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It was the beginning of the worst recession Mexico had seen in fifty years. My father left to pursue a dream—to build us a house. Although he was a bricklayer and had built many houses, with Mexico’s unstable economy he would never earn the money he needed to make his dream a reality.
Once reality set in, and he realized that dollars weren’t as easy to make as the stories people told made it seem, he had been faced with two choices: return to Mexico empty-handed and with his head held low, or send for my mother. He decided on the latter, hoping that between the two of them, they could earn the money needed to build the house he dreamed of. Then he would finally be able to return to the country of his birth with his head held high, proud of what he had accomplished.
I was born on September 7, the day of Santa Regina. When my mother went to city hall to obtain my birth certificate, she had been angry at my grandmother for constantly criticizing her cooking or the way she cleaned, so in an act of small defiance, my mother registered me as Reyna. My grandmother never called me by my given name.
She pointed to the circle of rocks and a pile of ash and told me that during my birth, a fire had been on while Mami had squatted on the ground, over a straw mat, grabbing the rope hanging from the ceiling. When I was born, the midwife put me into my mother’s arms. She turned to face the fire so that the heat would keep me warm. As I listened to Mago, I closed my eyes and felt the heat of the flames, and I heard Mami’s heart beating against my ear.
But then Mago touched my belly button and added something to the story my mother had never told me. She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, “It doesn’t matter that there’s a distance between us now. That cord is there forever.” I touched my belly button and thought about what my sister had said. I had Papi’s photo to keep me connected to him. I had no photo of my mother, but now my sister had given me something to remember her by.
that the distance between us and our parents was destroying our relationship more than any of us could have imagined.
If only he had realized he was making a mistake, building a house on a property that was not under his name.
She said that no matter how many bricks and buckets of mortar we helped carry to the bricklayers, the house would never be done because it was just a foolish dream, just as silly as our dream of having a real family again.
“They aren’t coming back until that house is finished,” Mago said. “It’s taken Papi four years to build a foundation and half a wall. How long do you think it will take him to build the rest?”
IN AUGUST 1982, two months after my mother had returned from El Otro Lado, the peso was devalued for the second time that year due to the national debt crisis.
And now he had returned to us a different version of my mother, one who was bitter, heartbroken, and weighed down by the knowledge that she had four children to support and was on her own.
Later, when the middle class was almost entirely wiped out as a result of the debt crisis, those parties became less frequent, causing La Quinta Castrejón to lose its glamour and be mostly forgotten.
with the cost of everything going higher and higher,
I was gripped with a fear so great, it made my stomach churn. What if something happened to me, Mago, Carlos, or Betty? What if, by the time Papi finishes his dream house, there’s no one left for him to keep safe? Or what if he never finishes it, what if he never returns, and we are left here to face the wolf all on our own?
I didn’t want to see that look on his face. All those years staring at his photo, wishing that his eyes were not looking to the left but instead were looking at me. All those years wishing to be seen by him. And here he was, looking at me, but not really seeing me. He couldn’t see past the tangled hair, the dirt on my face, my tattered clothes. He couldn’t see the girl who had longed so much for this moment, to finally meet her father.
He hugged me too briefly, too hesitantly, the way one would hug an acquaintance’s child, as if out of obligation. Looking back on it now, I understand how awkward it must have been for him as well. We were strangers to him, too.
I wanted to yell at her, to say something mean, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead, I compared her to my mother.
I felt the sting of jealousy burning sharp like a scorpion sting, and I thought of Mami. Just briefly, I understood how she had felt. For a moment, I understood her anger.
“You can’t take her,” I said. “You can’t take her.” “Why not?” he asked. “Because she’s all I have.”
“I won’t go with you if you don’t take Reyna,” Mago said. “I mean it.”
Betty could fly back with Mila since she was a U.S. citizen.
“Tell your father that he can’t have Betty.”
“I know I promised not to separate you, but if your mother won’t hand over Betty’s birth certificate, I won’t be able to take her. She’s too little to run across the border.”
her decision had come from stubbornness. Pride. If she had allowed my father to have Betty, it would have meant that he had won.
