Borderlands (2 page)

I can imagine my mother’s disappointment, my father’s wide grin around a celebratory cigar.

V

We lived in Tampico but a short time before moving south to other coastal towns—Veracruz on the bay of Campeche, Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec—where over the next few years my father built roads along various shorelines. We did not live anywhere for longer than four months in the first six years of my life.

My earliest memories of the natural world are of seashores with tall palms and long sand beaches and trees full of squalling parrots, of wet heat and dense foliage dappled with green sunlight, of a series of different houses and all of them white and bright and high-ceilinged, with wide windows open to the sea and the sound of breakers. I was often in the charge of mestizo maids who laughed like little bells and had brilliant white teeth and warm brown skin that smelled faintly of sugar and smoke. They would take me to the beach to play in the surf and at naptime sang me to sleep with songs I would never hear anywhere else thereafter.

I was still shy of school age when my father moved us to the western frontera he so dearly loved, and I can recall my wonder at the dramatic change in the look and feel of the world. The land was now barren and sand-blown and dust devils rose and whirled across it. Long red mesas shimmered in the rising heat. The desert stretched to the ends of the earth under skies of stunning vastness, under a demonic sun that made blood of the horizon at every rise and set. During the following year, we lived in many of the border towns already familiar to my parents; but now, whenever my father went off to the camps and left my mother behind at home, I was there, as well as the maids, to keep her company. Some of the servant girls were from the high country and said they had come to the frontera to get away from the earthquakes that so often shook the mountains. I never forgot the tale one of them told of a temblor that opened the ground of her village and swallowed her family’s hut while her brothers were yet inside.

Sometimes when my father was home from the job for a day or two, he’d take us to the nearest town for dinner in a restaurant; and sometimes, as we were driving to or from town along those isolated roads, we’d see groups of people—usually all men but sometimes there were women and children among them too—trudging over the desert hardpan with rope-lashed bundles and small bags on their backs. The first time I saw such a group I was amazed that anyone would be walking so far out in the desert and I asked my father who they were. “Mojados,” he said. That’s what they were called along the eastern region of the border, all along the Río Grande, “mojados” or “espaldas mojadas”—wetbacks—because they got soaked in their illegal crossing of the river to get to the American side. But most of the western region of the borderland was open country and without fences and people could simply walk through the desert and into the United States. My father thought all of them, no matter how they sneaked across, should be called estúpidos for wanting to go to the U.S. in the first place.

On that car trip I heard for the first time about the desperate risks some people were willing to take in order to get to the United States, to el norte—to what they were sure would be a better life than they would ever know in Mexico. Before long we would move to Texas, and I would see them—my countrymen, yet as different from me as moonpeople—stooped and dragging long bags behind them in the cotton fields, picking vegetables on their knees, toting boxes of produce on their shoulders from field to truck. There would come a day in South Texas when my mother would see me looking out the car window at a field of cotton pickers and she’d say, “We’re lucky, Jaimito. We’re very lucky.”

VI

My mother was now trying to instruct me in the rudiments of English, but I was steadfastly opposed to learning the language of Americans. I’d often overheard my father and his friends talking about them—gringos, they called them, enunciating the epithet like it had a bad taste—and I refused to learn the language of such a mean and brutish people. No amount of my mother’s reasoning against such bigotry could sway me. Whenever she tried to teach me so much as a phrase in English, I would put my hands tightly over my ears and sing Mexican songs at the top of my voice. It maddened her no end and vastly amused my father.

One day, shortly after we settled into yet another rented house, my mother took me with her on a shopping trip to Calexico. It was my first time on the American side of the border, and there I saw gringos by the dozens and heard their growling language everywhere. And I couldn’t help but remark that most of them looked more like me than most Mexicans did.

