Children of the Land

by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  It was quiet; not even the insects announced themselves. I walked to the back of the house, which was surrounded by a stone wall. I picked up rock after rock and put it back down. I turned rocks around to see what was underneath them. My blood was in that earth; it was in those trees, and even in the walls themselves.

  I wanted to change something about the scene, even if it was only moving a single rock around. I wanted it to be different because of my arrival, different at my departure. I wanted my ancestors to see that someone was still there, tending to their eternal home. I made a little clearing. Removed all the rocks I could pick up and placed them on top of the wall. I wanted them to know that a part of them, which was inside a part of me, was still breaking a sweat in the crisp morning air on that mountain.

  *

  I talked to them. I didn’t know all of their names, but I didn’t need to. They knew all about me. I knew they could hear me and knew why I had come, more so than I did. I said I was sorry. I said I would make things better. I knew a lot of things weren’t my fault, in fact most weren’t: why the ranch was abandoned, why my father drove us into debt, why he was deported, why the family couldn’t just stay a little longer in the U.S. after baby Manuel’s death to get their green card under Reagan’s famous amnesty order. How different our lives would have been if only they had waited. But although none of this was my fault, I wanted to take the blame, to let it all fall on me. If all it took to reverse any of this was for me to be punished, I would have gladly taken the beating.

  I closed my eyes and saw the ranch in its glory days. I could see my mother as a child running through those meadows, laughing and swimming in the arroyo. I held my mother’s small hand as she guided me through the house. We played games, we made clay pots at the river bed and pretended to drink tea. She knew who I was, she knew what the future held for her.

  There was a sapote tree with its large fruit hanging from its branches that looked new, as though it came only after everyone left, as if it was waiting for everyone to leave.

  I wept quietly at the center of my blood.

  My mother’s small hands led me to the courtyard, and there she was with all of her sisters, none of whom had been married yet. I could see them all sitting in the sun, sewing together, making dresses to wear into town, laughing at riddles they would tell each other to pass the time.

  There was the room in which my great-great-grandmother Josefina died. She died on a cot near a wall. As she was dying, it was said that she kept digging her nails into a small crevice in the adobe wall. They said she was hiding jewelry in that hole, or that she was signaling to those standing around her that something was there. She died with her hand in that hole.

  When I entered that room, I looked for the small crevice, and sure enough found it, right where my mother said it would be. It was just large enough for my palm. Nothing was inside. I took out a pen from my pocket and buried it in the wall.

  *

  I sat in a clearing in the courtyard. At my feet and around me were stalks of corn that sprouted haphazardly here and there. Gone from my vision was Amá and my tías in their youth, sitting in a circle, replaced by tall stalks of corn that came from those loose kernels dropped on the floor. For two hundred years my family had sat in that very courtyard repeating the same steps of desgranando mazorca to make nixtamal for tortillas.

  I felt a sense of largeness come over me. I wanted to take my clothes off and touch every single adobe brick with every part of my body. I wanted to dance in the middle of the clearing and let all of the snakes hiding in the weeds come join me. I felt a sharp pain, like a wire wrapped around my throat and getting tighter, like something sectioning me in pieces. If the moon came out I would bow in reverence, I would unravel before it and speak softly into the dirt.

  I envied the rhizomes sprawling beneath the earth, their secret language. I, too, wanted to touch that many things at once, to stretch for miles, connected by a single fungus, and to pulse through the roots of countless trees.

  *

  If I could, I would have left a part of my body behind. I rubbed my skin with a rock until it turned red. I knew the landscape would outlast me, that the border would still be up long after I died, that the trees would continue to be just that—nothing but trees. Apá’s house would still be there, as would the walls of La Loma. I wanted so much more, but I still felt that I was missing something. I still felt like I was opening a small box with another box inside it, and it would go on forever. Maybe the point was the box, not what was inside it; the point was those walls that no amount of rain or hail could crumble. The point was that they came from the earth and were in no hurry to return. It’s common to carry a small piece of dirt from your homeland when you leave. Knowing they will never return, some people eat it. I wouldn’t know where to begin collecting dirt.

  We left the ranch and began our descent into town. Apá seemed annoyed that I had taken so long. Perhaps he was upset that I didn’t want him with me, that I wanted that moment to myself. In my hand I held a small rock I was hoping I could sneak past customs. They don’t allow dirt of any kind to be brought into the States. I put it in my pocket and rubbed it gently with my fingers.

  The next day was Christmas Eve. We sat in the patio of Apá’s house with a large fire in an oil barrel between us. We were quiet, listening to the frogs and crickets in the darkness. At exactly midnight, and unannounced, Apá opened the main door to the courtyard, walked out to the street, and fired six rounds from his .357 Magnum revolver, which I had no idea was tucked beneath his jacket and which he had been carrying all day. I jumped at the sound of the shots. He came back in, locked the door, and sat down without a word, a slight smile across his face. It was his way of celebrating Christmas. No presents, just six hollow-point rounds into the air. In the distance I could hear others doing the same. He laughed a little and tucked the gun into his jacket. He said every man should know how to hold and fire a gun and that he would teach me in the morning.

