realizing it, I was already applying what I’d learned of the American dream from my two visits to the San Joaquin Valley, first at age eleven and then at age fourteen. I wanted to believe that I could travel to Faraway in my own country and have adventures, meeting opportunity and success along the way. I wanted to believe that I could be like my hero, Benito Juárez, and come from nowhere to make important contributions to my country. I most wanted to believe that poor and politically ignored people like me were not powerless. For a decade, during which economic troubles exacerbated poverty and suffering, the once-thriving middle class had been left in the dust. Now I was finding out that the promise that had sustained me—that people like me who had sunk to the bottom could eventually alter our own circumstances—was nothing but a fairy tale.
My future was suddenly in question. Did I even want to be an elementary school teacher? Had I really excelled, or had learning just come easily to me? As I relived the recent years of my education, I realized that I’d felt little passion for my subject matter and now, more than ever, resented this system that had lured me in with promises it couldn’t keep. Had I chosen my path because becoming a teacher was practical, because someone else had done it and had left me a trail? Had I given up on the dreams that had roused my fighting spirit from the time I was a little boy?
Everything at this point appeared more difficult than before, and at times my situation seemed hopeless. At moments, I even wondered whether my life was worth living, whether anyone would miss me if I died. Yes, I had a family that loved me and a girlfriend who thought I had something to offer. But perhaps they were mistaken. Maybe everyone would be better off without me.
No one was able to explain to me that I was probably suffering from an overdue bout of depression or that my disillusionment was probably age-appropriate. No one was there to mention that this dark period would help me in years ahead—allowing me to empathize with patients and to understand their struggles.
One image kept me from losing all hope: the memory of my mother’s jubilant face when I returned from Mendota and handed her my earnings. That hard-earned cash proved that people like me were not helpless or powerless. That was worth something, I had to admit. And I also took some comfort from a dream that had come to me during this time of near despair. In it, a shadowy stranger assured me that better days lay ahead and that I could be the architect of my destiny, although I would have to leave all that was familiar to do so. I asked the stranger how I would know that I was on the right path. He told me that a woman would appear to accompany me at the right stage of the journey; she would be fair-haired and have green eyes.
The dream gave me few other specifics. However, clinging to the image of my mother’s face when I’d returned home from working the fields the last time, I decided I could still become a teacher if I made a few adjustments in my plan. If I returned temporarily to Mendota, I could earn enough money to buy a car and also put aside some of my earnings to supplement my meager income when I returned to Mexico to begin my community service job. Uncle Fausto kindly agreed to put me back to work at the ranch, where I enjoyed my reclaimed status as Dr. Pacheco. Before long, I accumulated seven hundred dollars of earnings and this time needed no persuading to buy myself a wreck of an old Thunderbird at a local used-car dealership.
My dream of fixing up the car’s interior like a Las Vegas attraction—with photos of movie stars, a pair of dice, some religious iconography, and a cassette player for blaring the heavy rock I now loved—would have to wait. But in the meantime, that wreck of a Thunderbird traveled much farther and back again than its makers probably ever imagined.
Toward the end of 1986, as I approached my nineteenth birthday, I felt my life’s journey was nearing a crossroads. While I fought the idea of leaving Mexico for longer than a stint here and there and refused to give up wholly on finding a teaching position that would pay me a small salary, deep down I knew that it was only a matter of time before I migrated north.
I thought of my girlfriend, of course, and the possibilities of building a life together. But what could I offer? Then I recalled all my nights on the roof watching those fast-moving, action-seeking little stars—all going somewhere exciting, beyond the limits of my imagination. There was my answer, as certain as the fixed planets that I now knew hovered in the night sky.
Again, the opportunity to continue working at the ranch in Mendota was central to my thinking. The idea was to go there for a couple of years, returning periodically, like Uncle Jose, with money and help for the family. I hoped I could soon rise to Uncle Fausto’s level, which would enable me to put aside enough money to come back to Mexico and study at the university. I wouldn’t need political connections because I would be a man of means unto myself.
With that plan in mind, though I hadn’t made a final decision or revealed my thoughts to anyone other than Gabriel, he and I decided to go up to Mendota for a few weeks before Christmas to earn some money for the holidays. We would then bring Fausto and Oscar back with us just before New Year’s to enjoy the local festivities. After that, I would drive my cousins back home and either drop them off (as Oscar was finishing high school and Fausto was in his first year at Fresno State) and return home or stay at least until the following summer.
True to the plan, we worked in Mendota over the holiday, and then a few days before New Year’s Eve, I rounded up my cousins and Gabriel, and the four of us hopped into my Thunderbird to make the now-familiar drive through central California toward San Diego and then east to Calexico to cross the border for home. After my earlier ordeal, I made sure to carry my passport wherever I went, so I wasn’t worried about the border crossing, even if we were stopped. Besides, I thought, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place.
Not so fast!
We weren’t stopped that day. But on New Year’s Eve, now back in Mexico, the three of us decided to drive back over the border to Calexico, at which point a couple of border agents stopped us and asked to see our passports. We showed them the documents, and everything was fine—until the agent asked when I had last entered or left the country and where I had been. “Fresno,” I said. “Travel. Visit family.”
Fausto and Oscar waited in the car as Gabriel and I were escorted into a room, where a two-hour interrogation ensued. The agents had nothing on us. Finally, they asked if we’d ever worked during our travel and family visits to the United States. “What?” I asked indignantly, as if that notion were the craziest thing I’d ever heard. All this time I had been working with only a tourist visa—clearly illegal. Now I was sweating bullets, but I managed to appear cool.
When they were about to let us go, one of the agents said, “Fine, let me take a look at your ID again.”
But instead of letting me pull out the paperwork to show him, he grabbed my wallet, where he immediately found fairly recent pay stubs, issued in the United States, with my name on them. And there was a pay stub with Gabriel’s name on it, too.
We were now officially in trouble not just for working without a permit but for lying about it.
And that was how lightning struck twice and I had my passport confiscated, as did Gabriel. When we came outside, Fausto and Oscar were waiting in the Thunderbird. I got behind the wheel and followed the agent’s directions as he pointed us back south toward Mexico.
If I had been at all ambivalent about leaving home and spending a longer period of time in the United States, that incident sealed my fate. Granted, I had no passport, no legal means of crossing the border again. But that technicality wasn’t going to stop me from executing a new plan. There was no time to make my good-byes, no time to explain myself or express my regrets to my friends or my girlfriend.
I had searched my heart
