by Robert Coles
Finally she offers her subject a nose and a mouth, the latter with large, pumpkin-like teeth. This is the sheriff who is constantly poking around, on the hunt for “trouble” — any sign of unrest among the “Mexican-American field hands,” as the local Anglo paper refers to various neighbors and relatives of Carmen’s. This is also a sheriff who is big, fat, and quite content with himself. The result: a large stomach to go with a large, open, toothy mouth — and for good luck, as well as for the sake of accuracy, a beefy pair of arms and legs. And that is that: no land, grass, sky, trees, flowers — only the big, powerful man. And a few final reflections: “I hope my children are all like my cousin. I probably won’t go to Chicago. I’ll stay here with my sister, and we’ll be as close as my mother and my cousin’s mother are. My aunt says that she is proud of her son, even if he can’t get a job in Chicago. At least he stood up and looked the Anglos right in the eye. If I had one son, and he did that, I’d feel I had done a good job. If I had five or six children, girls and boys, and they all did that, I’d feel as if I was a great success in life.”
A Barrio Game
Her cousins aren’t doing so well in San Antonio. Francesca wants very much for them to be prospering, and unashamedly she acknowledges why: there would be hope for her too. But they have exchanged one form of hard life for another, as the uncle, Antonio, who insisted that they leave willingly admits: “Up here, no sheriff rides up and down checking on you; it is different. We are left alone — so long as we stay to ourselves. The police don’t want to come here if they can help it. The storekeeper calls them when he is robbed, and they take half the day to show up. When they do, they give the storekeeper a lot of trouble. They threaten to close his place down because it’s a fire hazard, they say. The poor man, he ends up pleading to be left alone. He’d rather be robbed than threatened by the police! He slips them a few dollars, and they go! That’s justice in the city! I walk the streets here and wonder why I ever left the Valley. My brother was right. He is always right. I thought I’d show him what I knew, but I’m afraid that I didn’t know very much!”
He pauses, seems about to resume, then indicates by his lowered head that he has nothing more to say. He has been in San Antonio for a year and has not found a job that lasts. He worked for three months as a short-order cook, but the restaurant closed. He has applied for many other full-time jobs, only to be turned down. He has resisted welfare with vehemence, turning instead to the church. He gets odd jobs that enable his family at least to eat. If only there were some large farms near San Antonio; then he could work at harvesting crops but live in the city, where (he feels) his children are getting a better education than they would have received in the Rio Grande Valley. He takes exquisite care of the house he rents. He weeds the lawn, hovers over the flowers, frets about a semitropical vine. When he can find no more work to do around the house, he volunteers to help the priests at the church; their garden needs the kind of affection he has for grass and plants. His wife will soon work; when their baby son becomes a toddler, she will try to become a maid. Then, at least, there will be a steady if small income.
The barrio where they live is, of course, not near the well-to-do section of the city, but there are buses, and she will be glad to take them, even if she will have to be away from early in the morning to rather late in the afternoon: “I wish I could find a good job,” says Antonio. “I don’t want my wife to work. She doesn’t want to take care of anyone else’s house. She wants to take care of us. But there is no choice. She will be glad to find work, and we can only hope that she finds a boss who is a good person. The Anglo women can be mean and spoiled and selfish. The Anglos have too much for their own good. My neighbor’s wife works for a lawyer’s wife. She is a big Anglo woman; she eats cake all day long. She goes to a bakery and buys a cake — after her husband has left for work — and she eats it up before he comes home. Once she caught my neighbor’s wife eating a piece after telling her to eat anything, anything at all. The Anglo woman went crazy. She screamed and told my neighbor’s wife that she was fired, and she had to go home right away. Then she changed her mind and said that she should stay, only she must never tell the lawyer about his wife’s habit.
“The poor Anglos — they have more than they know what to do with. But ask them to give up a dollar for one of us, and they are ready to fight at the Alamo again! That lawyer’s wife, she is always telling my neighbor’s wife how lazy and spoiled the poor are. If the poor really wanted work, she says, they’d go find it. Instead, the poor demand welfare checks, and sit back and cash them and eat to their heart’s desire. She is swallowing a big piece of her cake when she talks like that! Then she goes to the bathroom, gets a diet pill, and announces that she’s going to lose fifty pounds in the next month. An hour later, another slice of cake goes down to her stomach. I am sure that she could swallow all my children, and there would be plenty of room for them to breathe and move around. I remember my oldest son coming home with a story he’d heard at school — a big whale had swallowed some people, and he had been tickled, and he coughed or sneezed them up, and they swam away. The Anglo woman must have a stomach that big, to listen to my neighbor’s wife. But the fat Anglo lady has gone away now, to a resort in Arizona. She will come back thin, she says. She has already ordered dozens of new dresses. Our neighbor is sure it won’t be good; the lady will hide food in Arizona. The lady buys crackers and eats them in front of her husband, but she knows where the cake is. He has his own life; he has a girlfriend. So he doesn’t care. That is the rich for you up here in the city! I miss our grower and his foreman; they are tough people to work for, and when they get mad, you are in real trouble. But I think they are more honest. The Anglos up here, even the lawyers and businessmen — the priest tells us that they are all scared of each other, and they don’t trust each other out of their sight. And I came here to improve myself!”
