A Dream Called Home Read online

  She seemed so grown-up when she said that, and I leaned in to hug her. I wasn’t happy that she was pregnant at this age, but at the same time I could see the effect this little human being growing in her womb was having on her. She seemed confident and mature.

  “Come visit me whenever you want,” I told her as I said goodbye.

  Little by little, Betty and I found our way back to each other. We never talked about that night when I kicked her out, and even though I wanted to apologize, I didn’t have the courage to bring it up. Whenever I saw her belly, I felt it was my fault, though I suspected it would have happened whether or not I had forced her to go live with Omar. She never acted as if being pregnant was the end of her life. She didn’t resent it the way I did.

  I still couldn’t let go of the dreams I once had for her.

  My nephew was born in August 1998, during my second summer in Santa Cruz. I went to see Betty at the hospital and to meet the new addition to the Grande family. Mago had already given birth to her second baby in May. Carlos and his new wife had had a baby girl in July. And now Betty had had her baby on this first day of August. Three Grande babies in a period of four months!

  “What’s his name?” I asked as I took the baby from her.

  “Randy Alexander.”

  He was a cute baby, tiny and fragile. I felt his warmth against my chest, and I rocked him so that he would fall asleep. It was awkward in the hospital room, and I didn’t know what to say as I took in the beeping machines, the uncomfortable cot, my sister in her blue hospital gown looking exhausted and older than seventeen, as if motherhood had already aged her.

  Betty and Omar with baby Randy, 1998

  I knew that on this occasion I was supposed to say, Congratulations! I’m so happy for you, or something like that. But I just couldn’t say it. I couldn’t stop thinking that my little sister’s life was over because she had become a mother so young. Somehow, along the way, I had grown to believe that being a teenage mother was the worst thing one could be, especially for Latina girls, who already had too many obstacles to overcome because of race, gender, and class inequality. The statistics weren’t good for Latina teens and their rate of success. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I cared too much about not being a statistic. Betty, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn what society thought of her.

  When he fell asleep, I handed my sister the baby and stood to go. “I know you’ll be a great mom,” I told her because I believed that she would be. I knew Betty needed to be a great mom, because that was the only way to heal the little girl inside of her. Giving her child the kind of mother she, herself, had never had was how she would make things right and ease the pain.

  As I was about to go out the door, she said, “Reyna, I have nothing to forgive you for, and you have nothing to regret. I know what you were trying to do for me, and I thank you. But I’m not going to regret anything either, especially my baby.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “No regrets then.”

  Two years later, at Betty’s high school graduation, I would realize that she was right—there was nothing to regret for either of us. I was extremely proud of her as I watched her go up onstage to receive her diploma. I had been afraid that she would drop out of school again, but instead, Omar and her baby had grounded her. Santa Cruz belonged to Betty in a way it didn’t belong to me. Her child had been born here. She had her own family now. Once she had been a leaf in the wind; now she had roots and had landed in a place where she would flourish and be happy.

  Betty at school with baby Randy

  15

  I WAS SITTING ON the bus on the way to my apartment after a long day at school, looking out the window at the darkness, when a laugh—loud and unapologetic—pulled me back to the light. I looked across the aisle to see a young Latina sitting with a guy, laughing about something he had said. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but I could see his flamboyant gestures, his whole body animated and deeply focused on the story he was telling her, pausing once in a while for her laughter to settle, only to make her laugh again. The sound erupted from her mouth like butterflies taking off into the air. She had long black hair that was braided and crisscrossed behind the nape of her neck. She wore a white Mexican dress and, instead of a jacket, a black rebozo with little white polka dots was wrapped around her slender shoulders. It was the kind of Mexican shawl my own grandmother wore every time she went out, one I didn’t expect to see on anyone my age here in this country, much less in Santa Cruz.

  I wanted to know why she was dressed that way—the braids, the rebozo, the dress. It shocked me to see a university student looking as if she had been plucked from a remote rural village in Mexico and transported to this surfer town. She held herself with total confidence, perfectly comfortable in her own body, dressed as if she were going to a Cinco de Mayo party even though it was February, and laughing unapologetically on a bus full of gringos who couldn’t hide their curiosity.

  She was flaunting her Mexicanness for all to see, and I was in total awe of her.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” I asked her before I knew what I was doing.

  Her friend stopped talking and they both stared at me, perhaps in disbelief that I had leaned across the aisle to ask such a thing. Then she smiled at me and said, “Nomás porque quiero.” Just because I want to.

  That was how I met Erica in my second year at UCSC. She was my first hard-core Chicana feminist friend. She reminded me of the writers I had read in Marta’s class. Unlike me, she handled her Mexican-American identity without the conflict and turmoil I had about my own split identity. She would teach me that it was possible to rotate in and out of both cultures instead of feeling like an outsider in both. On that first day on the bus, I thought her confidence came from the fact that she was a Chicana, a U.S.-born Mexican, not an immigrant and border crosser like me. She had that precious U.S. birth certificate to whip out whenever someone asked, “Where are you from?” Whereas I had a green card that literally labeled me an alien. But I would come to learn the source of Erica’s pride in her Mexican roots, the reason why her closet was filled with embroidered peasant blouses and rebozos, and why her apartment was decorated with Mexican artesanías: folklórico. She was co-director of Grupo Folklórico Los Mejicas, a dance group on campus which was composed of students and some community members. Never in a million years would I have guessed there was Mexican folk dancing happening at UCSC.

