by Noe Alvarez
Even with the Hawk’s windows rolled down, beads of sweat roll down my face and I lick salt from my upper lips. A hot gust enters the car and blows Chilo’s hat hair from his eyes, styled from the orchards working alongside his father.
They keep me strong, give me hope, friends whom I met sophomore year of high school, when I joined their ranks in honors classes, sitting quietly in the back of the rooms. As solitary and quiet as the Yakima-bred Raymond Carver who attended this school in the 1950s. A working-class boy like us who went on to become one of the greatest short-story writers of all time—a writer who captured the extraordinariness of ordinary people and their reckless acts.
Within a one-mile radius of our school, you can find three gas stations, a rundown bowling alley, an overcrowded mental-health clinic, and a jail. In the distance, the green Del Monte water tower pokes its head above the town, stalking us. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor. The rich have flocked to the hills above us and into orchards on the West Side.
We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes.
To sprint out of them.
Tonight, my friends and I gather at the Fruitvale Trailer Inn where one of the Farias brothers, Miguel, has lent us his home for poker night. Buy-in: twenty-five cents. No one knows it at the time, but for nineteen years, he will live under constant police surveillance as an undocumented person. He will be deported several times and he will one day be placed in solitary confinement at the Tacoma Detention Center, three hours away from Yakima, and remain in custody there for fourteen months. He will participate in a hunger strike against the poor conditions there. He will, eventually, miss his father’s funeral.
This night, his eyes droop, perhaps with exhaustion. His is a face thickened by work in the outdoors. “Here are the keys,” he says, soft-spoken. “Lock up when you guys are done.” He gets into his truck and leaves for work.
The three of us and Miguel’s younger brother sit on the front steps of the trailer under a dull bulb, clinking Smirnoffs. Moths flutter, crickets sing, and a Confederate flag hangs from a neighboring trailer. Inside, on a table, is a scattered deck of Mexican cards and the trace of young men trying to make sense of life over a game of conquian and music because it’s hard to put into words that which is better conveyed with the gestures of camaraderie. “Camaradas,” we say. Still, every day I try gathering words as our people do apples, ones to help keep me moving forward. Words that help me imagine what I struggle to imagine in this town.
That I am worth something.
“One day, I’m buying those houses,” I promise, speaking of the million-dollar ones, “all of ’em.” I point toward the hills on the West Side of town on Scenic Drive and beyond, where the tall mansions try blocking out the horizon. But the hills and the people below them know better. We do not wish to be cast under a shadow. That’s why some of us say we’d rather level them to let the land breathe. Or, like me, to, “Buy them all up and give them away to the poor.”
On a night like tonight I look at my hands as if that’s all it takes—physical strength—to make everything right, succeed.
“One day I’ll buy the orchard where my dad works. We’ll work there, but as owners,” Chilo promises in the light tic of his tongue. “We’ll call it the Casteñeda Orchard,” he says, after his family’s name. His view of the orchards and life in general has always been more positive than ours. That always centered me. It was he, in fact, who’d introduced me to the works of Carver.
We create pacts over french fries and tacos, and stack onto our shoulders the kinds of promises that weigh on first-generation youth: to be the ones who save our families from things like poverty, deportation, and harsh labor conditions.
Back in the Hawk, I think back to the year 1995, when I was ten years old, working in the fields alongside my father throughout the year, and during summers and weekends:
One day, I was under a tree deep in the center of an apple orchard, when I lifted my face from the blanket, startled by the movement of animal life around me. Hints of tractor diesel pinched my nose in the crisp air of la mañanita. As usual, dew drops dangled from the tips of grass blades. Branches arched low with the weight of apples, crowding out the horizon.
