juanzqui

Is there a “th” sound in the Spanish language (aside from the weird way Castillian-speaking Spaniards pronounce the letter s)? Most folks would tell you no, and I was one of them until not long ago when I realized there most definitely is a “th” sound, and those of us who speak Spanish use it a lot, without realizing it. It is found in the letter d.

That letter can be pronounced as a hard d, as in ándale or bandera or comprender, but in about half of the cases, it is pronounced as “th”. As in madre, which is most often pronounced mathre.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I am not an expert on the Spanish language. In fact, even though it was my first language and I spoke and thought and dreamt in Spanish until sometime in my 20s, I have never really studied the language (high school Spanish doesn’t count). I have talked to no experts about this. Neither have I done any studying on the subject. So, what you are reading here comes from my personal observations. And it’s entirely possible that I’m full of mierda 

So, what determines when you use the d sound and when you use the th sound? Placement, it seems. Look at the examples I cited above. If the “d” comes after a vowel, or is between two vowels, it’s pronounced th. In “ándale,” the d follows a consonant. In “madre,” the d comes after a vowel, and in “estado,” the d is between two vowels.

But not all consonants call for a hard d. The word mierda is pronounced miertha, for instance. 

Originally, I had written that if the d comes at the beginning of a sentence, it more often than not is pronounced as a hard d. “Dame la mano,” for instance. Or “Dios te bendiga.” But the more I think about it, the more I realize that is not necessarily so. The d could just as easily be pronounced as th in both cases.

You can even have both pronunciations in a single word. Like “dedo” (finger) or dedicación. You pronounce them detho and dethicación. There’s an exeption here: if the article that precedes the word ends in a vowel, both d’s are pronounced “th.” Una thethicación.  Ese thetho.

Of course, there are always exceptions. The word doctor, for instance, is pronounced either doctor or thoctor. It’s “el doctor” and “la thoctora.” But I bet you nobody would notice if you say “el thoctor.” And if you’re addressing a female doctor, you’d probable say, “Doctora …”

There may be other unwritten rules or exceptions to those rules, but I can’t come up with any.

What is fascinating about this is that it is not something that is taught. Spanish-speakers seem to just automatically pick it up and figure out how to pronounce the letter on their own. It is absorbed, like osmosis. Which is why many non-native Spanish speakers, as good as they are with languages, have a difficult time sounding like a native speaker. I’ve known some non-native speakers who have spent years becoming experts in Spanish, learning the vocabulary and perfecting their accents. Yet, because they never understand some of the intricacies of the language, they will never sound like native speakers.

Next time, children, we’ll explore the b and v sounds in Spanish. Thanks for being so attentive.

(Recently, the San Marcos newspaper for which I worked a number of years, The Hays County Citizen, was digitalized by the San Marcos Public Library. I haven’t had a chance to read much of what is there, but this column, written on my 30th birthday, caught my eye. I thought I’d share it as I near by 77th birthday.)

TODAY IS MY 30th birthday. I don’t know how it happened but there it is. 

(Isn’t that a nice line? I wish I’d come up with it, but I stole it from John Steinbeck, who used it on his 60th birthday.)

If there is anything I feel on this first day of my 31st year on this earth, it is a disappointment. Not at my life, but at the fact that I have not changed at all now that I am 30. I was under the impression that at 30, one went through a radical change in lifestyle, philosophy and action.

Not so. I’m still me. And even though I am disappointed that there have been no changes, I am glad I still am me. For, you see, I like myself the way I was before I turned 30, and I do believe I would like to stay that way, at least for another 30 years.

What is there to like about myself, you may ask. To start with, I think I have been extremely lucky, especially over these last 10 years, when it comes to jobs, friends and things accomplished. 

I have not had to suffer or sacrifice much, or at least not as much as others, in getting to this point in my life. I have yet to have had to struggle to get my job and my friends. And, despite my arrogance and pettiness, the friends I have acquired have stuck with me. I don’t deserve them and they don’t deserve me, but there they are. 

That is a good feeling.

I GOT INTO newspapering rather by accident and I have learned to love it and the people with whom I have been associated in that field, and despite occasional feelings of self-doubt and restlessness, I feel I belong here, and that too is a good feeling. 

I have a good feeling about my family, both my natural family and the other people who have become members of the secondary family. They are loosely connected, and some of them are far away, but they are members of my family nonetheless. 

Nearly every day I hear stories of families where there is nothing but constant bickering and backbiting. I find that hard to accept because in my family all the fighting was done when we were kids, when fighting was what was expected of us and when it was fun. We don’t do that anymore.

