*
I had an older friend who was deported and got the ten-year ban. Let’s call her Esperanza. She thought the same thing as Apá: “I can do it. I’ll follow the rules.” Esperanza tried to make it work; she brought her children with her, those young enough to obey; the others stayed behind with her husband, and those who could cross tried to visit. But two years into her punishment, she realized that it was impossible to be separated from the rest of her family for that long. Even though she returned, things were never the same.
Upon being reunited for the first time in almost two decades, the first words an aunt of mine said to her son were, “Who are you?” to which the stranger replied, “I’m your son, Mom.” They had always exchanged pictures over the years, and yet. My aunt looked down, slightly embarrassed or ashamed, and said, “Of course, of course.”
Ten years was just enough time to learn how to live without someone and move on.
[Third Movement as Migration]
We had to leave Tepechitlán for many reasons. There were so many different ways to say we were tired, each a synonym for debt. There was a point when I knew the names of the birds in Tepechitlán and thought it was a good idea to eat the flowers in my mother’s garden so that I could be a different color on the inside. I was too young to love, but I kept falling in love. I was convinced that, like me, the whole family couldn’t sleep because they too couldn’t remember the name of that bird with the yellow breast and black head.
Over dinner, Apá confessed that for the size of the town, there was a disproportionate number of suicides. He said it calmly, like he was talking to strangers about the weather, while he picked at his plate.
The events happened in order. First we lost our home, the home that Amá built with the little she was given after her mother’s death. Then “It’s a boy,” the doctor said in late 1992 to Amá as he pointed to the blurry ultrasound. Another one, her last. She smiled and rubbed her stomach with her callused hands. We tried to pretend it was easy to feed a family of seven for as long as we could.
“Toña, you can barely feed the children you have, what were you thinking getting pregnant again?” my aunt Beatrice said to Amá when she told her the good news of the baby. Beatrice said it as if it was Amá’s fault alone that she was pregnant, as if my father had nothing to do with it.
Amá had weathered a lot in her life, but hearing her sister say “You can barely feed the kids you have” was a breaking point. Amá gathered her kids and told Apá she was moving to the U.S., with or without him. She would prove to my aunt that her kids would never go hungry, by which she meant we would never return to Mexico.
My father, seeing her anger and conviction, agreed and sold his guns in order to afford the trip north. If we were to leave and cross to the other side, we would have to do it soon, before Amá’s belly grew even larger.
We gave away our pathetic attempts at prayer, our small, irredeemable gods and their suffering. I imagined the afterlife as a kind of song played on repeat forever. We were selfish in our longing.
I, too, gave away what little I had to my cousins and friends, making them swear to take care of my things. I asked them not to break my toys because I would be back to reclaim them. How dumb of me?
It was like a Greek play in which everyone played the role of the chorus because we each thought we knew how it would end.
We made promises. We made promises.2
8.
Looking back into the distance from inside the taxi, I couldn’t tell what was El Paso and what was Juárez because at night the lights all looked the same. Each patch of dark meant that no one dared, or could not, settle there.
But the buildings and their design differed on either side of the line. On the Mexican side, the homes, even the poor ones, had the flair of modern design—everything was a square on top of another square. Perhaps modernism was well suited to Mexico across class divides in a way that it wasn’t in the United States, at least not in homes. The U.S. was still wedded, for the most part, to the Victorian, the cottage, the Tudor.
In Juárez, as in Guadalajara and, I imagined, most of Mexico, no one built with wood, which allowed for those small, intricate designs of ornamentation and peaked roofs. For builders, tradesmen, and journeymen working with steel and cement, the only way to go was modern—90 degrees by 90 degrees by 90 degrees. It made the most practical sense. One could say that modernism had caught up to the practicality of Mexico and most other non-Western countries.
The old colonial buildings like the church and the presidential palace in the oldest part of every Mexican city were the only buildings that really curved. They were adorned with the embellishments that harkened to the Baroque, neoclassical, and Rococo—all orbiting around the image of Christ at the center. Everything was gilded and emanated away from itself, as if it were meant to go on forever, as if their reign over the colonies would never end. Had it?
The opulence and sheer breathtaking scale of those older Mexican buildings sent a message to the (then) present but also to the future. The splendor of the vaulted ceilings announced itself as power, reminding every citizen and slave of its colonial presence—“We are always here, we will be here long after.” Those buildings were meant to last.
Throughout Juárez, absent were the eaves drooping over the walls as they did back in the states, in the suburbs of anywhere USA. Absent were the pitched roofs that allowed for empty space that would, by design, go to waste and was only good for things like attics. Absent were the beveled cornices, the cantilevered fascia boards, bargeboards, soffits, and gables. When a house in Mexico caught fire, everything inside burned but not the house, made of stone, cement, and iron beams.
The U.S. was also enamored with the architecture associated with the centuries from which it was born and from which it gained its power. It held closely to the nostalgia of its eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and never left. It romanticized the New England aesthetic—the house on the shore with a high-pitched roof and thin planks of spruce wrapping around—or the Craftsman bungalow. Although Mexico (in a strictly colonial sense) was a much older country, the vaulted arches still carried the same weight as they always had, still emanated the same message of colonial power.
