by Jose Orduna
“José Orduña’s book violates—in a most exciting way—a number of literary borders: the political essay is enclosed within a novel; tough political observation is enlivened suddenly by a rush of metaphor or lush detail from the poet’s eye; finally, humor and pathos meet on the page ‘without papers.’ Here is an exuberant, outlaw literary style that is the mix of several and that exactly matches the many ironies of being—and not quite ever being—a North American.”
—RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, AUTHOR OF Brown: The Last Discovery of America
“José Orduña’s wonderfully wry, insightful, and beautiful debut is as deft as they come in nonfiction. The Weight of Shadows teeters on that dangerous nexus of race, class, and identity in American culture, charging through its subject matter with exhilarating confidence in order to bring us a mix of reportage, history, and autobiography that ultimately coalesces into a meditation on the physical, psychic, and aesthetic boundaries that taunt, challenge, and sometimes even inspire us all.”
—JOHN D’AGATA, AUTHOR OF Halls of Fame: Essays
“A beautifully written, insightful memoir that examines questions of citizenship and immigration with compassion, integrity, and fearlessness. The Weight of Shadows is an outstanding debut that instantly places Orduña among the ranks of literature’s best new talent.”
—JERALD WALKER, AUTHOR OF Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption
“In this timely and remarkably crafted work, José Orduña skillfully weaves personal memoir with deeply researched facts to reveal the disquieting truths no citizen of conscience can afford to ignore. A powerful meditation on the fraught road to naturalization, The Weight of Shadows awakens us to the privileges and burdens of Americanness and the troubling and often-dehumanizing abuses suffered by those in the ‘shadows.’”
—SHULEM DEEN, AUTHOR OF All Who Go Do Not Return
“José Orduña has written a provocative and insightful work that is destined to introduce a new form to the world of creative nonfiction. We have faith in his facts and Orduña essays us into a position of activism, documentation, and nuanced storytelling. The Weight of Shadows opens new pathways toward understanding the repercussions of our immigration policies, a counter-narrative to our media-skewed perceptions of a human rights issue that has no border. Orduña’s hybrid approach to narrative employs the urgency of fiction, an investigative, reportorial eye, and a sublime, bilingual lyricism. This memoir will no doubt be required reading for years to come.”
—WILLIE PERDOMO, AUTHOR OF The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
THE WEIGHT OF SHADOWS
A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement
José Orduña
BEACON PRESS
BOSTON
For Yolanda and Martín,
and for all those who refuse to live as shadows
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
Imaginary Lines
CHAPTER 2
Martín y Yoli
CHAPTER 3
Biometrics
CHAPTER 4
La Soledad de Octavio
CHAPTER 5
A Civilized Man
CHAPTER 6
Good Moral Character
CHAPTER 7
Ceremony
CHAPTER 8
Friendship Park, USA
CHAPTER 9
Passport to the New West
CHAPTER 10
Disappearing Act
CHAPTER 11
Streamline
Acknowledgments
Notes
CHAPTER 1
Imaginary Lines
Toward the tail end of the evening rush where Octavio and I work, three large men with sharp faces come through the back door. They move tactically, tracing a straight line through the dim dining room, their movements almost graceful as they glide past the museum-quality Morales and de Jesus paintings on the walls—fine art for the diners’ consumption, to accompany tweezer-plated morsels prepared with color composition, textural variety, and playful temperature variances in mind. No one seems to notice these bulky men who never break stride. But I see that one man looks at people’s hands, the second focuses on faces, and the third scans torsos. Smoothly turning their heads to survey the room, they look like feeding herons.
Returning to the host stand, I catch the gleam of an earpiece snaking down the third one’s thick neck.
God, I think to myself, to hear the voice on the other end.
The gait of the man in the middle seems somewhat stunted, not so fluid as the others. Just before he turns a corner I think I notice a large geometric bulge under his jacket. I imagine it’s some kind of submachine gun with switchable burst settings, designed for use in close quarters—like a dining room. I picture one of the customers being cut down by a short fusíllade, penetrated by three rounds diagonally across the chest, or perhaps two individual rounds from two separate trigger squeezes.
The Swiss-made SIG Sauer P229 pistol chambered with .357 SIG rounds is an agency preference, its platform and round combination merging the accuracy of a nine-millimeter with the stopping power of the .357. Stopping power: the ability to transform a human into a corpse right where one stands, a hot metal projectile boring its way nine to fifteen inches into a human chest. This kind of power is given a rating based not only on the depth of the hole but by the size of the temporary stretch cavity it creates. The SIG’s is forty-five cubic inches. Picture a hole in a chest the size of a Christmas ornament displacing connective tissue and organs, splintering bone. Stopping.
Catching a glimpse of Octavio clearing a table across the dining room, I smile and he returns a quick nod. I turn back toward the men, but they’re gone. Octavio approaches the host stand and draws his face in just a few inches from mine.
“Qué pasa, cabrón?” he whispers.
“Obama.” I motion toward the back table with my head.
