by Reyna Grande
Leticia had a boyfriend, so Claudia and Paola went with me to Watsonville to hang out with these three cousins. We were curious about their lives, so different from ours at the university.
I was fascinated by Arturo, the surfer-looking Mexican farmworker with hands rough and calloused and skin sun-blistered from field work. Though he was six feet tall, he stooped a little, as if ashamed of daring to be taller than the average Mexican and taking up too much space, or from bending over the fields for so long. I told Arturo that my father had once been a field-worker. When he had arrived in the U.S., he had worked in the Central Valley harvesting crops. He once told me that he had lived in an abandoned car to save money for the dream house. I pictured my father living in that car, with no tires and broken windows, all alone in an empty field, of how many sacrifices he had made for a house he would never live in and in the end not even own.
Arturo’s house was in the middle of lettuce fields, and the only way to get there was by a bumpy dirt road. Dirt and lettuce as far as the eye could see. He shared the place with several men, including his two cousins. It was a dilapidated house, as filthy inside as it was on the outside. His landlord took no pride in it, and the house had deteriorated to the point where only desperate immigrant men would live in it. I couldn’t wrap my head around seeing him in this place. In my mind, I saw him walking down the aisles of the McHenry Library on campus, checking out some books for his research paper. I wanted that for him so badly that, not long after I met him, I gave him a tour of the university so that I could see him there for real, not just in my fantasies.
But Arturo wasn’t comfortable in Santa Cruz. The campus intimidated him. He clung to me as we walked hand in hand from building to building. Though he towered over me and many of the other students on campus, he seemed small. “Ya vámonos,” he said to me not long after the tour had begun. And we returned to Watsonville, back to the fields and the bar he loved, where we drank Coronas and listened to the jukebox play rancheras—the melancholy music from Jalisco, the place he longed for. He fed the jukebox more quarters, and with Vicente Fernández singing in the background, he told me about his home, his family, everything and everyone he had left behind. We sang along to “Canción Mixteca,” which he played on the jukebox again and again: “México lindo y querido, si muero lejos de ti, que digan que estoy dormido y que me traigan a ti.”
I joined him in his añoranza, and didn’t have the heart to caution him on the perils of indulging in nostalgia, of how easy it is to fall victim to your fantasies of a place that might no longer exist.
We went out to clubs, and Paola and Claudia and his cousins would be on the dance floor having a great time. My friends went out with the cousins to have fun and nothing else, and I wished that was all I wanted, too.
“Maybe I can marry him and get him his papers,” I told Mago one day. “I could teach him English. He could go to school, get a better job.”
“Ay Nena, why are you always trying to rescue people? Focus on your dreams. Olvida ese lechugero. Don’t let him distract you from your goals.”
Lettuce picker? I wanted to say. How dare you call him that? I wanted to do for him what I wished someone had done for our father when he had slept in that abandoned car and had been far from home. Mago hadn’t seen where Arturo lived. She hadn’t seen him so tired and drained from the field work that for a minute in that club, despite the dim lights, he hadn’t looked twenty-two, but fifty. If she met him, maybe she would feel differently.
“You can’t save him,” Mago said, reading into my silence. “You can’t wish him into being something he is not, like you do our father.”
The next time I visited Arturo at his house, I lay on his dirty mattress that had no sheets, only a threadbare blanket to cover himself with, and I still wanted to help him.
“The adult school in Watsonville offers English classes,” I told him. “You could go after work, start learning English.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I know I look like a gringo, but I’m not. And I’ll never be one. Mexico is my home. One day, I will go back.”
“You can’t spend your life looking backward. You have to look at what’s ahead, too. Besides, learning English doesn’t make you a gringo. It’ll give you job opportunities. You can make a better life for yourself. Don’t you want to learn to communicate with Americans in their own language?”
“I have you for that,” he said, and held me tight with fierce ownership. I thought of my stepmother, of how for all the years she was with my father, he depended on her for everything because he was afraid to interact with the outside world and overcome his fear of speaking English and navigating the choppy waters of American culture. Even when he was dying of cancer many years later, Mila was the bridge between him and his doctors. His life had literally depended on her.
Arturo was using his nostalgia for Mexico as a barrier between him and American culture, the same thing my own parents had done, the same thing I had done on occasion. I had spent too many years mourning for what I lost, wandering the borderlands trying to find my way, pretending, adapting, and reinventing myself, trying not to buckle under the strain of assimilation and the pressure to hold on to my roots. I had spent too many years torn between wishing to forget and needing to remember, between wanting to fit in and resisting being a sell-out, between dreaming of the future and longing for what used to be but was no longer.
I was trying to be Arturo’s cultural coyote and translator, but perhaps it was time to let him find his way. How could I save him from his torment when I could barely save myself from mine?