But Antonio is sure that he will do just that — hence his refusal even to consider (seriously, at least) a return to his former home. There are some people in the barrio who have fairly good jobs, by his standards. And no doubt about it, the city offers a certain privacy, a certain sense of remove from the immediate and overwhelmingly assertive political and economic authority of the Rio Grande Valley. Nor does he forget what he left “down there,” though to his own surprise, at times, he manages to come up with nostalgia: “I wake up in the morning, sometimes, and I say to myself that this is no place to be. But before I am ready to go back to the Valley, I stop and remember. I remember the foreman with his guns. I remember the grower, driving up to us, and spitting, always spitting, while he leaned on his car and watched us picking his tomatoes. Then he’d whisper something to the foreman and go drive off — while the foreman stayed and started blowing his whistle and shouting at us: harder, harder, pull in more, pull in more. My back would be almost broken, and my hands covered with blisters, and I’d be covered with sweat, but they’d want more, and if they didn’t get it — well, they’d get us. Some men would go back and forth, from the farms to the jail. They’d call them drunk, whether they’d had a beer in them or not. You learn to work as hard as you can; it’s better than being inside, behind bars. But the weather is better down in the Valley than up here; not so rainy, and warmer. And you had more room; your children could go and play, and you didn’t worry so much that a truck might come and run them down.”
His children do indeed find life different. His oldest son is ten; he had stopped going to school at age eight, when he was in the second grade. A teacher had told his parents that he was very slow, that he was, in fact, retarded, and that he would never really learn very much. She had suggested to the parents that the boy leave school, go work with them in the fields. That way, she observed, the boy would learn how to do something useful, would make money, and would be a source of help to others. In school, it seems, he was noisy, overactive, and uncooperative. When the family came to San Antonio the mother took the boy, Luis, to the priest, who in turn took him to a school
, where he was enrolled in a special class for older children who have not yet learned how to read or write. Luis began to do well in that class, and his parents were told that he was, actually, a rather bright boy, who had a lot of interesting things to say about the world around him. He was an expressive child, and they liked hearing that very much. So did Luis: “Once my mother called me to her. She was sewing. She said she wanted to talk to me. She said the teachers think I’m smart. I told her the truth. I told her I don’t like the teachers. I’d rather not go back to school. It’s a waste of time — repeating the capital of Texas after the teacher, and the capital of the United States, and the other countries. My friend, my new friend up here, he wants to be a pilot. I wouldn’t mind being a pilot. But I’d rather be the chief of police, right here in San Antonio. Then I could give orders to the police. I could tell them to leave us alone here and go bother other people. I could send them down to the Valley, and they’d outnumber the sheriff there and beat him up. He belongs in jail.
“I won’t ever be the chief of police. And you can’t send the police from here to the Valley My father always pours cold water on my ideas. He tells me I’d be lucky if I got a job selling in a store, or working in a factory. The chances are, I’ll be standing in line for the welfare checks. Or my wife will. I don’t want to get married for a long time. I’d like to meet a girl who is smart, and she can get a good job. If you work as a maid for a rich family, and they’re good people, then they will help you out — they’ll get you a job, if you ask them. That’s what I’ve heard. There’s a friend I’ve met, he’s twelve, and he said you’re better off looking for a rich Anglo family that needs the grass cut and the garden weeded and dug up than you are sitting in school listening to those teachers tell you how stupid you are.”
Luis is, again, not stupid; and he has not been called stupid by his San Antonio teachers. Quite the contrary; they have tried very hard to encourage him about his academic future. A Spanish-speaking woman has given him a battery of tests and found him “superior.” Nor does Luis talk as cynically to his teachers as he does at home. His father is quite cynical, and with good reason; he has had serious trouble keeping his head above water in San Antonio. The boy hears his father, repeats what he has heard. He is the first one to acknowledge how much he admires his father — despite all the hardships the father has had to face and has not succeeded in overcoming. Luis has only one criticism he feels willing to state: he regards his father as too kind toward his natural enemies. Luis has asked his father how he would behave toward Anglos if he had all the money and power they have. The father said he would be very kind — he would follow the example of Jesus and love people he knew to be, in a way, his enemies. Luis was quite upset; he told his father that he felt that the Anglos deserved less. The father said nothing. The boy prodded him. The father became angry, said basta! no more talk about a fantasy rather than a real possibility. Luis nodded, left for the street, his friends, a game of war.
