Prologue:
Los Angeles: 2015
“You don’t know anything!” my daughter Luz shouts, stamping her foot in defiance. At fourteen, she thinks she knows everything. Yesterday it was about a boy who is old enough to drive a car—a car that she will never ride in unless he is willing to wait until she is eighteen. Today her anger is fueled by yesterday’s argument as she tells me that I know nothing about the Central American children who are fleeing poverty and crime and have been detained at the Texas border. If she only knew what I do know—but I can’t tell her. Not everything.
We had been watching the news when the screen filled suddenly with young brown faces and a headline “The Kids Are Back,” referring to the previous year’s migrant children desperate to cross the border and those newly arrived. Despite the government’s attempts to handle the crisis, children were still coming. I wanted to take them all in my arms. Those with eyes full of fear and worry were clinging to each other, but there were others seated slightly apart, some with sagging shoulders and empty eyes, and one with arms crossed, chin lifted and a cold piercing gaze. I had seen these eyes before. All of them. I had whispered softly, mostly to myself, “God bless you, pobrecitos, perhaps you should have stayed home,” when my daughter jumped up from her chair and exploded with her “You don’t know anything!” remark, followed by, “Just because you crossed the border a long time ago, you think you know what’s happening today?”
She is standing above me, hands on her hips, leaning forward. Gone is the gentle face of my sister Rosa whom Luz resembles in her sleep. In its place are my stubborn squint and firm pressed lips. As always, I search for traces of Manuel, but right now I see mostly my younger, angry self, as Luz continues with her lecture on my ignorance. “Many of them are just little kids; you were older. They have no one to help them like you did. Some have no parents anywhere; you had a mamá back home. Some are trying to get to a parent who is working in the United States, not missing like your papá, but actually there. This is not like you at all. They can’t just ‘stay home.’” She flips back her long, thick hair and lets out an exasperated sigh. My Adelita warrior!
A long time ago? Not so long, though to her it is a lifetime—I was just a couple of years older than Luz when I made my journey, and then she was born. Her unexpected anger has stopped the tears that welled up in my eyes at the sight of these children. I yank out the yarn of my crocheting, for I have lost count.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Luz. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have come. I just meant . . . well, I know the hardships they must have endured.”
“Not worse than the hardships they are fleeing,” she says, her nostrils flaring like Manuel’s when he was angry.
I suppress a slight smile at this familiar sight and sigh, “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s complicated.”
I look up into her dark eyes. There is much I wish I could tell her, but she is so young. I have always thought that maybe one day, when she is older, I will tell her more. I want her to know me, who I was, who I really am. But now, as a flood of memories sends a chill that turns my hands ice cold, I tremble with the knowledge that she will never know my true story but will always live with the safer one that I have given her.
Perhaps this is the way of mothers and daughters. What, after all, did I ever really know of my own mother?
“Complicated?” Luz is saying, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice as she gathers up her schoolbooks and hugs them to her chest. “I’m going to my room. My math homework is ‘complicated,’ but I want to figure it out myself. I don’t need your help.”
This last bit is said to spite me, but I let it go. This is not her usual behavior. This is really about yesterday . . . about a boy . . . and we have tossed enough angry words about this apartment for one night. No more.
I pick up my yarn and begin to count again. Ten single crochets, skip a space, ten more. Should I have stayed in Mexico with Mamá? The thought alone makes my stomach turn. But if I had stayed, if I hadn’t searched for Papá . . . I think of Rosa, of Manuel, of the night of the blinding stars. Maybe Luz is right. Maybe I don’t know anything. But one thing is certain: Luz can never know the truth of my journey. My precious Luz de Rosalba can never know.
Recuerdo . . .
1
Oaxaca Bound
My father disappeared in 1997. My precious papá, who knew me better than anyone else, who saw not only who I was, but more importantly, who I could be. He was the one who praised my schoolwork, spoke with my teachers, and made me dream beyond our simple life in Oaxaca. Never my mother. Papá encouraged my fascination with numbers, and at a young age I learned exactly why he traveled so far, for so long, to support our family. I remember vividly the two of us hunched over a table by candlelight, my small fingers clutching a fat pencil, as we created three columns listing the cost of monthly expenses and comparing them to what he earned in el norte and what he would earn doing the same work in Mexico. I understood well enough to see the staggering reality. Numbers always tell the truth.
I was thirteen when Papá left for el norte that year like he had countless times before. For over three decades, he had worked on farms throughout California, arriving at each at designated times. He would stay for a season, sometimes longer, then return home for a couple of months. But this time his departure was followed by a chilling silence. No boxes arrived with T-shirts, toys, stickers, and stars. No first Sunday evening of the month telephone calls at the Cortez house, for we didn’t have a phone. No word at all made its way back to us those first weeks, that became months—and then, as the season ended, no money, no Papá.
Mamá must have been terrified.
I think that now, but I didn’t then. I thought only of myself and Papá.
Mamá let me stay in school that first year without Papá. Of course, I gave her no choice, throwing a fit until she said I could at least try to combine school and work. I was beginning the first of three years of secundaria, similar to junior high in the United States, but unlike my older sister, Rosa, who had decided not to finish her third year, and unlike most young girls we knew, who never went on to high school, I dreamed of going to preparatoria, and maybe even university one day to become a math teacher.
Papá had always said that nothing is impossible. He had learned this as a teenager, when he first began working the fields in Central California and met the leaders of the farmworkers’ movement, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Oh, how he talked about Dolores! He had never seen a woman quite like her before—small, but mighty, and so determined. He would often tease, and instead of calling me Alma, he’d call me his pequeña Dolores . . . his little Dolores, which made me feel very proud. But because of what he saw over those years, the long struggle and ultimate success of the farmworkers, he had learned that with patience, hard work, and a deep belief, anything could be achieved. And so, he had encouraged me to pursue my dreams—of course, I could become a teacher one day.
Because of this, staying in school was a must for me. But that year, unlike previous years, I had to hurry home to help Mamá and Rosa prepare tortillas. Mamá had found work with a taco vendor named Mundo, who was also an old friend of Papá’s. The more tortillas we made, the more money he paid. So, we worked late into the night, mixing the masa, rolling a ball, and then flattening it between hands with a pat, clap, slap. Mine came out perfect each time because I measured the ball’s diameter using my finger as a ruler. Then, after clapping each back and forth exactly ten times, I would finish with three slap, slap, slaps and onto the fire. Once done and stacked, they were wrapped and packed to go.