A Dream Called Home Read online

  When the new year arrived, Betty started high school, and I started my second quarter at UCSC. I dropped her off at the bus stop on campus and then headed to my advanced fiction class.

  To my disappointment, I was the only Latina in the class.

  My visit to Mexico, though painful, had once again reinforced my need to write about the place of my birth. It was by writing about the people I knew, describing their plight, that I could honor their difficult experiences and keep them in my heart and mind. I had to remember each of them, write their stories, share their pain, so that they knew they weren’t alone. The ten days I spent in Iguala had inspired me to write that story collection I claimed I was writing to get the grant from Kresge. I had gotten the funding, gone on my trip, and though the money was given to me with no strings attached, I felt an obligation to follow through on what I had said I would do.

  The stories were all set in my hometown, so every assignment I turned in to my fiction teacher was about a world—an experience—neither she nor my classmates knew anything about.

  “You have a wild imagination,” my teacher said of my story about a flood that devastated the whole neighborhood, forcing the people to spend a week on their roofs, navigating makeshift canoes to retrieve the floating bodies of their dogs, cats, and chickens.

  “Your work is over-the-top and overwritten,” my teacher said of my story about a young girl who was forced to go to school barefoot because her family was too poor to buy her shoes. And just like I had been, she was physically abused by her teacher for being left-handed.

  “Your work is too flowery and full of clichés,” my teacher said of my story about a young mother who falls into the community well where she was getting water for the wash, leaving her two children to be raised by their abusive, alcoholic father.

  But when it came to the work of white students—who wrote stories about drinking, doing drugs, going to parties, and having sex—the teacher praised them as if they had just written a masterpiece worthy of a Pulitzer.

  There were times when I wanted to run out of my classroom and never come back. What am I doing here? I thought. Who do I think I am to even consider that my stories are worth telling?

  I thought of my fifth grade teacher who had rejected my story because it was in Spanish, and by doing so had also rejected who I was. Now I was experiencing the same disapproval. The experiences I put on the page were so foreign to everyone in my class, I might as well have written them in another language.

  I could choose to leave. I could choose to drop out of the creative writing program, to be silenced. I could choose to believe that my stories didn’t matter.

  Or I could fight.

  Hadn’t my own grandmother survived the Mexican Revolution? If I allowed rejection to defeat me, my dreams would fester. I would be eaten by maggots. How could I allow that to happen?

  When I first met Edwin, he had given me a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Regardless of the author’s controversial political views, I loved her book and appreciated the lesson The Fountainhead had taught me. The story was about a young architect, Howard Roark, who constantly had to fight for his vision of the buildings that he wanted to design; not replicas of what had come before, but his own original work. He had to fight for his designs because almost no one around him understood them. People were always telling him what he should build, how he should create—by copying the old masters and doing the same thing as everyone else. He went up against society and clung to his unique vision, his art, his voice.

  In The Fountainhead I came upon a word I had never heard before—“impervious.” When I looked it up in the dictionary I knew that it was a word I wanted to be defined by. I wanted to be unaffected by the scarcity of love around me, unaffected by the lack of support I encountered with my family, and now at UCSC, unaffected by the ignorant remarks of people who had no clue whatsoever about my reality, my truth, or my world. I had to fight for the right to create the kinds of stories I wanted to write.

  So when my teacher handed me back my latest story, looking as if it were bleeding from the red ink of her criticism, I put it in my backpack and said, “I’ll see you next week, then.” I rushed into the grove of redwood trees to heal, to be renewed by the scent of hope.

  Fortunately, that quarter I also enrolled in Chicano literature, and my teacher, a Chicana named Marta Navarro, reminded me of Diana—she was kind and generous and seemed to care genuinely what happened to her students inside and outside of class. Once, I mentioned to Marta the experiences I was having in my creative writing class. “I feel that no one gets my stories.”

  Reyna and Marta

  “Why don’t you let me take a look?” she said. The next time I visited her in her office, I brought her one of my stories. When she finished reading it, she said, “Reyna, your writing reminds me of Juan Rulfo.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Juan Rulfo, as it turned out, was one of the finest Mexican writers of his generation. Marta gave me a Spanish copy of The Burning Plain and Other Stories and Pedro Páramo. “Rulfo writes about nature as something beautiful and powerful, but also as a menace, something that destroys,” Marta said. “The towns he writes about are poor and forsaken, populated by people who are lonely and destitute. He writes about men who leave and don’t return, floods that devastate neighborhoods. These are things you write about, too, Reyna. It isn’t melodrama. It’s your truth.”

  I went home that day and read the books, and when I finished, I felt deeply honored that Marta had compared my work to that of this great writer who had captured, so eloquently, the harsh reality of being poor in Mexico.

  “You write like Tomás Rivera,” Marta said to me another time. She handed me a copy of And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and I went home to read the book about migrant workers in the U.S. living an oppressive life of poverty and limited opportunities. With even more conviction, I continued writing, because one day I hoped to write like those incredible authors that Marta so admired, and who were now influencing my own writing with their simple and elegant prose.

