Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Read online

  In response to a disconcerting succession of bad seasons, my father and uncle decided to branch out into other working venues, such as construction and demolition. The women always had a place in the packinghouses—warehouses that exclusively hired females to stand behind the conveyor belts to sort fruits and vegetables all day and sometimes well into the evening. They sorted everything from carrots and corn to citrus and palm tree date, smuggling a few samples out in their lunch bags or in the pockets of their plastic work aprons for us kids to enjoy. The healthy goods from the warehouses never looked anything like the wimpy merchandise at the local supermarkets, which always made us wonder where the better crops went. “To Beverly Hills,” my grandfather quipped. “Russia,” he added.

  The men, on the other hand, found jobs with the famous Buxton Ranches. The family saw the good times coming. Everyone in the Coachella Valley recognized the big rancher's contractor and developer logo with the lush purple grapes glaring out from the shipping truck doors. The white trucks themselves were an awesome sight, invading the road like glaciers. My father learned to drive a Caterpillar track dozer, my uncle the tractor, and together with a small team of men they cleaned and leveled the rocky terrain alongside the desert hills to expand the grape fields. My father would come home many afternoons to tell us about the huge machines that plowed through the earth like scooping up ice cream. He would also speak highly of his generous boss, the only white man to ever enter the dinner conversation regularly.

  “Mr. Buxton this, Mr. Buxton that,” my grandfather once mocked my father. “Can Mr. Buxton guarantee you a job next month, you?”

  My grandfather's words contaminated the air like a jinx. Just as quickly as my family saw our luck changing for the better, it took a nosedive for the worse. Within months of each other, two critical events occurred: the packinghouse workers went on strike; and Buxton Ranches went bankrupt. Everyone was forced to look back to the inconsistent hours and low wages of the fields. But since the strikes had caused an industry-wide hiring freeze, everyone was left unemployed and empty-handed.

  During that particularly lean holiday season, my eight cousins, my brother, and I all reluctantly accepted that, once again, we wouldn't get anything besides a traditional tamalada and a cup of warm atole. The tamales were delicious, but we consumed them disdainfully, knowing that the celebration of the night was incomplete without presents.

  “Now I understand that joke,” my cousin said.

  “What joke?” another cousin responded.

  “Why do Mexicans make tamales for Christmas?”

  We all stared at him, waiting for the punch line.

  “So they have something to unwrap.”

  But then, my grandmother came through with an honorable gesture, bringing each of us a humble bag of candy. We took our aguinaldos and sat glumly about the living room, watching our grandfather play records of the music of his generation. At any moment we were expecting him to pull out his accordion, which none of us grandchildren really appreciated though we all admitted he played it well, when suddenly, one of my cousins realized that what we held in our hands was not simply a bag of candies. Hidden inside and showing through the plastic was the stoic face of Abraham Lincoln. We looked over at our grandmother. She placed one index finger over her lips to signify that she had done this without consulting our grandfather, who was a skinflint regardless of the household economy. We therefore proceeded to discreetly exit the noisy living room, the tipsy adults shouting a conversation above the flimsy too-much-bass speakers. In the privacy of the back room we dug into the bags of candy, madly searching for the five-dollar bills. What we found touched us, as an emblem of our grandmother's sacrifice, but also disheartened us by throwing us back into the grim reality of our financial situation. Of course our grandmother couldn't afford to stuff a five-dollar bill into ten bags of candy, so she economized, using five Lincoln bills: she had clipped them in half and allotted one piece per bag. We spent the next five minutes putting the bills back together, uneasy about having been forced to compromise with shared money.

  Having no playthings in the house had its benefits. We learned to employ our imaginations, becoming resourceful on the back porch, which overlooked a wild desert landscape: in the palo verde tree we saw a jungle gym, in the mesquite brush, camouflage for hide-and-seek, and in the fine sand, an abundance of a key ingredient in mud play. The noisy cicadas scolded our persistent presence on the back porch during the hottest afternoons of the molting season. Luckily, since there were ten of us children running around causing chaos, we were thrown out of the house to entertain ourselves, away from television. We argued, we reconciled, but always we interacted, never feeling lonely or alone. One of our favorite weekend pastimes was to break into the school for kids with Down syndrome across the street. We pulled out the tricycles and held races all afternoon until we were called in for dinner. Then we took the tricycles back, undamaged for next week's venture.

  As our family's finances worsened, the moment neared to make critical decisions about our future. Clearly, this extended family experiment—what we had in México—had been a failure here in the United States as well. After a year and a half, no one had saved money and tensions were high, manifesting themselves in abusive encounters between adults, between children, and between adults and children. My grandfather, who acted the role of the patriarch with relentless authority, was the main culprit. He had been beating my grandmother, had been beating the grandchildren, and had been threatening to beat his daughters-in-law as well. Much of his anger had to do with the relief paychecks my mother and my aunt had been guarding jealously. My grandfather wanted to control the finances exclusively, and he wanted everyone to hand over the funds to him. After my mother returned from the post office one afternoon, he made his demands clearly known. My mother clutched her fists to her chest, tightly clasping the envelope, and refused to comply.