17
Farewell to Manzanar autographed by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
IN MY THIRD—and final—year at UCSC, I met my first professional writer. The creative writing program hosted a reading by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. She spoke about her work to an auditorium full of literature majors and aspiring writers. Seeing her onstage made my dream of being a writer feel more real. There she was, a flesh-and-blood author standing under the bright stage lights. She was tiny, just as small as I was, but she held herself with such confidence and spoke with such conviction that a minute into her talk, I stopped seeing her as small. She was larger than life, and I clung to her every word as she spoke about her memoir, Farewell to Manzanar.
I had read the book in preparation for her visit. Though it was about the effects of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Japanese-Americans, I related to her story. As a woman of color and an immigrant, I knew what it was like to be marginalized, to have to prove constantly how American I was, always to have to fight for my right to remain. I was filled with anguish and rage at reading about the way Japanese people were abused and mistreated, torn away from their homes and families and sent to internment camps. Similarly, during the Great Depression, Mexicans were scapegoated and blamed for the economic woes of the country. Calling it a “repatriation,” the U.S. government rounded up Mexicans, 60 percent of whom were American citizens, and dumped them into Mexico by the busload, to be trapped again by the poverty they had escaped. Hundreds of thousands of families had been torn apart by those heartless decisions.
When Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston spoke that night at the Kresge Town Hall, something changed for me. I recognized my struggle in her story as she shared her difficulties of trying to navigate American culture while trying to hold on to her Japanese heritage. She couldn’t find books that she could relate to, books that spoke about the difficult experiences her family had endured in the internment camp. She wrote the book that she couldn’t find. Through Farewell to Manzanar, she had become a voice for her people and others, like me.
When I learned to read in English in the eighth grade, I remembered feeling that same desperation that she spoke about—the need to find books I could relate to. As a child immigrant from Mexico struggling to adapt to the American way of life, I had had a hard time finding my experiences reflected in the books given to me by my teachers at school or the librarian at the public library. Instead, I gr
ew up reading stories mostly about white, middle-class kids whose only worry was what kind of pet to get or what to wear to the prom. Books like the Sweet Valley High series gave me access to an America that wasn’t mine, and I felt a yearning inside of me to feel connected, to see my story as part of American literature. I would often ask myself, If I am not in literature, does that mean I don’t exist?
Later, I found books about adult immigrants that touched on the struggles that first-generation immigrants—like my parents, like Arturo—experienced when they arrived in the United States: low-paying jobs, abuse and discrimination in the workplace, fear of deportation, struggles to assimilate and learn English, and the hardships of navigating and understanding the nuances of American culture and society. But I would ask myself, Weren’t child immigrants as much a part of the immigration narrative? Weren’t the stories of our pain and heartbreak, struggles and triumphs, also worth telling?
While in Santa Cruz, I had read novels and memoirs assigned to me in class or that I found at the library, yet I still felt a void, a yearning, a missing piece that I desperately wanted to find. What I wanted most of all was to not feel invisible. Where was the book that spoke about the effects of separation and how immigration can turn parents and children into strangers?
I had complained about this to my new writing teacher, Micah Perks. The year before, UCSC had finally hired a tenure-track professor in the Creative Writing Department, and I was happy to know Micah was there to stay, unlike the adjuncts who had come and gone when the quarter was over, never to be seen again. She was the first teacher in the creative writing program who understood me and my culture, who didn’t think I had “a wild imagination” and instead accepted my writing for what it was—my reality, my truth. In addition to the classes I took with her, I had signed up to take an independent course to work one-on-one with her. She had told me, “Reyna, sometimes you have to write the book that you want to read.”
In other words, I would have to write my way into existence.
I tried to visualize that book I wanted to read and needed to write. I knew in my heart what it was, yet I was frightened. What if I wasn’t up to the task?
Now here was Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston saying what Micah had said to me before: Write the book that you want to read.
I had never met a professional writer before, so being a real writer had seemed abstract. Sometimes I felt I was clutching at a dream made of smoke. When I was younger, I imagined that books just magically appeared on the bookshelves of libraries and bookstores. But seeing Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston on stage, answering our questions, and later, sitting at a table so that we could meet her, shake her hand, and have our books signed, I couldn’t believe that she was there. That she was real. When I had read her book, I had felt connected to her, but not the way I did at that moment when she was only three feet away from me and we were in the same room breathing the same air. I realized then that a writer shouldn’t just write all day, removed from the world. The books a writer produced were important to be sure, but a writer’s physical presence could be just as powerful to readers. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s presence and the words she spoke that night empowered me as a woman and as a writer of color.
Many of the students waiting in line to meet her were in tears, especially those who were Japanese-American. They kept telling her, “Thank you for writing our story. You’ve inspired me to keep fighting.”
It was then that I fully grasped what a writer did. A writer changed lives and told her readers, You’re not alone. Have courage. At that moment, I became even more committed to my writing and understood the power of storytelling that I had been given. I would have to honor that gift.
When it was my turn to get my book signed, I told her, “Thank you for inspiring me to write my people’s stories. To fight against invisibility. To demand that we be seen. Heard.”
