Some part of me feared that I was going home to die. Where would I want to be buried? If I were laid to rest in Mexico, then so much of my family in the U.S. would never be able to visit my grave. Perhaps fate staved off my death in the U.S. in order to avoid betraying that little stone that was waiting for me to unravel on my mother’s mountain.
Maybe it didn’t matter where I would be laid to rest. Maybe it was just one long stretch of land where people seemed to lose their minds. This moving back and forth felt like an endless repetition. We had been doing it for a hundred years and still here we were again. Maybe we would be doing it for a hundred more.
*
I was also going to reverse my parent’s journey; walking backward to what led them to cross in the first place. I was mapping. I was a cartographer. I would reach and keep reaching. It was an act of dissection, an opening up. I am trying to dissect the moment of my erasure. Something had been stolen from me.
Rubi held my hand on the armrest and nudged closer to me, trying to calm me down. What could I tell her? I looked down and noticed that the landscape had changed. We had been in the air for about two hours and were approaching what would be the border below. I felt myself getting smaller.
[First Movement Before Me: Amá and Apá]
There was not much courtship between my parents before they married. It was more of a convenience and numbers thing—this ranch had X number of sons, and another ranch on the other side of the mountain had X number of daughters. It was math.
People were carrying a statue of the Immaculate Virgin Mary of Fatima to every ranch on the mountain. My parents met at the gathering and procession of a saint known for secrets.
When they married, Amá and Apá went to live on a part of the mountain called Mala Noche, which means “bad night.” They had a small shack made out of adobe, which didn’t have a roof, only a plastic tarp that didn’t stop the rain from pouring onto the dirt floor. Amá said it was one of the saddest days of her life when she left her beloved home, where she didn’t have to work, where she rested beneath the sun during the day and still listened to the radio at night, for Mala Noche.
Apá was gone mostly, so Amá was left to feed and care for her firstborn daughter alone, as well as maintain the ranch. She herded cattle down the mountain, gathered firewood, and walked three kilometers to fetch water. It was hard work that she wasn’t used to, but she said those years at Mala Noche made her realize that she was on her own, even when Apá was home.
She would tie the baby to a tree with a rope so she could go work on the farm, and she left her faithful dog by the child to protect her from coyotes or snakes. On cold, wet nights, the dog would sit at the entrance to the shack and growl every now and then into the darkness. It was just her and her little girl, who at one point chewed on a straight razor she found on the floor because she was teething and her gums were itchy. Amá spent days cutting small pieces of onion for the child to bite on, hoping the onion would soothe and disinfect her tongue and gums that were tattered from the razor.
Amá doesn’t remember what happened to that dog, her only companion, the only one who knew her sadness, the only one who didn’t say to her “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”
6.
From the air, the actual borderline looked like a long thread of hair—but nothing in the landscape around it held a particular shape for long. This is why I turned to nature for answers—because it reminded me of inconsistencies, breaks in a pattern we work so hard to preserve. Even the perfect little squares and circles of cropland were bunched together to make an amorphous shape out of many perfect ones. They all stopped at the foot of the mountains, where farmers could no longer exert control over the land.
I felt like I always had to redraw myself back into the landscape in one way or another—to my detriment, I was light-footed, I never left a trace of me behind. I usually used cash because it couldn’t be traced and because there was no other option; for many years I didn’t have a bank account. None of my family’s cars were registered to our names, so it felt like we weren’t even there. Every time I went hiking I felt the urgent need to turn over a stone and move it. It was always obvious to me that I didn’t belong in the landscape of the West, the rolling foothills of Northern California leading up to the Sierra. Yes, I was aware I was entering a sacred space and I didn’t want to disturb it, but I wanted to let someone know that I was there, that I meant no harm, that I too had been scarred.