While it was my immediate family that provided me with the love and nourishment necessary to go out into the world with a healthy mind and healthy attitude, it has been members of my acquired family who have provided me with something that is just as important: the confidence necessary to survive and compete in this world. 

I wish I could name all of them, but they know who they are and I hope that they will feel that what they helped create was not a monster, but rather a loving, caring person whose ultimate purpose was to make his world better. 

AS FOR accomplishments, I won’t deceive myself into thinking I have been important to this world. But I know I have mattered in some people’s lives, and that too makes me feel good. I do not wish to overestimated my own importance, but I also hate fake humility. Damn it, I have done some good in this world, especially in this community.

If nothing else I have acted as a lightning rod and a catalyst in the struggle for equality in San Marcos. My willingness to expose my feelings and leave myself open for ridicule and contempt have helped the lives of a few other people by making them realize their similar feelings are legitimate and important. Nothing has given me more pleasure than to have somebody come up to me and say, “Yes, you said it exactly as it is, thank you.”

I know I will never be a great columnist, but the people I care about the most know what I’m talking about, and that’s all that matters. My sentences may be a little crude, not quite as flowery as those of others, but people know what I mean. Considering that when I started out in the public school system, I had no idea what the English language was about, you must admit I have done well.

BUT WHAT I’M most proud of is that even though my body has begun the process called aging, my mind, my spirit, my soul, my heart – whatever you want to call it –  is still young. Perhaps too young, some might say, but I would rather be child-like forever if that means keeping my ability to become excited about the insignificant things in life, and if it means never becoming a grump. 

A man who would rather read a newspaper while in the car instead of enjoying the beauty of the countryside is a dead man, as is a man who would rather sleep in an airplane instead of looking out the window at the earth below to the clouds around him – and one who is afraid to cry or laugh or show his emotions in any manner.

If I can keep my enthusiasm over the small things for the rest of my life, then I know I will live a happy live a happy life forever.

My hope for the coming years is that I remain very much an alive man and that I retain my ability to laugh and cry. And feel – really feel – for other people. And that I can retain all my friends and gain new ones, and that someday I will be able to offer them as much as they give me.

(I was going through some old emails and found this bit in a long 2010 missive to a friend.)

I’M AT A Houston airport restaurant, sipping on a Cuba libre as I wait for my flight home to Washington to board.

It’s already 45 minutes late so this is not my first drink.

A cell phone rings nearby.

A woman sitting two tables away from me picks up her phone and listens. 

“You can’t be serious!” she finally gasps.

There is panic mixed with anxiety in her voice

“What happened?” she demands.  

“That is not supposed to happen,” she says after a while. By now she is practically screaming.  

“That is so wrong – so, so wrong!” 

Another lengthy pause. 

“OK, here’s what you do, honey,” she says. 

She’s apparently figured it out and her voice is now calmer, as if she’s decided the emergency can only be taken care of with serene firmness. 

“Now, pay attention; this is important,” she says. 

In my mind I can see and hear a surgeon on the phone with a medic out in some remote area, offering instructions on how to remove a bullet lodged in some poor innocent victim’s guts.

I stare at the woman, wondering what her next words will be.

“You go to the Domino’s website and you go to the very top of the page and you click on ‘Coupons’…”

Problem solved.

I only read eight non-fiction books this year. Of those, by far my favorite was Solito by Javier Zamora. I read it first for a book review I wrote and then I went back and listened to it in audio because he did the narration and I wanted to hear him utter those sentences that captivated me. I was not disappointed. 

As I wrote yesterday, Solito is a well-written and compelling memoir by Zamora, a poet, detailing his months-long journey from his home in El Salvador to California to join his parents. He was 9 years old and  travelled alone, with no other family members.

My other favorite non-fiction books:

• Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, by Andrew Kirtzman, listed by the New Yorker as one of the best books of the year.  Although Kirtzman (a former Houston Post reporter) is a dear friend, I hesitated to read this book. I didn’t want to risk having to read something redeeming about Giuliani. My hatred for the former New York mayor is that intense, that deep. I am so happy I read it, for this book offers the reader a stark portrait of a corrupt, immoral two-bit politician. 
• Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff. There’s been a lot written about this sad era in American politics, but this fresh new look offers a lot that I didn’t know, and Graff’s style of writing is compelling. 
• Chasing History by Carl Bernstein. I really enjoyed this book by former Washington Post reporter Bernstein. It wasn’t that he has much new to say about Watergate. It’s what he writes about his young days as a reporter, starting at the Washington Star. I don’t mean to in any way compare my journalistic career to Bernstein’s but newsrooms are newsrooms they are all great sources for compelling stories. Good newsroom storytelling like this is addictive.
• Somewhere We Are Human, edited by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guiñansaca. I’ll let Goodreads tell you about it: “A collection of 35 bold, important, and groundbreaking essays and poems by migrants, refugees and Dreamers—including award-winning writers, artists, and activists—that illuminate what it is like living undocumented today.” Powerful essays.

