A Dream Called Home Read online

  He didn’t leave me, I would tell myself over and over again every time my hero turned into my tormentor. Since he was an alcoholic, living with him had been like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day my father would tell us to reach for the stars and to dream big. Then the next day when he had drunk too much and his other side emerged, he was literally beating us to the ground, calling us a bunch of pendejos, ignorant fools.

  Carlos was the first to leave. At twenty years old, he dropped out of college to get married. He wanted to show our father that he could do a better job at being a husband and father. His marriage didn’t last, but the damage did. The next one to leave was Mago, who had turned to shopping and clubbing to deal with our traumatic upbringing. But soon the material things and the dancing weren’t enough. She dropped out of college to get a full-time job to pay off her credit card debt and her brand-new car. Though she had promised to take me with her, she left my father’s house to start her own family without me.

  I understood that my siblings had done these things out of desperation. My father’s alcoholism and abuse had forced them to leave in pursuit of their own home.

  In my senior year of high school, I was accepted into the University of California, Irvine. When my sister left our father’s house and got pregnant soon after, my father was so disappointed with my siblings that he assumed I would disappoint him, too, even though I was still there with him, still in school, still the dutiful daughter. I was seventeen, and I needed him to sign the paperwork to secure my spot at UCI, but he refused. Mago was his favorite daughter. He had believed that she would reach the dream of higher education first. But her priorities had changed, and now I had to pay the price for my father’s disillusionment.

  “You can forget about going to that university. You’re going to be a failure, too, just like them, so don’t even bother going,” he said, and with those words, he had crushed my dream the way he crushed a can of Budweiser when he was done with it.

  Now, on the bus, I realized that if I had let my father’s words break me, I could have ended up like that homeless girl. And the thought that I still might made the tears come.

  Just as I was about to unravel on that bus, a miracle happened. I caught sight of a Mexican market through the window; its name, painted in bright red letters, made the tears go away: LA ESPERANZA MARKET. The bus sped up Mission Street, and I could no longer see the building, but I knew I hadn’t imagined it. I had found the one place I could come back to again and again to taste the flavors and smell the aromas of the homes I once had! What a beautiful name for a grocery store, I thought. Esperanza—hope, expectation, possibility. Esperanza was also the name of the heroine in my favorite book, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Like me, Esperanza had left her family and her community to go in search of her dreams, but she had promised she would come back one day and help those who couldn’t escape. Like I hoped one day to return for those I had left behind.

  When I got off the bus at Kresge, I took a deep, deep breath, filling my lungs with the Santa Cruz air until I felt as if I could soar across the sky. If the word esperanza had a scent, I thought this was how it would smell—like a redwood forest.

  Reyna looking toward the future

  4

  Reyna and Diana at PCC, 1996

  A FEW DAYS LATER, school officially began. I walked to my literature class—Theory and Interpretation—anxious about my very first university lecture. The crispy air nipped at my grogginess as I crossed the footbridge. Golden sunbeams radiated through the morning fog, making the redwoods appear dreamy and magical. It was a sign, I told myself. It was the forest telling me things would be okay.

  Despite my father’s prophecy, hadn’t I avoided failure so far? After he refused to let me attend UCI, I fell into a gloomy place. But just like sunbeams on foggy mornings, my determination had cut through the gloom. I defied my father and enrolled myself at the community college, where I had graduated with not just excellent grades, but the knowledge that I was responsible for my own learning. I had learned how to adapt, how to use my creativity. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  I hurried to class, and the fog had completely dissipated by the time I got to the lecture hall. Students rushed by me—some still wearing their pajamas—and I froze at the door. Over a hundred people were jammed into the lecture hall. What have I gotten myself into? At PCC, the only class I had been in that had a hundred students was marching band. For literature, thirty people max. Not this.

  “Take a seat,” the teacher said, and I forced myself into the room. All the seats in the back were taken, and I had no choice but to sit near the front. The teacher, a bearded man in his fifties, went over the course outline and expectations, telling us about the books and authors we would be reading—Voltaire, Marx, Engels, Stendhal. I had never heard of any of them.

  As I sat there looking at the overwhelming syllabus, I reminded myself I was good at English and literature—they were my strengths. At least that was what Diana had said.

  Diana was the first person to give me my very own book, one that I could keep, The Moths and Other Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes. That book was followed by The House on Mango Street. She was the first person who told me I had writing talent, that my stories mattered. It was because of her that I was now majoring in creative writing.

  But the best thing that Diana had done for me was to take me into her home two years earlier when my father was arrested for spousal abuse. I lived with her for four months, and then again after my father got back with my stepmother, Mila. The time that I spent at her house was a time that I will cherish for the rest of my life. She helped me finish my studies at PCC and kept me from dropping out because of my family problems. I was at UCSC because of her, but as I sat there surrounded by all these students, and as I read the list of assignments and tests we would be doing, I couldn’t help but wonder if she had been wrong. What if I didn’t have what it took to succeed in this place?