  “You should join Los Mejicas,” she and her friend Benigno told me on the bus. “The group is open to all students, and you get credit for it.”

  “I’ve never danced folklórico in my life,” I said. “And my older sister once said I dance like a horse.”

  I saw Erica a few more times on the bus, and I learned that she was also from Los Angeles and a transfer student, like me. She had gone to Glendale Community College, which was the other local college I’d thought about attending before deciding on PCC. She told me how lonely she had felt in Santa Cruz when she first arrived, and how she and her mother talked on the phone every day. What saved her from the loneliness, she said, was discovering Los Mejicas.

  She told me she was majoring in Latin American and Latino/a studies. “How about you?” she asked.

  “Creative writing and film and video,” I said. The previous quarter, I had added film as a second major so I could stay an extra year at UCSC to explore a different kind of storytelling through images, and I was loving my film classes. I was running around town shooting films and would spend my nights in the editing room putting the story together. I loved figuring out how to string the scenes together to create a whole, the way a novel is written. I told Erica that my film classes were making my writing better. When I wrote, I felt I was watching a movie in my head.

  “Folklórico tells stories, too,” she said. “It tells the story of Mexico from before the Spaniards arrived all the way to the Mexican Revolution.”

  I had never thought of dance as a form of storytelling.

/>   When she invited me to her apartment, the first things I saw, prominently displayed on her living room wall, were prints of two paintings, one of a woman with a unibrow and parrots, and the other of the same woman wearing what looked like a bunch of lace around her head, but which I would later learn was actually a Tehuana dress.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Erica.

  She looked at me in disbelief. “¿Qué, qué? ¿Cómo que no sabes? Girl, let me tell you. That’s Frida Kahlo, the best Mexican painter of all time. She’s my hero.”

  And that was when I discovered this female artist who had done what I was trying to do—turn her pain into art. Crippled by polio as a child and then severely injured in a bus accident in her teens, Frida Kahlo had spent much of her life in a wheelchair, painting self-portraits and conquering her suffering with every stroke of a brush.

  From that day forward, Frida Kahlo became my hero, too. Especially when I discovered her famous double self-portrait, Las Dos Fridas. I saw myself in that painting. The Two Reynas holding hands, the two versions of me—the Mexican and the American—holding tightly to each other. It was by looking at this painting that I finally understood what Marta had meant. I was twice the girl I used to be.

  In her kitchen, Erica tried to teach me a step called “el huachapeado,” which she said the dance group was currently practicing. It was a step from the state of Veracruz, which had one of the most beautiful dances. After I tried the six-part step a few times, she said, “Don’t worry, we have all levels in the group.”

  On Sunday afternoon, Erica took me to practice with her, and everything changed for me that day. I stood in a corner of the studio and watched the dancers do the complex combinations of steps. The girls wore long skirts down to their ankles and black shoes with heels. The guys wore black leather boots. Later I learned that the heels and toe tips of their shoes were covered with tiny nails to increase the sound. I watched their sweating bodies turning and turning, their feet tapping and stomping, their skirts twirling like butterfly wings. And I found my own feet wanting to stomp, my heart beating to the strumming of the mariachi music, and I wanted to burst out onto the floor and dance with the butterflies.

  Once I joined the group, I learned that folklórico was not merely to entertain. It was a source of pride, a rich cultural tradition that celebrates the unique history of my native country through dance. In addition to honoring our indigenous roots, folklórico also celebrates el mestizaje—the cultural intermixing—that took place in Mexico. The dances reflect the influences of Spanish, African, French, and native cultures. I was surprised to learn that the northern states, such as Sonora, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua, had inherited the polkas brought by German and Polish immigrants to the area. Who knew Mexicans danced polkas! I knew little of my own country’s history, but I began to learn about it through its dances. Instead of focusing on what was lost in the collision of cultures, folklórico tells the unique story of Mexico and the beauty that resulted from the chaos.

  Just as it had with Erica, Los Mejicas took away my loneliness. I made friends who were like me, either immigrants or children of immigrants, and first-generation university students. It was my first time standing before floor-to-ceiling mirrors and being fully aware of my body, of what it could do. It took some effort to see past the imperfections of my too-short legs, my too-wide shoulders, my big belly, but thankfully, unlike other types of dance, folklórico is more forgiving when it comes to body shape. Hardly any of us Latinas were tall and skinny, and the good news was that we didn’t need to be tall and skinny to dance folklórico. What mattered was the joy and pride the dance gave us.

  Through the weeks of practice, I learned how to coax my body to move, spin, twirl, stomp, and sway to the rhythm of accordions, guitars, harps, marimbas, and violins. I wasn’t a natural dancer, not gifted the way other girls in the group, like Erica, were. I knew I would have to work hard, push my body in a way I had never done before. As a beginning dancer, I was only able to do the polkas from northern Mexico, though in a simplified version. Polkas didn’t require intricate skirt work, which I hadn’t learned yet.