The other non-fiction books I read this year: Atlas of the Heart (Brené Brown), Happy-Go-Lucky (David Sedaris) and Regarding the Pain of Others (Susan Sontag).

Poetry:

I also read a lot of poetry books this year. so many I didn’t keep track of them. Many were good. Some were very good. A handful were very, very good. One stood out, reached out and grabbed my heart (it still hasn’t let go): These Trees, Those, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara, who teaches at the University of Houston and is one of my favorite poets. A kind and generous soul, he is. The book has gotten numerous rave reviews. Here is the latest, from the Los Angeles Times.

WITH ONLY a few days before the new year arrives, it is time to let you know which books I enjoyed the most this year. As if you gave a hoot!

There were a lot of books released this year, many of them very, very good. I read or listened (mostly listened) to 36 books. Twenty-eight of them were fiction. I know non-fiction books are valuable, but I’m at a stage in life where I choose entertainment over education. Actually, the truth is that I’ve always preferred to read about made-up people in a made-up world.

Two of the books I consumed this year (Como Agua Para Chocolate and Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra) I had read before. I re-read them because my Spanish book club chose them. I had also already read Solito and even though it was a book-club selection, I listened to it because I wanted to. It’s that good!

In fact, Solito topped the list of my favorite books this year, fiction and non-fiction. It’s a well-written and compelling memoir by the poet Javier Zamora detailing his months-long journey from his home in El Salvador to California, where he joined his parents. He was 9 years old and  travelled with strangers, who were to become like a family to him.

Not all the books on my list were published this year. My second-favorite book, Apeirogon by my new favorite writer, Colum McCann, was published in 2020. Had it not been given to me as a Christmas present last year, I may have missed it. I had never heard of him.

“Goodreads” has this to say about Apeirogon: “an epic novel rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss.” It continues: “McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate, and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our time.”

MY OTHER favorite fiction works of the year were (in no particular order):

• Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra. The NYTimes called Zambra “a writer of startling talent,” and he is (although I was not as enthralled by a more recent novel, Bonzai). This book made it into a number of best-of-the-year lists. According to Goodreads, Chilean Poet is Zambra’s “most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family.”
• Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski. From Goodreads: Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut.
• Young Mungo by Douglas Stewart. Goodreads: Mungo and James are born under different stars –Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic – and they should be sworn enemies… Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong … 
• In the Distance by Hernan Diaz: This is a much better, and much more fun, book than Diaz’s latest novel, Trust, which has gotten a lot of praise. Goodreads: A Swedish boy finds himself penniless and alone in California. He travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the west. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend.
• Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty: If you’re a fan of “Reservation Dogs,” you’ll love this short-story collection. Goodreads: Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the 21st century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
• A Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande: Thoroughly enjoyable. Goodreads: A Long Petal of the Sea meets Cold Mountain in this sweeping historical saga following a Mexican army nurse and an Irish soldier who must fight, at first for their survival and then for their love, amidst the atrocity of the Mexican-American War.

HERE ARE all the books of fiction I read this year, listed in alphabetical order:

1. A Ballad of Love and Glory     Reyna Grande
2. Amor y Otros Demonios         Gabriel García Márquez
3. Apeirogon                               Colum McCann
4. Bonzai                                     Alejandro Zambra
5. Chilean Poet                            Alejandro Zambra
6. Como Agua Para Chocolate**Laura Esquivel
7. Demon Copperhead               Barbara Kingsolver
8. The Devil Takes You Home     Gabino Iglesias
9. Dos Crimenes  *                      Jorge Ibargüengoitia
10. Fishing the Sloe-Black River    Colum McCann
11. French Braid                           Ann Tyler
12. Harlem Shuffle*                      Colson Whitehead
13. Hola Papi                                 John Paul Brammer
14. In the Distance                        Hernán Díaz
15. L.A. Weather                           María Amparo Escandón
16. The Last Chairlift                     John Irving
17. Let the Great World Spin        Colum McCann
18. Less Is Lost                              Andrew Sean Greer
19. My Name is Lucy Barton*       Elizabeth Strout
20. Night of the Living Rez            Morgan Talty
21. Portrait of an Unknown Lady María Gainza
22. Swimming in the Dark            Tomasz Jedrowski
23. The Town of Babylon              Alejandro Varela
24. Trust                                        Hernán Díaz
25. Venice Beach*                        William Mark Habeeb
26. El Viaje del Elefante                José Saramago
27. Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra**  Tomás Rivera
28. Young Mungo                         Douglas Stuart

