, my reward for taking care of mom or feeding the goat. One year, I forget how old I was, he came early…sometime in August. I awoke one morning to find him outside, talking to my mom and my grandmother. I ran to him and asked for my reward. He pointed me to a box on the table. Inside, there was a pair of low-cut brown boots, with a zipper on the side. I didn’t know what to make of it. I must’ve been 8 or 9, and I loved to run around and climb rocks, chase the goat, play soccer….why the boots? He seemed particularly happy about them. I was just happy that he was happy, so I put them on. They felt uncomfortable and heavy. My mom gushed: “que bien…miralo!” My grandmother feigned shock, as if the boots made me taller or colored me green. My dad said he bought them in LA, that all the kids were wearing them. This was a particularly revealing moment for me: I questioned fashion for the first time, and the mass hysteria that goes with it. Why would anybody want to wear these ugly zipper-boots?

The next day my father took me with him to a nearby town, where his friends gathered for the horse races. They hung around a small storefront, drinking beer and talking about those still in el Norte and those in jail, about those who were caught by the migra and about those who had died far away from home. Then the conversation turned to me. They talked about my age, how big I was, how lean I looked…they said I looked “fast.” The store owner overheard this and said: “let’s race him with my boy…a case?” My father said yes, why not, a case was good. Suddenly, I was in a race with a younger, darker, barefooted boy and a case of beer was on the line. I told my dad that I couldn’t race the boy, since he looked faster than me and I was wearing those damn boots. He was laughing at the prospects of buying the storeowner a case of his own beer and he didn’t hear me. They put me on the starting line against every protest (and with the odds firmly against me). The storeowner’s son was ready. He had a stance! His feet were callous, hard, ready to run. I felt over-dressed, embarrassed, and stiff. Then, go! I’ve never been on stilts, but that’s how I imagine it feels like to run on ugly, brown, zipper-boots. My foot stared to slip out, and the zipper broke from my left boot; my foot went through the zipper, and then my boot came off; I limped across the finish line about what seemed like 18 hours after the barefooted kid. Everyone laughed. My father bought the case, and then drank it with the winner (the storeowner). I wished he’d stayed in California.

My wife wants to buy my son some boots, but I don’t know….

Tales from the Gashouse, Four

According to the school bus driver, I lived in a place called "Mann Ranch." I asked him once because I was curious as to how the morning bus driver communicated with the evening bus driver about my stop. I was the first one on the bus and the last one off--in other words, for some reason, the trip to school was quicker than the trip home.

There were four structures on Mann Ranch: the Gashouse, a double-wide trailer that served as an office and a mistress-den for the Ranch manager, a nicely kept house with a giant front yard that belonged to a "normal" American family, and a giant, dilapidated barn, which was both a safety hazard and my clubhouse. These four structures sat beneath the giant Eucalyptus tress that protected us from low-flying airplanes--they stood guard all around us like the stone heads of Easter Island. All day long, the God-trees moved about in the wind, releasing a fresh, clean, smell that made it all the way to the first step of our house. It lingered there, and didn't dare come in. The Gashouse wouldn't have it. These were two different environments, the toxic one which nurtured me, and the godly one which I could only admire. At night, the trees blocked out the moon and cast a deep dark shadow on the structures beneath. They were still--one could hear leaves falling. I could see the guardians of our island from miles away. Sometimes, when a sudden sadness would overtake me (or nostalgia, or fear, or homesickness), I would search them out--I could make out their outline from any part of town. I felt safe knowing they were there.

The God-tress are gone now--so is the Gashouse and Mann Ranch. They dug into the roots and yanked them out of the ground sometime in the late 90's, cutting them to pieces once they were rootless. There is no sign of where they stood. Whenever I drive down the 101 toward Southern California (if I do, because to get South from the North, it is easier to take the I-5, and everyone knows it), on the bridge that connects King City to the rest of the world, I always seek them out and catch their absence. I guess they are some sort of empty symbol of my childhood--or maybe a metaphor for my own uprootedness...or the death of memory...or I don't know. Whenever I think of them, though, I can't help but feel exposed. I guess they kept us hidden in our Gashouse--hidden from God, the law, history. The God-trees absorbed our sins, our crimes, and our suffering into the green of their leaves. And that's why this blog.