Sitting up, cold and stiff from the lumpy earth, I inhaled the sweet smell of apples decomposing on the ground around me in brown rot. Birds reeled in worms like spaghetti, while squirrels trapezed between trees that trembled from my father’s plucking hands. His torso was deep inside the ball of foliage and his legs stuck out against the rungs of the tripod ladder. His boots squeaked against the ladder as he climbed down with a picking bag attached to his chest. He leaned over one of the wooden bins and unloaded the bag of fruit, then stripped it from his chest and dropped it onto the grass. He polished two apples against his faded blue pants, before resting against the base of a tree next to me.
“Ten, cómete esto.” He handed me an apple before spitting pulp into his own hand and tossing it to the birds. Long hat hair escaped from under his trucker hat and over his ears. The inside of the hat was imprinted with my father’s sweat, that distinctive head smell.
For a while we sat, absorbed in the soft sounds around us. My father sipped at his thermos before finally speaking.
“Mijo,” he paused. “Never be like me. Like any of this,” he said. “Get out when you can.” He then picked up his bag, collapsed the fifteen-foot ladder over his right shoulder, and slipped away into the tunnel of tall grass and apple trees.
After a while, I hung my blanket over a branch and hurried to help my father in his work.
Work was my initiation into manhood. The way into my father’s love. But it wasn’t always fun. I tended to the vegetable garden, carving into the crusted earth with an old hand plow, clearing the area of weeds and maintaining the perfect ripples my father had already drawn into the land. The hot summer sunlight wrung salt from my sweat into my eyes. My palms burned with blisters.
As a child, it was a need of mine to explore, lured everywhere by animals that I’d give chase to far into the outer reaches of the orchard. Once, at the edge of a DO NOT TRESPASS sign posted on a barbed-wire fence, beyond the faint outlines of migrant housing—a cinderblock shack with a tin roof, and beyond-corroded smudge pots that stood erect like cigarette butts in an overcrowded ashtray—I stumbled upon the fetid remains of a coyote carcass ensnared at the paw by a metal trap. Its mouth was agape with maggots and flies, as if frozen in a moment of agony. These were the darker sides of orchard life. Shotgun shells riddled the banks of a slime-green pond where swallows dove after their own reflections one inch from the water’s surface, whisking off a top layer of bugs. Chattering finches rendezvoused in the spiny blackberry bushes. Big-bellied robins in orange puff ties stood at attention while squirrels scaled down trees headfirst.
But work came first. In addition to working on the orchard, I fed chickens and collected eggs from the tarp-and-wire aviaries my father built.
I pushed myself to work hard like my father, pushing hard against rest.
In the evenings, when the air finally cooled and the sun was nearly receded behind the hills, we jumped into my father’s truck, the bed sinking with the weight of his tools. I observed if my nails were as black with dirt as his as we reversed out from the orchards as men.
As soon as I was old enough, I awoke from the delusion that nature was good to my people. With time I became suspicious of orchard and warehouse life. By the time I reached the age of ten I had already been well acquainted with my social class, with working with my hands and imitating my father in the apprenticeship of hard labor. I learned that I was poor, monolingual, and from a struggling family living the sort of day-by-day life that had no cl
ear end in sight. Only apples and more apples. I saw my own reflection in my father’s fears.
On the orchard, everything seemed to sweat no matter what time of the year—the trees, the grasses, and our bodies. Farm bugs, ticks, and mosquitoes pestered my ankles and wrists while I worked. I pulled weeds that lacerated my palms. Dust collected on my face, neck, and nostrils. Even in the winters I sweated, and my knuckles bled in the dry and frigid air.
I was born into the life of dirt. My hands inherited the marks of the Latino farm laborer.
On this unrelenting land, in a small plot, I helped cultivate cabbage, chard, zucchini, green beans, and asparagus for the owners. I dragged five-gallon buckets of water and birdseed to caged chickens, pheasants, roaming peacocks, and other game birds.
In many ways I wanted to be like my father because of his superstrength. Work brought me closer to him. I wanted his long hair, his calloused hands, and even his afflictions. When not tending to the birds, or picking apples from beneath the trees, I raced to relieve my father from work. “I can do it,” I’d tell him. He was always on the go racing like a man who was still homeless and hungry on the streets of Mexico.
