A Dream Called Home Read online

  The window faced a path that led to the parking lot, and I could see students and their parents carrying their belongings to their apartments. “Do you need anything else?” I heard parents ask their sons and daughters, and I wished I’d had someone to ask me that question. Did those students realize how lucky they were? I imagined myself in their place—at a farewell party showered by relatives with their congratulations and best wishes and I’m-so-proud-of-you’s; at the store with my parents shopping for towels, bedding, and new clothes; at the local supermarket walking down the aisles side by side with my parents, pushing a shopping cart loaded with my favorite foods. My stomach growled at the thought.

  I closed the curtain and began unpacking. I looked at the room, the small, empty closet. You’re alone, yes, but you’re here. That’s what matters.

  I put away my clothes and unpacked my computer. My first big purchase had put me $2,000 in debt, but for a new university student it was a necessary expense. At PCC, I had used the computer lab, but I knew the workload would be much heavier here. I took out the monitor, the hard drive, and the keyboard, and stared at the cables, wondering where they went, how to make it work.

  “Ready?” Carolyn said, knocking on my door.

  I dropped the cables back on the desk, leaving it for the next day.

  Dizzy with hunger, I followed Carolyn to the next apartment. She said she was starting her senior year and knew the campus like the back of her hand. I hoped one day I could say the same about my new home. When we approached the door, and I heard the laughter and chatter inside, I felt like running back to my room, but Carolyn was already pushing me into the apartment. She was so different from me. She went around saying hi to everyone, smiling, cracking jokes, giving people high fives, acting as if she knew them all, even though many were new arrivals like me. She disappeared deeper into the apartment and left me on my own to hide in a corner.

  Except for two or three brown faces, and some Asians, every person in the apartment was white. I felt hyper-aware of my foreignness, my brownness. In Los Angeles, I hadn’t felt like a minority. PCC had a large Latino population, and I had never once felt out of place. I had known that UCSC wasn’t as culturally diverse as my old school, but now that I was here, confronted by its whiteness, I wanted to flee. I retreated deeper into the corner.

  No one in this room had any idea how far I had come to get here. I had never told anyone—except Diana—that twenty-one years before, I had been born in a little shack of sticks and cardboard in my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero, a city only three hours from glittery Acapulco and from the bustling metropolis of Mexico City, but a world away from there. Iguala was a place of shacks and dirt roads, where most homes didn’t have running water and electricity was unreliable.

  Because of the national debt crisis and the devastating peso devaluations, in 1977 my father became part of the biggest wave of emigration ever from Mexico when he left Iguala to look for work in the U.S. My mother followed him two years later. By the time I was five, I no longer had a father or a mother, and the border stood between us, keeping us apart. My siblings and I had been left behind on the wrong side of the border, under the care of my paternal grandmother, Abuela Evila, who more than lived up to her name.

  My grandmother had never liked my mother, and she transferred her dislike to us, often telling us we might not even be her grandchildren. “Who knows what your mother was doing when no one was looking?” she would often say. Living with her had made the separation from our parents even more unbearable. My grandmother spent most of the money our parents sent for us on other things. So, for the most part, my siblings and I were dressed in rags, wore cheap plastic sandals, had lice and tapeworm, and ate nothing but beans and tortillas every day. “What’s the point of having parents in El Otro Lado if we are treated like beggars?” we often asked ourselves.

  My childhood was defined by the fear that my parents might forget me, or worse, replace me with children born in the U.S. Worst of all was the fear that I might never have a home and a real family again. The only thing that sustained me through the dark times was my dream of one day having my parents back in my life.

  Then my father left my mother for my stepmother. Finding herself all alone in the U.S., my mother returned to Mexico with no husband, no money, nothing to show for her time in El Otro Lado except for the American baby girl in her arms, my sister Betty. She took us out of my evil grandmother’s house and we went to live with my sweet maternal grandmother. My siblings and I were elated and relieved to have our mother back, but it wasn’t long before we realized that she had changed. All she cared about was finding herself a new husband, and once she did, the family we’d once had was gone.