The Visitors

We were the lucky ones. Our house—the Gashouse—didn’t have wheels, it didn’t move, it stayed in one place, and it had heat, a stove, running water, a toilet. My father had a steady job. Everyone knew we were the lucky ones—everyone knew we’d made it. In Michoacan, my father’s family (sisters, brothers, cousins) spread the word about my father’s good fortunes. There was a rumor that we were rich, that my father made so much money that my mother didn’t have to work, that I had my own car, that we lived in a mini American mansion. The rumor was somewhat true: my mother didn’t have to work, but only because my younger sister was mentally ill, and my mother had to care for her; I had my own car, yes, but I bought it with my own money, money I made after school, and during the summer, when the white kids in school went to Idaho and Montana and Disneyland.

Every year a new group of refugees would arrive in the middle of the night to ask for my rich father's generosity. They would come in June and leave in November. My rich father never said no. Although our mini-American mansion only had two rooms, a family of 6 or 7 would stay with us, disrupting whatever sense of normalcy we’d developed over the winter months. They would sleep in the living-room and, against every protest, in my room. The house was abuzz from 3:30 to 6:45 in the morning when the last guest would go off to work the tomato or the garlic fields of Southern Monterey County. The Gashouse would loose its familiar gas smell for a few hours while the women prepared the mole and roll the burritos which they stuffed in thermoses and lunch-bags.

One visitor I remember clearly because he slept in my room on a couple of extended stays. His name was Miguel, and he snored, smelled, and stuttered when he spoke. He had a clock which kept me up all night with its tick-tick-tick-tick. I was used to the mice in the stove, the snoring, the smells, but I couldn’t stand the tick-ticking of the clock.

I could never understand why my father couldn’t say no to our visitors. Perhaps he wanted them to keep thinking that he had what he hadn’t--I'm sure they didn't think this for long. Maybe he was just being kind. My mother and I resented them all. I dreamt of stuffing a shoe in Miguel’s throat every night around 1 a.m., after I had tried in vain to sleep amidst the thunderous snoring and the hammering of the clock. I ended by smashing his clock to bits and blaming my little brother, Art, who could barely pick up his bottle, much less smash a well-made American clock to bits.

Miguel was killed in a car accident one winter while driving back to Mexico. All my hate and resentment turned into despair and sadness. I wish I hadn’t broken his clock. I wish I had talked to him about his dreams, maybe I could write about them, or use them in a lecture.  He did tell me once that he wanted to marry a gringa so that he could get his citizenship papers. 

Something on the news about immigration reform got me thinking about the visitors today...I think it was a gringa voicing her concerns about the guys who hang around Home Depot. 

Old Immigrants

My father will be 59 this fall. He’s been working the fields of the central California coast for 40 years. He lost his job last year, and has been collecting unemployment for a number of months. If anyone deserves unemployment “benefits” it’s him, so I never asked him about looking for work or encouraged him to do so. I figured that a guy who’s worked 7 days a week, every week, of every month, of every year for the past 39 years, deserves to rest, at least before regretting never having enjoyed life in America at least one year. But his unemployment is running out. This, together with the fact that he’s driving my mother absolutely bonkers, motivated him to ask his old boss for a job—a guy who swore he would get my father work whenever he wanted it and who just happens to have a new crew working the fields in King City. His old boss, a devout Christian who doesn’t miss an opportunity to preach charity and good will and the magic of Jesus, didn’t hesitate to tell my father that he was too old to work, that if he were 15 years younger, then he might be exploitable, but not at 59! My father said fine, and resigned himself to despair and the memories of a different sort of discrimination. I called him and told him that we should get a lawyer and sue their asses for age-discrimination. What for, he said, they’ll deny it and say that they just don’t need men right now. Would a Christian lie? I asked. Surely, if questioned about his reasons for not hiring you, someone who believes in the Resurrection would tell the truth. My father, who usually doesn’t say much, didn’t say much. “Umm,” he said, “I’ll go ask Rusty if he has work for me.” Rusty is a guy he worked for when we lived in the Gashouse…I have my doubts about my father’s future in the business. Old immigrants are expendable.