  It was wonderful to perform with the group at cultural celebrations happening around Santa Cruz County, which turned out to have more Mexicans than I had previously thought.

  Two months after I joined, we all drove up to San Jose in a caravan to attend Danzantes Unidos, a three-day festival of hundreds of folkloristas who came together to celebrate our Mexican culture and dance traditions. It was my first time being at a conference where everyone looked like me, hundreds of Latinos joined together by our love of folklórico and pride in our heritage.

  At the end of spring quarter, as I wrapped up my second year at the university, Los Mejicas put on a recital to showcase the dances we had learned throughout the year. It was my first big performance, and though I only danced for ten minutes onstage, I got a taste of what it was like to be under the bright stage lights, bathed in reds, blues, and yellows. Onstage, I had no past and no future—only the present moment mattered. There were no alcoholic fathers, no absent mothers, no wild dreams to pursue, nothing to make me feel ashamed, unwanted, unloved, or afraid. There was only the dancing, the music flowing through my body, my mind focused on making the right movements, my muscles contracting and releasing, my lungs expanding with each breath I took.

  When the show was over, the audience erupted in applause, and I stood under the bright lights with my peers as I let the adulation envelop me and carry me off the stage, back into a world which, in that moment of euphoria, I was no longer afraid of.

  Reyna in Jalisco dress

  16

  Reyna and Claudia

  THANKS TO MY friend Claudia, whom I met in Los Mejicas, I got a job at the Capitola Mall working as an assistant to the optometrist she worked for. Two other friends worked at the optometrist, too: Paola, who was also from Highland Park, the neighborhood in L.A. where I grew up, and Leticia, whom I met in the paint crew at Kresge my second summer.

  One day, when I returned from my lunch break, Claudia handed me a chart and pointed at the guy sitting in the waiting area. She took her lunch break and left me in charge of the patient, who sat with his legs stretched out before him, completely exhausted, as if he had had a late night of studying. Even sitting down, I could tell he was tall. He had hair like brown sugar, and it curled around his ears and the nape of his neck. His eyes were lighter than his hair, like raw honey. His fair skin was red from too much time in the sun, and I wondered if he was a surfer, or perhaps a volleyball player; I pictured him playing at the beach, barefoot and bare-chested, his skin glistening with sweat.

  I wondered what year he was, what his major was, and if he lived on campus or off. I wanted to know where I could find him again. When he saw that I was coming for him, he smiled at me and stood up, but when I said, “Hello, I’m Reyna, nice to meet you,” his smile disappeared and was replaced by a deep, red blush. He looked away from me and lowered his gaze to the floor.

  I had been too busy drooling over him to look at his chart and find out his name. The information on the chart didn’t match my image of this boy surfing in Monterey Bay, or walking around campus with textbooks in hand drinking a latte to stay awake in class.

  His name was Arturo and he lived in Watsonville, the town half an hour from Santa Cruz with a large Mexican population. It was an agricultural town, known mostly for its strawberries. I had passed through there on my way to UCSC and performed there once with Los Mejicas.

  “No hablo inglés,” he said in a soft voice. He towered over me, at least by a foot. He extended his hand and I shook it. The calluses on his hand and his sunburned skin gave me a new vision of him, bending over fields picking strawberries under the hot sun.

  “No hay problema,” I said. I took him into the room to do the pretests before he saw the doctor.

  “Do you see the hot air balloon?” I said in Spanish as he scooted up to the chin rest of the auto-refractor. “Keep looking at it and don’t move
.” I looked at his eyes, as bright as yellow amber from the light of the auto-refractor, and felt a pang of sadness to know I had been wrong. He could have been a university student but wasn’t, because, as someone once said, talent is evenly distributed around the world, but opportunity is not. Such was the case for most people in Mexico.

  “What state are you from?” I asked him as I transferred him to the NCT machine to do the eye-puff test.

  “Jalisco,” he said. That explained the light skin, the amber eyes, the hair like a shiny penny. There were a lot of light-skinned Mexicans who came from Jalisco. European ancestry still had a strong presence in that state. The dances of Jalisco, accompanied by mariachi, were exquisite, but only the most advanced dancers in our group got to perform them.

  I warned him about the puff of air, and he laughed when, despite my warning, it still startled him and made him jump. I laughed with him.

  “¿Y tú, de dónde eres?” he asked.

  “De Guerrero,” I said. Guerrero, my warrior state. We didn’t have many light-skinned people like him there. Our indigenous heritage was strong. My father’s skin was the color of rain-soaked earth, though mine was more yellow in tone. I shopped for makeup at Asian stores to find a good foundation and powder that went with my skin tone.

  Arturo asked me if I would go into the exam room with him to translate for him what the doctor said, and I willingly did, happy to spend more time with him. He left that day with a prescription for new glasses and my phone number, both tucked into his shirt pocket. When he asked me out a few days later, he also asked me if I had any friends that might want to come along. “I have two cousins,” he said.