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.