The Haunting

After a few years of living with my grandmother my father built us our own house on the banks of a river which ran red as blood most of the year (it was red because of the clay). A small 10 foot-wide road ran in front of the house, into and through town, and continued on into the mountains and then on and on north until it reached the heart of Mexico itself.  This road was used by the revolutionary soldiers during the war—my grandfather’s uncle, I.S., was an ally of the cause, so it was a "friendly" road during those days. As the soldiers headed into the hearland, into war and possibly death, they would bury their belongings on the side of the road, in small holes on the ground or in the hollows of trees, or behind fences. Sometimes they owned gold or money, which they stashed on their way to fight, in hopes, I think, of coming back; most didn’t. 

My uncle, who lived next door to our new house, found a sack full of gold pieces next to his fence. This made him a rich man. When my father was building our house, he dug up some pottery. Those helping him stood around it and asked him to break it and see what was inside. But they jinxed the deal before they cracked it by making elaborate plans with the riches they still hadn't seen--it was a well known fact that you should never spend a dead man's treasure before you have it in your hands. When they cracked it, there was a lump of clay inside. My father threw the broken pot into a trench and poured cement over it. Someone told him that this was a bad idea, since the spirit which guards the pot was sure to continue guarding it, which meant that our house would be haunted. My father has never believed in ghosts. He has no religion. 

We moved into the house before my father finished it. He had to return to the States to work, so he left it without windows (just boards) or locks on the doors (thicker boards) and no electricity (candles) running water or toilets—we had an outhouse. One night, as we lay in bed (I slept with my mother when my father was gone…with ghosts and the spirits of dead soldiers around, why would anyone sleep alone?), and as my mother finished her prayers a light appeared on the hallway. It slowly climbed the hallway wall until it stood suspended halfway between the floor and the ceiling. We looked behind us, as someone might have been shining the light from outside…but we had no windows, and the boards which covered the window-space were tight and nothing was coming from outside. We turned to the light and it loomed there, now with bright sparkling stars in its center, now with colorful boarders, purple, I think, which vibrated. I held on to my mother hoping the entity would not attack or swallow us whole. My mother prayed hard, since, as a good catholic, she has to believe in ghosts.  After a few minutes, the light crawled down the wall and sunk into the floor like a melting ice cube. Then it was gone.

I don’t trust my memory on this one. I think that the constant retelling of the story added details that were never there--I just don't know which details are ornamental and which are real. My mother says she remembers it clearly, and blames my father for throwing that pot into the foundation. We had a conversation not too long ago about getting some money together to dig the thing out and rid ourselves of the spirit which guards the pot, and many pots like it up and down that road and all about the banks of the red river. I was joking about it; my mother was writing things down. But I know there’s not enough money for that, though—or enough determination. Besides, why invest in ghost-eradication in a place which will never be our home...not again, anyway. No one is going back there alive, I know that for certain. It’s too late. 

On Death and Poodles

The irrigation pipe is aluminum, about 12 feet long, with a smaller, 2 foot pipe sticking out of it atop of which is stuck a sprinkler head. These pipes are connected each to each for hundreds or thousands of feet, depending on the size of the field. My job—my father’s job—was to disconnect these pipes one at a time, move them about 20 feet away from their original spot, on a parallel line, and reconnect each pipe again. This requires walking through 2 feet of mud, or 3 feet of whatever plant is stuck to the ground, in cold, heat, wind, and hunger. Sometimes the pipes are still filled with water; sometimes animals will crawl inside and die; sometimes they’re empty, so the wind whips them about.  One of the guys who walked ahead of me was whipped about by the wind which forced him to tilt his pipe upwards, juggling it he stumbled backward, and in the process hit an electric wire which fried him on the spot.

The big local news on television that night revolved around a woman whose dog had been eaten by another dog; the former was a poodle, the latter a stray dog. The dog was caught and killed. The woman, white hair trembling in the wind, cried and begged the public to look after their dogs, lest they kill or be killed in this horrible, violent, world. 