  Eight years after he had left, my father returned for us and hired a smuggler to sneak Carlos, Mago, and me across the border. I was almost ten when I arrived in Los Angeles to live with my father and his new wife. A year later, my mother returned to the U.S. and lived in downtown Los Angeles with her husband, Betty, and her new baby, my half brother Leo.

  Both Betty and Leo were American born, and for many years I felt inferior to my younger siblings. Just like I felt inferior to all the students at the party, especially the blond, blue-eyed girls who flipped their hair back and laughed with a confidence I had never had. Too many of them were gathered around the food table, and though I was desperate to get some of the chicken wings and vegetables on the trays, I was too afraid to leave my corner.

  One of the Latino students spotted me and came over. He walked with a limp and held his right arm at an angle. “Hi. I’m Alfredo,” he said. His speech was slurred, and I wondered if he was drunk. But he couldn’t be! We were on campus. Alcohol wasn’t allowed. Had he already, on his first day, broken the rules?

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  Coming from a Latino, the question didn’t shake me up the way it had with Carolyn. “L.A.,” I said, this time without any hesitation.

  “No kidding? Me, too. I’m from East Los, and you?”

  “Highland Park.”

  “And that there is Jaime,” Alfredo said, pointing to the other Latino student in the room. “He’s also from L.A. Huntington Park, I think.” Jaime waved at me but didn’t come over. He was busy chatting with a girl.

  How crazy that all three of us new Latino students were from L.A. It made me feel better to know that at least Jaime and Alfredo might understand how I was feeling, what I was going through.

  Alfredo was much older than me. I had turned twenty-one less than two weeks earlier, and he was in his thirties. He told me that when he was eighteen he had gotten beat up by an older man. His attacker was wearing steel-toed boots and had kicked Alfredo in the head several times. “I almost died,” he said. Instead, he had sustained a brain injury that affected the right side of his body, which was why he limped and held his right arm at an angle, and why his speech was slurred. I felt embarrassed that I had thought he was drunk.

  “I had to learn how to do everything again,” Alfredo said. “How to walk, talk, read, and write.” That beating had set him back many years, but he hadn’t given up. Finally, at thirty-three, he was here at UCSC, trying to make his dream come true. Just like me.

  Before he could ask questions about me, I excused myself to grab some food from the table while it wasn’t so crowded. I didn’t feel alone in the room anymore, and I felt that I should share something about myself with Alfredo, just like he had. Maybe another day I might be ready to open up to him. I could tell he had come to terms with his past and had managed to move beyond it. I hadn’t yet. I was constantly picking at the wounds of my memories and bleeding again, and again. I hadn’t yet learned how to allow the scars to form and fade with time.

  Besides, what would I say to Alfredo? He wouldn’t believe me even if I did tell him. My life until now had been a Mexican telenovela. I didn’t get kicked in the head with steel-toed boots, but like him, I’d also had to learn how to read and write and speak all over again—in a language that w
asn’t my own.

  When the party was over and I walked back to my apartment, I was glad I had gone with Carolyn. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had a full belly, and I wouldn’t have made a new friend and heard his story. Alfredo was a survivor, and his resilience inspired me.

  Reyna in her student apartment, UCSC, 1996

  3

  THE NEXT MORNING, with my stomach growling again, I walked to the Kresge Food Co-op, a little store where Carolyn said I could buy a few things to eat. I tossed the name around in my head as I walked there, wondering what a co-op was.

  I asked a few people for directions until I found it tucked into the rear side of some dorms near the Maintenance Department. The co-op was just a small room with shelves and containers of things I didn’t recognize. Plastic bins labeled for granola and oats, barley, couscous, quinoa, wheat germ, and wild rice. In the fridge, I saw something called tofu, soy milk, and deli meat that claimed to be meatless, things I had never eaten in my life or even known existed.

