Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  Everyone says I look like him as a young man, and that soon I’ll start looking more like him as an older man. I have a picture of him in his early twenties, and I do in fact bear a striking resemblance beyond even the obvious father/son connections—our cheeks, our eyes, our thin faces.

  As he was getting his bag ready, a small tan leather duffel, my mother began crying. She always cried for the departed, perhaps because she had to do it so many times. Her eyes swelled up, but Apá never looked up to console her. He merely kept shuffling through his duffel bag to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything.

  I was thinking about what I would be allowed to wear now that he was leaving. To anyone else who didn’t know him, that would sound silly, but most of the fights between Amá and Apá were about how we dressed. My mother didn’t really care how we dressed as long as we behaved and had good grades. My father, on the other hand, equated wearing baggy clothes with being morally bankrupt, with being looked down upon as a thief, as a gangster, as a useless miscreant, which stemmed from a long history of antiblackness and anti-indigenous xenophobia in ours and many Mexican families. He had a low regard for black culture because he equated it with so many negative stereotypes, and thus had a general mistrust of the black community in our low-income neighborhood. As a child and preteen, I didn’t have the language to articulate his antiblackness, but I see it now. Perhaps, in an ironic turn, he saw blackness as quintessentially American at the same time that America distanced itself from black life and people while co-opting their culture.

  I wanted to be like my friends whose parents didn’t care if they wore baggy pants, or red shirts, or listened to rap and hip-hop. He saw it all as evil, a stain. I remember watching BET or VHI or MTV when I got home from school and quickly changing the channel when I heard his truck pull up the driveway. Like many older Mexicans, he had conservative ideas of what was good and what was wrong in the world, and no one would change his mind.

  I always had to wear fitted jeans, and I had to tuck in my shirt. It was a struggle to be allowed even to wear regular crew-neck T-shirts and not buttoned-up collared shirts all the time. Shorts, of any size or length, were strictly forbidden. I could not comb my hair slicked back, or too short; it had to be combed to the side. I was absolutely forbidden to shave my head. I always needed to wear a belt, my jeans (and only jeans) always needed to be snug, nothing baggy, and I always had to carry a wallet with at least one dollar in it. If it was up to him, we would also be wearing cowboy hats to school. The strangest thing to me was that he wouldn’t let us wear tennis shoes until a certain age, and once he did, the only requirement he would not budge on was that he mandated that they could never be white, or majority white. I could never understand what white sneakers meant. I knew why he didn’t want us in baggy clothes, but what did he have against white shoes? I came to the conclusion that to him, white shoes were for women. He didn’t want his three boys dressing like women.

  Maybe I snuck around him with baggy shirts because I wanted to get him mad, but more than that, it was because I didn’t want to stick out. To wear boots and a sombrero was to imminently be called a naco, and if you were labeled a naco in my middle or high school, then you were also read as undocumented. He didn’t care if people knew he didn’t have papers because he never wanted to belong here, he never had the desire to fit in with six hundred other high schoolers. Why couldn’t he see that I didn’t want to bring attention to myself, that I wanted to hide? And wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and tight jeans to a high school mostly populated by kids of color was not the way to blend in.

  The house where I grew up was in a neighborhood called Wilbur Block that was run by a relatively small gang of Norteños, but it was the largest concentration of Norteños in town. He knew this. He saw them hanging out in their yards, walking the streets, sitting at the park. They were all my friends. We grew up together, went to school together, and yet he wanted me nowhere near them.

  Often I woke up unnecessarily early for school just so that I could comb my hair like my friends and leave before he got up. I laid my clothes out and sometimes packed a larger shirt in my backpack to change into once I got to school. I liked to spike my hair up or slick it back, which he hated. I chose my clothes the night before and carefully laid them out by my bed along with my shoes so that I didn’t make any noise looking for them in the morning. I opened the bathroom door slowly because it creaked sometimes, and I turned on the faucet just enough for a small trickle to flow. The aerator on the tap made a loud hissing sound, which I wanted to avoid. It took a while for a small puddle of water to collect in my closed palm, which I rubbed together with gel and ran through my glossy hair. I tried to be as quick as I could.

  Sometimes he would wake up quietly too and sneak up behind the bathroom door, which I had to leave cracked because closing it would have made too much noise. He would peek through the small opening of the bright bathroom, illuminating the hallway outside. His surveillance was obsessive. I never knew when he was watching me so I assumed he always was, and he would catch me and take the belt out. It was about control. The days that I didn’t hear him sneaking up behind the door, he would catch me and slam the door open, startling me, and grab me by my hair with his fist.

  “Hijo de tu pinche madre,” “You son of a fucking bitch” was a favorite phrase of his.

  Everything needed to be done his way, and his fights with Amá were somehow always our fault, the kids. According to him, if only we would dress respectably, like real men, like machos, then all of this could have been avoided. If only we wouldn’t talk back to him, even when he was wrong, then there wouldn’t be any problems. If only, if only, if only. Of course, there were always problems, but to him, none of them were of his making.