On Death and Ducks

The ancient philosopher Anaximander said: “Whatever has come into existence must also pass away with necessity.” It’s the necessity of passing away which is hard to grasp—especially when we’re used to presence. But death is shocking, and discombobulating, and noisy, and it disturbs the permanence that presence promises.


I remember my first death: a friend of my mother died when I was 9. She took me to the burial, to a town called Villa Mendoza (where my mother was born). Before they put my mother’s friend into the ground, they dug up the woman’s mother, who had been dead some 10 or 15 years. A group of men lifted the broken up coffin from the earth and placed it next to the grave. It was rusty, and the glass was broken, it was muddy on all sides. I didn’t want to look inside, but I did. The skeleton of the woman was fully dressed in a dirty white dress. She had long hair. Her jaw was gone. She was partially submerged in a rust-colored water. They put her daughter in the hole and then the mother on top of her. Two coffins in the same grave…to save money. My second death came much later, when my grandfather died. He was 91. We expected it—I was old enough to know that his passing away was necessary. And after that many more deaths. Too many to count. Each with its own distance. Each with its own denial.

My father took a bus down there for my grandfather’s funeral. He was gone for a few weeks. In the meantime, I learned Algebra and shot my sister in the arse with a .22 caliber rifle. The Sheriff came and asked for the gun. I told him it was an accident, that I was shooting at ducks in the nearby reservoir and one of the bullets ricochet off the water and went looking for my sister, who at that very moment was bending over to pick up a shinny thing on the ground. I wasn’t arrested, but it was close. The doctors who took the bullet out said that if she’d been standing upright or been a little bit shorter I would’ve killed her. I expected my father to unleash the hounds of hell when he returned from burying his father. I told him as soon as he walked in the door, to save me the agony of waiting for the fury. He just asked how my sister was. I said she was fine. I didn’t understand where he was—I do now, but only from this far-away space that projects back a belated empathy and a voiceless compassion. I hover over the rest of their experience in this way.

More Tales from the Gashouse

Somehow I had a room to myself. It lacked insulation, so it was cold and damp. It had blue walls and a window that didn’t close—the screen was gone. My parents slept in the livingroom/bedroom with my sister and my brother on the foot of the bed. Because of the cold, I used to sleep with my clothes on. This saved time in the mornings—I didn’t have to get dressed to go to school, and I was warm. I spent the evenings in my room, thinking about how cool I wasn’t, thinking about the girls I crushed on at school, thinking about the money I didn’t have—regretting everything I had said that day to everyone. I lived in the immediate past.

Since we lived in a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I had to go into town to hang out with my friends. This involved buying beer and drinking under a bridge by the town’s golf course. We drank and talked about what we didn’t have and how we would get it; we drank and plotted strong armed robberies that never took place; we drank and designed our future custom cars; we drank and predicted the best ways to die—we paid no mind to the reality of death, only to its possibility…we were children. After our drinking and our planning and plotting, I would go home and wait for the event. My father, it seems, was tired of his marginal existence and the only way he could express his marginality was through violent rejections of his present condition. He was a black-hole of rage and desperation, sucking everything into his center, luring everything and everyone into his event-horizon where we stood mesmerized, afraid, with no choice but to fall head-first into the clamorous darkness of his soul breaking. I would wait for these events—which happened often. I anticipated them and held my breath. But I had to be there, or else they wouldn’t happen. I had to be there, you see, because they had to happen. The happenings unraveled always in the kitchen, next to the stove, by the flimsy kitchen table, and the chocolate-brown refrigerator.

The Epiphany

When I was 12 my father seized me up, pulled on my arms, kicked my foot with his foot, poked me in the belly with his index finger, and concluded that I was fit to contribute to the well-being of the family. He looked me in the eyes and told me in a loud, angry, voice, that he would no longer clothe me. If I wanted to dress sharp, look good, or just stay warm, I’d had to buy my own shit.