  At the end of class, the teacher took attendance. I listened to the names, looking at the sea of students around me, most of them white. I dreaded whenever teachers took roll. Having the name Reyna Grande, “the big queen,” when you are only five feet tall sets you up for a lifetime of ridicule. I braced myself for the laughter that would follow as soon as the teacher said my name. But there was no laughter. My name wasn’t even called. Instead, the teacher said, “Renée Grand?” No one raised her hand to claim that name, and I suspected he was trying to say my name but mispronouncing it. It had happened to me before. When we first arrived in the U.S., Mago’s teachers had changed her real name—Magloria—to Maggie because they claimed it was unpronounceable. At home, she was always Mago, but outside in the world she was Maggie. At times, I got called Renée and sometimes my last name—Grande—was pronounced like the river in Texas, a river I hadn’t crossed, though I had on numerous occasions been called a wetback.

  “Renée Grand,” the teacher said again, and this time I knew he meant me. I looked at the students around me. The ones wearing their pajamas, the ones who hadn’t brushed their hair and had what I later learned were called dreadlocks, the ones who had stayed up too late drinking and partying, who walked around campus so sure of themselves. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be Renée Grand because I knew she would blend in with them in a way Reyna Grande might not.

  “Renée Grand,” the teacher said a third time. I didn’t raise my hand to claim that name as my own, though there was a part of me that wanted to. I was in a new city, starting a new life, and I could reinvent myself into Renée, the girl who belonged.

  But if I did, what would happen to the Big Queen, the grandiose name my mother had given me and which I knew one day I would have to live up to?

  After class, I gathered up the courage to approach my teacher.

  “My name wasn’t called.”

  “These are the students enrolled in my class.” He let me look at the list and sure enough, there I was.

  He checked
the roster where I was pointing and said, “I did call you. I called you three times.”

  “My name is R-r-reyna Gran-de.”

  He shrugged and marked me present. If he mispronounced my name again, I knew I wouldn’t be afraid to correct him, just like I wouldn’t be afraid to tackle the works of those white European men we would be reading.

  Luckily, literature was my only big class. My other classes were more manageable. As a transfer student, to my great relief, I realized that the study skills and academic confidence I had acquired at Pasadena City College had prepared me for university work. It turned out I knew how to hold myself accountable for my own progress. Some of the students at Kresge didn’t know how to manage their independence. They just wanted to party, drink, and do drugs, instead of focusing on their studies. When it rained, they would go out into the redwoods and dance naked in circles, pretending to be fairies or wood nymphs. They didn’t care about getting in trouble with the school administration. Without their parents keeping them in check, they were doing everything they hadn’t been allowed to do at home. Others missed home too much and walked around wallowing in their homesickness. The couple of times I ran into Jaime, the other Latino student at Kresge East, he reminded me of the protagonist in Voltaire’s novel. Seeing Jaime’s tragically sad face—like the face of someone who had been ejected from an “earthly paradise”—made me think of Candide.

  Jaime mentioned that he might return home by the end of the quarter. “I feel lonely up here,” he said. “I miss my family. My girlfriend.”

  Don’t you understand that this is an opportunity of a lifetime? I wanted to say to him. To be at a university, working hard toward your future, and you would throw it all away simply because you miss your family and some girl and now you want to go home? But the truth was I envied Jaime. I wished I had a home that I could return to. Candide had been kicked out by the baron and was never allowed to return to the “most beautiful of all castles,” and though the home where my father reigned had never been beautiful, I wasn’t allowed back, either.

  “School just started,” I said to Jaime, trying to be kinder, more understanding of his añoranza, that deep longing I knew well. “Give it time. It’ll get easier. This place could be home, too.”

  Also like Candide, I had come to learn that not all is for the best, but if there was anything that life had taught me so far, it was to try my hardest to make the best of things, no matter how difficult they might be. I focused on this until it became routine, until I no longer felt lost and disoriented.

  My roommate Kim, who was a foreign student from China, helped me set up my computer and even gave me a pet. He installed a program on my computer that was a screen saver unlike any I had ever seen. When my computer wasn’t in use, a little dog ran around the screen, and I could feed him, give him water, and throw balls for him to catch. He even barked! That old Mexican saying didn’t apply to me anymore. I still didn’t have a father or a mother, but I finally did have a dog to bark at me.

  5

  EDWIN CAME TO visit me on the weekends, but soon the demands of our schoolwork, the distance, and our jobs became too much and we went our separate ways, though we remained friends. I had taken a tutoring job at the writing center, which kept me busier than I would have liked. My financial aid package—loans, grants, and work-study—wasn’t enough to cover my expenses. In my last semester at PCC, Diana had helped me apply for scholarships, and though I had gotten several small ones, without parental support I had no one to turn to when money was tight, which was often. This California beach town was an expensive place to live. It was full of wealthy retirees, people with trust funds, and high-tech workers from Silicon Valley, but the jobs, on and off campus, were low-paying compared to the crushingly high cost of living.