*Print

**Re-read

***Print and audio

Solito, A Memoir, by Javier Zamora (Hogarth, 381 pp)

By Juan R. Palomo

[Note: this review is being published by “Voices de la Luna,” a San Antonio literary magazine]

AS A YOUNG boy growing up in his grandparents’ home in La Herradura, a Salvadoran fishing village, Javier Zamora dreams of flying over mountains. His destination: a land where everything is new, garbage is collected by trucks, water comes out of silver faucets, and it snows the whitest snow.

In his dreams, he joins his parents in “la USA,” where they show him their living room, swimming pool and other American luxuries. He pictures himself cuddling between his parents in clean sheets, and he dreams of eating orange sherbet. 

He also has bad dreams, including one about growing a beard with his parents still gone.

Zamora’s father and mother are in Northern California, two of the thousands of Salvadorans who made their way north in the aftermath of the bloody U.S.-funded civil war of the 1980s. His father left when Zamora is still a toddler and he has no memory of him; pretty much all he knows about him is that he sounds nice over the phone, his voice soft “like a sharp stone skipping over water.”

 “There was a war and then there were no jobs,” is how his aunt Mali explains his parents’ absence to Tontito, as his grandmother calls him. It’s a word he likes because it sounds “like rain slipping through holes in our roof.”

Zamora’s fear of growing a beard before seeing his parents does not become a reality. In 1999 – four years after his mother had made the journey to California to join her husband, promising the 5-year-old Javier she would be back for him – Zamora begins his own journey north in the care of Marcelo, a family friend, and Don Dago, a coyote.

The plan was that it would take them a couple of weeks to travel – with other Don Dago clients – through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, and that he would cross the border at Tijuana, where his parents would pick him up. 

But plans do what plans often do – they change – and he ends up crossing instead in the Arizona Sonoran Desert. On foot. Three times. And by the time the 9-year-old is at last reunited with his parents, nine weeks have gone by.

Zamora, whose 2017 book of poems, Unaccompanied, garnered widespread acclaim, has no idea how harrowing his journey will be, nor how long. His mother had told him about her own relatively quick trip to cross the border. Her use of the word cruzar, invokes in his mind images of a fence made up of hundreds of little crosses.

In his new book, Solito, A Memoir, Zamora provides the account of his experience that Unaccompanied, because of its format as a book of poetry, could only hint at. It fills in the blanks.

Long before Zamora is finally picked up by his parents at a Phoenix safe house, both Don Dago and Marcelo have disappeared and he is left to fend for himself. Until he hooks up with three fellow travelers: Chino (whom Zamora comes to regard as the older brother he never had), Patricia and her daughter Carla. These three are to become Javier’s traveling family, providing assistance, companionship and compassion. 

ZAMORA DEDICATES the book to his temporary family. 

“I wouldn’t be here without you,” he writes. He probably wouldn’t, for the book is replete with account after account of how his adopted family helps shepherd him along when his quest seems utterly hopeless. 

Solito offers many stories. Some are humorous:  the Salvadorans’ awkward attempts to speak like Mexicans (“practicing my Mexicanness”) to avoid the Mexican hostility towards Central Americans; learning the meaning of a new English word that sounds like faak; and Zamora’s amusing himself by naming trees in the monotonous desert based on their looks: Lonelies. Spikeys. Fuzzies.

Some are moving. A Latino U.S. border patrolman takes pity on the group and, instead of detaining them, drives them back to the border, where he releases them, allowing them to try crossing again a few days later. And there’s the touching scene of Chino carrying an exhausted Zamora on his back during one particularly treacherous desert hike.

The most harrowing passages describe the group’s being held up, at gunpoint, by Mexican soldiers, and the hikes across the unforgiving desert, lost, without water or food, and constantly on the lookout for snakes, la migra, angry ranchers ­– and angrier bees. 

More than anything, this book is about family: family left behind, family waiting at the other end of the line, and the family that sustained Zamora along the long journey.

In one of the most poignant passages, Zamora describes the early-morning departure of his “pretend family” for Virginia after they finally make it across the border: 

“I think I watched them leave. The room was dark, a lot of people standing up with their backpacks, waiting in line. Patricia kissed my forehead. Chino combed my hair. ‘The van is here,’ they both said. ‘Salú,” Carla waved at me. Then they each hugged me one by one. The door closed, and I closed my eyes and slept. I thought it was a dream.” 