*
Apá’s house in Tepechitlán adopted the compartmentalized aesthetics of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde—out of functionality, not style. Rooms were separated by function in a much stricter sense, and nothing was connected. The kitchen was the kitchen and nothing else, the living room was the living room and nothing else; the bathroom, the bedroom, the store/feed room, the same. Newer American homes, on the other hand, always wanted everything open. They wanted to see everything happening in front of them, as if to say “Nothing is hidden in this house,” one thing seamlessly leading into another and another—“We don’t keep secrets.” You could be dicing tomatoes in the kitchen while someone talked to you on a bar stool in the dining room as both of you watched football on the far TV in the living room. It was the American way of life, to be seen, splayed out; its entire aura said “Look at me, look at me, I’m happy.”
Like so many other houses in Mexico, the compartments of each room in Apá’s house in Tepechitlán affected how people inside interacted. The separation of rooms, all having a common courtyard, altered people’s behavior. The act of having to leave, say, the kitchen, and go outside to the common courtyard in order to enter another room felt like a cleansing of the palate, an intermezzo, a small dash of sorbet to wash out the bitter taste left in the mouth after an argument at the dinner table. Leaving one physical space for another, you could start fresh, even better than before, forgiving those who had hurt you. It was the outside that did it, the fresh air, the act of situating your body beneath miles of open sky before coming back into a different room. That wasn’t possible in most American tract homes, where all the tragedy happened under one roof and was never released.
In a way my father, just like, I figured, everyone else, was an extensio
n of the spaces he inhabited. He functioned as they functioned; it was how he saw himself in relation to the world and the people around him. He could go from absolute joy to absolute rage in a matter of seconds. And he lapped circles around us between rage and joy while we tried to keep up. It was so easy for him to switch back and forth, as if he was walking from room to room in his head. Sometimes Amá would just shrug and continue with her business because she knew he would boil over and then simmer, almost embarrassed to admit that he had been stricken again. It was always so confusing to me, but as I got older, I soon began to do the same. I found my rage was quickly followed by laughter followed by rage. I had only lived in those compartmentalized houses for the first five years of my life before we migrated to the gabled and pitched homes of the U.S., but that was enough time to establish that pattern in my head, or I inherited it from him at birth. And in my head, I did feel like I could walk into a room that housed anger, turn around and leave, and then walk over to the room that housed love, sorrow, or shame, and stay there. On/off, on/off.
Growing up, I never knew how to approach my father because there was no sign of how he was feeling at any particular moment. There was no warning. He was never expressive to begin with, and the large palm sombrero he always wore obscured his features even further, casting a slight shadow beneath his eyes. If I laughed when it wasn’t a time for laughter, I would certainly know it. If I was somber when I should have been happy, he would look at me and slap me on the back, shine a few crooked teeth at me and say, “Trucha, mijo.” And I would let out a deep nervous breath.
That breath, a calibration. I was adjusting myself to his likeness, I was matching my rhythm with his so that there would be peace, so that we could just go one more day without screaming. That was my breath, led, as if by a leash, by the rhythm of his. It was a guessing game most of the time, and it took me many years to become a good guesser. Even then, I guessed wrong many times. I was always following behind him, going from room to room, whiplashed from the darkness of one room to the brightness outside, always looking beneath that large hat for any sign of what would follow.
9.
The taxi stopped in front of our hotel, next to the U.S. Embassy. I paid the driver and thanked him. He took our luggage out of the trunk and rolled it over to the entrance. I tried to help him with our bags, but he kept insisting that he should get them. I handed him a tip and thanked him. He was kind. “Thank you, sir, and good luck with everything,” he said as he jumped back into his small Nissan, heading back to the airport. Although it was midnight, no doubt, he would repeat the same trip many times before the sun came up—from the El Paso airport to a hotel near the embassy and back.
The hotel was meant to accommodate people coming from the U.S., meant to make them feel at home, as if saying, “This isn’t Mexico.” It had stuccoed foam around its cornices, which made it look like a suburban tract home. Soft amber light tumbled out of the low windows of the first-floor rooms and lobby onto the narrow patches of bright grass that surrounded the building, and if you stood close enough, it almost made you forget you were in the desert. Water runoff from the sprinklers trickled down the sidewalk and pooled in the gutter for what seemed like hours. Such a waste.
We couldn’t really afford that hotel, but we felt like we had no choice. We wanted all our collective energy focused solely on my father’s interview so that he would have nothing else to think about other than what to say to the agent when the time came. We wanted to eliminate any unpredictable variables. It was next door to the embassy, it served breakfast, it had a copier and printer, and it was comfortable. We never thought, however, that it was the kind of place that Apá was not used to, that it was comfortable only for Rubi and me, that it was something foreign to him.
