up for her.
Some of my happiest memories of childhood exist not in story form but in scattered images or recollections of smells and tastes. For instance, I can vividly recall waking up to the smell of my mother’s tamales on Christmas mornings. Just the memory floods me with warmth and contentment, along with the happiness I felt on one Christmas in particular when I received a surprise gift. It was a racing car set that my mother had refurbished after buying it on one of her excursions across the border. In those days, it was possible to obtain an official identification card that allowed Mexican citizens to travel to the United States as tourists to shop or visit friends and relatives. My entrepreneurial mother would go over the border to Calexico on such shopping trips, usually with my father, and after rummaging through garage sales and picking up discarded items, would return and fix them up for sale. I knew that the racing set would have sold for a tidy sum of money. But instead she had decided that I was to be the lucky recipient. Just as I recall my own joy in receiving the gift, I can still see the smile on my mother’s face as she watched my delighted reaction.
I have similarly happy memories of time spent with my father and my brother Gabriel, particularly our periodic trips to the Sea of Cortez. Even though Papá traveled there to set up his stand and sell refurbished items—frequently trading them for food—to me these exciting expeditions felt like vacations. The drive down to San Felipe required us to journey south and through the desert. Our three-hour trek through the desert was made not just in any automobile; it was in my father’s one-of-a-kind, custom-painted, custom-built flatbed truck.
To visualize the shade of green that my father had painted this truck, you might want to imagine a neon green parrot. An ugly green. The always-colorful Sostenes Quiñones, of course, would have disagreed. He was equally proud of the multicolored spiraling stripes he had painted on the truck bed—twenty colors in the pattern of a barbershop pole. A true work of art! If the exterior was outrageous, the interior was likewise laughable. The springs poked out of the seats and made for a sore behind for all occupants. The floorboard was apparently added as an afterthought, leaving cracks over the engine. The stick shift and the knob atop it would come out of place if we shifted too forcefully, causing the truck to slide around the road in between gears as the driver held a knobless stick in his hand while trying to deal with the jammed axle. Plus, the truck wouldn’t go much faster than thirty miles an hour. The drive was always a journey—a fantastic, unforgettable adventure.
The road was full of dips and dives, winding over crests and around curves, so the only thing we could see as we made our way around the side of a hill and approached the town of San Felipe was desert. But all at once, we would come over a rise and see a spectacular panoramic view of the Sea of Cortez. In the morning sun, the shade of blue was deep and pure, incomparable, like an ocean of shining, rippling sapphires.
It felt as if we might drop right down into the sea itself. I loved the vantage point from the top of the hill that let me look down on the horizon rather than view it at sea level. It seemed to open up to infinite possibilities in the world beyond, somehow bringing me closer to the stars. Each time we headed off to the Sea of Cortez, I would anticipate this sight, becoming more excited with every mile. And the image would stay with me long after the excursion was over—symbolizing hope for my future and firing me up with the spirit of navigation that applied as much to the sea as it did to outer space.
One of our more memorable trips took place in 1977, when Mexico’s economic downturn was starting to send tremors across the country before becoming a full-blown earthquake and forcing the catastrophic devaluation of the peso. On this trip, as soon as Papá parked the truck, he sent me and Gabriel off to play for many hours on our own. On a weekend day like this, we were usually at work at the gas station, so this truly was a holiday. We spent most of the morning building an elaborate sandcastle—a fortress fit for a king—until it was time to comb the beach for the small shiny rocks and shells that we determined were gold and pearls.
Then it was time for our feast! My father had exchanged goods for so much fresh fish that he had enough to cook us dinner before we made the journey back home. He cut the fish open, cleaned them of bones before stuffing them with vegetables and spices, and then baked them in tin foil over a fire that he made on the beach. The smell of the baked fish when my father first peeled back the foil was so intoxicatingly fragrant that I could almost taste it with my nose. The lens of memory captured it all: the red embers of the wood heating the package of tin foil, the seductive peeling back of the foil, and the vapor rising from the fish, just caught by local fishermen, waiting to be eaten. A feast to be remembered, savored again and again, and always appreciated.
Upon our return from the Sea of Cortez, even as leaner times began to seriously encroach on our lives, I refused to be robbed of childhood and constantly sought creative ways to hold on to the magic of life. The prime opportunity to challenge darker days occurred whenever it rained and a lake would form outside and then flood the lower part of our house, where everything was already made of mud. To my mother, this was a housekeeping nightmare: a messy, salty, sticky, disgusting ordeal that would take weeks to clean up after the rains were over and we were no longer wading through water up to our knees. But to me, it was our very own Sea of Cortez—inside our house! By a wonderful stroke of luck, my father had purchased a wreck of an old fishing boat, basically a wooden board with sides that he insisted on keeping in the yard. Obviously, it was a pirate ship begging to be put to use!
You should have seen the surprised faces of the adults when I created a contest to determine who could command the old boat in the waters filling up the lower part of the front yard. Of course, I didn’t wait for the sea to form. The minute the rain began to fall, it was rock ’n’ roll time! Gabriel and I would rally our younger cousins, I’d assign roles, and then we’d let the games begin.
No matter how hungry, wet, or sticky with mud we might have been, we didn’t care. We were having fun, and it didn’t cost a peso. We could create the magic with the superpower of our beautiful brains! How much did I learn from my trips to the Sea of Cortez and from my other research in the laboratory of childhood about how to use mental resources to withstand the tests to come? Everything.
TWO Faraway
Misfortune seeped into my family’s existence very slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. Then, toward the end of 1977, when I was nine years old and in the fifth grade, tough times seemed to descend on our household all at once, like a drastic shift in the weather. Even through the foggy lens of memory, I can recall the moment when I understood that we had left behind the simpler, more secure days and were treading upon shaky ground.
The moment of realization arrived when I found my father behind our house, alone, crying desperately. Something was very wrong. My first reaction was to ask Papá why he was crying. But I was too shocked to ask. Here was my father—the strong, stubborn head of our family, highly intelligent though not educated, hardworking, honest, and kindhearted, the colorful, passionate, larger-than-life man who was my hero—crying his eyes out.
For some time, there had been clues that business at the gas station was going poorly, but not until I found him crying did I understand the magnitude of the crisis. Without being told exactly, I figured out that the worst-case scenario for our family—losing the gas station, our primary livelihood and means of putting food on the table—had occurred. The station was our family’s identity—not just where I’d worked since the age of five but a place of business that gave us stature in the community. Even at nine years old, I understood why this loss was such a blow to my father’s sense of self, not the least because his father, Tata Juan, had chosen him to be his partner and then given him this endowment that was to have secured our future well-being.
In the year that followed, I came to better understand the circumstances that had led to this predicament. One factor was the financial downturn in Mexico,