I worked with him in the fields from then on—until I left for college when almost 18. I worked in the summers, starting in mid-June and going ‘till mid-August. Whatever money I made I kept. It usually wasn’t much. The first check was $80 dollars—for the whole summer. I made it by tying rubber-bands over cauliflower leaves—a practice meant to protect the cauliflower head from some harm or other. I wasn’t fast enough to make more than a couple of dollars a day. I bought a pair of pants (Levis’-$24), two T-shirts (plain-$20), a pair of shoes (Addidas—$30), and a necklace that I wear to this day, for which I put my last $6 as a down-payment. When I was fourteen I got a permit to work after school. I would hurry home and put on my boots, meet my father’s mayordomo outside the house and do as he said. This paid a bit more: about $25 a day.

When I was 17 I knew my father’s work. I knew what I needed to do and I did it well. But it was hell. On a warm summer morning in 1992, as I finished moving a heavy aluminum pipe up a green carrot hill, I looked over to my father, who did the same thing some 50 feet away, and yelled: “I don’t’ want to do this anymore!” He didn’t hear me, but I heard me. It was the first time I’d heard anything for years. I shook the mud off my boots and went for the next pipe. But I had a sense that I had made a decision and, for the first time that summer, I was really fucking happy.

Tales from the Gashouse 2

A mechanic welding a piece of steel to a tractor started a brush fire that sped toward the house. I saw it from the step, where I sat staring into the giant eucalyptus trees which hovered above us like gods. I was looking at a nest at the very top of the one closest to me, where a giant bird had once lived. Someone shot it in the chest with a .22 caliber rifle while it perched in its nest a summer before. It was a beautiful bird. I found it dead in the grass and fed it to my dog.

The fire sped quickly. I grabbed a hose and confronted it. The mechanic ran after it with a jacket, swinging it wildly, hitting the fire over the head, hoping to knock it out and stop it from burning us all to hell. My fear was that the fire would get to the propane tank, which sat two dozen feet from the front steps of the house. I poured water on the tank, hoping to get it ready for what might come. I turned my attention to the fire which slithered towards it, as if looking for a fight. I poured water on its head while the mechanic kicked dirt in its eyes and hit it with his jacket. It died.

The mechanic thanked me and walked back on the black earth to what he was doing before. I went back to my step and thought about the explosion that I had just prevented.

It was a Sunday afternoon. My father had fallen asleep on the sofa. He’d been drinking and watching soccer. My mother, pregnant with her fourth, was knitting on the bed. She came out because she smelled smoke.

“What’s the smell?”

“The mechanic burned the grass.”

“Well at least the fire didn’t make it to the tank.”

“Si.”

Smoke hovered over the patch of black earth. It didn’t rise too far into the atmosphere. I was happy something had happened.

The Gashouse

In exchange for housing, my father would put in a 24 hour work day, taking naps here and there throughout the night. The specifics were these: from 5:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. he would work in the fields, moving pipe, digging ditches, unplugging sprinklers with a wrench (mice would get stuck in the pipes and the water would force them out in pieces through the sprinkler head), driving tractors, weeding, and the rest. He’d come home and eat, drink a twelve-pack or two, and fall asleep on the couch until 10:00 p.m., at which time he'd go turn on water pumps, check on reservoirs levels, and chase deer away from the crop with a .22 caliber rifle or a flare gun. He’d do this 3 or 4 times a night…every night.


The housing he got in exchange was criminal. When we first arrived in San Lucas, CA., we were put up in a small trailer that smelled like rotting flesh in the summer and wet dog in the winter. Later, in the fall of 1985, we moved to "the house where I grew up." This was an old decrepit house which stood in the middle of hundreds of acres of farmland. It was immediately surrounded by giant Eucalyptus trees which rocked and swayed during earthquakes and perfumed the air with the smell of medicine and Spring. They encroached on our entire existence, like guardians or annoying animals. Inside, the house was painted a light blue, had thin, worn out brown carpeting, and a yellow kitchen. The bathroom was small and cramped and the linoleum floor was peeling off. There were holes everywhere: rats and mice would watch me pee while eating popcorn with their friends. When I sat on the toilet, they sat on the edge of the sink and stare right into my eyes. They walked on my face when I slept; and when I woke up, they’d jump out of my shoes. At night, they’d play in the stove and it sounded like a million mice typing Shakespearean plays. They damaged the stove and the pipes and the house smelled like gas for years. My mother left a window open to let the fumes out. But the gas was in my palette when I drank milk or ate donuts; if I didn’t smell gas, then something was wrong. No one ever complained, because that wasn’t our style, but my headaches and my asthma went away when I got to college. My sister, who was born in 1989, has severe mental handicaps...who knows why. My father used to smoke in the house and no one ever pointed out the obvious—I guess there were things more explosive than gas in those days--especially when my father was around. I got used to the sound, the smell, the sights, and the vertigo of that house—I got used to its symbolism and its danger, to its weather and its geography; but I never got used to the gas—it was the smell of death or some unknown disturbance.