  *

  Clean-shaven, showered, and with fresh new clothes, he stepped out the door with his tan duffel bag in his hand. My mother followed behind, fiddling with something in her hands as if whatever she was holding would come to life and fly away. “Well, that’s everything,” he said to my mother and leaned over to me. I didn’t know where my younger two brothers were. They should have been there, but they weren’t. Perhaps my mother sent them away because she didn’t want them to see their father leave yet again, which was silly because they knew he was leaving either way. My father shook my hand, gave me a light pat on the back, and said to take care of my mother and brothers. It was a firm handshake, the way he always taught me to shake. I would be his little hawk, his little accomplice. I would be the man of the house. Besides, I was named Marcelo too.

  There was nothing special about that day, nothing momentous. We didn’t know that his plan of being away for six months would turn into a deportation of ten years. It was a few days later that we got the call. He was charged with having violated the terms of his visa, which had been revoked. He entered Mexico no longer with the glee of visiting for as long as his money lasted him, but like a dog with his tail between his legs. His first plan was to buy a house in our hometown of Tepechitlán, Zacatecas; his second plan was to make us all come back with him, but that proved harder than he anticipated.

  We didn’t know then that we would have to stretch our memories to last us ten years. I would have paid more attention on that last day that he left. Maybe there would have been a party where our joy would slowly morph into a sadness that still didn’t feel completely like sadness but had all of the consequences of sadness.

  [First Movement Before Me as Good People]

  It was easier to cross back and forth when Apá was young and still working the harvest seasons up and down the West Coast. He used to be more daring because the stakes were lower back in the 1980s. If they caught you, sometimes they just let you go and you would just turn around and try again the next day. Apá said he had friends who were sometimes caught three times in a single day. Still, one could never be too careful, so he crossed with larger groups because it was safer. In one of his trips north, he crossed with a group of about ten that included a pregnant wom
an who also had another small girl walking beside her. They walked mostly by night. The child tired quickly and often. The woman tired often too, and said her feet were unbearably swollen. The group stopped for them because that’s what anyone would do.

  They stopped again and again, but they figured if they stopped anymore to rest for her, they would miss their rendezvous and would all be in danger of being stranded with no food or water. No one said the words, but everyone was thinking the same thing. They were all hoping that one person was brave enough to say it, to say, “We can’t stop anymore” and keep walking, or simply not say anything at all and just keep walking. The rest would surely follow, absolved.

  Apá always said time stood still out there, like it was broken and would never work again no matter how many watches you wore, which meant that one step was no different than another—they were going nowhere.

  *

  They were good people, honest-to-God people, hardworking people. They didn’t mean to keep walking, but Apá said that no one outside that moment would understand. No one was meant to understand.

  Maybe they had to pretend not to hear her anymore. In their heads, it wasn’t as bad if they simply didn’t turn around to see her—action disguised as inaction. They must have told elaborate stories to convince themselves that it was all a dream, that they were making it all up. There were ten of them, never twelve.

  And so they moved on, empty, vacuous, everything ahead of them monochrome, buzzing in a low electric drizzle.

  *

  Apá stayed behind. It wasn’t that he was more courageous than them, not abandoning the woman; maybe it had nothing to do with choices. It was their fate to keep walking, and it was Apá’s fate to stay behind. I want to believe that morality had nothing to do with it. No one questioned the higher powers that descend to the lowly depths of people in the desert. They do as they do and, in the moment, do not ask why.

  Night fell, and they huddled together. Apá opened his large coat and nestled the woman on one side and her daughter on the other. When morning came, they set out again. A day passed before they found a road. There was no sight of the group, most likely picked up the night before just as was planned. There were nine, not twelve.

  Apá waited by the side of the road for a long time until he saw headlights in the distance. He flagged down the car and asked the driver to take them to Los Angeles, which the driver kindly did, seeing the precarious situation they were in. They didn’t care if it would have been immigration that they flagged. By that point, “immigration” was only an eleven-letter word and nothing else, except a chance to drink some water.

  The woman’s family, nervous that she didn’t arrive with the rest of the group, buried their heads into my father’s shoulder when they arrived in Long Beach, trying to stuff dollars in his pockets, which he didn’t refuse. He said he liked the attention and told the story over and over about how he draped his jacket over them to keep them warm at night. They killed a pig in honor of Apá and threw a party with music and drinks and carnitas from said pig. They paid for his trip farther north, to the sister towns of Linda and Olivehurst, where we would eventually end up again a decade later.

  If only the group had waited. Years later, I doubt they ever think of that woman and her child. But every now and then, I’m sure it returns to them, the memory, and there is nowhere they can hide. They didn’t mean to. They are still good people. They will create elaborate stories to rid themselves of doubt, but nothing will work. Maybe they will even bump into her without ever knowing.

