Pendejo was a very strong word in Spanish that meant stupid-ass, but really had even more science and chile to it than that. We all quickly agreed with Ramón’s assessment of the situation and we were now voicing our own opinions and just beginning to feel better among ourselves when suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge muscular woman-teacher, who had a voice like a man, rushed in on us.
“NO SPANISH!” she bellowed. “You were all told that in your classroom! There will BE ONLY ENGLISH SPOKEN on the school grounds! Do you boys understand me!”
“Pee pee,” I said under my breath, wondering if “pee pee” was Spanish or English. And once more I squeezed my legs together real tight, hoping to God that I wouldn’t pee again.
To my huge surprise, as the rest of us all went silent with fear, Ramón went right on talking in Spanish in a calm tone of voice, saying, “They’re not our parents. They have no right to be yelling at us, especially when we’re out here by ourselves.”
“I told you, NO SPANISH!” yelled the teacher, grabbing Ramón by his shoulders and shaking him.
“OYE! YOU’RE NOT MY MOTHER!” shouted Ramón at the huge teacher. “Let go of me! You have no right to be grabbing me!”
But she didn’t let go. No, she now grabbed him by his hair, shaking him all the more. “NO SPANISH, I said!” she bellowed. “You hear me, no Spanish!”
“LA TUYA! VIEJA PINCHE MALA!” shouted Ramón.
“What did you say!” yelled the teacher. “Don’t think I don’t know your DIRTY SPIC WORDS!”
And she slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times, but still Ramón continued speaking in Spanish, telling us not to fear, that we were Mexicanos, and that we weren’t their slaves!
I quit crying, just like that. My God, I couldn’t believe it, this boy Ramón had to be the bravest human being I’d ever seen. And the huge teacher, she just kept right on slapping him until his face was covered with blood.
I dried my eyes and thought of the pictures of Our Lord God Jesus on the walls of our church when He’d carried the cross on His back to cavalry. Quickly, I made the sign of the cross over myself, and I was saying a quick prayer when the buzz, buzzed and she finally stopped hitting Ramón. And my God, Ramón was just a little five-year-old kid like the rest of us. She dragged him off, towards the bathroom.
“The rest of you dirty little spics get into your classroom RIGHT NOW, while I wash this little twirp’s mouth out with soap!”
Another teacher, a man, came up but he didn’t yell at us. He’d seen what had happened, and he very nicely escorted us back to our classroom. I’d been right when I’d told my mother that something bad was going to happen at this school. My mother had been gone less than an hour and already things were going so bad that it seemed to me like it was the end of the world.
That day, my mother never came for me until the end of school, and when I saw her, I got real mad and yelled at her. “Mama,” I shouted, “why didn’t you come back to stay with me like you said that you would?”
“I did come back,” she said, “but the school authorities told me that parents aren’t allowed on the school grounds unless it’s an emergency.” Then she asked me if I was okay?
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. Compared to Ramón, I guessed that I was okay. And at home that afternoon I tried to wash my own Levi’s and my mother’s handkerchief so no one would know my terrible shame.
Then at dinner, when my father asked me how my first day of school had gone, I didn’t know what to say to him either, because I didn’t want my dad finding out that his son was a crybaby coward, and that he’d been a fool to have ever told me that everyone loved Mexicans, because they didn’t. Our teachers hated us Mexican kids!
So all I said was, “Okay, fine, papa,” and I said nothing more that day and I didn’t say anything the next day either or the day after that. And each day, things at school got meaner and more terrifying than the day before. They were crucifying Ramón. They were really hitting him and hitting him, because he was the only kid among us who wouldn’t break.
Finally, by the end of my first week of school, I was having nightmares almost every night and wetting myself in my sleep, too. And I’d never been a bed wetter before. I just couldn’t help it. All night long in my dreams, tall, huge teachers kept chasing us Mexican kids, and they had big, sharp teeth like a dog’s, and we kids had to keep running or we were going to be eaten alive if we spoke any Spanish. And sometimes, my God, Spanish would just slip out of our mouths.
