by Robert Fraga
For a couple of years, José attended the local school in San Judas, the one named after Alfredo Nava Sahagún. This was the two-room facility that the neighbors had constructed themselves. A nativity scene was pinned to the bulletin board at Christmas time. The Virgin Mary and Joseph, represented as starched and spotless Mexican peasants, watched with unassertive pride over the Baby Jesus. The divine infant was depicted with shining doll eyes, like a Pokémon figure.
José’s textbooks came from Mexico City. There were five of them: math, science, Spanish, ethics and philosophy, and civics. José did math and Spanish every day. The other subjects were taught twice a week. In math, he liked figuring out the areas of geometric figures: triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids. He was good at this sort of thing, and he did his sums quickly. Spanish was okay, but it was science that fascinated him. At an early age, he learned about human anatomy from full-color representations of the heart, the circulatory system, and the brain. His science book contained drawings of animals and plants native to Chihuahua. He pored over these for hours.
There were two teachers at the school in José’s day: Señor Martinez, a sad-eyed disciplinarian who wore a baggy beige suit, a striped shirt, and an incongruously loud tie; and Señora Gomez, a youngish free spirit who affected granny glasses and encouraged her students to dream about their future. Neither teacher lived in San Judas. They both took the bus in from Ciudad Juárez. They taught anywhere from ten to thirty students squeezed into their classrooms. Each teacher did all the subjects in the curriculum. There was a map of Chihuahua in each of the classrooms along with a picture of Emiliano Zapata with his bushy mustache. Señora Gomez had tacked up a portrait of Che Guevara alongside Zapata.
Shortly after the move to San Judas, Papa Bernal’s health began to fail. Possibly it was fatigue, possibly the lack of prospects for a better future. Possibly it was what an American psychiatrist would diagnose as depression. The classic pattern of working mother/stay-at-home dad weighed heavily on José’s father. He developed a stubborn cough, which some days kept him in bed. He began to drink a lot of mescal, sometimes downing a bottle a day. At least he kept his sense of humor. He would look at his young son, at the dark honey color of his skin and call him an Aztec campesino. There was some truth in the joke, but the Bernals had Catalan as well as Indian blood in their veins. José developed strongly angular features as he grew, and there was the issue of his eyes, the subject and inspiration of his eventual nickname, a pale non-color that had the effect of startling, even amusing, people when they first encountered him.
Whether it was a premonition of things to come or a carefully thought-out precaution incubated by the misfortunes of his own life, who could say? But José’s Dad wrote to his two older brothers in the U.S. Years had passed since they had left Chiapas. It was difficult to find a mailing address for the men, but the Bernals of San Judas managed with the help of neighbors and a local priest. They needed all the help that they could get, since the Bernals wrote and read so little Spanish they were functionally illiterate. Would they be willing to sponsor José if the family could complete the paperwork to secure the boy a visa? Both men, the boy’s uncles, agreed.
When the paperwork came to a successful conclusion, the family scraped together enough money to buy José a bus ticket from El Paso to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where his younger uncle lived. It was the first José had heard about it.
“Why do I have to leave?” José asked his father tearfully as the family assembled the boy’s meager belongings in a battered suitcase.
Papa Bernal ran his hand through his son’s thick black hair. He said softly, “Things are better up there. You will have more of a future up there.”
José remained quiet. He stared at his scuffed shoes with holes in their soles.
“You can come back when you want, too,” his father coaxed him. “You’ll be with family. Stay with your uncle and learn English.”
José’s stay with his New Mexico uncle was not a happy one. His uncle had his own family, which included two boys who treated José like the vaqueros had treated his father. His cousins called him the little Spic and made fun of his tattered clothes. The rest of the family talked half the time in English, ate cheeseburgers instead of enchiladas, and seemed hell-bent on assimilating into Anglo culture. The family’s disdain for anything and everything Mexican confused and hurt José. Who were these freaks of nature whom his father had called family?