  In one impossible scenario in their heads, to appease their regret, she is still somewhere out there, holding her two children, now adults, by the hand.

  8.

  The plane finally landed, and I felt the weight of my country above and around me. It happened, I could feel it in my bones, I had arrived. When the door opened, a wave of petroleum fumes wafted in, mixed with the smell of burnt rubber and a slight hint of soft, damp earth. It looked like it had just rained, but I didn’t see a cloud in the sky. We took stairs off the plane and walked onto the tarmac to the terminal. Of all places, we agreed to meet at a Burger King inside the airport. Rubi and I walked closely together, lugging our suitcases behind us. I didn’t want to look like a tourist, so I pretended to act bored, like I had done this a hundred times, but Rubi could tell it was an act. I looked at her nervously. She didn’t care what people thought about her, and I envied her for that—I always had. She wore a large sun hat and a long dress. From afar, or up close, it was obvious we weren’t from Mexico, at least not recently. I didn’t have a question for her, but I hoped she had an answer.

  It was so strange to hear everyone speaking Spanish. The attendants, the soldiers in the airport with their long assault rifles hanging across their chests, and the announcements over the intercom—all of it, Spanish. That was the first thing that disoriented me. I had never functioned in a space like that. I couldn’t remember carrying my body in Spanish, completely in Spanish. Back home, even in private moments the atmosphere was still English: the TV was English, the cardboard cereal box labels were all in English, as were the unopened letters and bills on the table, and everything in the fridge.

  It was hearing Spanish through the vehicle of authority that shocked me most. I realized how little is made up of words and how much of it is something more ethereal. The energy was different. I changed my dollar bills for pesos, and the man behind four inches of bulletproof glass in the exchange cubicle waved me aside for the next person in line with an uninterested glaze across his face. Even the flicking of his wrist felt like it was in Spanish, quicker to the point, frustrated.

  I approached Mexican customs and immigration thinking I had something to worry about, thinking I had to prepare myself for the worst, as I always had. But then a sudden relief came over me, as had never happened before. I was a citizen of the earth on which I was walking; I pertained to the same body that could be elected president. There was a small moment of pride that died as soon as the officer said, “Are you Marcelo Hernandez?” The police were the police were the police, no matter.

  [First Movement Before Me as Animal]

  The first time my mother came with my father to the United States, she left the kids back in La Loma in the care of her mother, my Amá Julia. They promised they would only be gone a few months and would be back as soon as they made enough money. When they crossed into the U.S., they wandered the desert alone for miles without food or water. They were still young; maybe they still loved each other, or would soon start to. Every direction seemed like it was north, as if it was always noon in their heads. They moved because regardless which direction they faced, they trusted what was ahead more than what was behind them.

  *

  After a day of walking, a pack of wild dogs appeared to Amá and Apá out of nowhere. At first they thought it was a hallucination, the first signs that their minds were going. Both parties stopped to observe each other. The animals were real. The humans were real. After miles of indiscriminate turns around arroyos and brush too thick to enter, almost a statistical improbability, they happened to find each other at the precise moment that fate ordained. In a way, every decision they had ever made, even in childhood, led my parents to those dogs. Every song my mother played on her radio as a child led her to those dogs, every bird my father shot led him to those dogs, every heartbreak, every dress she sewed, every cup of warm coffee in the morning.

  Two of the dogs left, uninterested surely, but one stayed behind. It approached them with its head down as if to say “I will not hurt you,” and rubbed its head against Apá’s leg. It walked right past them and continued ahead, slowing its pace and looking back to make sure its new friends were following. And indeed they followed.

  They followed the dog because they thought it must have known the way to something—anything. The dog moved through trails hidden to Amá and Apá. Trails that only dogs are keen to. It turned with precision, and intent, as if it knew its decisions were the dif
ference between life and death.

  The dog led them to a ranch where men were working. They told the men their situation and asked if the dog was theirs, but they said it wasn’t.

  They’re still not sure if the dog was real or not, but they remember it so well—its jaw slightly open, its head hanging low like a wilted flower. Maybe there wasn’t a dog, and when those ranchers stumbled across my parents, rambling about a dog that no one else could see, dehydrated and wild-eyed, they simply shook their heads and said “Yes, yes, here, drink.” My mother has never wanted to own a dog since.

  *

  The men gave them chicken soup and plenty of water, but not too much at once, because they heard it was bad. They tried to eat slowly, they tried to eat quietly. Even half dead, they still remembered that they were guests in a stranger’s house, they still remembered it was bad for the body to drink so fast when it was thirsty.

  Amá cooked a few days for them until the boss arrived with his provisions: food, water, and beer. They would have gladly stayed but the boss said he couldn’t take them because they had children waiting for them back home. He was nice enough, though, to give them a ride to Los Angeles.