From above, the border looked so obviously out of place, so obvious that it didn’t belong, an encroachment to the snaking valleys, hills, and mountains. I heard that parts of the wall were made from old landing pads from the Vietnam War. Its point was to stand out, to be “other-than-the-landscape.” Its geometrical consistency was jarring to the eye, violent in its precision, stretching for hundreds of miles without a single curve even when everything around it was curving. It announced its presence. And even in the past when there was no wall, there was still its vivid presence breaking two things apart.
I knew there were workers down there maintaining it, repairing broken sections, putting up more wire, clearing bushes for trucks to drive alongside it; they were marking the earth. Without those small interferences, it would be swallowed by the landscape. It would not last a single decade.
Given the nature of decay, perhaps that was not the same border we crossed decades before. How much of it had been replaced—as if it were a living thing that replaced its entire makeup of cells every few years? And yet it was still there, quite unchanged.
*
I ventured to believe that the function of the border wasn’t only to keep people out, at least that was not its long-term function. Its other purpose was to be visible, to be seen, to be carried in the imaginations of migrants deep into the interior of the country, in the interior of their minds. It was a spectacle meant to be witnessed by the world, and all of its death and violence was and continues to be a form of social control, the way that kings of the past needed to behead only one petty thief in the public square to quell thousands more.1 The biggest threat to immigrants who succeeded in crossing was the fear that the apparatus was always watching you. It was the idea that was most menacing, that infiltrated every sector of a person’s life—total and complete surveillance. It was the unrelenting fear that was most abrasive on a person’s soul. And on the Mexican side of the line, it stood as a symbol for those wanting to cross, announcing: “This could happen to you if you dare cross.” We had all seen what happened to bodies in the desert; we knew the dangers of coyotes.
I always felt like it was on my back, looming just above me, the omnipresent nature of the beast. The border didn’t just exist in the Southwest, but rather, everywhere. I had possessed its lesson; I knew that place wasn’t somewhere I traveled to or lived in; the border had taught me that it had to be something else. I wanted to exist in a place that had no relationship to the border-at-large or to immigration or to my status or my family’s. I just wanted a tree, a beach, a mountain, even a bird, not tinged the color of all of my fake documents. But where could I go that didn’t involve a border in one way or another? Where on earth is a border irrelevant? How could I create a small landscape of memories divorced from that spectacle? Maybe this place could be independent acts of love that transcended the limitations of time and memory associated with borders, as in the phrase “I don’t remember where we kissed, all I know is that we kissed.” Place as memory. Place as disassociation . . . dissociation. There was no escape, so over the years I started drinking to create my own spectacle.
I knew that it was not simply birds, trees, and dirt down there. There were ghosts, very much as real as the trees around them. There was blood down there that didn’t possess the magical ability to dry, to wither away into nothing, to be forgotten.
How easy it would have been to look down and see nothing but sand. How fortunate for those who couldn’t or, better stated, refused, to see the bodies strung like sweaters on clotheslines ben
eath the water in the Río Bravo. I felt like I’d lost control of my body, like I was already dying six miles above the earth. There was death down there, and to some, it hardly made a shadow, it hardly made a sound; to others it was deafening, it started to sound like hammers.
[First Movement Before Me as Mist]
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, when Apá left Amá to come work in the United States, he came to labor camps along California’s Central Valley, mostly in Stockton and Modesto and sometimes as far north as Yakima, Washington. He slept in basements along with thirty or so other men without electricity or running water. A bucket in the corner was the latrine, and they rolled dice to see who would empty it next. Rent and food was deducted from their pay, as were their tools (marked up, of course), and the company usually and conveniently owned a small store to supply the men with any other provisions. Whatever was left in their pay they would send back home. There never was much left. Yes, he left Amá alone in Mala Noche, to fend for herself, to feed herself, and to care for their child by herself, but he was trying to get their small family ahead. It was the price to be paid for any kind of comfort.