  My work as a tutor was to help students with their writing assignments, and one of my students was Alfredo. Because of his brain injury, writing didn’t come easily. I helped him with the essays he had to write. The other students I tutored were struggling with their writing as well. I taught them how to put together a good sentence, a good paragraph, how to take ideas, thoughts, and opinions and make them come to life on the page. It amazed me that I was mostly teaching students whose native language was English but who had worse grammar than ESL students and couldn’t write a decent paragraph in their native tongue.

  “Where did you learn to write like this?” Alfredo asked me one day.

  We were sitting at the dining table in my apartment. The dining room had a big window where I could see the redwoods.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’ve been writing in English since I was thirteen.”

  I told Alfredo about the very first story I wrote. It was for a writing competition at my school when I was in fifth grade. I wrote it in Spanish because I had only been in the U.S. for a few months and my English was limited. My teacher didn’t read Spanish, and when it was time to select the stories to be entered into the competition, she put mine in the reject pile without another glance. “I swore I would never write again,” I told Alfredo. “To me, my teacher hadn’t just rejected my story, she had also rejected me, and I felt ashamed to be an immigrant, a Spanish speaker, a person of color.”

  “I’m sorry she did that,” he said.

  When I was in eighth grade, I told Alfredo, my junior high had a writing competition as well. By then, I had graduated from the ESL program at my school and was enrolled in regular English classes. My accent was still pretty thick, but my writing and reading skills were solid. I made myself enter the competition because I wanted to be judged on the same terms as everyone else. My story was inspired by my relationship with my little sister. Whenever Betty and I saw each other, things were awkward between us. Having grown up in two separate households, she with my mother and I with my father, made us feel disconnected, distant. I had been reading books like Sweet Valley High, and so the story I wrote was about twin sisters who get separated when the parents divorce, each parent taking a daughter, and when the sisters are reunited years later, they’re complete strangers to each other.

  “And I got first place!”

  “That’s awesome!” Alfredo had put his essay aside and was listening to my story with interest. “I’m glad you overcame that first rejection.”

  I was glad, too. If I hadn’t, my writing career would have ended before it had even begun.

  I didn’t know that at thirteen years old I had turned to writing as a way to deal with my traumatic experiences before, during, and after migration. Because I was a child immigrant, my identity was split; I often felt like an outcast for not being completely Mexican but not fully American either. The border was still inside of me. Physically I had crossed it, but psychologically I was still running across that no-man’s-land. I was still caught back there, and so were my parents because the truth was that we were never the same after we crossed the border. We all changed. Perhaps it was because we had left something of ourselves behind, the way migrants leave a shoe, an empty can of tuna, a plastic water bottle, a shirt. What we each left on the border was a piece of our soul, our heart, our spirit—clinging to the branches of a bush, flapping in the wind.

  Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder—these words were not part of my vocabulary, so I never used them to describe how I felt. I expressed my feelings through stories while my father drowned his in a can of beer.

  I turned to writing to save myself, to record and remember, to give meaning to my experiences. Writing was an act of survival. It wasn’t until PCC that I discovered it could be a possible career option. Having grown up never reading any Latina writers, I thought Latinas didn’t write and publish books, so I had assumed I couldn’t either. I hadn’t thought I could pursue a career in writing until I met Diana. “If Sandra Cisneros can do it, you can do it. If Isabel Allende can do it, you can do it,” she would say to me while handing me a copy of their latest books.

  After Alfredo left, I went to my room to work on a story that wa
sn’t part of any class assignment. Talking to him about my writing had given me inspiration to sit and write, which I hadn’t done the whole month I had been at UCSC. My creative writing classes wouldn’t start until winter quarter. For now, I was stuck writing academic essays about Candide and The Red and the Black.

  Usually my stories were about Mexico. I had now lived in the U.S. longer. Only through my writing could I hold on to my native country and keep it from floating into the mists of my memory. By writing about it, I could claim Mexico in a way I couldn’t in real life. Despite everything I had gained by emigrating, I had also lost things: my relationship with my sweet maternal grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my friends, and my native country itself. The Mexican way of life felt different now; my Spanish was broken, my Catholic religion almost nonexistent. I knew little about Mexico, just pieces of its history, its customs, its geography. It was, in many ways, a mystery to me. Like my parents, my native country was full of flaws, and it had mistreated and abused me, and yet I still loved and clung to Mexico with childish hope and optimism, dreaming of the day it would change for the better, in the same way I hoped my parents would change.

  On my first return visit to Mexico three years earlier, everyone treated me like a foreigner because I had been “corrupted” by being Americanized. To the people who had seen me grow up, I was no longer Mexican enough. But in the U.S. I wasn’t American enough either. For years, I had struggled to fit in, to learn the language and culture, to find my way. But no matter how hard I tried, I still felt like a foreigner, especially here in Santa Cruz where I was struggling with feelings of isolation, loneliness, otherness. UCSC wasn’t yet the Hispanic-Serving Institution it would one day become, so I hardly saw anyone who looked like me. I took refuge in my writing. The words I put on the page created a bridge that connected both countries, both languages, both cultures. I hoped someday to write my way into a place where I finally belonged, where I finally felt I was “enough.”