For seven of the nine weeks he is on the road, his family does not hear from Zamora, nor of him. Everyone fears he is dead and so relatives at both ends pray for his soul. The fear of death is always constant on the journey, as is the fear of being jailed, robbed or killed by men with badges on both sides of the border. Zamora describes his brief time in an Arizona immigration jail as like being in a cage, “a monkey with at least twenty-one other monkeys.”

Yet, there is also humor, even in the direst of moments, offering temporary relief from reality.

“Rest,” a coyote tells Zamora’s group as they stop to rest before crossing the border. “Tomorrow you’ll be gringos.”

The author describes his unforgettable journey in intricate detail. This is a fascinating book; one readers will find it hard to set aside. And it might force them, as it did me, to look with a different perspective at stories of immigrants found dead in the desert or in unvented trailers, for Solito reintroduces the human factor that is often missing from the immigration saga as it has become just one more political football. 

ZAMORA IS FIRST and foremost a poet and his talent shines through in practically every page. For instance, in describing the riveting scene of the immigrant party’s cramming into a van for the final trip from their desert pickup point to the safe house, Zamora writes:

                                    We look like a matchbox

                                    Sticks on top of each other.

                                    A human cake.

When the reality that his long saga will soon be over hits Zamora, he becomes concerned that without Chino, Patricia and Carla as witnesses, no one will believe what he went through. 

“No one else will understand the bees in the desert,” he thinks. “The flying fish, that fried fish in Acapulco, getting dragged out of the bus, learning what faak means.”

Zamora needn’t worry. Countless news accounts have made us way too familiar with the horrors undocumented immigrants endure in their quest for a new life in this country. This evocative, skillfully crafted narrative is all the witness he needs.  

Juan R. Palomo is a former columnist for The Houston Post and USA TODAY. His poetry chapbook, Al Norte, was published in 2021 by Alabrava Press. 

THE FIRT TIME I ever went to Eagle Pass, Texas, I was a third-grader. I joined all the other students from my school who’d tested positive for TB on a school bus for the 45-mile trip to an old hangar in an abandoned Air Force base. There, a giant X-ray machine (at least it seemed that way) would scan our small bodies and decide if we had TB or not.

Getting on that bus was the loneliest action I had ever taken. I felt like an outcast. If I had known then what a leper was, I would have felt like one. If I had known then about the Holocaust, I would have felt like a Jew being shipped off to a concentration camp aboard a rail car. I felt worse than what I imagined the students who periodically were found to have lice on their heads and treated with a white powder on their hair.

That I was with about 30 or 40 other students mattered little. I was still an outcast. It was likely that I felt that way because nobody else in my immediate family had tested positive for TB, but at that point in my early life, I wasn’t into analyzing the emotions that gripped my heart.

I was already feeling bad — different – because, as I wrote in a previous post, that year was the first year I had been required to go to the El Campo school. That was not the name of the school. It was known as Airport 2 School, because it was near the airport (why bother coming up with a real name for a school attended by Mexicans?), but we called it that because the school had it’s beginning as one of several schools built during World War II in a camp for the Japanese-American and German-American kids who had been forced to move to South Texas with their families (some of the Japanese families were from South America).

When the war ended, the government turned over the camp — including it’s airport and schools — to the city and school district. This particular school became a junior high school until the late 50s when a new junior high was built and the school became another elementary school for Mexican kids, particularly those from migrant families.

The school I felt I should be attending was Grammar School, which was about four blocks from my home. That was where my two sisters (one and three years older than I) went to school and that was the school I always assumed I would attend after I left DeZavala, the school for first and “pre-primer” grades. Pre-primer was like kindergarten for the Mexican kids who did not know English when they turned 6. It was the grade during which we were supposed to learn enough English to enter the first grade.

Grammar School was also the school that housed all the Anglo elementary students. Each grade got a certain number of teachers at the beginning of the year and as the Mexican migrant kids from our neighborhood returned from the northern states, they were allowed to enroll in a class at Grammar until each class filled up. In the second grade, I was lucky enough to be one of those students who were able to get a place in one of the Grammar classes (Mrs. Busby was my teacher).

But when we returned from North Dakota the next year and I went to Grammar, fully expecting to join one of the third-grade classes, I was turned away. I would have to go to the Airport School, the all-Mexican, mostly migrant school at the other end of town. It was a traumatic rejection for me. It meant that I would be separated from my sisters and most of my neighborhood playmates and would have to walk more than a mile each day across town.