*
Apá said that on some weekends, when they felt festive, they would invite girls from town to the camp, borrow a guitar, buy cheap tequila, and have a makeshift baile, or party. Since they were only ever able to bring a few girls at a time, the remaining men would dance with each other, holding themselves by the waist to a polka or ranchera, cheek to cheek, drunk, never to mention this to their wives back home until decades later.
The next day they would be back in the fields, picking one red and ripe strawberry at a time. Immigration raids were more common then. They were more public, it was part of the show. They also came in vans, but back then, they were marked in large green letters. They would come to a screeching halt and agents would surround a field like cowboys herding cattle. There was chaos and screeching, and flailing, and ducking, and “Stop, inmigración” in thick American accents that always sounded like they were part of a Hollywood western. There were heavy-metal-bumpered Bronco pickups with big tires that kicked up a dust storm when they came to a halt and also when they peeled out. Everyone knew the drill.
Sometimes if the bosses didn’t want to pay their workers, they would call immigration themselves. During a raid, those who had papers never ran; they kept their heads down, continuing to pick their fruit as if nothing in particular was happening around them, as if they didn’t see their friends jumping off their ladders, or jumping in a hole, hiding in a tree. One day a raid came and Apá just kept calmly picking his fruit, a bluff. It worked. The agents left without bothering to ask him anything. They came and went like ghosts. He laughed about it with his friends at lunch a few hours later when they returned from hiding, drenched in ditch water, or scraped up from hiding in the branches, laughing a little as to why they didn’t think of it themselves, sighing because a bluff could only be done once.
*
Working in the fields was hard, but there was pride in it. The dirt felt good in your hands, and you were making your own living wage, much more than you would ever make back home growing corn, or anything else that came from the earth, even though it was the exact same earth you were cultivating up north as well. At the end of the day you could look back and see all the trees you stripped clean of their fruit. It was visible in the way other things were not. Sometimes there was no greater joy than sitting in the middle of a watermelon field, breaking open a melon and burying your face in the juicy red pulp. And on the hottest days, Apá said it almost felt nice when the crop dusters sprayed the neighboring field, how cool it felt when the pesticide mist poured over them with the slightest breeze.
7.
As we descended into Guadalajara, Jalisco, I began to worry about being able to return. My provisional document relegated my admittance back into the U.S. to the discretion of whichever individual border agent I happened to get at the checkpoint. If they were in a bad mood, they could deny me reentry and I would be stuck technically in Mexico but also in less of an actual “place” than I had ever been before. That feeling first came upon me when I boarded the plane back in Sacramento, when the stewardess announced that the doors would be shutting and wouldn’t open again until our landing. But as we approached Guadalajara, it felt more pressing. As we got closer I could make out the houses, which looked like compounds with large walls gating them off from the outside world. I could see into people’s courtyards, I could see the tiny dots of potted plants that I remembered having as a child in our courtyard. Even from that distance, I was starting to remember.
Ten years can do a lot to memory. I didn’t know who my father was anymore or who he had become. I wanted to know if he had changed beyond just appearances. Had I?
*
I was fifteen when he left, and he was fifty-five. Upon my return, I was twenty-five and he was sixty-five. Our birthdays were one day apart. We were both Aquarius. He left me as a child and I was coming back to him as a man. I had a mustache and beard, my shoulders had squared, I was taller, maybe as tall as him, and I had a wife whom I’d met shortly after his departure and who fell in love with me over many nights talking on the phone about the man I was now returning to see.
I wondered what he would think of Rubi. I wanted to hold her the way he never held Amá and to show him the kind of respect a husband should have for his wife. I wanted to be heavy-handed about it with my body because I knew I couldn’t talk to him directly. I always had to relay everything through symbols, images, and body language. We never spoke to each other, we spoke about each other. I wanted to prove to him that I made it just fine without him. And it was true. Had he been in my life at the critical times between fifteen and twenty-five, he would have probably told me not to go to college. I would find a way to tell him this. I would try to look him in the face and not say anything at all.
