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.