Even at that early age I recognized that Airport was an inferior school. Unlike the solid brick building that housed Grammar, the Airport classrooms were in drafty wood-frame buildings. The playgrounds were either a desert of bare dirt or a sea of sticky mud.

To make matters worse, that year was the year that school officials decided there were too many students at Airport and they had to send some of us to the old junior high, which they now called Airport 2 (the other became Airport 1).

So I was already feeling like an outcast. I — who had always been the good boy, who had always followed the rules, who had never caused any trouble — was now somehow being punished, sent into exile far, far from my home.

I’m happy to report that the feeling of being an outcast didn’t last very long. It was only a matter of time before I became inured to the idea of getting up earlier than my sisters so I could get to school in time, to not being able to go home for lunch, to walking and running across a muddy (or, more often than not, dusty) field filled with thick mesquite brush, to try to get to the high school in time to hop on the bus that hauled the rural kids to their homes  before it departed for its next stop, Grammar School. Getting on that bus meant getting home at least half an hour earlier, and about a mile less walking. I didn’t always succeed, but I always tried, and every time I hopped on that bus, driven by Don Chema (who was also the high school janitor), I would have done a high five had high fives been invented back then.

I made friends at Airport 2. There was a kid named Raul Reyes, who lived about six or seven blocks from my home and became sort of my best friend. He was a stud, even in third grade. He combed his hair like Elvis and he would sing You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog and Blue Suede Shoes at our class parties, complete with the hip swivels and snarling lips. The girls loved him and the rest of us envied him. His family eventually decided to stay in Wisconsin year-round and I lost track of him. There were others. Dora Mata, who dressed and acted like some girl out of “Grease,” and who was very popular with all the boys but not so popular with the girls. There was Olga Guerrero, a tall, tall girl. She didn’t care about fancy dresses or girly hairdos and thus she was treated as a weirdo.

Dora and Olga were rivals. They were always getting into fights and vowing to meet each other after school to duke it out. The word would get out and as soon as the final bell rang, throngs of blood-thirsty students from every classroom swarmed around Dora and Olga as they headed down the dirt road towards town. I don’t remember there ever actually fighting, but the excitement of a possible fight was all we needed.

I liked both girls, but I was  partial to Olga. First, because she was a Guerrero, daughter of Juan Guerrero, who took his family every summer to the same town in North Dakota to work in the sugar beet fields. As such, Olga was like family. Secondly, because Olga, in her gangly, unsexy way, was seen as an outcast, and nowhere near as popular as the flirty Dora. Even at that early age, I was always – always – for the underdog.

One day, somebody drew a picture on the blackboard of a monster-looking character while Mr. Davenport, our third-grade teacher (funny: for years, I have not been able to remember his name until now, as I am writing this, his name pops into my head). We all found it funny. Then Dora yelled, “Olga,” meaning that the monster represents Olga. Immediately, Olga replied in an equally loud voice, “Dora.”

The next time Dora called out Olga’s name, a few more voices joined her. When Olga responded, it was only her voice that was heard. And each time the routine was repeated, more voices joined Dora until it became a boisterous chorus shouting, “Olga,” and only a defiant Olga declaring, “Dora.”

I had kept quiet throughout until I felt I couldn’t sit by any longer and the next time Olga said, “Dora,” my timid voice joined her. And it continued that way, two against thirty or so, until Mr. Davenport came back.

Dora never held it against me. I think she understood. Olga never said anything about it.

I STARTED THIS by writing about a bus ride to a strange town to get find out if I had tuberculosis. You should understand the significance of TB at that time. It was still very much a public health threat. One of my father’s younger brothers had died of TB in the mid-1940s, leaving his wife with six children to feed. In the mid-50s, one of their older children was found to have TB and he was taken from his family to a sanitarium in San Angelo, where he spent I don’t know how many years. Several years later, his youngest sister was also taken away.

So you can understand why it was a terrifying disease: not because I had any idea what it did to one’s body, but because I feared that if I turned out to actually have the disease, it was possible that I too would be hauled off to a faraway hospital for years and years, away from my family and my neighborhood and my school.  Of all my siblings, I was the only one who ever tested positive whenever those TB patch tests were administered, and it was only I who would have to be X-rayed to prove my innocence.

