True Faith and Allegiance

by Alberto R. Gonzales

  When we could barely keep our eyes open, we tried in vain to get some sleep. A few hours later, Tim picked me up again, and we headed back to the White House around 5:30 a.m. to confront a brand-new world—a world that is not safe, and may never be safe again.

  CHAPTER 2

  DREAMING THE DREAM

  I grew up in a much calmer environment, or at least it seemed that way. Immigration—and particularly illegal immigration—is and will most likely remain a hot-button issue in America for years to come. In the Gonzales family, immigration was not simply a hot topic we heard discussed on a television program; for my family, it was a deeply ingrained reality. Three of my four grandparents were born in northern Mexico, where they struggled to eke out a subsistence-level lifestyle in farming and ranching communities. They crossed the border into the United States—possibly legally, though probably not, at times—in search of a better life. They were perpetually poor, but they were hard workers, migrating to wherever the jobs could be found, primarily in Southwest Texas, occasionally making their way back home to Mexico, only to be forced back northward when they could not find work south of the border.

  Although they lived in the United States most of their lives, my grandparents never lost touch with their Mexican roots. Both of my parents, however, were born and raised in America. My father, Pablo M. Gonzales, was born in 1929 in Kenedy, Texas, a small town with a population around three thousand people located in Karnes County, about sixty miles southeast of San Antonio. A nondescript place, Kenedy is best known in history as the location of the Kenedy Alien Detention Camp, where German, Japanese, and Italian prisoners of war were held during World War II. Some of the people detained in the internment camp were civilians who had been longtime residents of the United States.

  The oldest of fifteen children, my father left school before finishing second grade and went to work doing odd jobs in town and around the house to support his family. He never really had a childhood. He never participated in athletic games or pool parties; his life was dominated by hard work. Like the children of so many other migrant workers, from the time he could carry a basket Pablo Gonzales traveled with his family to various parts of the country, picking crops. He worked with a passion, as though his life depended on it, which it did—often pushing his brothers and cousins to work harder in the fields so the family could survive.

  As an adult, he worked at various manual labor jobs with construction companies. He was a quiet, serious man, difficult to read or know well, and even his own brothers and sisters had difficulty figuring him out. As the oldest, he was the leader, the one who pushed his siblings to work. People close to him were certain of two things regarding Pablo Gonzales: he worked hard, and he expected those around him to carry his or her fair share of the load. Pablo never sought or accepted a handout.

  Maria Rodriguez, my mother, the woman who would most impact my early life, was born in 1932, the fourth of seven children in a poor family in San Antonio, Texas. A shy, introverted little girl, Maria loved to read and enjoyed school. She completed the fifth grade, and had a good start in the sixth grade, when her father took her out of school early in the spring. He packed up the family and carted them off to Michigan to pick crops. They returned to Texas later that fall, but school had already begun, so Maria sat out the remainder of the school term. Migrating to find work was the yearly pattern for her family, preventing Maria from completing another academic year due to her extended absences.

  Maria’s hopes of returning to school were further dashed when tragedy struck the Rodriguez family. At only thirty-two years of age, Maria’s mother died during natural childbirth at home. The child was stillborn. Maria was a mere nine years old at the time. Nevertheless, as the oldest female in the family, she assumed the role of mother and caretaker.

  In both Pablo’s and Maria’s families, any money earned by the children was turned over to the head of the household to help make ends meet. It was, after all, the 1930s and early 1940s, and America was still reeling from the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Not surprisingly, during their childhood and adolescent years, neither family had indoor plumbing or telephones. Both grew accustomed to using outhouses, washing their clothes in a creek or a washtub, and cooking their meals on an old-fashioned wood stove.

  When Maria was seventeen and Pablo was nineteen, they met in Lorenzo, Texas, where their families had trekked as part of their yearly pilgrimages to pick cotton. It was love at first sight. A few months after picking season, Pablo asked Maria’s grandmother if he could have Maria’s hand in marriage. Firmly entrenched in family traditions, Pablo did not dare ask Maria to marry him without receiving the blessing of her eldest family members. Grandmother and Grandfather Rodriguez gave their consent, as did Maria’s father, but it was two years before the excited couple could marry.

  Raised a Catholic, Maria possessed a strong faith in God. Because the church taught that marriage is a sacrament, Maria insisted on a church wedding and Pablo agreed. They married in the Catholic Church in San Juan Capistrano Mission in San Antonio. Not surprisingly, the young Catholic couple had their first child, a daughter they named Angelica, within a year.

  I was the second of eight children—first Angie; then me, Tony, Rene, Timmy, Theresa, Christina, and Paul—born to Maria and Pablo Gonzales. As usual, my father had been following the work opportunities, so the family was living in San Antonio, Texas, when Mother gave birth to me on August 4, 1955, at Santa Rosa Hospital. I was the firstborn boy—a position of honor in Hispanic families—and my parents felt it was important that I have a name that reflected my distinction, so they named me Alberto R. Gonzales, the R in honor of my mother’s maiden name, Rodriguez, even though they gave me no middle name to accompany the middle initial.