Morons and their Ideas

If the following had happened 35 years ago, I would've received the best private school education an immigrant farm-worker's salary could afford! Brilliant!

GOP bill aims to retool immigrant birthright citizenship

Stephen Wall

Republican lawmakers in Congress are sponsoring a bill that seeks to abolish birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents.
Federal law automatically grants citizenship to any person born on American soil, regardless of the immigration status of the child's parents.

Supporters of the bill say that many people come to this country for the express purpose of having children who are American citizens, making the family eligible for welfare and other government benefits.

"You have many people coming to this country illegally," said Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, a co-sponsor of the legislation. "They come to this country and have babies. The children are citizens. The children are eligible to go to school. They receive food stamps and social programs. The American taxpayers are paying for it."

The bill does not seek to change the Constitution, which grants birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868.

Instead, it would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

The measure would limit birthright citizenship to children born to at least one parent who is either a citizen, lawful permanent resident or actively serving in the U.S. military. The legislation would only apply prospectively and would not affect the citizenship status of people born before the bill's enactment.

If the bill passes, people on both sides of the issue say it is likely to be challenged on constitutional grounds. "This bill is unconstitutional," said Rep. Joe Baca, D-San Bernardino. "It would change one of the most basic principles that our nation was founded on: If you were born in the United States, you're an American."

Second-Hand History

My grandfather was 9 years old when the Mexican Revolution broke out. He lived in Acuitzeramo, Michoacan, somewhere in the middle of the state, currently 3 hours by car and but back then a few days by horse from Mexico City. His uncle, a guy I'll call "I.S.", joined the “bandidos,” or revolutionaries, and befriended Zapata’s general in the state, another guy named Inez Garcia. Once a month for years, Garcia would march his soldiers through town and would demand to be fed by the locals. My grandfather’s job was to gather all the unmarried girls and take them to the hills that surround the town. They would hide there until Garcia left—for obvious reasons. I.S. wasn’t liked very much by the towns-folk. In fact, those that remain still despise him. The towns-folk didn’t care for the revolution. My grandfather died in 1992 at the age of 91. He didn’t tell me the story—I was too young to care before we left and in the process of learning verbs and English conjugations when he died. My father told me the story after I named my son “I.S.” having no idea about the infamy of this name.

Migrants

I was a “migrant student” until the 10th grade. This meant that I got a free lunch at the school cafeteria and all the Spanish classes I could handle. I developed some guts sometime in the 5th grade and I protested: I wanted to take “regular” classes! With the gueras! I was tired, I told my ESL teacher then, of learning about “apples” and “green” and “run”—I was bored. She said I wasn’t ready. “Ready for what,” I asked. “For English,” she said. I asked when I would be ready. She said: “Well…there’s a lot to learn” and held up a 8 x 11 card with a picture of a guy in a red sweater acting out a verb…I think he was running. I told my mom about it when I got home and she assured me that my teacher knew what she was doing.

My mother was very trusting about other people’s best intentions for us back then. She had confidence that no one meant us harm. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to make noise. Maybe she thought that as long as she kept quiet, no one would notice us. We hid like this for years. In fact, both her and my father got used to hiding, to keeping quiet, and to the silence that comes with that. I guess it's one of those things you do when you come to believe that you're trespassing on someone else's land--or rather, when you're forced to believe it. It took me a while before I got the courage to vote.