I often wondered what would happened if I were sent to San Angelo or some similar place. My cousins would send home pictures of themselves in the hospital, wearing pajamas and robes. I had never owned a pair of pajamas in my life (underwear and a T-shirt was all I ever needed; why waste good money on pajamas?), and in a way, I envied them. I fantasized about living in a world with indoor toilets and no working in the fields every summer, a world where I would wear pajamas and a robe – and I would try to convince myself that maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

I’d soon snap out of it, though, because I thought of my mother and thought about how her heart would be totally, completely, irrevocably broken – shattered — if I were taken away from her. I often wondered how my aunt was able to go on with her life with two of her children far away, unable to visit them except maybe once or twice a year. I loved my aunt and was close to her, but she was a stoic, solid person. She never betrayed her emotions. At least not to me. I never asked her.

So, if you’ve read this far (and I thank you for that, if you have), you’ve pretty much figured out that this post is about the fear of alienation, about being scared of being torn away from family and community. And you’re probably wondering (I know I am), if this dread is such a major part of me, why is it that I have spent most of my adult life tearing myself away from family and communities of friends?

The hell if I know. (One of the first columns I wrote for The Houston Post was about this. I’ll try to dig it up and post it here.)

(The first few paragraphs of this post were written in November, when I went home for Thanksgiving and I joined my sisters and various nieces on a trip to Eagle Pass for a movie. I was in the back seat of a car, looking out the window and suddenly the memory of that first trip to that town came to me, and so I took out my iPhone and started writing. Thank you, Steve Jobs.)

Note: I wrote this 11 years ago but I posted on an earlier blog. I thought it would be a good idea to migrate it here, where it belongs. If you’ve read this far, thank you.

 

THE MONTH of May summons many images. Mother’s Day. Cinco de Mayo. Graduation. But any Catholic will tell you the real significance of the month: May is the Virgin Mary’s month.

During May, Catholics gather – in their churches, at people’s homes – to recite the rosary in honor of Mary. It is an especially big deal among Latinos, who revere Mary almost as much as God Himself. 

When I was growing up in Crystal City, my sisters and I would go to church every weekday evening for the rosary. It was supposed to be voluntary, and I guess it was, in the sense that paying taxes is voluntary. If we didn’t go, we had to answer to the nuns and to our parents.

When she was alive, my grandmother Manuela insisted we attend the rosary, sometimes at her house, but after she died, I don’t think my mother ever forced us to do so. We were all so caught up with the many mysterious rituals of the church that we would have gone without any pressure. And it was a beautiful ritual, involving many sounds, smells and sights. The burning candles and the flowers provided the smells. The sounds came from the chant-like recitations of the prayers that made up the rosary. “Dios te salve, Maria…,” the priest would begin the first part of the Hail Mary prayer.” “Santa Maria, madre de Dios…,” we responded with the second part. After 10 of these, we’d recite the Gloria followed by the Lord’s Prayer. We then begin another set of 10 Hail Marys, except that this time the people said their first part in the priest responded with the second. 

The praying itself could get terribly monotonous and much of the time most of us kids paid little attention to what we were mumbling. Often what emerged from my mouth with mere gibberish. This was particularly true at the end of the Hail Mary when “now and at the hour of our death” – which in Spanish is, “ahora y en la hora,” often came out sounding like a never ending rumble: “orainalorainlaora…”

Because the building was not air conditioned, its doors had to be left open, allowing bats to fly in. They fluttered back and forth from one end of the church to the other period. We would watch them, much of the priest’s consternation, our heads swaying in unison as we followed their paths through the air.

As we recited our Hail Marys, we were supposed to keep track on the rosary beads we’d received when we made our First Communion, but I was never able to concentrate. No matter how hard I tried, I was always one or two off.

WHILE THE praying itself was monotonous, what came in between the misterios – the sets of 10 Hail Marys – made everything worthwhile. That was when we kids marched up the aisle with a handful of flowers and deposited them at the foot of the statue of the Virgin. As we did this, the congregation sang one of the various songs dedicated to Mary.

Ofreciéndole flores a la virgen, we called it – offering flowers to the virgin. Each of us was responsible for bringing flowers from home. We carried those precious flowers proudly as we walked toward the church, and we beamed when the neighborhood ladies, sitting on their front porches, oohed and aahed over their beauty, and marveled at our devotion to the Virgin. At first, we were allowed to carry those flowers to Mary. Later, however some do-gooder nun got the bright idea of pooling all the flowers into one big pile, from which we were each handed a handful as we begin our procession up the aisle.

The scheme was intended to ensure that all the children, even those whose mothers didn’t have gardens, would have flowers, but my sisters and I thought it was grossly unfair that the beautiful roses my mother had carefully cut from her precious bushes ended up in some other kids’ hands while we had to settle for oleander or other ordinary flowers. 