  During my first few years, our family moved frequently as my father chased available construction jobs, first to Texas City, then to Beaumont, and eventually settling in the Houston area.

  About the time I turned five, my parents purchased a small, undeveloped lot in Humble, a community named for Humble Oil Company (the predecessor of Exxon) on the outskirts of northern Houston. By then, my father was an excellent carpenter, so after work each day and on weekends, he and two of my uncles set about building a small, two-bedroom house for our growing family. I played in the yard as my father and his brothers sawed and set the two-by-four frames, hoisted and nailed the plywood and composition shingles onto the roof, and nailed up the sheetrock for the interior walls. The brothers sank a well in the yard for water and installed a septic tank to collect and diffuse sewage.

  They did all the work themselves, without the help of any professionals or subcontractors. Although my father had limited funds with which to build, he never considered asking the government or anyone else for help. He believed in family helping family; his brothers would help him build his home, and then he would return the favor one day. Brother helping brother—that’s the way it was meant to be.

  The Gonzales brothers built the house, but they included no luxuries. We had a small kitchen, two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom, but no hot running water, so we boiled pots of water on the kitchen stove to fill the tub for our baths. We didn’t get a home telephone until I was nearly a junior in high school. This was the house in which I grew up, and the entire time I lived at home, I shared a bed with one of my brothers, while two other brothers slept in another bed in the same room. My sisters shared the other bedroom, and our parents slept on a bed in the living room. The accommodations were crowded by the time our family grew to ten members, but our mother filled our home with love, discipline, and great food.

  Each morning, my mother awakened me before dawn to eat breakfast with my father. The breakfast was always the same—scrambled eggs and tortillas. While my father and I ate, my mother prepared Dad’s modest lunch of beans and tortillas and placed the meager portions in a brown paper bag. That daily routine rarely changed. I stood outside our house and watched him walk up the road
and hitch a ride to work at a construction site. I waved until I could no longer see him. Then I went back inside and roused my brothers and sisters from their sleep as Mom prepared breakfast for the rest of the family.

  It never dawned on me as a young boy that my parents had set up housekeeping on the poor side of town. Our few neighbors were like us, hard-working, blue-collar families. I noticed, however, that many of the lots around our home remained vacant and unkempt all the years I lived at home. My brothers and I didn’t mind. The vacant lots made good sandlot baseball fields, and I loved playing baseball.

  Our mother insisted our family attend mass every Sunday, and that each of the children be baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church. Mother suspected that we probably would not consistently attend church services if the decision were left solely to our father. My dad believed in God and in Jesus Christ as our Savior, but he was not as devoted as our mother.

  Almost like a scene out of Fiddler on the Roof, my father had reminded my mother, “Maria, I am the head of this family, and I will decide if we are going to church.” Indeed, he emphasized that he would determine whether my mother could attend services.

  Surprisingly, my strong-willed mother agreed with my father. “Yes, Pablo, you are the head of the family, and I am required by God to obey you. But just remember, you will have to answer to God for this decision, and you will have to account as to why I missed mass.”

  So we went to church. My father recognized and respected true authority. Indeed, he never again spoke a word in opposition to our family attending church services.

  Mother later credited the Holy Spirit for giving her the right words to say in the most appropriate manner. Because of their traditional Mexican upbringing, had she directly challenged her husband’s authority and claimed her independent right to attend mass, my father would have undoubtedly balked. But Mother knew that her husband respected and feared God’s judgment. And perhaps she also knew a bit of psychology.

  My father was a proud man, steeped in our ethnic traditions. He had been raised in the old ways—in the days when women stayed home and tended to the children, and the men went out to earn a living. As the head of the family, my father believed it was his responsibility to provide for his family. My mother never worked outside the home nor learned to drive an automobile until after my father died. To my father, for his wife to take a job outside the home to help make ends meet would be tantamount to saying that he was not adequately providing for his family.

  My father’s independent spirit was a mixed blessing. His responsible nature and commitment to work made it difficult to challenge his excesses. Consequently, when he wasn’t working himself ragged, he sometimes drank excessively—especially on weekends. Despite being a good man with many noble qualities, my father was an alcoholic, and when he drank, he became a different person, often belligerent, caustic, and mean. Sometimes he and my mother had terrible fights, lashing out at each other in vicious verbal sparring. On a couple of occasions, driving while intoxicated, my father wrecked our one family car. It was a miracle he never hurt himself or injured anyone else.

  Regardless of his circumstances, which often included a throbbing headache and a heavy hangover, my father got up at five o’clock on Monday morning and set off for work. I don’t know how he did it. His dedication and sense of duty to his family were so strong that no matter how sick he felt, he refused to miss work. No doubt his indomitable work ethic helped fuel my own.

  It broke my heart to see my father drunk. His alcoholic episodes left an indelible impression and produced in me an irrevocable decision to avoid alcohol. In the military, and during my service in Texas government and eventually the White House, despite the readily available alcohol, I chose not to drink. Not during the long, lonely nights on an isolated air force radar site, not at the many Washington parties and receptions I attended, not at all; any time I was tempted to raise a glass or down a shot of whiskey, images of my father flooded my mind. Those memories were strong deterrents and still are.