  Second Movement: Interview on Allegiance

  1.

  Rubi immigrated to the United States with her family only a year before I did, in 1992. Although she came from the coastal state of Guerrero, after living in Washington State and San Jose, in 1993 she and her family settled in Yuba City, California, the same town where I had just settled in from Mexico. We lived in the same government migrant labor camp for many years and must have, at one point or other, crossed paths as children.

  All of the kids in the migrant camp knew each other, but it wasn’t until high school that Rubi and I became better acquainted. We were both in a cultural dance club at school, and eventually started dating in 2005. I wrote my very first poems to her and would slip them into her locker, and she would show them to her Spanish class, who would then try to interpret them, even though they were in English. I wanted to write poetry because I believed any practice in the English language would distance myself from my identity as an immigrant and I thought (naively, ashamedly so) that the farthest association from an immigrant was a poet. How foolish I was. Little did I know the lineage of immigrant poets I came from and would follow. But more than that, I wanted to write and speak English better than any white person, any citizen, because in the unthinkable case of ever getting caught by immigration, I thought I could impress them enough with my mastery of English to let me go. What a stupid idea.

  It took me months before I was ever able to muster enough courage to confess to Rubi that I didn’t have papers, after which she admitted that she had only gotten hers a few months before. She was the first person I trusted enough to confide in about my documentation status, but it wasn’t easy. We kissed before I told her I didn’t have papers; I told her I loved her, and she said it back, before I ever mentioned I didn’t have papers; we made love, we fought, we met each other’s parents, before I told her I didn’t have papers—I didn’t want her to leave me before telling her I didn’t have papers, if it ever came to that.

  We married six years later on
September 10, 2011. We chose the date specifically because it was 9–10–11, and thought the sequence of numbers was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I liked things that felt rare and intentional. It was difficult to convince myself that people weren’t saying behind our backs that I only married Rubi for her papers, so I decided to wait a while before filing an immigration application. It was a way of saying, “I’m in no hurry, I’m with her because I love her.”

  *

  She finally submitted a petition for me to get a green card. It wasn’t a single process, and could sometimes take up to sixteen years, depending what route people take. Because I was able to leave the country and reenter legally with my DACA permit, I didn’t have to leave the U.S. for my immigration interview. When we submitted the form, again I said to Rubi, “You know I love you despite any of this,” to which she laughed and said, “I know.”

  2.

  The order to appear for my interview came in 2014, in a letter printed on special thick paper. Getting the notice to appear meant that I had met all of the requirements needed to receive a green card if all went well at my immigration interview. The interview was set for July 28, 2014. I was twenty-six, twenty-one years after I first arrived.

  *

  An immigration interview follows the same rhetorical form as any other interview. The rules you’re expected to follow are the same. It’s a structure so common that I sometimes took its usefulness for granted. It happened every time I waited in line at the bank, at the store, or even when I made love.

  “Do you love me?” I would say to Rubi in our first one-bedroom apartment with no AC.

  “Yes,” she would say.

  “Isn’t it love even if we don’t change?”

  “Amor, I don’t understand the question.” We were so young and so much in love that we thought love could be anything we wanted it to be.

  I repeated those words over and over. Sometimes in my head to myself—“Is it love even if we don’t change?” I wanted to approach questions as I would approach a large body of water, as things in which I could drown, knowing how easy it was to drown, knowing exactly the limits and dimensions of my body and what it would take to drown it.

  *

  If I ever stood in front of a crowd, I would like to interview them in secret to see what they thought of me, to see if I would allow them to love me. We would all be knee-deep in water.

  I would want to know what their collective answer would be. I would hold my finger to my mouth and tell everyone to quiet. And they would. We would know things about each other at the end of it that we did not know at the beginning. We would all nod our heads but some for different reasons. There would be small cubes of cheese at the end and wine to wash them down.

  *

  The day of the interview, I took out my entire closet for the right thing to wear.

  “What shirt says: I want to be an American?” I asked Rubi, holding up two blue collared shirts in each hand. One was slightly lighter, the blue of open ocean, and the other was of the deeper ocean, where bioluminescent creatures lurked.

  Maybe if my cells tried just a little harder, they too could light up just like those creatures floating a mile beneath the surface. Why not? They carried inside their scales everything that was already inside me.

  “I don’t care which one you wear,” Rubi said, “but hurry, because we have to go, it’s getting late.”

  We got in the car and drove to the city. I chose the shirt that was the color of an expensive velvet dress I saw an older white woman wear to a symphony, the darker one. It was my first and only symphony I had ever attended, and I was wildly underdressed. Maybe I would light up, maybe I would drown inside my car from so many questions as we practiced what we would say.

  3.