The president has a standing reservation here. He gets the quiet table in the back corner near both rear exits. When he decides to come for dinner, a Secret Service agent sends the general manager a text message from a Type One device—Blackberry, probably—that’s been certified by the NSA for transmitting classified government information. The text, perhaps just the word Renegade, will have run through several of the world’s most complex algorithms before landing in the general manager’s inbox. It might read RRRR, if Renaissance, Radiance, and Rosebud plan to join him for a family dinner.
Octavio walks to the wall that divides the two restaurants into discrete dining rooms, takes a look into the fine dining side, but doesn’t go in. Busboys on that side wear ties and silk vests for the politicians, celebrities, and hedge fund managers. Seating is done by reservation only, filling at least three months in advance. You can order à la carte, but people usually opt for one of the three five-course tasting menus paired with whatever the sommelier recommends. The average diner drops around five hundred dollars for a meal.
Octavio dips back, clearing three tables before he’s at the end of the regular dining room. Busboys from this side wear black guayaberas and never enter the other side. This rule doesn’t even need to be stated because it is so concretely understood. For example, the dishwasher, El Conejo, is never seen outside his dish pit. He eats his shift meal standing above the industrial sink if he has time, or chugs the black coffee—two Splendas—I sneak him. When he’s had too much caffeine he emerges, having frantically powered through a mountain of dishes only to hit a lull, which in turn makes him pop his head aggressively through the swinging doors of the pit, grab the first busboy who walks by, and growl, “Tráeme más platos, puto.”
I go wherever I want because I speak English as if it were my mother tongue. Instead of a uniform, I wear Herm�
�s ties with H’s woven into their double-ply silk. When the maître d’ for the fine-dining side is swamped, I’m allowed to give him a hand. I ask people, most white, if I may take their coats, handing them off immediately to a young Mexican woman who manages to remain out of sight until the very moment she’s needed. I pull chairs out for women, wait until the men have taken their seats, then place open menus directly into everyone’s hands.
When payroll makes an error on my check, I don’t hesitate to take the elevator up to the corporate offices, knock on the head accountant’s door, and kindly ask him for a moment of his time. Once, two pay cycles went by without me getting a paycheck, and the floor manager kept forgetting to do anything, telling me the problem would be sorted out by next payday. In his office, the accountant carefully looked at his screen and let out a forceful hah, as if trying to dislodge something in his airway. Seemed I’d been deleted from the digital clock-in system so that none of my hours had been logged.
“Well, how many hours did you work last month?” he asked, not especially perturbed.
There was no way for me to remember, I told him. I tried to picture the beginning of the month when I’d first gotten the job, thinking I’d be able to save enough money to move to Iowa for graduate school, put a deposit down on an apartment, and buy a $680 money order to send to the Department of Homeland Security with an N-400 form in order to initiate naturalization.
“Come on, come on,” he said, flopping his big hands at me. “Just gimme a number.”
I did some quick math. “A hundred forty?”
It was only slightly above what the real number must have been. Perfectly fair, though, I reasoned, considering the two pay cycles I’d had to wait. Without hesitation, the accountant took a fat wad of folded bills out of his slacks and counted out fourteen crisp hundreds, placing each one directly onto my open palm.
“You let me know if this happens again, kiddo.”
Slowly placing the bills in my hand, the bookkeeper was perfectly genial, but I wondered if he didn’t realize that this kind of error—missing hours, inaccuracies in pay rate, payroll system glitches—happens regularly, inevitably in the restaurant’s favor. I wondered too if he failed to understand that the reason El Conejo in the dish pit and Octavio on the floor didn’t come up to his office was because they’d been obliged, since their first jobs in the States, to grin and bear whatever, without saying a word. Men like Octavio and El Conejo might get their money eventually, after bills had moved into collection and accrued late fees; after they’d received calls from debt collectors making threats of repossession; after their gas was shut off, teaching them what a bitterly cold shower feels like at five in the morning, the same lesson their children would learn at six thirty when it was time to get ready for school.
In 2008 we would have been happy to see Obama walk quietly to his table—all that hope so neatly wrapped up in a black package. Now, however, three years later, when the three men reappear, posting themselves at three separate points in the dining room—two near the entrances and one sitting at the next table—it’s different. We joke about him dropping dead after choking on his deconstructed taco.
There are two men at table fifty-six who I think might be on the job. They have the same thick bodies as the other three, and they have the same square hands, with fat thenar eminences that bulge after years of gripping things. They don’t seem to be enjoying their luminous squares of perfectly cooked halibut, topped with cilantro foam, placed delicately on a disk of micro greens and edible flowers grown on the restaurant’s rooftop garden. They don’t seem to notice the hammered copper chargers underneath their plates. Neither one has touched the wine the sommelier poured.
My phone buzzes against my thigh, and as I take it out to check the blue voicemail symbol, I miss the presidential entrance.
He’s sitting now, surrounded by a bunch of old white men. No Renaissance, no Radiance, no Rosebud. One of the men fingers the slightly angled silverware placed in front of him, nudging it back from the brink of chaos. Most of that cutlery was polished this morning by Octavio, an “illegal alien.”
“Pinche Obama,” he says, back at the host stand, shaking his head before he goes back to work.