  “This money is ours,” she said, her voice betraying a confidence I had never heard before.

  My mother was beside herself when her father-in-law raised a menacing hand to her. Since I had been a witness to this exchange, my mother made me promise not to tell my father. Later that day, my grandfather singled me out among the group of his grandchildren playing soccer in the schoolyard across the street. I walked out of the game at his command, and followed him to the back of the house, where he thrust a hoe into my hand and demanded that I start to weed. I was surprised because not only had I never maneuvered a hoe but the backyard of the apartment was essentially a desert growing only wild crabgrass and dandelions in such sparse proportions that it had never merited a cleaning before. In fact, the land was so bare we could chase dust devils with our eyes closed without tripping on anything. Slightly apprehensive, I took the hoe into my clumsy grip and began to push the blade into the salty topsoil. Quickly dissatisfied with my performance, my grandfather grabbed the hoe away from me and beat me repeatedly with the metal end. Each time the blade made contact I felt I was being branded with a hot poker.

  At the moment of the beating, all the other beatings came back to haunt me, as if the pain were stimulating memory. Making too much noise while your grandfather napped warranted a threesome of welts across your back. Accidentally shattering a plate earned you a knock against the ear that left you too dizzy to locate the pieces on the floor before his anger flared up again and you got a second dose. And thank the long-sleeved discounted shirts from the second-hand stores, or else you wouldn't be able to hide the bruises on your arms from that time you leaned on your grandfather's truck and left your body print on the hood. But how you cursed your luck that the next day was St. Patty's, and that your long-sleeved shirt from the Goodwill Thrift Store didn't possess a stitch of green, and that cruel kids came over to pinch your flesh, unwittingly layering the hurt on your wounds.

  My awkward gait that afternoon alerted my mother, who demanded I show her my bruised legs and thighs. Later that night she made me show my wounds to my father, who was forced to ac
knowledge the escalating violence in that household. The three of us were in the bathroom, where the washing machine was kept. A load of laundry was swiveling inside the tub, and it drowned out my mother's weeping as she struggled with the pant leg of my brother's inside-out pair of jeans.

  Our extended family household split apart soon after that, each family going its own way to try to make it alone. A gloomy silence descended upon the house as each family unit packed its belongings in preparation for the exit out the front door. Even the younger children sobbed at the sight of the cardboard boxes collecting in the corners of the apartment. My older cousins and I had been sent on the mission of dumpster diving for moving materials and we took the task seriously, coming home only after we had gathered loads that made us pause for breath every few blocks.

  “Are we not going to see each other ever again?” I asked, immediately embarrassed by the sentimentality of my question.

  “Don't be stupid,” one of my cousins replied. The rest of us realized his response had been impulsive since he didn't elaborate. Instead, as we were nearing the front porch and were received by my grandfather snickering behind his can of beer, my cousin added, “At least we don't have to see him ever again.”

  Indeed that was the only identifiable blessing for me. My grandfather had fought against the idea of people escaping his grip. My family was the first to leave. When the last box containing what little we owned was squeezed into the borrowed truck, my mother ushered us into the seat and slammed the door once she climbed in. My grandfather had forbidden anyone else from helping us load our belongings and my mother resented the other grown-ups for obeying. I found out later that he had also forbidden anyone from standing outside or even looking out the windows to see us off. When we drove away, the porch was empty as if we were fleeing an abandoned building. Only when the truck reached the street did my grandfather run out onto the porch in a dramatic display of weak triumph to shout at us, “You're going to fail! You're going to fail! You'll be back! You'll be back soon enough!” From the side view mirror I saw my grandfather's image grow smaller and smaller, a tyrant disappearing into his shrinking kingdom.

  My family moved into a trailer park in the middle of the desert, but we stayed there very briefly because my mother didn't like the communal toilets or the outdoor showers, where the boys pressed their faces against the stalls to catch a glimpse of the nude women through the cracks in the wood slats.

  Our next move was to a small unit on top of a garage located on the same street as my school. It was just the four of us: father, mother, and their two sons. The garage was not an ideal living arrangement either because every morning, when the landlord revved up his truck's engine, the noise would awaken us to the odor of exhaust and motor oil. But this was our home, and it was the only time I remember living as a nuclear family in a decent building—one with its own toilet and shower that we wouldn't have to share with a dozen other people—in the United States. I was so moved by the novelty of the feeling that I felt our new life needed to be documented somehow, so I bought a green pocket diary at the indoor swap meet. Though I eventually lost interest in recording the everyday happenings in our new home, the first entry was inspired by what I knew would be the beginning of a better life. That year I turned eleven. We celebrated our birthdays with a cake and presents. We celebrated Christmas like the people in the United States and didn't celebrate Three Kings' Day like the Mexicans in México. We could afford a weekly Sunday outing to McDonald's to chow on burgers, and best of all we took our first American-style family trip, to Disneyland. All this was thanks to my father's new job as a construction worker, and to my mother's decision to work in the fields, picking grapes beneath the scorching sun, against my father's advice, as he cautioned her about her delicate health and weak heart.