School became a living hell, and at home I no longer wanted to listen to my father’s stories around the dinner table about how great we, los Mexicanos, were. My dad was a STUPID FOOL! He had no idea what the HELL HE WAS TALKING ABOUT!
CHAPTER five
Looking back, I now remember that it was just about this same time when a red-headed kid with lots of freckles came to our school. And this kid spoke an English that was so much worse than all of us Mexican kids that we thought, Goodie, goodie! Somebody else besides us, los Mexicanos, is now going to get slapped across the face and called stupid!
But boy, were we wrong. Our teacher didn’t hit this new boy, knocking the freckles off his face. No, she gave him compliments and always told him how smart he was. Finally we vatos-guys got together and went to our teacher to complain.
“Look,” we said to her, “how come you don’t hit him on the head and call him names like you call us? His English is way worse than ours. He’s a foreigner.”
“He isn’t a foreigner,” our teacher said to us. “You twirps are the foreigners. He’s from Boston, and Boston is back east, and is a very important historical part of the United States.”
Well, we didn’t believe her. How could he be from the United States, talking as funny as he did. Like the word “car,” he said “ca-a,” sounding like a crow talking to the wind. His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass. He was strong and I was strong, so we were having ourselves a real fun time rolling around and hitting each other, when a bunch of my vato amigos came up and said, “No te dejes! Pegale! Don’t let him get you! Hit him!”
Hearing this, Howard stopped wrestling and he stared at me with big eyes. “Are you Mex-eee-can?” he said.
I quickly translated what he’d said in Bostonian English into Californian English and said, “Yeah, sure, I’m Mexicano.”
Well, this boy, who’d just been wrestling with me with so much confidence and power, now let out a scream of sheer terror, scaring the living hell out of me, saying “YOU GOT A KNIFE!”
And I thought he said that he had a knife, so I turned tail and started running as fast as I could to get away from him. But then, as I ran, I figured out what he’d said and I turned around and saw that he was running in the opposite direction. I stopped and started after him, catching him at the end of the playground where he was all sweaty and scared and crying to beat hell.
“Look, Howard,” I said, “I don’t got a knife.”
“Oh, yes, you do!” he yelled between sobbing cries.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Yes, you do!” he yelled again, his eyes flowing with tears. “My parents told me that Mexi-eee-cans always have knives!”
“They do? I didn’t know that. I’ll bring one tomorrow,” I said.
The bell rang, and we walked back to the classrooms. Despite this, we really liked each other, and the next day I brought a little rusty pocketknife to school that I couldn’t get open. At recess I showed it to Howard and asked him if he’d like to come to the ranch and go bow-and-arrow hunting with me or learn how to ride a bucking pig.
“I’d like to,” he said, “but I can’t even be around you anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I had a talk with my parents last night,” he said, “and they explained to me that I can’t be ar
ound Mexicans because they’re bad, dirty people and you can’t trust them.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said, feeling my whole chest tighten. “I’m sorry.”
And saying this, I didn’t know what to do, because I really liked Howard a lot, so I didn’t want him getting in trouble for being around “bad, dirty people.” I turned and walked away, feeling terrible.
I’d never known that Mexicans were bad, dirty people and you couldn’t trust them. I’d just thought that we were stupid people, closer to the animals, and not as smart as White people, as the playground teacher kept explaining to us.
All the rest of the day, I hung around with my vatos-amigos, so I wouldn’t offend anyone else, feeling really awful. And when my amigos asked me what was wrong, I didn’t want to tell them what I’d just found out about us, so I kept still, with tears running down my face.
That afternoon, when I got home to our ranch, something happened to me that I would never forget for the rest of my life. I could now see very clearly that what Howard had told me about us, los Mexicanos, being bad, dirty people was absolutely true. Our horse corrals were full of manure and there were flies by the zillions in the milking barn, and our cars and truck and tractors were covered with dirt and mud.
