A Dream Called Home Read online

  Kresge footbridge

  One day in November, as I was walking across the footbridge to my Latin class, I ran into my roommate Carolyn.

  “Are you going to the protest?” she asked as she walked alongside me with her usual briskness.

  “What protest? I’m going to class.”

  “You have to go to the protest, Reyna. You have to support your people.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, and I wasn’t going to miss my class just because of some protest. I had never been to a demonstration, and I didn’t want to get into any kind of trouble that might jeopardize my studies. So far I had kept a low profile, stayed focused on my classes, and done very little besides studying and working.

  “Maybe another time,” I said.

  “There might not be another time. You have to come with me. You have to stand with your people.” She grabbed me by my elbow, and by the look she was giving me, I knew she would drag me over there whether I wanted to go or not.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll go,” I said. She let go of my elbow, and I followed her, getting angrier and angrier just thinking about my class and what I would be missing, the work I would have to make up to get an A.

  I followed Carolyn to Hahn Hall, the building where the administration and student services were located, and as we neared the building, I heard them. The chants of the students rose up into the sky, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Spanish. “¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!”

  Once we cleared the redwood trees, I could see the building and the hundreds of students who were marching around it, holding signs. Carolyn’s words suddenly made sense. There they were—all the brown faces I had been looking for. Students who looked just like me. Hundreds of them mixed in with black, white, and Asian students. Where in the world had they been all this time?

  “What are they protesting?” I asked Carolyn.

  “Prop 209.” At seeing the blank look on my face, she added, “It’s a proposition that was voted on yesterday and passed. It does away with affirmative action in California.” When I didn’t say anything, she got angry at me. “Don’t you get it? It affects you as a Latina. It affects me as a woman. We have to make ourselves heard!”

  I liked to believe that my good grades and my dedication had earned me a spot at the university, but the reality was that as a Latina I was up against not only gender inequality but also racial inequality, and in some way affirmative action had given me a boost. I suddenly realized that if Prop 209 no longer required schools to consider race, ethnicity, and the gender of their students, minority students—and females of all backgrounds—would have a harder time being admitted to four-year universities.

  “I get it,” I said. “Come on.” I hurried down to Hahn, my backpack swinging from my shoulder, and I made my way to the students who were forming a human chain, preventing anyone from entering or leaving the building. They broke the chain to let me in, and I took the hands of the students on either side of me and began to shout.

  “What do we want?”

  “Diversity!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  My voice rose to join theirs until we all became one. For the first time since I had arrived at the school, I felt connected. We began to walk around the building, still holding hands and singing, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

  I had never heard this song before, but as I sang it, I felt my chest expand, the pressure making me hurt. There was a little light inside of me that life’s challenges had tried to extinguish on more than one occasion. But it was still there, shining bright, and I knew I had to protect that light no matter what. For me, for my family, for my community. For both my countries.

  “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

  Our protest didn’t have much of an effect. Prop 209 had passed, abolishing affirmative action so that people like me wouldn’t get “preferential treatment,” and there was nothing I or anyone could do to reverse its passage. The defeat was felt across campus, and though demonstrations at other universities were also held, nothing came of our student protests. Yet it was the first time I realized I had a voice and that it was my responsibility to use it.

  It was also when I finally discovered that most of the Latino students were at two of the other colleges at UCSC—Oakes and Merrill, which hosted the Latin American Studies and the Languages Departments. I would later find out that 15 percent of the student body at UCSC was Latino, but I wouldn’t have known that being at Kresge College, where the majority were white and Asian. To my delight, Oakes and Merrill also housed the two taquerías on campus, and I soon started going over there after class to grab a carne asada taco or shrimp burrito, and to surround myself with other Latinos who, like me, were struggling to figure things out as the first in their families to attend a university. Most were majoring in education, Latin American and Latino/a studies, math, Spanish, or history. They encouraged me to take Chicano literature the following quarter.

  It was then that I realized that the protest did have a profound effect—on me, that is. It led me to a place of belonging and brought me closer to making Santa Cruz and the university my home.

  6

  Mago, Reyna, and Betty

  I HAD BEEN SO wrapped up in surviving my first quarter at UCSC, I hadn’t yearned for my family as much as I had when I first arrived two months earlier. I had talked to Mago and Carlos a few times, and my father and mother not at all. Once, in a moment of weakness, I had walked over to the pay phone and picked up the receiver to call my father. I was desperate to hear his voice. To hear him call me “Chata,” my special nickname. But I didn’t dial. Clutching the coins in my fist, I listened to the dial tone until the phone started screeching like a dying rooster and then I hung up.

  I knew I should call my mother. Right before I left for Santa Cruz, she had sent my fifteen-year-old sister to Mexico as punishment for her behavior. For a few years now, Betty had been going down the wrong path: getting into gangs, having unprotected sex, stealing the rent money, ditching class, and the last straw—dropping out of high school.