Six months after José came to live with his Las Cruces brethren, word came that his father had died. The cause of death, it was reported, was tuberculosis. José returned to San Judas for his father’s funeral. He was buried in a patch of desert surrounded by a coyote fence and sprinkled with a handful of rusting crosses.
“I’ll stay here with you from now on,” José told his mother.
“No, you won’t!” said his mother. “You need to go back. Otherwise you’ll end up like your father. I have friends here now. I can manage on my own.”
José shook his head. “I’m not going back to Las Cruces. I hate that place.”
His mother frowned. She thought over what he had said. “You have another uncle in Los Angeles. That would be a better situation for you.”
It took more paperwork, more trips to the U.S. consulate, but with help from the same set of neighbors and the same priest in Ciudad Juárez, Señora Bernal packed José off to his uncle in L.A.
Tio Antonio was older than his brothers. He was a taciturn, introspective man who rarely showed what he was feeling. He had served in the Korean War and had a Purple Heart and a Medal of Honor to show for it. These were kept in a wooden box on the buffet in the dining room. “I got shot,” was all he would say when José asked him about the Purple Heart. About the Medal of Honor, he would say nothing at all. His own children, José’s California cousins, had left their father’s house to strike out on their own.
Tio Antonio and his wife Imelda lived in a Mexican American neighborhood of East Los Angeles called Boyle Heights. Their house on Soto Street was a bungalow, similar to other houses on their block. It had a pillared porch and iron grills on the windows. When the wind blew the right way, you could smell the hot bread in La Favorita Bakery on 4th Street. By comparison with what José had known in San Judas, it might have been the Palace of Versailles, but in Los Angeles it was a drab working-class dwelling in need of a paint job.
One day, walking home from school along Fickett Street, José passed a wall mural. He had seen it before but had not paid much attention to it. The mural portrayed the death of a young man dressed in a white tee shirt and brown pants. He lay in the arms of two friends, a man and a woman, while a brown-faced Blessed Virgin hovered overhead. Her arms were outstretched, all encompassing, as if waiting to receive the youthful victim into the blissful realm of Paradise. He was a gang member, José guessed, probably a member of Varrio Nuevo Estrada, the principal gang of Boyle Heights.
A couple of days later, when he was passing the same mural, José was stopped by two kids his own age. They looked a bit like his Las Cruces cousins, but their manner was more cordial. It had none of the hostility José had encountered on his first foray north of the border. “Hi,” one of them said, “how you doing?” This and the rest of the conversation that ensued was in Spanish. José was guarded in his responses. “Would you like to come with us and meet some of our friends?” they asked. José was tempted. He wanted to fit in, to find friends, but his uncle had warned him to give the gangs a wide berth. Maybe, he told them, but now he had to get home. His uncle and aunt would be waiting for him. His new friends smiled and nodded and said that maybe another time they could all go off together to meet some of los hermanos.
Varrio Nuevo Estrada—generally known by its initials VNE—had begun as a sort of vigilante group to protect the Mexicans of the neighborhood. The white cops of L.A. didn’t give a shit for the peónes of Boyle Heights. Someone had to protect them. Over time, however, VNE evolved into a criminal gang, one of the most notorious i
n the city. They branched out as well, spreading in the 1980s into other neighborhoods of central Los Angeles and some of the city’s suburbs. Their raids on the other side of downtown L.A., in the Pico-Union district, led to the formation of a new vigilante group to protect the Salvadorans who populated the area. That was Mara Salvatrucha—the infamous MS-13—which followed the same descent into criminal conduct as VNE. MS-13 turned into what was possibly the most vicious of the Hispanic gangs to spring up in the Los Angeles area. With alarming speed, it became an international network of small-time punks.
Tio Antonio heard of his nephew’s encounter with the local VNE. The old man had evaded the gang’s grasp as a youth, but he knew his neighborhood; he had contacts everywhere, and he put the word out on the street that los hermanos were to stay away from his nephew. The VNE never again approached José.