He taught me how to see. With the heart of my hands.
For hours, Chilo, Rigo, and I sit like this in the car, dreaming that Yakima will change, that it will accept us with open arms, and renounce its assault on migrants and poor, working-class people. This is how we soak in the timeless evenings. We talk about who we’ll take to prom, summer jobs in the orchards with our fathers, or sorting fruit in warehouses with our mothers. We don’t talk about the things that really bring us down: friends’ suicides and murders, the drug overdoses, juvi incarcerations, or the Middle East—where Chilo’s and Rigo’s brothers will deploy to, one of them hoping to win his citizenship by enlisting.
4
Getting Out
One day my senior year of high school, catching my breath from a long run home, I check the mailbox and see a package. Taped to it is the long-awaited letter from Whitman College. All the other schools to which I applied wait-listed or rejected me. Whitman, my last hope, will undoubtedly also reject me. On the front steps of my house, I brace myself in private for disappointment.
I consider tearing up the letter. I do not want my mother, who is inside the house, to share in my defeat when I open the letter. I can tell by the smell emanating from the front spring door of my house that my mother, who always insists on expressing her love through food, is preparing my favorite dish of enchiladas. “Vas a desaparecer,” she’d often jest about my weight.
“Congratulations!” the letter announces. In a mixed moment of joy and anger I slam the package as hard as I can onto the front lawn, forgetting myself. I feel so much joy, and anger for all the times I was told to set my goals lower. Anger for all the times that I was reprimanded in elementary school for speaking Spanish, and the times I was made to do janitorial community service because, as people said to me then, “that’s what Mexicans do.” Cleaning other people’s messes.
I open the box and run inside with a big smile, to show my mom its contents. My mother, who embraces me in excitement, loosens her grip around my waist when she realizes the significance of the letter that I translate for her. To her, leaving home is like leaving the country. People who left Mexico, like her, never returned. If they did, it was only after many years had passed. “But look, Amá,” I say. I try to reassure her that times are different, that I will visit her. And, I show her, “The college sent us onions.” She inspects the Walla Walla sweet onions silently, places them on the counter, and turns to the boiling pot of chicken. Things will be different now, I try to convince myself. I fold the letter, put it in my back pocket, wash my hands, and help her dice some college onions, feeling conflicted.
Later, my father walks in through the back door and removes his heavy boots. His eyes are red from a long day at work.
“Apá,” I call out as he sinks into his chair at the dining table. The same table he’d regularly have me sit at when he needed me to translate papers, to read to him in Spanish, or simply someone to unload on about his time growing up in Mexico. Mexico, where he survived his brother’s murder, and his mother’s fatal car accident. Where he survived a father who abandoned him, and survived living in hog pens among rats. The many times he dodged starvation. Now, my father eats from the plate my mother has set in front of him quietly, pinching tortillas into his mouth.
“Apá, I have good news,” I say.
His face is still stuck in the shock of somewhere else. He never seems happy and I usually give him his space. He’s happy about the college letter. I leave it there. I don’t tell him where I’m going to get the money to pay for school. That would be a conversation for another day. I let him rest.
A couple of months later, my family accepts an invitation to attend the Hispanic Academic Achievers Program (HAAP) banquet—an event held every year at the convention center in Yakima honoring college-admitted migrant students and presenting them with scholarships. I am happy that I am being considered for a scholarship, but we are not told in advance how much support we will receive. Still, I see my parents in a new space, polished, and that means something. My mother has treated herself to a new dress and a visit to a hair salon. My father bought the works: a clip-on tie, a dress shirt and pants that are a little baggy, Payless shoes, and suspenders that don’t quite match the rest of his outfit. Their rough hands rest on the soft white tablecloths.
A mariachi band plays in the background. Steaming hot plates of Mexican American food are served to Mexican mothers who make comments about the rice. Too much cumin. Their home-cooked tortillas are much better. Eyes glance around for direction on how to proceed, what silverware to use first, and some jest about what items to steal at the end of the banquet. Some brought Tupperware.