  My mother said that she sent Betty to Mexico because if she no longer wanted a high school education, then she would get a different kind of education—she would learn how to be a woman. My aunt would teach my little sister how to cook, clean, and obey the men in her life, especially her future husband, whoever he might be—just the kind of upbringing my grandmother, mother, and aunts had had in our hometown.

  I hadn’t known what my mother was planning until it was too late. My sister was already on a plane to Mexico by the time I found out what was happening. “I can’t deal with her anymore,” my mother said when I told her it was the most irresponsible thing she had ever done. Her decision reinforced my idea that my mother had been born without a maternal gene. Or at least when it came to her four oldest children, because she indulged my little half brother and gave him everything.

  It shamed me to realize that I hadn’t given Betty much thought since I arrived in Santa Cruz, and I should have. Just as my father had banned me from his life, so had Betty been banned from my mother’s, though for opposite reasons. I had done nothing but try to make my father proud and help him during his hour of need. Betty had done nothing but make life difficult for herself and my mother, but she had her reasons. She was reacting to my mother’s physical and emotional abuse in the only way she knew how—by rebelling. But by hurting my mother, she was also hurting herself in the process.

  I picked up the phone and called my mother to see how Betty was doing in exile. My family in Mexico didn’t have a phone, which meant I would have to go through my grandmother’s neighbor to reach my sister. Besides, I didn’t have money for international phone calls.

  “She’s driving your aunt crazy” was the first thing my mother said. “She’s running wild, and your aunt can’t control her anymor
e.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have sent her down there in the first place,” I said. “She’s your responsibility, not my aunt’s. Why are you always making other people raise your children?” It was a low blow and I knew it, but every time I spoke to my mother, it brought out the pain of the many times she left me, and I retaliated.

  As usual, she ignored my comment and said, “Your sister is having an affair with a married man. ¿Me escuchas? She’s fifteen years old and already her reputation is ruined!”

  I didn’t have anything to say to my mother then. The year before, Betty had asked me to take her to the clinic for a pregnancy test. She was fourteen, and as we sat there waiting for the results, I had prayed so hard for it to be negative, which to our relief it was. A pregnancy would have ruined her life. And now here she was again, jeopardizing her future. I couldn’t let that happen.

  “I’ll go check on her,” I said. “I’ll go to Iguala.”

  As I walked back to my apartment, I realized there was a big problem with what I had just committed to—I didn’t have money for a trip to Mexico. But something told me I needed to make it happen. I was worried about my little sister, so I wracked my brain wondering how I could come up with the cash. I paused halfway across the footbridge, looked up at the redwoods, and said a silent prayer, though I was no longer religious. When my siblings and I arrived in the U.S., it didn’t take long for us to lose our religion and forget the teachings of our sweet maternal grandmother, Abuelita Chinta. When we asked our father to take us to church, he refused, raising his can of Budweiser and proclaiming, “This is my God.” That quickly put an end to our Catholic faith.

  Now I was an atheist, yet when surrounded by such natural splendor here in Santa Cruz, by trees that seemed to nearly reach the heavens, I couldn’t help but want to believe in a higher being. God? Goddess? Mother Earth? Tonantzin, Aztec mother goddess?

  One of them heard my prayer. The next day, when I stopped at the main office after picking up my mail, I spotted a flyer announcing a $500 research grant Kresge was offering to students. That was the perfect solution! I hurried back to my apartment and filled out the application and letter of intent, explaining that I needed to go to Mexico for a short-story collection I was working on. It wasn’t true. I wasn’t working on a collection, and I felt ashamed about lying, but it was the only thing I could think of. On the application, I stated that I needed the funds to do research on the town and the people I was writing about.

  A few weeks later, I knew that I was meant to go see my sister when I received a letter from Kresge informing me I had received the grant.

  This trip would be my second time visiting the country of my birth since I had left at nine. The first visit had been three years before, when I was in high school and I had gone with Mago and my mother. It was on that visit that I realized I was no longer Mexican enough. Everyone treated me like an outsider, as if I was no longer one of them, as if I had lost my right to call Mexico my home.

  As soon as winter break arrived, I headed south. My plane landed in Mexico City at 7:00 a.m. and I began the three-hour journey to my hometown. As I rode in the taxi from the airport to the bus station, I lowered the window and breathed in the smell of the city, a mix of diesel fumes, urine, and corn tortillas.

  “You aren’t from here, are you?” the cabdriver asked me. I held my breath, feeling the floor sinking under me as I imagined the worst. He thought I was American. I was going to get kidnapped!

  “Chale, claro que sí,” I said, trying to speak Spanish like a real Mexican. But the man shook his head.

  “I can hear America in your voice,” he said.

  Thankfully, I arrived at the bus station safely, where I waited until it was time to board. As my bus traveled south, I thought about my mother. Every time I talked to her, I couldn’t control the anger that raged inside me.

  Even after all these years, I still felt the devastating blow of her abandonment.