The Great Resolution

The headline to the statement below was something about the Obama administration’s fragile hold on the Latino electorate and how it all depends on promises made regarding immigration reform. It was a paragraph, but I schematized it some. I lettered and numbered it so as to really absorb its genius. It reads:

(A) White House spokesman Adam Abrams said the president wanted to sign a bill that strengthened border enforcement and
(B) cracked down on employers "who exploit undocumented workers to undercut American workers."
(C) He also said the president wanted to resolve the status of 12 million people who were in the U.S. illegally,
a. "that they should have to register,
b. pay a penalty for breaking the law
c. and meet other obligations of legal immigrants such as
i. paying taxes,
ii. or leave the country."

(http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100215/pl_mcclatchy/3427344)

Without getting all poli’ical n’ stuff, I’d like to point out how asinine this statement is.

A is ridiculously empty. Of course, the job of a president should be to sign bills that strengthen border enforcement. One of the essential requirements of Nationhood is that it has borders and that they are protected. So every President since Washington been signing bills that “strengthened border enforcement”—this is nothing new.

B just says: “don’t hire illegals or you’ll get it…you’ll get it good.” Again, every president since I’ve been alive has made this threat. The interesting thing about this quote is that it adds that the “undercut American workers” bit. So here we have an interesting logical situation: if the exploited undocumented worker does not undercut American workers, then ...what? Most “illegal immigrants” never undercut American workers. I have never seen an “American worker” cut lettuce for a living—work that requires one to bend over for 12 hours a day 7 days a week without the possibility of a chiropractor…in the mud and without being allowed to spit or pee or talk or shit for fear that wiping will contaminate the hands and in turn the lettuce…. So B is idiotic.

C: Once, while driving past Little Rock, Arkansas, I saw a billboard that caught my attention. It said: “God wants the 11 million illegal aliens out of our country.” I guess God doesn’t always get what God wants, since the number is now 12 mill—this was in 2004. The Great Resolution, or C, will take a variety of forms, each with its own moral twists: a: they’ll register, and wear an I for illegal; b: they’ll register, wear the I, and pay for it; and c: they’ll register, wear the I, pay for it, and (i) pay taxes or (ii) leave the country. Which means, of course, that if they pay taxes, they can stay…or not.

The Great Resolution is, again, nothing new. Most illegal aliens already pay taxes in the hope that they’ll be able to apply for residency one day, at which time they’ll be asked: have you paid your taxes? At which point they can say confidently: well, yes, I have all these 1040’s stretching back 24 years. And, as per certain implied agreements, they’ll be allowed to stay...or not...usually not.

This all means one thing: Obama can easily keep his campaign promise by doing exactly what has been done before. The Illegals, of course, will keep on paying taxes and if they’re "asked" to leave, will leave and turn right around.*

*at the risk of saying way too much about my political sensibilities, I voted for Obama and will continue to support him and his administration. But this policy, or its representation in the media, just sounds illogical...and that's upsetting.

The Crossing II

My parents were in the hotel room with us when I woke up. My mother was asleep in one of the beds, with a red bandana on her head. My father lay next to her—they were both covered in dust and strands of yellow grass. My sister was in my mothers arms. I don't remember were she came from. Anyways, I was happy they weren’t dead.

We were rounded up at about noon and packed into a truck headed for Anaheim. No one said a word. I remember the silence and the fear. After a while, my mom started a conversation with another lady about the weather. I think it was hot in the back, so the conversation was natural. Then the woman said that they had almost gotten caught the night before, but, that as luck would have it, the migra’s truck had overheated and they were able to run for it till they found a hiding place. My mom told her that they had crawled through a tunnel to get across; that she was on her knees for about 4 hours; that the smell of dead bodies had made her throw up; that the dead body was a woman’s. She told me that story many years later, and I recalled the trip to Anaheim when she did.

My father slept next to me with his hat half-covering his face, as he does. It had the word “KING” sewed on it in the shape of a crown (now it sounds like I’m making this image up to reference some sort of unconscious projection on my part, but everyone I knew had a hat that said KING on it. I learned later it was an agriculture supply store in King City, CA. where my father, and everyone he knew, bought their work boots…and their hats). The truck stopped a couple of hours later--or was it days? My father paid the driver and we got to Anaheim. We went into a McDonalds with our bags and my father bought us food. It was the first time I had seen them eat in two days. I fell in love with McDonalds that day. It was the greatest, best smelling, and most delicious place on earth. We had arrived.