  Since we had only one car, when one of us kids got sick and needed to go to the doctor, my father dropped off my mother and all of the children at the county clinic on his way to work. Mother packed a sack lunch, and we spent the entire day at the clinic until my father returned to pick us up after work. In an emergency, Mother might ask a neighbor for a ride to a bus stop a few miles away. We would then catch a bus to the county hospital. The image of my mother carrying an infant with several kids in tow, hurrying to get medical attention for one or more of her sick children, is forever ingrained in my heart and mind.

  For her part, Maria Gonzales thought nothing of it. When I asked her later about her sacrificial spirit, she simply shrugged. “That is what moms do,” she said.

  During one of our many trips to a clinic that provided free immunizations to poor families, Mother was speaking to us kids in Spanish. A nurse overheard our mother. Whether from prejudice or a sincere desire to help, I would never be sure, she warned my mother, “You better speak English to your children. They are going to have a hard time in school and in life here in America if they can’t speak English.” Bilingual education did not exist in our area yet, so anyone who did not learn English was bound to have a tougher time in life.

  Mom took the nurse’s words to heart. My parents continued speaking to each other in Spanish, but thereafter they made a conscious decision to speak only English to their children. Consequently, though I had a rudimentary understanding of the language, I didn’t become fluent in Spanish. While friends and relatives questioned the wisdom of our parents’ strategy, knowing and speaking English worked to my advantage academically. Many kids in Texas schools who spoke mostly Spanish were erroneously assumed to be poor and academically challenged.

  As a young boy, I persuaded my parents to let me join the Cub Scouts. Many of the boys in my pack were, like me, from poor families, so the camaraderie we felt from wearing a Cub Scout shirt and neckerchief, our chests decorated with colorful patches we had earned, was especially motivating. One project, however, taught me a lesson I have never forgotten.

  Members of my Scout pack were required to carve a canoe from a stick of wood using only a pocketknife. Most of my fellow Cubs chose branches no wider than an inch. Not me. I picked out a piece of wood three to four inches thick and went to work whittling it into something that looked like a boat. After school, day after day, I worked diligently on the project, but as the deadline approached, I realized that at the pace I was progressing, I would not finish in time.

  With hope nearly gone, I asked my father for help. He looked at my scarred piece of wood, and we began working together to hollow it out. As I followed his instructions, slowly the branch began to take on the shape of a canoe.

  “Dad, do you really think it is going to work out?” I asked.

  My father looked at me and smiled. Then with absolute confidence, he said, “Son, it’s gotta work out.” He harbored no doubts in his mind about the outcome. It had to work out.

  My father’s optimistic attitude, instilled within me, would serve me well over the years, especially when the world was shaking and people all over the earth were wondering whether things were going to work out. During my lifetime, I have had to confront some difficult situations, circumstances that seemingly defied resolution. In those most intense times, I often remembered the simple lesson I learned from my father: yes, there is a solution, and everything will work out if you are patient, have faith, and just stay with it.

  I played organized summer baseball, and I was a pretty good player, too, selected as the league’s Most Valuable Player in Little League when I was twelve years old, and again in Pony League when I was fourteen. Baseball continued to be my first love, but like many boys in Texas, I also played football. My passion for the gridiron heightened even more when I got a part-time job selling soft drinks at the seventy-five-thousand-seat Rice Stadium on the campus of Rice University, a beautiful, tree-lined setting located just off Main Stree
t in Houston, but seemingly in its own world, tucked away in the shadow of the Houston Medical Center.

  To me, the Rice campus was like a heavenly oasis in the midst of the busy city. For several seasons in a row, I worked on Saturdays as a soda-vendor, carrying trays of cold Cokes and Sprites up and down the upper deck during Rice’s home football games. Following the game, after cashing out and returning my soft drink trays on Saturday afternoon or evening, I sometimes climbed to the top of the stands and watched the students walking back to their dorms. I dreamed of attending college and wondered what it might feel like to be a student at Rice.

  My parents possessed little academic education themselves, so not surprisingly, they didn’t see college in their children’s futures. Their simple hope was that my siblings and I could graduate from high school and get a job. To my mother and father, earning a high school diploma was an admirable and honorable accomplishment in its own right, for us and for them—signifying my parents’ achievement in providing a better life for their children.

  As a child, I never sensed overt discrimination against me, perhaps because there were so many other Hispanic kids around or maybe it was simply the natural innocence of youth. But as I moved into junior high, I increasingly noticed the differing attitudes toward students with darker skin. Indeed, I sometimes felt embarrassed by my Mexican heritage.

  In class one day, my eighth-grade history teacher vividly recounted the historic battle at the Alamo, a major milestone in the fight for Texas independence from Mexico. As the teacher extolled the virtues and heroic acts of men such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, and how they had stood against the tyranny of General Santa Anna and the evil Mexican army, I squirmed in my seat, increasingly uncomfortable about being poor and of Mexican descent. I wanted so much to be one of the good guys, but with my dark skin, brown eyes, and black hair, I looked a lot like the bad guys our teacher had been describing.