Those games of war take place every day: us against them, Chicanos against Anglos, the barrio against other barrios, the Chicanos of Texas against the people of Mexico — but most often, Spanish-speaking boys against imaginary Anglo boys. If only the latter were there in the flesh, then there would be a time: “We’d go after them. We’d even give them a head start: let them make the first move. We’d dare them. We’d trick them. We’d surround them. They’d have to surrender. If they refused, we’d move in. They’d be all through, all through. They wouldn’t know what happened to them. Even if we went to fight on their streets, even then we’d win. The reason Anglos are on top — it’s because they tricked people, and shot them, and did everything dishonest. That was our mistake. We gave in too easily. We weren’t tough with them. My father says we should love the people who spit on us, but my friends say that’s the trouble, a lot of people like the Indians trusted the Anglos too much, and it did them no good. They lost everything. That’s what the Anglo teachers don’t like to tell you. They admit that the Indians lost most of their land, but they tell you it was only right because there wouldn’t be the America we have if the Indians had been allowed to sit there and do nothing. One teacher kept telling about ‘the trouble with the Indians’ and ‘the trouble with us,’ my people: we sit back and do nothing, while the Anglo, he’s always building up the country, and now it’s the strongest, richest, best country in the whole world. I guess that’s true. I don’t like to hear the teachers talk like that, though. They seem to be saying that they’re good and we’re bad.”
He returns to the imaginary game, the large-scale struggle between mortal adversaries that he and his friends play. They picture themselves older, and with guns. They picture themselves in downtown San Antonio. They meet the chief of police, walking down the street. They stop him, ask him to come talk with them. He says no. As he begins to reach for his gun, they surround him, tell him that he either comes with them into their car or he dies immediately. He complies. They drive away, keep driving to a deserted area, stop the car, get out, begin to talk. The police chief cannot understand why they are troubled. He keeps begging that he be let loose. They tell him that the police are unfair to their people; in their own language they list many grievances: a high rate of unemployment; poor jobs; insulting schoolteachers; streets that are unpaved; whole neighborhoods denied adequate sanitation and drinking water. The chief is indifferent; he simply wants his freedom. He makes a final demand: let me go, or there will be a high price to pay. They tell him they are quite ready to die, and will not be intimidated. He realizes they are serious. He begins to agree with them. He tells them that they have a point, several points. He tells them that they are right, that he regrets not acknowledging so earlier, that he intends to repent his ways. He will hire many more of their people; he will try to bring about various changes in the way justice is done in San Antonio. He will, in short, be a friend of theirs and will enlist other friends.
The particular words used may vary, but the drama that Luis and his neighborhood pals go through again and again remains quite constant: “We play ‘police chief,’ that’s the best game. One of us becomes the chief, and the rest of us have got to capture him, then persuade him to join up with us. If you’re the police chief, you have to fight back, but after a while you begin to see that you’ve been wrong, and the guys who have captured you are right. They’ve got to argue you down, but you aren’t dumb, and you’re not completely bad, so they get to you after a while, and then you make your promises to them, and that’s the end. We used to have the chief escape sometimes, but mostly we don’t anymore because you’ve got to convince him to change sides, and the more he escapes, the harder it will be, and we don’t want him to escape. Why should we let him? There are a lot of us; he’s only one. If we let him trick us and get away, the teachers would say: You see, you guys are lazy, and you’re not quick enough; you’re dumb, compared to the Anglos. That’s what they say in school, and they give us a smile, and look at the clock: how much more time until we can leave and get out of here and go over to our side of town, where the smart Anglos live?”
Occasionally Luis doesn’t want to think about that game. The same holds for his friends of nine or ten or eleven. They are a band of boys who now and then favor what they call “the real thing.” They leave the barrio and work their way toward downtown. They walk, or they persuade an older brother or sister, rarely a parent or aunt or uncle or grandparent, to give them money for a bus ride. When they arrive at their destination, they are excited, curious, active, happy. They move fast; they stare intently at a store window, abruptly become bored, move on. They especially are drawn to stores that display men’s clothing, musical instruments, posters advertising travel abroad. They are also taken with various automobiles they find parked. They can gaze in windows for two or three hours straight, or examine car after car. They show no apparent desire to enter any store, even the one whose display holds their attention the longest. Finally they decide to go home: they will be missed, and will be pu
nished, unless they appear at such-and-such a time.
On the way home they begin to think of games they might play later on that day or the next. They will, for instance, break into a bank, leave with a lot of money and a policeman as hostage. He, too, will be won over to their side and will help them escape to Mexico, where they all will live in comfort, joy, and self-respect for the rest of their lives. Or, less ambitiously, they will venture into a music shop, convince the owner that they are truly extraordinary musicians, come home with drums, a banjo, a clarinet, a harmonica, some records, and a hi-fi set. Their families will rejoice — especially when told that those objects were gifts and not stolen. Or maybe they will go into a clothing store, be promised jobs when they get older: salesmen. With the jobs, of course, go a wardrobe: suits, jackets, and slacks, shoes and socks. Everyone they know will envy them! They will move elsewhere — but return to visit their families. They might even get similar jobs for their brothers, cousins, good friends.
There are other times, however, when they all become moody, distracted, sullen, resentful, and exceedingly quiet. On the way home they speak monosyllabically, if at all. Once, on such a day, Luis said not a word from the moment he got on the bus in downtown San Antonio until the moment, a half-hour later, he got off another bus — back in the barrio. It was then that he muttered, to no one in particular: “It’s not fair.” One of his friends asked him what wasn’t fair. Luis shook his head, and could only say: “Everything.” No one felt it necessary to ask that he be more specific.