  The girl at the cash register sat on a stool staring at me. She had the strangest hair I had ever seen. When I first saw her, I thought she had snakes for hair, like Medusa. But as I made my way closer to the counter, pretending to be interested in a bag of peas with something called wasabi, I studied her from the corner of my eye and wondered if she had ever brushed her hair, because the strands had twisted and formed into what looked like dirty brown ropes. The girl had piercings in her nose, left eyelid, and lower lip; she wore a tattered multicolored dress, and yet she looked at me as if I were the weird one in this place.

  “Are you a member?” she asked.

  “A member of what?”

  “Of the co-op, obviously.”

  I didn’t know if I had to be a member to make a purchase. All I knew was that whatever they had in here, except for the bananas and apples, looked like something from another planet. I wanted corn tortillas and rice and pinto beans. I wanted some pan dulce and bolillos, a can of jalapeños and chipotle, a bag of fideo, and frozen tamales if freshly steamed ones weren’t available. I wanted a container of Chocolate Abuelita, a package of pineapple barritas, a bag of chicharrones, and a bottle of hot sauce to go with it. I wanted green mangos and jicama and a shaker of chili powder to sprinkle on them. I wanted comfort food. I wanted something I would know how to cook or eat.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  After eating some chocolate chip cookies from the vending machine, I walked across the campus to the bookstore. I was taken aback by the hundreds of books on the shelves. I had my required reading list, and I hoped the money I had from my financial aid package would be enough. As much as I tried not to pay attention to the parents, I watched them help their children find their books. “I read that when I was in college, too,” I heard a mother tell her daughter as they leafed through a book together.

  I would never hear such a thing from my own parents. With my father’s third-grade education, and my mother barely managing to finish sixth grade at seventeen years old, the day I started junior high school I had surpassed my parents in terms of education. I never had a parent help me with homework, tell me about the books they had read in school, or go book shopping with me. The few times my father went to my school for teacher-parent conferences, my siblings and I had to translate what the teachers said. My school experiences hadn’t been something I could share with either of my parents.

  I had had enough of the textbook section, so I moved on to school apparel. Hanging on racks and displayed on shelves were T-shirts, sweaters, sweatpants, jackets, socks, hats—all imprinted with the school mascot: the banana slug. The slug had round eyeglasses on and was reading Plato. In the background were the words FIAT SLUG—“Let There Be Slug.” Of all things, I thought as I ran my fingers over a T-shirt, a slug as a mascot, a slimy, spineless yellow creature that crawls on the ground and can be easily stepped on. Reading the history of UCSC, I had learned that the original mascot had been a sea lion, but the students had protested and fought for the mascot to become a banana slug to honor the spirit of Santa Cruz as a place that embraces peace, loves the environment, and celebrates its counterculture ideology.

  I held the school T-shirt in my hand. Even though I wanted it, I put it back on the rack. I couldn’t afford it. I had enough money for only the most essential textbooks. The rest I would have to borrow from the library.

  As I was about to make my way back to the textbook section, I caught sight of a few parents admiring the garments hanging in the corner. The T-shirts were imprinted with the words UCSC DAD, UCSC MOM, UCSC GRANDMA, etc. I tried to imagine my parents wearing one of those shirts, announcing to the world that their daughter was a university student—the first in the family—and their faces beaming with pride.

  I stood before the shirts, wondering if I could buy one for each of my parents. I took them off the rack and held them against my chest. I could put them in the mail first thing tomorrow. Maybe I could sacrifice the purchase of a textbook for these two shirts. But would they wear them? How would a silly T-shirt make my father and mother feel proud of me, anyway?

  I put the shirts back on the rack. I would just be wasting my money on something they might never wear, on pride they might never feel.