That night at the dinner table, I felt like I was sitting down to eat with people I’d never really seen before. My mother, who I’d always thought was so beautiful, I could now clearly see that she wasn’t. Her brown skin was the color of dirt and her dark eyes were too large, and her hair was black and her lips were too big. Also, she was chubby with large breasts and looked disgusting, the way she kept letting my baby sister Linda hang all over her, nursing all the time.
And my father, my God, he had a big head with curly black hair and a real thick neck like a bull, and he was so loud. He ate with his fingers, using his tortilla to scoop the food into his mouth, and he chewed with his mouth open, laughing and telling story after story, showing the food that he was chewing. I’d never realized it before, but my father wiped his hands off on the tablecloth, pulling more and more of the tablecloth towards himself as the meal progressed. We all had to move our chairs down the table towards him as we ate, if we wished to stay with our plates.
And my sister Tencha and brother Joseph, who I’d always thought were good-looking, too, I could now see that they were also chubby, dirty Mexicans just like my parents.
I remember well that I wanted to cry. I’d never known any of this about mi familia. We really were dirty, bad, ugly people, and liars, too, just as the playground teacher kept telling us. Because she was right; we did lie to her when we’d deny that we hadn’t been speaking Spanish on the playground. The truth was that we still spoke Spanish every chance we got. And why, because, simply, it felt good to hear in the sound of the language with which our mothers had rocked us to sleep when we’d been little.
I finally felt so sick, sitting at the table with these ugly, dirty, bad people, mi familia, that I got up and went to the bathroom to get away from them. Then in the bathroom, I’ll never forget, I puked in the toilet, then stood on my little stool so I could wash out my mouth in the sink. And this was when I saw in the mirror, that oh, my Lord God, I, too, was Mexican and ugly! I had big teeth, a wide face with high cheekbones, and my skin was also a dirty brown color!
“Oh, my Lord God, Papito!” I screamed. “WHY DID YOU LET ME BE BORN A MEXICAN?”
That night I awoke screaming and my mother had to come to my room several times to help rock me back to sleep. And when she’d ask me what was the matter, what could I tell her? I didn’t want my parents finding out that we were bad, dirty people and couldn’t be trusted. I loved them. I really did. And so I didn’t want to hurt them with all these awful truths that I was learning about us at school.
After all, the school was way bigger than our home, had a huge flag at the entrance of the school grounds, and so they knew what they were talking about; not my papa and mama—poor fools.
CHAPTER six
The very next day, I don’t exactly know why, but I took two pocketknives to school. I guess I figured that, hell, since I was a no-good, dirty, bad Mexican anyway, I might as well carry two knives. Not just one. So I could then be the baddest, dirtiest Mexican of all. I’d found the first little knife in a drawer in the tractor shed. This second knife I took from my dad’s personal toolbox. And this second one, a much larger knife, my dad used for castrating the pigs and calves on our ranch, and so it was razor-sharp and you had to be real careful opening it or you could cut yourself real bad.
At school I showed the vatos-guys my two knives, telling them how I’d been told that Mexicans always carried knives, so I was going to carry two.
“But that’s not true,” said Blackbird, one of the vatos, “in my family, we carry guns. Not knives!” This guy’s nickname was Blackbird because he was the darkest vato among us.
“Yeah,” said Screwdriver. He was the skinniest guy in our group. “My family has pistols and rifles, too, not just knives, so I say, we should also bring guns to school to protect ourselves from all of these pinche teachers!”
This made sense to all of us—why limit ourselves to just knives? We should bring guns to school, too. And so there we were talking, really enjoying ourselves, and getting to feel a whole lot better when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was that big, old muscular woman playground-teacher at our side, yelling:
“NO SPANISH!” she screamed. “ENGLISH ONLY!”