  Thanks to Marta, I remained confident in my work and managed to become impervious to the criticism of my creative writing teacher and peers.

  As the weeks passed, Betty and I fell into a daily routine. We went to our classes, then in the afternoon we were back in our apartment, cooking dinner, going for afternoon walks on campus and planning our future, taking the bus to explore downtown Santa Cruz. We would spend the evenings doing homework.

  When I called my mother, I would say with pride, “She’s doing great. We’re both happy.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I proudly reported to Mago. “I’m looking out for her.”

  When I got her first report card, the worry that had been sitting in my stomach like a rock finally disappeared.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said. Compared to all the previous fails, this report card was an enormous accomplishment. I would say to her the very words I had longed to hear from my father: “You’re doing great!”

  For the first time, things were going smoothly for me, too. I was getting the hang of being a university student, I had my tutoring job on campus that gave me enough extra cash to meet our basic needs, and I was making progress on my collection of stories. We both had a safe and stable home where there were no abusive parents, no one to yell at us or demean us, no one to make us feel like failures. I felt proud of being able to provide that kind of home for my little sister and myself. The best thing I had ever done, I thought, was to come to Santa Cruz and bring Betty along as well.

  One day, as we were walking to our classes, Carolyn asked me about my summer plans. I had just learned that by the end of the spring quarter all students had to vacate their rooms. Most would be going home for the summer. That wasn’t an option for Betty and me. I didn’t know what I was going to do, where we were going to end up. I would need to find a place to sublet. I told Carolyn I didn’t understand why we had to move off campus during the summer.
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  “What about those of us who have nowhere to go?”

  “They do it every year,” she said. “That’s the time when the dorms get repaired. You wouldn’t believe how destructive college students can be!”

  I thought about my room at Kresge East. It was a room that I loved, that Betty and I kept clean and tidy. I didn’t understand why Carolyn said college students were destructive.

  “And speaking of,” she said, “the Kresge Maintenance Department is hiring students for the summer, if you’re interested.”

  “To do what?”

  “For the paint crew. I’ve worked there every summer. We clean and paint the dorms. Get them ready for the new school year. Do you want me to help you get a job?”

  If I had a job, that meant I would be able to support myself and Betty through the summer. “Yes!” I said. “That would be amazing. Thank you.”

  Later that day, when I picked up my mail, there was a letter from Santa Cruz High waiting for me in my box. I didn’t know why—maybe it was intuition—but my stomach started hurting as I picked it up and opened it. Standing there in the mailroom, I felt as if I had just been thrown into the icy waters of Monterey Bay.

  Betty was back to her old habits again. She was ditching her classes.

  “All I want is for you to do well in school, don’t you understand?” I said to Betty when she came home. “That’s all I ask of you. To do your best. Your future depends on it, don’t you see?” I sounded just like my father when he was sober; for one second, I wished he was here with me. But whenever he had said those words to me, I had listened attentively, hung on his every word. Betty, on the other hand, was completely tuning me out. Who knew what she had done to Elizabeth, because the girl staring back at me was the same rebellious, insolent teenager my mother had sent to Mexico.

  “What else do you want?” I asked when she didn’t say anything but just glared at me. “I’m giving you the home our mother never gave you. And all I ask of you is to be responsible and focus on your studies.”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll try harder,” she said. “Lay off me, okay? Do you think it’s easy for me, being here in this new place, trying to make new friends, to fit in with all those white kids at my school who always know the right answer?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s easy, but don’t make it harder than it needs to be, Betty. For both our sakes.”

  The letters continued to arrive. Letters telling me that Betty had missed a class or two. “What do you do? Where do you go?”

  “Nowhere,” she said, and shrugged.

  Then another letter arrived, but this one was from the Campus Housing Office. I was being asked to move out of my apartment or give my sister up. Someone had told on me. I eyed my three roommates with suspicion—including Carolyn, though so far she had been nothing but kind—and wondered who had betrayed me.

  “Mándamela,” my mother said to me when I told her the news of my impending eviction. I knew I had to move out for the summer. I had already made plans for the temporary move off campus, and, thanks to Carolyn, had secured a summer job. Now I would have to move out by the end of the month if I wanted to keep Betty. And for as long as I kept her, that meant I couldn’t return to live on campus, my little paradise.

  “Send her to me,” my mother repeated.

  When I gave Betty the news, her eyes filled with fear. “Don’t send me back to her,” she said. “I don’t want to go back there.” She held on to me and cried, and I cried, too. “Don’t send me away! I’ll stop ditching. I’ll do what you say, Reyna.”

  For days, I struggled with my decision. I couldn’t concentrate in class, and for once I didn’t care that my teacher and the students ripped apart my stories. My heart was being ripped apart as it was. On one hand, there was a part of me that understood I had taken on more than I could handle. But how could I give up on Betty now? If I kept her, though, I would have to give up my campus apartment. I would be a commuter. No more evening walks in the forest. I wouldn’t be able to participate in as many school activities or think of the campus as a true home. I would be a visitor.

