more upset that I had looked up girls’ dresses than that I had lied. Clearly, I wasn’t living up to the moral standards of the church or showing the kind of character that honored my family and my parents’ values.
While crawling on my knees from outside the church, I expressed true remorse again for that episode. And there was more. Besides having a sharp tongue and sometimes lashing out with sarcastic comebacks, I had been known to tell a dirty joke or two. Or three.
For these sins and more, I asked forgiveness all the way to the altar. Even though I had no reason to feel responsible for the loss of the gas station, just in case, I begged for forgiveness if anything that I had done or not done had contributed to our misfortune. More important, I also asked to be given the responsibility and the strength to help relieve the problems, along with the understanding to make sense of what was happening to us.
Thus ended my relationship with organized religion. From then on, though I attended church occasionally, I communed with God wherever and whenever I chose: at night under the stars or on my walk to and from school or to various jobs. There were times when my one-on-ones with God led to some heated questioning: why was there so much suffering, how could a merciful Supreme Being allow poverty, illness, injustice, and misfortune to exist, and what had my innocent baby sister Maricela done to be taken from the world? The explanations were rather hazy, although my faith that I would one day come to understand these mysteries was not.
In the meantime, my source of inspiration in coping with our earthly difficulties was my mother. Unafraid, without complaint, Mamá made up her mind that she was going to hold her family together, in spite of the already strained relationship between my parents and even with our ongoing challenges that had no easy remedy.
Already resourceful, Flavia now expanded her activities. In addition to buying and finding used goods to refurbish and sell, she soon set up a little secondhand shop in a market area outside Palaco. Forty miles south of the border fence that ran between Mexicali on the Mexican side and Calexico on the U.S. side, her shop attracted both local customers and tourists who wanted to venture into the country but not too far. When Mamá had raised a bit of capital, she bought an old sewing machine with a foot pedal and began doing piecework at home at night for a costume company—sewing, of all things, sexy outfits for hookers at the local brothel!
Word of this particular work spread in the neighborhood, and I was not amused when the taunts started. Too bad for the kid who sneered at me one day, “What’s it like to be the son of a woman who makes clothes for prostitutes?”
Putting my sharp tongue to use, I responded, “What’s it like to be the son of the woman she’s making the clothes for?”
After getting my butt kicked badly for that remark, I resolved to fight less and to find a better way to harness my outgoing personality. With help from my Uncle Abel, one of my mother’s brothers—and money from trading in all the marbles I’d been amassing for years—I went into the hot dog business. Who could resist a child with a big voice, standing up on a stool and hawking hot dogs? No one, I thought! Unfortunately, few could afford my wares. I then started selling roasted corn, but as the national economy worsened, I didn’t fare any better.
Desperation set in. Just when things became really bleak, my mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Jose, began to make periodic deliveries from the United States, where he worked and lived part-time—bringing food staples and sometimes money that meant we could eat for the next few months. The sight of his pickup truck heading our way and kicking up dust on the road—loaded with burlap bags of beans, rice, and potatoes—was like witnessing the arrival of the cavalry in old Western movies. Just in the nick of time!
I didn’t know the extent of Uncle Jose’s generosity at the time—he had few resources himself—but I did know that he cared enough to help. Interestingly, no one ever told Uncle Jose how bad things had gotten for us. Somehow he figured it out.
No one else did, including my mother’s brother, Fausto, who came down from the United States to visit us every Christmas, bringing my cousins, Fausto Jr. and Oscar, with him. Uncle Fausto had gone to California as a migrant worker in the 1950s through seasonal passports provided by the Bracero Program. Thanks to his tenacity and ability, he had found permanent work as a top foreman at a huge ranch in the town of Mendota in the San Joaquin Valley, where he was raising his two sons as a divorced father.
A plainspoken man, Uncle Fausto would have said something about our deteriorating circumstances if he had picked up on them. Instead, my mother had to raise the issue and ask him about the possibility of going to the United States for a summer of migrant work. When Mamá first brought up the idea to my father, he didn’t protest, although I imagine he wasn’t happy about the prospect of having to go across the border to America and pick cotton and tomatoes. But since he didn’t have any better ideas, my mother decided to talk to Uncle Fausto during his annual Christmas visit.
This decision came after months of tension at our house. Nobody said anything about it to us children, but the look on my mother’s face when my father came home in the middle of the night spoke volumes. Papá never laid a hand on Mamá, but he had a bellowing voice, and when the two of them began arguing, the sound of his unhappiness filled our house, making me feel that I couldn’t breathe, much less stop their arguing. One day, when Gabriel and I were in the background during a heated exchange, Rosa got caught in the crossfire. She stood between my parents, crying and begging them to stop yelling at each other, to little avail.
Mamá knew that we couldn’t go on as we were. But when she spoke to Uncle Fausto, her tone was casual, as she reminded him that we all had the required paperwork to travel back and forth across the border for tourism, so we wouldn’t need any new or special documentation. The plan, my mother suggested, was that she and my father could work, and we children could enjoy a summer holiday.
“Let me see what I can do,” Uncle Fausto replied with a shrug.
Not too much later, we learned that everything was in place for the summer and that when school let out, we were going to Mendota for two months. Road trip!
I couldn’t wait. My American adventure was about to begin.
Mendota, California, bills itself as the cantaloupe capital of the world—a distinction that made me feel right at home, since I came from melon country. But something else also lent familiarity to our journey, literally providing a link to my backyard at home. Mendota had been founded by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s as a switching station and storage area for repairing and housing railroad cars, and most of the products of California agriculture were unloaded and reloaded here. What were the odds? The tracks that passed by Mendota originated at the Port of Stockton (where I would eventually work)—where the ships docked to unload their cargo onto railcars at the water’s edge. After Mendota, destinations could be switched eastward or westward, or the trains would continue south to the end of the line in, yes, Palaco!
None of the dots had yet connected for me back in 1979 when I was eleven years old. But I had a feeling of destiny about that summer. As my first exposure to the United States, Mendota was as close to paradise as I could imagine—a Garden of Eden about forty miles west of Fresno in the middle of the fertile San Joaquin Valley that stretches for miles from Stockton down through the middle of the state, almost to Bakersfield.
As much as a quarter of the produce grown in America comes from California, and most of it is grown in the San Joaquin Valley. As soon as we arrived at the ranch where Uncle Fausto was a foreman, I reveled in the freedom of the first real vacation I could remember. And we could eat for free! I looked out upon field after field, as far as I could see, rich with abundant growth and produce of every variety. All around me were rolling