José liked his Tio Antonio, even if his uncle had little to say to him. He enjoyed the grandfatherly man’s company. He admired his courage and undemonstrative behavior. And he wanted to share more fully in his life. For years, Antonio had played guitar with a mariachi band that performed in Boyle Heights, mostly for weddings and baptisms. José knew this and wanted to take advantage of his uncle’s musical connections.
“I want to learn to play the guitar,” José announced one night after supper.
Tio Antonio had been dragging on an after-dinner cigarette. He looked noncommittal, neither for nor against the idea. “I can teach you the basics,” he said finally.
And so he did. He brought out his guitar, placed the fingers of José’s left hand on the frets and guided the fingers of his right hand over the strings. It was like witchcraft. José was mesmerized to hear the music that he made just by strumming. Soon José had the three chords for a simple melody.
“Practice,” Tio Antonio advised him.
And so he did. He learned chord progressions, rhythms, then more songs. For his birthday, his Tia Imelda and Tio Antonio gave him a guitar of his own, a beautiful Spanish guitar. Where had they got the money? José did not ask.
One day, like a bolt out of the blue, Tio Antonio asked his nephew, “Would you like to join the band?”
José gulped and answered without giving the question a second thought: “I’d like that.”
José could not believe the invitation that his uncle was extending. Would the band accept him?
Tio Antonio shrugged. “There’s no harm in asking,” he said.
Antonio’s attendance at rehearsals had fallen off recently, and this caused problems for the band—called Los Lobos—but Tio Antonio’s prestige in the neighborhood was such that his sporadic absences were accepted without censure. When he played, he did so like a guest performer.
Los Lobos wanted to hear the young man play. Fair enough. Tio Antonio taught José a couple of common mariachi songs, which he practiced until he had them memorized. One evening, during what amounted to an audition, he sang one of them for the band, accompanying himself on his new Spanish guitar. It was the well-known Canción del mariachi:
I’m a very honorable man
And I like the best things
I don’t lack women
Nor money, nor love
(Soy un hombre muy honrado
Que me gusta lo mejor
Las mujeres no me faltan
Ni al dinero, ni el amor)
Los Lobos were pleased with their new recruit. “You did good, muchacho,” the lead violinist praised him. The other band members nodded their assent. “You’re one of us now,” declared the harpist.
“He even looks like a wolf,” the group’s drummer joked. “Look at his eyes, the eyes of a wolf.” Everyone laughed. The nickname stuck. José became the mascot for the band, Los Ojos del Lobo. Tia Imelda went to work and concocted a charro suit for him, not one with as much embroidery as what could be purchased in a store but something that would fit in with the rest of the band.
José’s first gig was at a private party, the coming-of-age celebration for a fifteen-year-old girl, known as a quinceañera. The event took place in a church hall decorated with white and pink balloons and strings of confetti. The girl who was being feted wore an evening dress bristling with pink frills. She looked like a Walt Disney porcupine. Friends had had to shove her into the stretch limo that ferried her from her parents’ house to the church. Her female attendants wore long pink dresses, and the males in attendance were dressed in stiff white shirts with pink bow ties. Their hair was gelled. They looked like clones of Rudolph Valentino in his role as the Sheikh of Araby. A cake half the size of the hall and covered in an inch of pink and white frosting occupied the center of a long trestle table.
Los Lobos played. The audience clapped and cheered. José felt comfortable. He knew that he was playing decently and that people were smiling appreciatively at him. He was Tio Antonio’s nephew, after all, and the neighborhood was rooting for him. His uncle had come out of semi-retirement, brushing the lint off his charro suit, to play alongside of José. That bolstered young Bernal’s self-confidence.
Waiting in line for a slice of cake, José caught the eye of one of the attendants in a pink dress. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“My name is Maria,” she told him.
José stuttered, bowed awkwardly, and said, “José.” At least he had remembered his name.