Finally, students line up onstage. Rigo and Chilo go up to the podium before me. When my parents and I are finally called up to the stage, my heart beats as hard as that time when in middle school a car full of bullies tried running a friend and me down through alleyways and backstreets. The ceremony isn’t over, and already I am afraid of being run down in college by the pressure to do great things. To secure the career that will solve all my problems.
Then, the host announces: I have been awarded a full ride. I shout in excitement and punch my fist into the air. I look over at my parents, their faces aglow with pride as we shake hands with the governor. Finally, at least for today, I bring them happiness. My mother grips her arms tightly around my waist. We can’t believe it.
I will finally get out of town.
5
Walla Walla Walkabouts
On a bright weekend in August 2003, I move to college. Whitman College is in the small town of Walla Walla, three hours southeast from Yakima. My family and I make a road trip of it. We traverse the desert towns of Toppenish, Wapato, Sunnyside, and the Tri-Cities along vacant highways. My parents have traveled these lands for work before, and occasionally we have visited relatives, but this is different. A son off to college, a journey steeped with meaning and pride. My father’s eyes are fixed forward, his thoughts projecting onto the fallow lands. What lessons will he have for me now?
The car’s radio signal cuts in and out between the valleys. We often keep it tuned into Radio KDNA, “the voice of the campesino,” the nation’s first full-time Spanish-language radio station. It has been known to alert immigrants of immigration roadblocks and ICE raids by playing songs with themes about la migra. To my right, the loyal Yakima River runs alongside our car. I imagine myself alongside it again, running the Yakima Greenway trail one last time before it veers off into the distance for good.
After a long trip, we exit the CITY CENTER ramp in Walla Walla—“the land of many rivers”—into the bubble known as Whitman College—the school of notable alumni like actor Adam West and former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The school’s mascot at the time is “the Missionaries”—people who brought destruction upo
n the Natives. A historic 1920s building, the Marcus Whitman Hotel, towers high over the silent town.
“Que bonita tu escuela,” my mother comments about the campus.
Seen from our passing car are shirtless, long-haired hippies in harnesses rappelling the rock-climbing walls of the athletic center. Girls in bikinis dip inside a large fountain near a stately all-women’s residence hall and sorority. The brick facade of Prentiss Hall overlooks Lakum Duckum—a geothermal spring that keeps ducks around all winter long. Trimmed hedges and rose bushes carve out a path toward a creek and tennis courts. The watchtower of the admissions office, green with vines, casts its elegant shadow over the twenty-four-hour library—one of the few in the country and already in full use by students.
We look on, our faces softened by the shock of so much paradise.
We get out of the car and step onto this new ground gently, as if expecting it to crumble beneath our feet. My father comprehends the wealth and intellectual power around us, and for the first time, I see fear on his face. I look around, waiting for someone to approach me, to tell us that we’re at the wrong place, and that it’s all been a mistake. But no one does. The paper in my pocket assures me that Lyman House will be my new living space. We creep toward the dorm, thinking that there’s a secret etiquette to everything here. We get what feels like sympathetic looks. On a field nearby, people play the unfamiliar sport of lacrosse—a game I would later learn has its origins in Native American culture. Everyone but us seems to be perfectly in their element.
We enter my white-walled two-room suite on the third floor, where we’re welcomed by my Hawaiian roommate and his father. They gift us with leis and chocolate macadamia nuts. In return, my mother nudges me to hand them a bag of apples. I’m embarrassed that these overripe fruit are a reflection of me. I unload two duffle bags onto my bed, open my window, and stick my head out. Barefoot jugglers and tight-ropers gather below on the grass. In that moment I am overcome with a wave of optimism and think of all the things I will accomplish in college. I will study politics, change the world through social activism, and make money to help my family. The smell of my mother’s food fills the room—tacos tied in grocery bags warming my new desk.