I am grateful now that back then I was too young to fully grasp the extent of the danger we were in.
My first breakfast in the United States was bird food.
Mami had once said she didn’t want me to forget where I came from. “I promise I’ll never forget,” I said
I was not used to living in a noisy place.
Finally, we had unrestricted access to television, yet strangely enough, sometimes I would miss the radio and the fairy tales I’d liked to listen to. I didn’t like that TV took away my ability to imagine what things looked like.
we got to see the ocean for the first time.
For the first time, I felt as if we were a normal family, a family with two parents, as I had often dreamed about.
I wished I didn’t have to sit here in a corner and feel like an outsider in my own classroom. I wished I weren’t being taught something kids learn in kindergarten.
Although there were many good things we now had, there were also things we had in Mexico that we no longer had here. Mago, Carlos, and I missed our freedom. We missed being able to go outside to walk around the neighborhood and feel safe because everyone knew us.
Mexico was also in a cup of hot chocolate, the steam curling up into the air. I would inhale Mexico through my nostrils. While at the supermarket with Mila,
If I returned to Mexico, then I could see my little sister, my mother, and my sweet grandmother again. I would also get to keep my two last names. I would be in a classroom where I understood what my teacher said.
Where do I belong? I wondered. Do I belong here? Do I belong there? Do I belong anywhere?
I thought of that, and the new doorknob Papi had installed on their bedroom door, and I wondered if he was trying to tell us something.
But the father in this house didn’t know me. He didn’t know me at all. And I didn’t know him.
Back in Mexico, I wanted to say, my head was a nesting ground for lice. My belly was home to worms. Three times a week, Abuelita Chinta would send us to the canal to bathe in its muddy waters, and I often went around barefoot. But here in El Otro Lado, I had tennis shoes. I showered almost every day, and the water that sprinkled down from the showerhead was so clean I could lift up my head and stick out my tongue and catch the water drops that tasted of rain. We no longer had to wash our clothes in the dirty canal water, nor scrape our knuckles raw from scrubbing our dresses on the washing
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To my surprise, Papi wasn’t angry with me. Instead, he spent the rest of the afternoon parting my hair and looking for lice, removing the white nits very carefully so as not to pull out the hair strands. My father, the one who inflicted pain with his belt or his words, the one who had shown little tenderness toward us, who had hands hardened and callused from so many years of hard manual labor, was very gentle when delousing my hair. For the first time since I’d been in this country, Papi devoted a full two hours to me. Only me.
All of a sudden, I was back in Iguala. I was back with my sweet grandmother.
I felt bad for the alien because life in the U.S. was very difficult for him. I could understand his wanting to go home. I was jealous because he seemed to learn English a lot faster than I had all those months.
How I wished I could go home, too, back to Iguala where I could speak to my teacher in my own language. Where I could stand up for what I believed in, not caring if afterward I got hit with the ruler for my rebellion. I didn’t want to be in this country if that was how things were always going to be.
Looking back on it now, I think it was at that particular moment in our lives that our relationship with our mother finally hit its lowest point. It was then that I finally understood the kind of person my mother had become. And how little space she was willing to make for us in her life.
I loved playing an instrument because I knew that it didn’t matter whether I spoke perfect English or not. It didn’t matter that I had a “wetback” accent. Reading music didn’t require me to be fluent in any spoken language. And I didn’t need to speak, just play.
“I’m not going to put our lives in danger for a bucket of water.”
Papi caught a glimpse of the cholo’s face and said, “I let you take water from me and now you’re threatening me with a knife?” Papi later told us that Tino had actually apologized to him and put his knife away. “Good thing I’ve never said anything about the water,” Papi said. “He would have stabbed me right then and there because I wasn’t about to hand over my wallet that easily.”
“If I go out there and help him, tomorrow I will be the one who gets shot. Or you kids. Those stupid cholos will come seeking revenge, believe me. I don’t want to come home and find you kids clinging to the gate with a bullet hole in your chest!”
After two weeks of looking at his closed door, I realized that the dream house wasn’t the only thing he had lost.
In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself.
