had died in childbirth, essentially leaving her to raise the younger children, slaving under the abuses of her paternal aunts and trying to hold the family together while her father, my grandfather Jesus, struggled to find his footing after his wife’s death.
Though my parents never spoke openly of their sorrow, it was a presence in our lives, an undercurrent of sadness that affected each of us differently. I suspect my sister’s death had something to do with the added sense of responsibility I felt as the oldest of five children in our household, and with the recurring childhood nightmares in which I would find myself in the midst of disaster—fire, flood, or avalanche—and know that it was up to me to save my mother and siblings. In each of these dreams, part of the story was that I’d been given superpowers—able to walk through fire without being burned or swim through tidal waves without drowning (in reality I couldn’t swim and would never be at ease in the water). The notion of having special powers must have come from my ambition in those years to follow in the footsteps of Kaliman, a Mexican comic-book superhero who could fight off the attacks of multiple demons in one move: the gravity-defying Kaliman maneuver that I was determined one day to master. In my waking hours, I was convinced that I could really do this. But in my nightmares, to my despair, before I could put my superpowers to work and save my loved ones, the dream would end and I would fail in my mission. Every time, I’d wake up crying in bewildered frustration.
The death of Maricela, my repeating nightmares, and the considerable amount of responsibility I felt from an early age may help explain why my most primal struggle was to understand and make sense of life and death. These experiences may also have planted the seed for my later interest in medicine. In the meantime, the idea that my sister had gone to a better place was comforting. It fueled my already active imagination and my curiosity to know more of the world beyond what I could see and observe in the everyday comings and goings in the outskirts of Palaco. Long before medicine was a remote possibility for me, I dreamed of a life of travel and adventure!
Then again, as I recall my nights of stargazing in the period when I was six and a half, almost seven years old, I was ready to settle for being an astronaut. I announced my plan one stiflingly hot night in the autumn of 1974 to my mother, my five-year-old brother Gabriel, and my three-year-old sister Rosa.
Everyone laughed. I was definitely the family dreamer!
There were many nights like this one when the suffocating heat made sleep impossible inside our two-bedroom house, where we had moved a year earlier. Just across the canal from the gas station, the adobe-style house—built of cinder blocks in one part and mud in the other—lacked air-conditioning and was like an oven, baking everything inside it! When the heat was unbearable, as on this night, the four of us opted to climb up to the rooftop, first spreading blankets over the scratchy tar-paper surface, then settling into position. Rosa curled up on one side of Mamá, while I was on the other, in between her and Gabriel. Our flight to the roof was to escape not only from the heat but also from the ever-present threat of earthquakes known to collapse houses and create mudslides in this part of the Baja, where the San Andreas Fault trails down from the west coast of the United States. Up on the roof, you were more likely to survive by avoiding having the house fall on you—as had happened recently in the area, killing hundreds. Yet those worries seemed to vanish under the stars—where all was safe and peaceful and fun!
Clasping my hands underneath my head, I made a pillow for myself, and with my legs crossed, I was at ease—happily engaged and ready to savor the show playing out in the sky above us and in our surroundings.
For a while, we were quiet. None of us said a word as our senses awakened to the sights, sounds, and smells of the night. I could hear the chirping of crickets and the buzzing of other insects, along with the loud croaking of the toads as they sang with a bravado that reminded me of the strolling mariachis who frequented the restaurants of Mexicali.
In these years, we were fortunate to be dining in restaurants every now and then, and to be part of the lower middle class in our village, slowly rising out of poverty—thanks to the modest earnings from my father’s gas station. While our status was more precarious than we knew, I recognized that the steps up the ladder were many. I was aware too that not every family could afford to eat some meat once a week as we did and that none of our good fortune would have been possible if not for the family work ethic. I had been taught this fundamental lesson starting from the age of five, when I went to work at the gas station every day after school and on weekends, pumping gas, learning to fix cars and trucks, even driving them in and out of our mechanic’s garage with the help of many cushions. I saw nothing unusual about being a five-year-old who could drive or climb up on hydraulic lifts to look under the hoods of cars and trucks to assess what needed repairing—all part of the job.
My family imparted the importance of hard work directly and by example. My father started his day at dawn at the gas station and didn’t close down until nightfall, when he would go out to spend some of the day’s earnings for food and other necessities for the family. For that reason, he wasn’t usually up on the roof when we went up there to sleep. But I knew that when he returned home later, he would probably have something for all of us to eat in the morning—often my favorite, a loaf of pan dulce, sweet bread.
Up on the roof on this night in my memory, I imagined with pleasure what breakfast would bring even as I inhaled the green, wet, earthen smells of the night, savoring it all. Everything was fresh, present, and alive—like the smell of newly picked watermelon lifted from the wet soil, ripe and ready to be eaten. How well I knew these smells from recent outings to work in Palaco’s cotton fields. Though our efforts weren’t needed for the money at this point, my parents believed that we would use lessons from the fields in other ways. Papá also wanted to show me that working at the gas station was a much better job than standing out under the blazing sun all day and picking cotton, my bare hands bleeding.
Out in the field, there was no use complaining. So I made the best of the situation by watching the process unfold—as we walked up and down the rows, picking the light fluffy pieces of cotton and putting them into long burlap sacks, and then watching how the filled-up sacks were weighed so that we could be paid by the kilogram. There was no shame in being a field worker. This was opportunity. Besides, I felt proud of what I could accomplish with my bare hands. And the moral of the story was twofold: first, every job in the entire operation counted—no job was meaningless; second, no matter how small and fluffy that piece of cotton felt, if we kept pushing ahead, all those bits of fluff would accumulate and have real weight—as much as twenty or thirty kilos that were worth their weight in pesos!
Such was the value of honest, rigorous work—bringing with it the pride of a job well done, some form of compensation, and sometimes opportunities to advance in the world. This was how I came to purchase the used bicycle I desperately wanted. Gabriel—a much more obedient child than I, who also had more common sense—was unimpressed when I brought home the bike. “How can you ride it?” he laughed, pointing out that it had no pedals or brakes. To prove him wrong, I learned to ride it sideways and basically roll wherever the bicycle wanted to go.
However, Gabriel was considerably more enthusiastic when the two of us found a used black-and-white RCA television in a secondhand store and convinced our father to buy it—though he was careful to point out that we had only one line of power to the house and it was needed for the refrigerator and the two light bulbs that lit our home. Unfazed, we managed to build a makeshift outlet that gave us enough juice. Once we replaced the picture tube, magically the picture came on, thrilling us—at least during the few hours that Mexican television aired the two stations available.
Since the TV image was very grainy, we covered the windows with blankets to darken the rooms. With temperatures as high as 120 degrees outside, the insulation only made the interior more ovenlike. But we didn’t care! The TV was a luxury item that connected us not just to the rest of the world but also to the fantastic possibilities of space travel to strange new worlds. We were hooked on the afternoon reruns of Star Trek,