Pinche Obama because Octavio had let himself believe that, being not white, the new president would necessarily be sympathetic to the plight of undocumented immigrants. Because he had let himself believe he and the US-born fiancée he’s been engaged to for four years now would finally be able to get married.
At the very least we all thought something referred to as “the three ten bar”—introduced as a section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1996—would disappear. It didn’t.
Purely a punitive tool, this legal category of “unlawful presence” was entirely new to immigration law. Individuals who accumulated six to twelve months of “unlawful presence” would be barred from the country for three years, while those here for more than a year would be barred for ten. So in order to adjust his immigration status when marrying his fiancée, Octavio would have to leave the country for up to ten years, which would mean losing the home he’s paid a mortgage on for longer than a decade. The modest home his mother was having built in Mexico wouldn’t be finished. Instead, she would have to share a one-room structure, made of cinderblock and corrugated tin, with Octavio’s sister and his two nephews. As for his sweetheart in the United States, they might try to stay together while living in different countries, visit each other as often as possible, but the distance would become too great. They would begin to fight about any little thing, and then they would avoid talking for days at a time. For both of them, a day would come when they would quietly realize they no longer felt that pleasant attachment to the other—the intimacy of being together—and, soon after, their fifteen-year relationship would dissolve like sugar in warm milk.
We agree to meet at the bar next door after work. Octavio gets off an hour after I do, so I get started alone. El Conejo, having escaped his dish pit to join me, is leaning over the bar, rubbing his hands together, picking at dead skin, wincing. The right one is swollen and red, while the left one has thick, white scales that are raised at the edges. My dad has the same condition, several decades after being a dishwasher—hazards of one’s hands spending twelve hours a day submerged in hot water and industrial-strength soap. I walk up behind him and swat him on the back.
“No mames, guey,” he protests.
“First round’s on me.” He doesn’t speak English but understands it comprehensively.
At the far end of the bar, one of the cooks leans his five-foot-three body across the pool table. He’s about to sink the eight ball on our sous chef. There’s a whole goat at stake for weekend birria. All the regulars are there, each slumped forward in a severe curve that renders even the tallest (six and a half feet when standing) diminutive on his stool. No one’s fed the jukebox yet, so their cigarette-gnarled greetings rise above the sounds of clanking glass. I take my place at the end.
A Cuba libre seems the thing to have right now. It’s Octavio’s favorite, and once he shows up he won’t let me drink anything else anyway. If I order bourbon he calls me Yankee, pronounced Jahn-kie. I try to tell him bourbon is from the South, but he just cuts me off: Jahn-kie! The bartender is on the other side of the bar, telling one of the regulars how his girlfriend broke up with him a week after he paid for her breast implants.
“Nice return on the investment, huh?”
My phone buzzes against my thigh for the second time. This means what it always means: my voicemail is full. To delete messages I press seven repeatedly. I don’t even listen to them anymore. I know what they say. They’ll all be from my mom. Hijo mío, she says by way of opening, not mi hijo, her very syntax re-creating the process of a mother embracing her son. Placing the word for son first, she then grabs urgently with what follows: of mine. The interplay of these words evokes the rush of possession, the physical pull of a mother who hasn
’t seen her son in a long, long time. And then, following this, always a question or statement about eating: Have you eaten yet? What did you eat today? I hope you’ve eaten. Have you been eating good? I just deposited money into your account so please eat something good. Since moving out of my parents’ home it’s become easier to forget that the question of where meals were to come from wasn’t always so readily answered, easy to forget the evenings when, telling me they’d already eaten at work, they would simply sit and watch me eat.
I press seven and seven and seven again because I don’t even need to listen to know how, in a lowered voice, as if someone were listening, she will end by saying, “Cuidado—I love you,” and know that one of the things she wants me to be careful about is la migra.
Each long Monday afternoon, her day off, my mother sits in her kitchen drinking black coffee, watching sparrows dart by the feeder outside the window. She’ll turn on Noticiero Telemundo on the small television under the cereal cabinet and watch Pedro Sevcec while she dunks Marías in her coffee, trying to get them to her mouth before they liquefy and plop into her cup. It would be easy to attribute her news preference to language, but as soon as the reports are done she changes the channel to watch US sitcoms. Years ago it was Family Matters, Silver Spoons, and Dinosaurs. I have no idea what she’s watching now.
If she chooses Telemundo over the English news broadcasts, it’s mainly to avoid the US media’s endlessly broadcast images of Latinos hopping fences, depicting us as a unified deluge without end. On April 14, 2005, for instance, had she been watching CNN, a network that purports to be “the most trusted name in news,” she would have caught an episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight titled “Border Insecurity; Criminal Illegal Aliens; Deadly Imports; Illegal Alien Amnesty.” Within the first minute she would have heard host Lou Dobbs assert, “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans.” A few moments later she would have heard CNN correspondent Casey Wian follow by asserting that “almost a half-million fugitive illegal aliens are loose in the United States today” before relaying ICE’s plan to outfit low-risk “illegal aliens” with electronic monitoring devices.