Then she saw the little knife that I was trying to open and she screamed out again. “OH, A KNIFE! I TOLD ’EM! I TOLD ’EM that this was what was going to happen! I was going to catch you little dirty spics with knives one day, and now I have!”
She was so happy that she was beaming. Quickly, she took the little knife from me that I hadn’t been able to open, and she grabbed me by the ear, yanked me off the ground, and had me high-stepping it on my toes to the principal’s office. The good knife, the sharp one that my dad used for castrating, Ramón had snatched from me when she’d first come up, and he’d hid it.
In the principal’s office, the gallo-gallina teacher—as we’d nicknamed her, the rooster-hen—yelled and yelled, saying how she’d risked her life, but still, she’d done her job and disarmed me just when I was getting into a knife fight with another dirty Mexican kid.
“A knife fight?” I said. “There was no fight! You’re lying!”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Yes, but in English!” I said quickly. “All in English!” I added proudly.
Instead of my getting a reward for my brilliant ability to say all this in English, she now slapped me across the face so hard that I was knocked off my feet. Then the principal came around from behind his big desk, and I thought he was going to help me up and defend me from this crazy-loca woman, but he only started hitting on me, too, saying that he’d have no knife fights at his school.
Dodging their blows, I began screaming. “BUT I DID ENGLISH ONLY! Don’t you see, pendejos, I did English only!” This was when I got a glimpse of my vatos-amigos. They were outside the principal’s window standing on a bench, waving and laughing. That was the day that I was finally accepted by the vatos into their little club of Posole Town, the Mexican barrio in Oceanside, just up the hill from the pier and east of the high school. I’d finally turned out not to be such a little kindergarten baby-born-in-the-gravy, after all.
My parents were called to the school. They were told how I and a few other Mexican kids were the main troublemakers of the whole kindergarten, and that now we’d started a gang and that I’d brought a knife to school and gotten into a knife fight.
My mother was beside herself with shock. But my father, on the other hand, seeing the little rusty knife, just grinned and winked at me. “Does it open?” he asked the principal.
“What?” asked the principal.
“That little knife, does it open?”
“I don’t know. I guess it does.”
“Maybe you
better check to see if it opens before you keep on talking and accusing people.”
The principal tried opening the rusty little knife, but couldn’t. “But this isn’t the point,” said the principal. “Your son brought a knife to school, that’s the point!” And he went on and on about how bad we Mexicans were, until I thought that my dad was going to come out of his chair and knock the living shit out of the principal.
All the way home, my parents kept yelling at each other, trying to figure out what to do with me. I cried and cried.
“Lupe,” my dad said once we were home, “be smart! Don’t let yourself be taken in by that man’s bullshit! There was no knife fight. Get it? That knife didn’t even open. It will have to be soaked in oil for two or three days to loosen the rust before it can ever be opened.”
“But, like he said, that’s not the point, Salvador. What will our son be taking to school next, guns?”
“Yes,” I said under my breath.
For the next few days all my parents did was argue about what to do with me. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I decided that I was going to run away from home. I’d never meant to bring all this shame to my familia. There was just nothing else left for me to do but run away, was the way I saw it.
So Friday after school, I saddled up, got my Red Rider BB gun, and took off up the railroad track, going towards Vista. I figured that I’d go out past Bonsall, and learn to live off the land out by the Pala Indian Reservation where we had some relatives on my uncle Archie Freeman’s side of the family. Out there in the wilds of the Res—as our Indian relatives like to call the reservation—I’d live happy and free and be no trouble to anyone for the rest of my life.
I was five and a half years old and I’d already done-me nearly three damn months of schooling, so I figured that I’d just about learned-me all that I needed to know. “Shut up,” “nap time,” “keep still,” “stop fidgeting,” “no bathroom till recess,”—the only thing that they’d forgotten to tell us was when to fart, which was what some of us vatos had started doing after lunch in the back of the classroom. This drove our teacher crazy, especially when we cut loose a real-good, smelly one.
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