“Lisa is my cousin,” Maria said, glancing toward the girl cutting the cake. “Her mother and my Dad are sister and brother.”
José was clumsy at small talk. He thought for a second before saying that it was a nice party.
“Yes,” Maria agreed. Then she moved away, perhaps looking for someone easier to talk to.
Living in East L.A. had its pros and cons. In the 1980s, Boyle Heights was a close-knit community. People looked out for one another. That was important, because the area was a battleground for competing gangs. Police helicopters patrolled it at night. The choppers seemed to circle overhead nonstop. Residents called them ghetto birds. There were drive-by shootings. A ten-year-old boy had been shot and killed a few years before José arrived. For the most part, though, the local cholos—recognizable in their pressed white tee shirts and khakis, their hair meticulously slicked back—left everyone else alone. The area was famous for its restaurants and bakeries. The main drag, Brooklyn Avenue, was lined by clothing and appliance stores, many owned by Jews who had first settled there before the great migrations from Mexico began. Many stayed behind even after the majority of the barrio’s Jews had moved on to other neighborhoods in the city.
The best-known of its schools was Roosevelt High—named after Teddy not Franklin. Its football team was even called the Rough Riders. This is where José eventually enrolled. Roosevelt, with its teeming masses of students, was a far cry from Nava Sahagún. José learned English well enough to cope academically. But he still felt like an outsider.
José arrived in Boyle Heights almost twenty years after a turbulent period in the history of Roosevelt High. The school, like others in East L.A., had been caught up in a surge of racial consciousness. Tens of thousands of students had boycotted classes in the late 1960s to protest the inequality and racism in L.A. schools. The protests—dubbed “blowouts”—were led by a group called the Brown Berets, a Chicano version of the Black Panthers.
Something of this ferment lingered in the atmosphere of Roosevelt High, a sense of injustice perceived and challenged. José took it all in. However faint, he sniffed a whiff of activism in the air. It intrigued him. Even now, years later, it was an exciting smell.
One day between classes, José crossed paths with Maria in a school corridor.
“Hi,” he said. “How are things?”
“They’re good,” she replied. “Yourself?”
“Okay. Listen: What are you doing after school today?”
Maria giggled. He was a little bolder than before. “That depends. What did you have in mind?”
“What would you say to a walk in the park? We could talk. You wouldn’t be late getting
home.”
Maria considered the proposal. “That’s good,” she said. “But I have to get home on time.”
José was gallant enough to buy Maria an ice cream cone from one of the ice cream trucks on 4th Street before moving on to Hollenbeck Park. The park was reputed to be the stomping ground for devil worshippers who performed animal sacrifice there at night. But the flowers were beautiful, the trees offered abundant shade, and the park wasn’t crowded. So this was where he took Maria. It was his first date in his new country.
“Do you like it here?” she asked him as they strolled along hand in hand.
“It’s all right,” he confessed.
“Think you’ll ever go back?”
José licked his ice cream before replying: “To visit maybe. My mother still lives in San Judas.”
“The crime doesn’t bother you here?”
José snorted. “Remember where I come from,” he said.
“The gangs are not all bad,” Maria said. “One time my kid brother had a bike accident. He was barefoot, and one of the cholos carried him home. Another cholo brought the bike back later that day. That’s pretty good, verdad?”
Maria was a petite girl, with curly black hair held in check by a ruby-red headband. When she was thinking about something, she would fuss with strands of hair that escaped from the headband. Her family was conservative and would have liked Maria to dress like a convent girl. But she had an independent streak, as well as a fashion sense, and dressed in Jordache jeans and Reeboks. She had a dazzling smile. Her hands were delicate. Her nails were carefully manicured. José would have liked to rub up against her Jordache jeans, but he was careful not to push his luck.
“What will you do after Roosevelt?” Maria asked him.
“College if I can manage it. Anyway, that’s years from now. I’ll need to earn some money first.”