In a small eatery whose air was thick with strange wonderful smells, my mother bought me my first hamburger. As he set our plates in front of us, the American proprietor said something to me in English and then smiled and spoke to my mother, who laughed and said something to him in return. When he went to wait on another customer, I asked her what he’d said. She started to tell me, then stopped short and smiled sweetly and said she’d be glad to teach me a little English so I wouldn’t have to depend on others for the rest of my life to find out what people around me were saying.

The ploy worked. In the remaining months before we left the western borderland and moved to the lower Río Grande Valley, I learned to speak English well enough to make my mother smile and my father shake his head and mutter.

VII

We moved to the United States—Brownsville, Texas, the geographical bottom of the republic—for two reasons: I was of age to begin my formal schooling, and my mother was again pregnant. She not only insisted that her next child would be born American, but also that I would be educated in American schools. I didn’t like the idea very much, but for reasons it would take me years to understand, my father had come to agree with her. So we settled into a house on Zaragoza Street in a dusty oak-and-mesquite neighborhood at the edge of town and I was enrolled at St. Joseph Academy.

Now did I begin to learn about the complexities of nationality. Even though about half of the families in the neighborhood were clearly of Mexican descent, many of their members had been born north of the border and were therefore Americans, whom I had always thought of as fair-skinned people who spoke only English.
Those
people, I would soon be informed by my Mexican friends, were called Anglos.

The Anglo kids of Zaragoza Street—most of them native Texans, all of them Southerners—were the first I’d ever known, and my acquaintance with them roused deep confusions about my own identity. My first exchange with them was in front of our new house on the day we moved in. When they asked where I was born and I said Mexico, they thought I was joking. When I insisted on my Mexican birth, some of them got irritated, and one said, “Then how come you don’t look like it nor talk like it neither? You ain’t like
them
.” He pointed at a bunch of kids watching us from the front porch of a house down the block, a group of mestizos, typical brown-skinned Mexicans of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, and to these Texas boys what all Mexicans looked like. They didn’t believe I was Mexican because I didn’t look or sound like one. And they had not yet met my parents, not yet heard my pale-complexioned mother addressing me in Spanish, not yet caught an earful of my father’s movie bandido accent, which the years would never abate.

“If you
really
Mexican,” one said, “let’s hear you
say
something in Mexican.”

Now
I
was getting irritated at having to prove to these peckerwoods who I was, so I said: “Ustedes son una bola de tontos.” They looked at each other as if any among them might certify that what I’d said had indeed been said in “Mexican.” But none in the group had any understanding that I’d just called them a bunch of dummies. I turned to the Mexican kids down the street and hollered, “¿Qué tal? Me llamo Jaime Carlos y ahora vivo in este barrio también.”

The Mexican kids showed white grins and hollered back their welcomes, and the Texas boys’ mouths hung ajar. For a moment nobody said anything, and then blond Danny Shaw, my new next-door neighbor, said, “Dang if you ain’t the unmexicanest Mexican I ever seen.”

VIII

They never really knew what to make of me, the Anglo kids, both in the neighborhood and at school. Although they didn’t often mingle with Mexican kids, they didn’t shun me at all even after I’d proved to them I was a Mexican myself. And so I was able to pal around with both groups. Before long, I was speaking the slangy sing-song border Spanish of the Mexicans when I was with them, and falling into a Texas accent whenever I spoke English in the company of the Anglo kids. It was the start of a lifelong habit of trying to fit in with the people around me by assuming their modes of speech, a practice reputedly common to misfits, con artists and liars of all sorts, which of course includes writers.

Over time, some of the Mexican kids came to resent that I buddied with the Texans so often and so easily. And some of the Texans were always ready to remind me that I was not truly one of them. Although my English was improving in school every day, I often made mistakes with the language during my first years with it, and the Texans would leap at the chance to make fun of me for it. Sometimes they merely laughed for a moment and I merely felt embarrassed. Sometimes it went past that and the fight was on.