  At John Kelley Elementary School, many of us immigrant kids were required to attend speech therapy because of our purported speech impediments. Stuttering, lisping, slurring, and mumbling were but a few reasons teachers gave for our aggravating inability to learn and pronounce proper English. We worked in groups and then held one-on-one sessions with a grown-up. My grown-up was Dolly, a plump southern belle with orange hair. Dolly was old and wore a bright red windbreaker that swished loudly in the hall so that I could always tell she was coming even if my back was turned. She possessed, however, the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen. Effortlessly, she wrote down her progress notes on unlined paper, her fingers tight around the pencil in a type of graceful dance. In those instances, words became a work of art for me, and letters, the meticulous strokes and malleable lines of a skilled craft. The smallest of words took on magical properties on the page. I knew then that what this woman had to offer was important, and I listened.

  Dolly was a talker. Despite my limited English and her drawl, I learned that she came from Texas, that she had a son in community college, that she loved to watch Mike Douglas in his afternoon variety show, and that raisins made her sick. “And isn't that President Reagan a dreamboat?” she declared the day after a State of the Union address. She recited tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, and an impressive list of homonyms that made my head spin. She also introduced me to the infinite number of single-syllable nouns and verbs in the English language, a linguistic characteristic that my native Spanish didn't have. I became fascinated with her Pat-Pet-Pit-Pot-Put. “And yes,” she would boast, “every one of those sounds is a word.” Under Dolly's tutelage, my fear of English began to dissipate. However, the aversion to the language and school was still strong at home.

  In México and in the United States, my homes were without books. My grandparents on both sides were functionally literate, as were my parents and their siblings; none of them had completed an elementary education if they had attended school at all. As a result, my generation didn't appreciate the concept of reading for pleasure or keeping a personal library. The only books around the house were the TV Guide and the Bible, and being the non-practicing Catholics that we were, we consulted the TV Guide more frequently. The Bible was a gift from the Baptist church we attended the first Sunday of the month because they offered all their attendees a free home-cooked buffet.

  Since we were Spanish speakers, schoolbooks with their foreign grammar and diction intimidated and excluded us. We wanted nothing to do with them and we kept them away from the safety of our homes. Our bliss was the television, and also talking over each other at meals in the late afternoons. With time, my older cousins began dropping out of high school to enter the work force; the younger ones began skipping classes, hiding out in the desert brush across the grassy playgrounds. I was learning to enjoy school and had no desire to sneak out in search of more engaging extracurricular activities.

  Dolly was shocked to learn that I didn't own a single book. I had imagined that my revelation would earn me a gift, perhaps one of the new picture books with their colorful, glossy covers glaring out from the corner of the classroom. Dolly showed up the following session with a tattered, dull, hardcover book, the spine loose, and its thick innards of pages precariously bound with a yellowed glue.

  “Ya like rhymes, don't ya?” she asked.

  I nodded my head.

  “Poetry,” she said. “Read poems aloud every day,” she suggested in her Texas drawl. “It'll take care of yer accent.”

  Hesitantly, I stuffed the huge book into my bag and dragged it home. I was reluctant to open it at first. I found nothing inviting about an old book without pictures, just page after page of words. I recognized the rhymes but not the subject matter. I could read the names, but I had no idea who these poets were: Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Robert Browning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. William Wordsworth. John Keats. Anonymous.

  Weeks later the book remained unexplored. But I wanted to end Dolly's disappointment when, each time we met for speech therapy, she asked, “Are you readin' poetry?” and I responded with an ashamed shaking of my head.

  I became a closet reader at first, taking my book with me to the back of
the landlord's house or into my parents' room, where I would mouth the syllables softly, creating my own muted music. But as I distanced myself from outdoor games and rough play, I became more comfortable carrying this heavy book to the swings, where I drowned out the screaming and shouting of the other kids to concentrate on the page. The subject matter eluded me but not the rhythms pounding patterns deep in my throat. I found comfort in the book because it was mine and only I could enjoy the secret of its songs since the adults in my home couldn't read English, and my brother wasn't even curious enough to come near it.

  Dolly was pleased with me after I told her I was reading my book. She hugged me tightly. The faint smell of coffee and perfume made me take a deep breath so that the moment could linger longer in the memory of her scent.

  That afternoon I walked with my class to the bus stop at the far end of the playground. Although I didn't take the bus home, my teacher insisted on dismissing me at the fence with all the other kids. Suddenly Dolly came swishing by and said in my ear, “If you wait a few I have another book for ya.”