  “What are you going to do?” Betty asked when she got back from school one afternoon. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked so scared of being sent back to our mother. It pained me to see her fear. How much abuse had this little girl dealt with from our mother and stepfather?

  Now she was biting the hand that fed her, unable to distinguish the difference between the one who loved her and the one who had mistreated her. I felt an overwhelming desire for her to trust me. I wanted her to know that she mattered to me, that she wasn’t alone. And the truth was, I didn’t want to be alone either.

  She sat on the bed next to me and said, “It’s hard, Reyna.”

  “What’s hard? Help me understand.”

  Betty looked down at the floor. “It isn’t that easy to start somewhere new with the old you still inside you.”

  I sighed and looked out the window. It was my favorite view—a grove of redwood trees was the first thing I had seen every morning in the five months I had been here.

  “We’re moving out,” I said, hugging her close to me. “I’ll find us a room to rent in town.”

  11

  Reyna at Monterey Bay

  WE MOVED INTO the Westcliff Apartments, a block away from Monterey Bay, though we couldn’t see it from the apartment unless we stretched far enough over the balcony to catch a sliver of blue. Our new roommate was named Robert and he was a very nice man, though it was incredibly awkward to share an apartment with a man. I didn’t have much of a choice. March was not a good month to try to find off-campus housing since everything had been taken in the fall. Even though Robert gave us a good deal on the room, the location and the amenities, such as a pool, made the rent a challenge.

  Since I didn’t have a car, Betty and I had to walk the fifteen minutes to the nearest bus stop, on Bay Street, and from there she continued on foot because now the high school was closer to her. For me, it was a new experience to have to take the bus to campus. When the bus passed by Kresge East, I felt a stab of pain at the loss of my former apartment. I hoped that my sacrifice would be worth something.

  But another letter from the high school arrived and, finally, Betty confessed the truth. “I have a boyfriend.”

  My instinct was to tell her no, absolutely no boyfriends allowed. But I remembered my father, and what a tyrant he had been about boyfriends. Mago and I had to sneak around to have them, and I knew that if I forbade Betty a love life, she would find a way to have one anyway. But I remembered that the last time she’d had a boyfriend in L.A., we had ended up at the prenatal clinic.

  “I’ll let you have a boyfriend if you promise to do better in school. And no more ditching to be alone with him. Bring him here when I’m home. He can visit you here where I can see you. Promise me you’ll be responsible.”

  “I will,” she said.

  Soon, Omar started showing up at our apartment after school and on the weekends. He seemed nice enough. What I especially liked about him was that he always showed up with his little sister and brother in tow. He took care of them after school while his mom picked mushrooms at a farm in Pescadero. I liked that he was responsible and was helping his mother. Like me, he was looking out for his younger siblings. I felt relieved that Betty had found a boyfriend who was a good son and brother.

  I finally felt that I could relax and focus on my studies and my writing. Thanks to Marta, I had discovered a writer’s group of Latina students at UCSC, who published a literary journal twice a year called Las Girlfriends. “You should submit your work, join this group,” Marta had said. I was shocked to hear there were aspiring Latina writers on campus though I hadn’t seen them in my writing classes. Perhaps they’d decided to stay away from the program. I submitted a few stories, and it was through Las Girlfriends that I had the opportunity to publish my work and present it in public readings. Best of all, it was wonderfully empowering to be onstage with other Latina artists.<
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  Things were looking up for me at school, and Betty seemed to be more focused on hers. Though we couldn’t walk around campus anymore like we used to, we walked on Westcliff Drive, right along the bay. We looked at the cypress and pine trees which were leaning against the wind, beautiful in their struggle for survival, clinging to the soil with fierce determination. A few of them had been uprooted and lay on the ground, their intricate root system exposed for all to see. Even in their death, they were still beautiful to me. Standing under the lighthouse, Betty and I would watch the surfers and wish we had the courage to try. Betty didn’t know how to swim. I had learned to swim two years before, when I took a class at PCC, and I was an okay swimmer but not strong enough to do battle with unpredictable ocean currents. In Mexico, I had almost drowned in the canal when I was three. My mother found me just in time and pulled me out of the water. My cousin Catalina didn’t have the same luck. She drowned when she was five, during the rainy season, when she had slipped into the raging river. When her body was found, my uncle hung her up by her feet so that the river water would drain out of her. I had never been able to get that image out of my head—the bloated body of my cousin, water seeping out of her mouth and nostrils. I had been afraid of drowning ever since.

  As much as I loved Monterey Bay, I rarely went in.

  During our walks, Betty and I would wander around the Boardwalk even though it was off-season and the roller-coaster rides were still and silent, or we would meander through the streets during dinnertime. The magnificent houses on Westcliff Drive with their giant glass walls facing a sparkling Monterey Bay fascinated us.

  “What kind of jobs do you think people have to be able to afford these awesome houses?” Betty asked. “Do you think we could ever have a house like these?”

  “If we worked hard enough, maybe one day we could,” I said, and I wondered, How many words would I have to write to build my dream house?