The first time it happened was on my neighbor Danny Shaw’s front porch, when I was looking on with him and Nicky Welch at a magazine cover photo of a horse wearing a beautiful saddle. Without thinking, I said, “That’s a pretty chair.”

The two of them gave me puzzled looks and Danny asked, “
What
chair?” I pointed to the saddle—in Spanish called a
silla
, which also is the word for chair—and they burst out laughing. “That ain’t no
chaairrrr
,” Danny said, “that’s a
saaaddddle
!”

My face burned with the vocabulary error, one which seemed all the worse to me because I was grandson to a horse rancher. And then Nicky Welch, who always went for the extra bite whenever he could, said, “Only some stupid greaser would call a saddle a
chair
.”

My father had been teaching me to fight since before I entered school. He knew what would be in store for me with the Texan kids sooner or later and knew he couldn’t protect me from it, he could only prepare me. Whenever my mother had seen him showing me how to deliver a proper punch, how to use knees and elbows in a fight, she’d chide him for it and he’d stop—until she left, and then we’d resume our lesson. I always suspected that she knew we continued with them, and that she secretly approved. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word “greaser” was in her company. We were in Mexicali and heard an American yell it from his car at a Mexican cab driver who’d nearly run into him. The cabby didn’t even look the man’s way, but my mother glared at the Anglo and muttered that somebody ought to smack that damn gringo’s face—and my mother rarely used the word “gringo” and even less frequently swore.

I had been in little-kid fights in Mexico, a lot of shoving and wrestling and no real meanness intended, but this was my first fight with anger in it, with a desire to inflict pain. Nicky Welch was bigger than I was, but he fought in the clumsy awkward manner of the beefy and untutored, and by the time Mr. Shaw came stomping out of the house to pull us apart I had pretty well bloodied Nicky’s nose and puffed his eye and, best of all, had him bawling. Mr. Shaw demanded to know what the fight was about, and when Danny told him, he just sighed and looked away and softly told Nicky and me to get on home. I felt sorry for him because I knew him for a kind man and I could see that the word “greaser” embarrassed him. But what I mostly felt was exultation, felt it all the rest of that day and through the evening and as I lay in bed that night looking out my window at the stars. The next afternoon I saw stars of another sort when Nicky’s big brother Ruben got hold of me as I was coming home from buying a comic book at the drugstore. My mother nearly shrieked at the sight of me when I limped into the house.

There were plenty of other fights to come. I had more fights with gringo kids than my Mexican friends did for the simple reason that I spent more time with them than they did. Whenever some Texas kid made a crack about greasers or spicks in my presence, I usually shrugged it off because I knew that was how Texans talked and there was no personal insult intended. I thought only fools got angry at insults not directed at them personally. I still think so. When the insult
was
personal, there was of course nothing to do but fight. Sometimes, though, as I was punching and kicking and scrabbling around in the dirt with some other kid, I’d hear the Mexicans cheering in Spanish and the Anglos rooting in English and I’d have the strange feeling that the only one in the fight was me.

The fights fell off over the next few years, and one reason for that was my growing facility with English. The better I got with the Anglos’ language and the more I sounded like them, the easier it was for them to accept me as one of their own. By the time I was in fourth grade even the Anglo kids were asking me for the answers on spelling and grammar tests.

In the brief rest of our time in Texas, I was fully at ease in both cultures, was fluent with both languages, and had more of a sense of being at
home
than I’ve ever had since.

IX

One day my father announced that we were moving to Florida for reasons of business and within the month I left the borderland behind me.

But not really.

In the years to follow I would lose my ties to my native country, lose my ease with my native tongue. But I had not, I would learn, left behind the truest of the borderlands—the remote world of the outsider.

I would come to understand that a borderland is as much a region of the spirit as a physical locale, that some of us are born to it and come to know it well in childhood and inhabit it forever after, no matter where we might be on the map.

And I came to understand that even though I am hardly alone in lacking a sense of place in the world, I always
feel
that I am.