IT WASN’T fair, of course, but by then we had learned never to question the actions of the nuns, or anybody in authority, and we had learned to accept that fairness and religion often don’t coexist. Besides, in our hearts we were certain the Virgin Mary knew who brought those beautiful roses, and that was what really mattered.

(This piece was published originally in The Houston Post May 13, 1993)

THE LENTEN SEASON never fails to evoke strong memories of my grandfather. My father’s father was a big man. At least that’s the way I remember him. He had dark skin and white hair. He sported a broad, drooping mustache.

He didn’t drink or smoke cigarettes, although he did enjoy a cigar every once in a while. When he was not working, he would read the newspaper or pray, using his prayer book or his rosary. Alejandro Palomo was a carpenter. He built his own house and then built a house for each of his children, working alone, with only occasional help for his sons and grandsons. He didn’t own a vehicle, so it was not unusual to see him walking from the downtown lumber yard, about a mile away, carrying several two-by-fours on his shoulder.

He was not the easiest person to work for. He demanded perfection, and he ridiculed us when he feared joining him on a rooftop. He muttered obscenities under his breath when we bent a nail or hit our thumbs with the hammer. His biggest thrill was to ask us for a particular tool and have us hand him another tool (we never could remember their names), giving him another opportunity to ridicule us. 

“Muchacho tarugo,” he would always say. I never knew what the tarugo meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good. He lived in a small house behind Tío Adrián’s, which was next door to ours. He lived alone after my grandmother died in the early 1950s. Every morning, we kids were expected to go over to pay our respects, which consisted of saying, “buenos días,” and kissing his leathery brown hand. 

In addition to his carpentry work, my grandfather was also a caretaker of the local church. One of his duties there was to tug on the thick rope hanging from the steeple to ring the bell that would signal all over the town that mass was about to begin. He did it 30 and 15 minutes before mass, and the final time at the allotted hour period that meant he had to be there every morning at 6:30 or for the 7 a.m. mass. 

Late in the afternoon, he’d walk back to the church to lock it up. On his way back, he’d come to our house and sat down at the kitchen table where my sister Dora (he always asked for Dora) would serve him a cup of coffee with lots of sugar and milk. He’d drink it quietly then walk out. “Cierren la puerta porque hace frío,” he’d tell us. Or, if it wasn’t cold: “Porque hay zancudos.”

DURING LENT, Dora, my other sister Carmen, and I would go to daily mass as part of our seasonal “sacrifice.” Because it was dark at that hour, my mother insisted we walk with my grandfather, even if it meant we had to leave home more than half an hour ahead of time. We had to be prepared to leave when he was, because he did not like to wait. After we got the good mornings out of the way, we said nothing we simply followed him, single file, all the way to the church, about a mile away.

We must have been quite a sight. There were no paved streets or sidewalks back then, not in the Mexican part of town, so we’d raise a huge cloud of whitish dust as we stumbled in the dark (there was no streetlights either). While we made little noise – it was usually too cold to talk talk – the dogs along the way greeted us with loud barks and that caused those who were already awake to peer out their windows to see what was happening. I often wondered what these people thought of us, of this old man in the three young children trudging along down the dusty streets.

 When we got to the church, he would grunt something that I interpreted to mean, “OK, I brought you here, you’re on your own,” and went about his business. After mass, we’d go off to school and he’d stay behind. And we’d repeat the scene every day until the end of lent. 

MY GRANDFATHER never joined the migrant trail with us. One summer, however, my aunt decided to go to California, and she talked him into going with her family. They were all picking plums in an orchard outside San Jose when my grandfather reached for a tree, grasped it, then closed his eyes and died. He’d had a heart attack. 

We were in North Dakota that summer. I remember we were lying in bed when Tía Ester came to our door with the news. Tío Adrián, her husband had gotten the call from California. Nobody said anything after my mother thanked her. We stayed in bed. There was no point in getting up. Besides, we had to get up early for work the next morning. The only sounds of mourning I heard were a few almost-silent sobs coming from where my mother lay. 

They buried him in California.

The next Lenten season, we started our daily-mass ritual anew. We were old enough to walk to church alone by then. And we didn’t have to leave that early anymore. We should have felt better, but it was never really the same. When we were about halfway to church, we’d hear the clanging of the church bell and we were reminded that it was somebody else pulling on that rope. Alejandro Palomo lived a simple life dedicated to his family, his community and his God. He is a good man to remember during the season of selflessness.

(This was first published, in a slightly different form, in The Houston Post March 10, 1992)