I saw my father waiting for us in the lobby, draped in that soft light, with his familiar palm straw hat, his tight denim jeans, his boots, his belly hanging over his belt, and his tucked-in plaid shirt. It was strange to see him in a distant city, far from where we’d last seen each other, back home in Tepechitlán. Unlike the last time, I was now arriving as a seasoned traveler with a green card, even though my only other experience was a single trip to Tepechitlán the year before. I didn’t know where we’d left things between each other last, but as we approached, it felt less like a grand reunion and more like something I could see myself doing for a long time after—coming to see my father for short periods of time. It was a new way of being a son that I had never known before. Now I was the one coming and going, and he would be the one to stay behind, watching me leave. If things didn’t work out, I thought, this would be how our lives would continue, him waiting for me to come back and going back to his life as normal after I left. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so we shook hands and came in closer for a hug.
*
He traveled an entire day and a half by bus to get there from the south, and we boarded a plane in Detroit and flew a few hours from the north. I fell asleep on Rubi’s shoulder for most of the flight because I wasn’t too worried. I was optimistic. He did his time, he was going to collect his reward.
We met in something of a middle. But in reality it wasn’t the middle, at least not for him. The middle only existed for people like Rubi and, now, myself, who could go back and forth freely between the line. How much had changed in a year! Even though the U.S. was just a stone’s throw away, we could have been thousands of miles farther south and it would still feel just as distant. Even if I took him to the actual wall on the Juárez side, and even if he touched it with his bare hands, scraping his nails along its rusted metal, the U.S. would still be impossibly distant, it would still be out of reach until he acquired his papers. There were only two conditions: either you were inside the U.S., or outside it. To be close or far away from it didn’t matter, only whether you were in or out.
Yes, we knew our world by dichotomies, yes, it’s how we made sense of things—we knew them by what they were not. There was always a price.
*
I held Apá longer than I should have, and he began to pat my back as if to say “That’s enough, son, that’s enough.”
“How was the trip?” I asked him.
“It was fine, everything was fine. How’s everyone back home? How’s your mother?”
“They’re fine, Dad. We’ll talk to them in the morning. It’s late now.”
Even at the brink of his possible return to the U.S., I knew he was still asking, in one way or another, if my mother would ever return to Mexico with him, which either meant that he wasn’t as optimistic about his interview as we were or confirmed my suspicion that even if he was approved, he would still live in Mexico. All of this commotion at the border, the paperwork, the tense nights before big mornings, it was old news for him. He had been in the same kind of situation on the same kind of night dozens of times before. He was used to those roads, those lights, and the darkness beyond them.
He didn’t seem alert like we were, wiry with anticipation, our eyes tired and red. Our clothes looked outstretched from trying to sleep in them on the plane, the way they look when you’ve been wearing them too long. It didn’t seem like there was anything different about Apá. He talked like he always talked, moved like I always remembered him moving.
He had been to Juárez many times, and it was in the Juárez/El Paso border station, that very same checkpoint we had just crossed, where they detained and deported him back in 2003. For him, it was just another city, just another attempt at crossing, something he had been doing for decades either by car, by foot, or by paper. Unlike me, he held no grudges against the border, or the city, or anything related to the situation of his deportation. He was able to forgive and forget, something I admired him for.
We checked in and headed upstairs. I wasn’t sure whether to lead or to follow, unsure how to hold my body against the presence of his. I thought I would have learned all of that already since I last saw him, but I hadn’t. I followed but told him the way.
We decided to get
two rooms, one for Rubi and me and one for him. I didn’t know if he wanted to stay with us and perhaps spend more time together, or not. My excuse was that Rubi wanted her privacy, but in reality, I didn’t want to share a room with him. I didn’t want to start sharing the formalities of daily living, only to be suddenly cut off. I didn’t want to know what color his toothbrush was, if he wore undershirts to sleep, what side of the bed he slept on, if he preferred walking around with sandals or socks, or even how he organized his small bag, similar to the one he had when he left in 2003. His interview wasn’t going to be like mine. They weren’t going to ask him who he loved and if he loved them forever, they were going to ask him to say he was sorry.
There was the broader image of my father, which I knew well, and then there were the smaller subtleties that I had forgotten over the years, some of which I never knew. Even in the short moments we’d already had together, I could already observe he didn’t like the cuffs of his shirt to touch his wrists, he kept a pen in his shirt pocket with a small memo pad filled with names. Between both the large details and the small, they composed the entirety of my father. I was content with having only part of him.
I didn’t want to start something that we couldn’t finish.
10.
It was like any other Denny’s, with the low-hanging lightbulbs, the bright menus with enlarged pictures of sweaty meat, fries, and drinks. I thought it was appropriate to be eating at a Denny’s, as if just by being in the restaurant, we were already in America. Do you like burgers and fries, Dad? Do you like the unlimited coffee? The plates as large as your face? The ketchup and mustard and ranch dressing? Dad, does this suit you? The waiters with their name on their lapel, and the bright fuchsia-colored drinks dripping their excess on the menu? Is this all enough?
Children of the Land Page 13