*
The day he left, he spent most of the morning packing old tools into the back of his 1970s Ford pickup, his favorite style of truck. He always drove stick shift and tried to teach me once, but I could hardly reach the pedals, and the gears were old and difficult to shift.
“Shift into third, shift into third,” he screamed, which didn’t help me shift into third any faster.
He went to Mexico often because he felt like he was rotting from the inside if he went too long without going back. With each trip, he packed his truck to the brim with farm equipment and old tools to sell or barter back home. Because I was small, he had me hunch inside the camper and arrange all the boxes that he handed me from the garage. This was always my job. I had to arrange them exactly right, otherwise they would not all fit.
“Not like that goddamnit!” he screamed when I put a box sideways when it should have gone longways. He grabbed the heavy boxes filled with screwdrivers and made the truck shake from side to side with his shuffling on the bed, trying to fit the box exactly where I was going to put it anyway if he had waited.
It never took long for my father to laugh off his rage and leave it in the past, while we were still left scrambling with remnants of his emotions from three or four episodes before.
That day, packing his truck for what I thought was just another of his trips to Mexico, I was almost happy that he was leaving. I felt that at last I would be relieved of the weight of his rage looming over my shoulders. Perhaps I wasn’t sad because in my head I was certain that he would return.
Most of the money my dad made in the States would be sent back to Mexico to buy land, or a truck, or to pay off one of his many debts. My mother, on the other hand, worked for rent, gas, electricity, food, but my father worked for a separate reality that envisioned us all living again in Mexico. They never brought up the fact that the realities of their futures never crossed, it was just always in the air, most prevalent with a heavy sigh or a slammed door—never actually spoken.
When the truck was completely loaded, he went inside and took a shower. Apá made it a point to never look presen
table. It’s not that he didn’t care about how he looked, because he did; he wanted to look ragged. He wanted other people to feel sorry for him. He wanted my uncles to think that my mother never cooked for him or cleaned for him, which in Mexican communities was the currency of worth for a married woman. He was controlling my mother’s image to others more than she could herself. The reality was the opposite. My mother’s constant struggle was for him to take a shower and to change clothes; she always begged for him to eat at home, not on the streets. He did it on purpose, perhaps to justify his leaving for six months at a time. If he could convince himself that in fact he had a terrible wife who did not care for him, then it wouldn’t take much for him to enjoy his trip away from his family. Sometimes I thought he left only to be away from us; there was joy in his leaving, even though his joy looked nothing like any of ours. We each had our own definition of joy and kept its secret hidden as if in a secret box. No one would share their key; no one would allow anyone else to see inside their box.
Many times he would come home and scream at my mother that he hadn’t eaten in two entire days, which was a lie. “The food is ready,” my mother would respond, pointing to a pot on the stove filled with freshly boiled beans or squash. He would grumble something under his breath and walk away. He always wanted to make sure that he occupied the role of the victim. Nothing was ever his fault. And he fought hard to preserve and own that image of himself, even if he had to beat it into my mother to prove his victimhood, his woundedness.
*
When he got out of the shower, he put on some new boots I hadn’t seen before. They were dark brown with intricate white designs and floral patterns. He wore polyester wranglers, a crisp button-up shirt, and a palm sombrero, and he had shaved his beard except for his mustache, which was long and pointy. He looked handsome. He looked like someone who was loved or at least in love—a dapper older gentleman with a family. He combed his hair to the side, like he always did. Even for his age, his thick, lush head of hair never had much gray. Balding isn’t something passed down in my family. But I would have gladly preferred that rather than everything else I inherited: my anger and lack of patience. He’s always had a large potbelly. He doesn’t drink, so it’s not from beer, but rather from all the food he eats on the street to avoid my mother’s cooking, so he can complain about not eating a home-cooked meal. His belt is barely visible beneath his tucked-in shirt and belly spilling over.
Children of the Land Page 3