  I used to daydream that I was somebody famous. That people wanted to interview me on TV and radio, and I practiced my coy giggle with embarrassment. In these interviews, I balanced a very fine line between being humble and cocky in a way that was endearing to the crowd. They hated and loved me at the same time. Someone would walk up and give me flowers and I would thank them profusely, then walk away and toss them, even if they were still looking. Everyone wanted to be me.

  Interviews reminded me how much of my life was lived through questions—interrogations—how much of it was just someone waiting for me to tell them an answer—how good I got at avoiding giving one.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Where do you think?”

  But when I had no other choice but to answer directly, I still found a way to curve the truth about me; I took everything that was inside and put it outside, like how we don’t really know how some deep-water creatures really look because by the time they reach the surface, the change in pressure has deformed them. It was how an unknown became a known.

  Things always moved in a single direction, from the interviewer to the interviewee. Even when the person being interrogated responded, it was in the direction of the interrogator’s next question, always moving forward. The U.S. government was good at asking questions, and it got in a lot of trouble when people learned just how it got its answers—it was a simulated drowning, but a drowning nonetheless.

  *

  In late-night talk shows, I saw beautiful people sit sideways on a chair with their legs crossed, drinking from a mug with the show’s name printed on the front—it always conveniently faced the front. I always wondered if it was actually coffee they were drinking that late at night. They leaned over a chair, crossed their other leg over, and smiled with a mouth full of large teeth, almost too many teeth, which were so white they seemed to glow in the dark. Sometimes they wore sunglasses even though the only visible lights were the ones from the televised backdrop of the cityscape at night. Los Angeles was so pretty from above.

  They let you see into their lives, just enough to pique your interest, just enough to stay barely scandalous—careful not to seem sad or garner pity. No one likes a sad and washed-up star, but everyone loves a star that is on the verge of getting there, on the verge of breaking. Sadness itself is sometimes a good thing. Sadness is hot, sadness makes money, sadness has soft filters and ashtrays and turns a young Elizabeth Woolridge into Lana Del Rey cruising through Venice Beach on a Harley drinking PBR.

  The hosts ask questions they know will not be answered, but that is not the point. The point is for the celebrities sitting in the hot seat to shy away from their questions ever so slightly. The point is for them to say “Stop, you know I can’t talk about that in public,” or “Well, you’ll have to ask them, not me.” And then they all laugh because they’re supposed to laugh. And the audience laughs and coos, and the hosts drink from whatever is in their mugs and chuckle again and turn to the musical accompaniment for additional commentary, which is underscored by a snare drum and “we’ll be back after this commercial break.” I loved every minute of it. I loved the live band. I loved the witty banter, which seemed so effortless, how quick and smooth they were with their answers, how everyone seemed to be a few seconds ahead in the conversation than the audience—ahead of me.

  Then there was the moment when things went wrong. When someone didn’t follow the rules. People don’t like surprises. For instance, after a barrage of attacks, Cher (rightly so) tells David Letterman that he is an asshole. Her sadness stops being pretty to him. Though later it will turn out to be staged, Joaquin Phoenix stares inwardly from the reflection of his glasses, oblivious to the audience, and the world witnesses either a piece of performance art or a man who has lost his faith in an industry. The host, David Letterman again, aptly ends the interview by saying, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.” Joaquin doesn’t lean over his seat; he doesn’t whisper anything in anyone’s ear. He isn’t playing along like he is supposed to. You can see that he doesn’t want to be there; he doesn’t want to take part in the soliloquy. At least his portrayal indicates that. I’m sorry, you couldn’t be here tonight, as if you can be anywhere else.

  In a mo
re haunting episode, Crispin Glover, who played the dad on the Back to the Future franchise as George McFly, reads newspaper clippings about himself at a nightclub and seems surprised that he is being filmed at all when the audience erupts into laughter over his antics. He stares out toward the audience and looks directly at the camera as if wanting to see who is really there on the other side of the lens, who is really watching. He continues to read what the tabloids have said about him. He insists on arm wrestling David Letterman, who eventually walks offstage, visibly upset. A door has been opened that cannot be closed. The forward motion has stopped. Some of them were asked back on the show, and some weren’t. Some apologized, others tried to explain what it was they were doing in front of yet another camera, in front of another person asking them questions.

  [Second Movement: Hometown Pageant Queens]

  In 1991, two years before we left Mexico, my sister was voted pageant queen of our home town of Tepechitlán, Zacatecas. She was fifteen. Her dress was red, and velvet and long. Her king, another boy from school, was dressed in torn and dirty rags, “the ugly king,” as tradition goes. He groveled at her theatrical contempt.

  No one knew what opulence meant, so her court tried their best in their suits and gowns two sizes too big, making grand gestures with their hands. For a moment she said she felt famous, except there were no cameras.

  She was paraded through town on the hood of a truck, waving to the crowds.

  The band, walking ahead of the car, asked for her favorite song, but she didn’t have one. She was touched by the Holy Spirit and wasn’t allowed to listen to worldly music. She knew the subtle art of fainting on Sunday mornings at church when she went up for the altar call as the pastor rubbed olive oil on her forehead and pushed her stiff body back.