  The first time my mother left, I was four years old. She walked away from me, Mago, and Carlos to join my father in El Otro Lado. For many years, I hadn’t been able to understand why she had made the choice to leave her children behind to go to my father’s side simply because he wanted her to join him. Why did she have to obey him? Why couldn’t she have said no and stayed with her children? Later I understood that my mother hadn’t wanted to be an abandoned woman. In Iguala, there were women whose husbands had gone north long ago and had completely forgotten about them. How happy and proud my mother had been when my father telephoned and said, “I need you. I want you to come.”

  And just like that, she packed her bags and, complying with my father’s request, dropped off her children at his mother’s house. We had to watch her walk away from us, wondering if we would ever see her again. Then we went inside Abuela Evila’s house to endure two-and-a-half years of hell.

  The irony was that even though my mother left for the U.S. to save her marriage, my father still left her for another woman. Mila was a nurse’s assistant, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and a fluent English speaker—a woman who was everything my mother wasn’t. When my mother returned to Mexico with my little sister, Betty, it was one of the happiest days of my life. But soon after, she ran off to Acapulco with a wrestler and abandoned us once again. My maternal grandmother did her best to make up for the pain of my mother’s absence. But no matter how much Abuelita Chinta loved us—it wasn’t enough.

  When my father returned to Mexico to get us, my mother refused to let Betty come with us, so we left without her to reunite with our father and find something better in El Otro Lado. I had never gotten over the guilt of leaving Betty behind.

  Though my mother, and then Betty, moved to Los Angeles a few years later, and we were then all on the same side of the border, my family had completely disintegrated by then.

  I slept during the three-hour bus ride and woke up when the bus was making its way around the mountains cradling my hometown like cupped hands. I looked out the window, holding my breath in anticipation of the first glimpse of my city in the valley below.

  Iguala de la Independencia is a city of about 110,000 people. The first Mexican flag was made in Iguala in 1824. The treaty that ended the Mexican War of Independence was written in Iguala, and the Mexican national anthem was sung for the first time there. Despite its richness in history, Iguala is a poor city, with 70 percent of the population living in poverty. Through the years to come, things would get much worse—the mountain on which my bus was traveling would one day be covered in poppy fields to supply the heroin trade with the U.S. Iguala would become a distribution center where buses would leave the station loaded with drugs destined for cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. It would become a place of infamy when, in 2014, forty-three college students were attacked and forcibly disappeared by the police working with the cartel. During the search for the missing students, numerous mass graves would be found not far from where I grew up.

  But those things hadn’t happened yet, and when I arrived in Iguala in December of 1996, all I saw were the shacks, the dirt roads, the crumbling houses, the trash—the grinding poverty my father had rescued me from. When I was a child, I had been able to see past the imperfections and find the beauty of my hometown, but now, after all my years of living in the U.S., I no longer could.

  I hailed a cab at the bus station. Immediately, the driver said, “You aren’t from here, are you?” And I wanted to say that I hadn’t even opened my mouth to speak yet, so why the hell would he be asking me that already?

  “You put on your seat belt,” he said with a smile, anticipating my question.

  And I laughed.

  The road where my grandmother lived wasn’t paved, so taxicabs and buses didn’t venture there. I got off at the main road and walked to my grandmother’s house, dragging my suitcase behind me. I inhaled the smoke from the burning trash heaps along the nearby railroad tracks. City sanitation services didn’t exist in Iguala, so people had to burn their trash every day
. I passed the canal in which my siblings and I swam when we were kids, and was shocked at seeing the canal full of trash—old car tires covered in mud, broken pieces of furniture, the skeletal remains of an old mattress. The stagnant water smelled worse than a dead animal, and I held my breath as I hurried past it. Abuelita Chinta lived in a shack made of sticks and cardboard. When I lived here, it had been the only shack on the street, but now there were two of them. My aunt, Tía Güera, had built her own shack next to my grandmother’s.

  I stood there in front of my grandmother’s home, scanning the dirt road, the abandoned freight car left to rust on the train tracks, the piles of burned trash, the children walking barefoot, their feet and legs covered in dust.

  I was a long way from Santa Cruz, California.

  7

  Abuelita Chinta

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S DOOR was open, so I poked my head in and saw her sitting at the dining table with a cutting board on her lap, on which she was slicing a tomato, an onion, and a green jalapeño pepper. I hadn’t seen her in three years, but she looked the same to me. As usual, she wore her gray, curly hair tied back, a flowery dress that reached below her knee, and black sandals.

  “Abuelita, ya llegué,” I said as I came in.

  When she smiled at me, I could see that another tooth had fallen out since I had last seen her. I hugged my tiny grandmother and inhaled her scent of almond oil and herbs.

  “Gracias a Dios que llegaste bien,” she said, squeezing me tight. She looked at her altar, where a candle was burning next to the statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, and she crossed herself to thank God I had arrived safely. “The journey can be dangerous for a young girl traveling alone.”