  I hopped on the bus and went downtown to shop at the big grocery store on Pacific Avenue. The New Leaf was just a bigger version of the food co-op, full of strange stuff I had never eaten. There was a large selection of bread, and I didn’t know the difference between whole grain and sprouted grain and multigrain and sourdough. I grew up eating Bimbo, a Mexican white bread. The tortilla section was just as overwhelming in its selection. The store even carried red and green flour tortillas, which I’d never seen before. Who knew you could put tomato or spinach in the dough? I bought corn tortillas at twice the cost I was used to. Too many food choices at too high a price. I would have to find a cheaper place to shop. I wished there were a Mexican market nearby.

  I stopped at the thrift store and bought gently used sheets, a towel, and a blanket. My last stop of the day would be the laundry room at Kresge, and I hoped to get a good night’s sleep with my new used bedding. The night before I’d had to cover myself with my jacket.

  I was shocked to find that downtown Santa Cruz had homeless people everywhere. I would have never expected to see homelessness in such an idyllic place. In L.A. I had seen panhandlers when my siblings and I visited our mother, who lived in the worst part of downtown. The street from the bus stop to my mother’s apartment was lined with the homeless, most of them African-American. I was shocked that in Santa Cruz every man I saw sitting on the sidewalk asking for handouts was white. Many of them had weird hair like the girl at the co-op.

  “Got a buck to spare?” they asked as I made my way back to the bus station. The sight of these men begging bothered me immensely. I wanted to tell them they had no right to be asking me for money. They were white, male, and American born. Those three facts alone put them at an advantage over so many of us—especially immigrants and women of color. In L.A., I’d seen Latino men selling bags of oranges or flower bouquets off freeway exits, and selling tamales, corn on the cob, or chicharrones from shopping carts that they pushed up and down the streets. I’d seen them congregate in the Home Depot parking lot waiting to be picked up for construction jobs, and pushing lawn mowers or carrying leaf blowers, covered in sweat and grass as they maintained other people’s properties. On the drive to Santa Cruz, I’d seen them bent over fields, picking strawberries and onions. But I had never seen Latino men beg.

  From the moment my siblings and I arrived in the U.S., my father drilled into us the expectation that we were to grow up into hardworking adults who could take care of our own needs. “Never, ever, do I want you asking anyone for anything,” he often said to us. My father had many flaws, but he was the hardest-working man I’d ever known. He looked down on beggars. He had even criticized my mother for getting food stamps to feed my U.S.-born siblings. I wondered what
he would say about all these men lining the sidewalks of Pacific Avenue, grinning at me, asking me to give them the precious few dollars I had in my purse.

  And then I spotted a young woman sitting by the bus station, her hand stretched out to passersby. She was my age. She could have been a university student, but instead she was here, sitting on the sidewalk, dressed in rags and hungry. I looked into her green eyes and saw an emptiness in their depths found only in a person who is truly broken—or high on drugs, as I would later discover was common around here—but at this moment, all I wanted to know was who had broken this girl’s spirit?

  I thought of my father, and the words he had said to me three years earlier came back to haunt me again, as if he were standing beside me. You’re going to be a failure. His words had hurt me more than the beatings.

  Had her father said that to her, too, and she’d believed it?

  “Got any change?” she asked.

  I handed her a couple of dollars. I wanted to tell her, You aren’t a failure. But I said nothing. She had already looked away from me, stretching her hand out to someone else.

  On the way back to campus, on a bus full of strangers, it took every ounce of effort I had to stop the tears from coming. I had tried so hard not to let anything break my spirit, but the sight of the homeless girl reminded me of how close I had come to that.

  When I had set foot in this country, it didn’t take me long to realize there were two sides to my father. First and foremost, there was the man who was my hero. I would always be grateful to my father for the one gesture that completely changed the course of my life—he brought me to live in the U.S. At first, he hadn’t wanted to bring me, only Carlos and Mago, because they were older. He worried that at nine years old I was too young to attempt the dangerous border crossing. I begged him to take me with him. He could have left without me, but he didn’t. He took me out of the misery in Iguala and brought me to the place he knew I could flourish.