She smiled and took the book from me.
To Reyna,
A great pleasure meeting you—and best of luck to a future of writing many books!
Con cariño,
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
I returned to my apartment that night thinking about that book inside of me that I wanted to write but was afraid to. I knew then that I needed to find the courage to do it.
One of the requirements for graduating from the creative writing program was to write a senior project, which could be a portion of a novel or memoir, or a short-story collection. I decided to tell my story—to write that book I wanted to read. I would write about immigration from a child’s perspective.
I didn’t get very far.
Even though everything I had written came from my own experiences, I had always fictionalized them because being the protagonist of my story was too painful. Fiction allowed me to explore my experiences from a distance.
As I began to write about my father’s departure to the U.S., about my mother’s departure, about the years of longing for them, of being afraid they would forget me, I realized that I wasn’t ready to write about myself. I couldn’t. It hurt too much. I was twenty-three years old, trying to understand why those things had happened to me. I didn’t have the maturity to comprehend the emotions I was writing about, nor did I yet have the maturity as a writer to craft my story.
In fiction, I knew I could still write about my experiences and bare my soul without making myself so vulnerable. So I began to write a novel about a girl who was left behind in Mexico when her father goes to the U.S. to look for work. By turning to fiction, I created a character to stand in for me so that when the writing got particularly hard, I could tell myself: “This isn’t happening to you. It’s happening to your character.” That way, under Micah’s guidance, I managed to get through my senior project. I knew that, one day, in order to be set free, I would have to write that memoir. But for now, this book had to be a novel, so I let it be.
I didn’t have a title for my senior project yet, but eventually, many drafts later, it would come to me: Across a Hundred Mountains. I never thought that my senior project would one day become my first published book, a book that would change my life forever.
18
Reyna at her graduation, UCSC, 1999
AN IMPORTANT LESSON Santa Cruz taught me was that it wasn’t enough just to survive. I needed to thrive, regardless of the difficult circumstances I found myself in. I had been fortunate to have teachers like Diana, Marta, Micah, and Robin—strong, intelligent, hardworking women who helped shape me into the woman I would one day become.
In June of 1999, I became the first person in my family to graduate from college, finishing my time at Santa Cruz with college honors, honors in my major, and Phi Beta Kappa.
To my surprise, everyone came to my graduation. All my siblings were there—Mago, Carlos, Betty, and Leo—and their spouses and children. Diana and my mother came up, too. And so did my father.
I hadn’t expected my father to come. I hadn’t allowed myself to even dream that he would. When he showed up in Santa Cruz for my graduation, for a moment I thought he wasn’t real, just the way I had felt fourteen years before when he showed up in Iguala. Back then, I thought I had conjured him up—like a spirit—after so many years of longing for his return. More than my mother’s presence at my graduation, it was my father’s that shocked and pleased me the most. My mother had been coerced into coming to the ceremony by my siblings, but since I knew that no one on earth could make my father do something he didn’t want to, I concluded that if he was here, it was because he wanted to be.
They all spent the weekend in Santa Cruz, and joyfully I welcomed them into my world, showing them around the place I had called home for three years. The day before graduation, my father invited me to lunch, and I took him to my favorite Thai restaurant to try my favorite soup. He had never been to a Thai restaurant because, of course, he never ate anything that wasn’t Mexican.
And the truth was that for the most part, neither did I. But when I lived with Diana she had introduced me to other kinds of
food—Italian and Greek. Edwin, who was Salvadorean, had introduced me to his people’s cuisine, and here in Santa Cruz I had ventured out to try new things as well—Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai—whenever I had extra cash.
When we sat down at the table and my father looked at the menu, I was nervous. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to bring him here. What if he hated the food? What if he was angry that I had made him waste his money on this? I should have taken him to Taquería Vallarta instead. He looked at the menu, and as I looked at him, I could see his eyebrows pull together into a frown. His forehead wrinkled the way mine always did. I felt myself retreating to the insecurity of my teenage years.
When the waitress approached, she asked us a question, and my father and I looked at each other in surprise. She was speaking to us in Thai!
“Excuse me?” I said in English.
She repeated herself, again in Thai, and my father and I smiled at each other from across the table. “We aren’t Thai,” I said. “We’re Mexicans!”
The waitress laughed, surprised. “Oh, my God, you could have fooled me!”
My father and I laughed as well. He and I could probably pass for Korean, Cambodian, Filipino, Indian, or Thai. We looked so much alike: slanted eyes, round faces, small foreheads, wide noses. We recognized each other from across the table. I was his daughter, and he was my father, and we shared the same blood flowing through our veins, a common history woven from the same dreams and sorrows. For that brief moment, whatever had happened in the past no longer mattered.
I saw my father’s shoulders relax. He said, “Why don’t you order for us, Chata, since you know what you like from here?”
“All right,” I said, and the tension in my own body began to disappear. I ordered chicken pad thai noodles and my favorite coconut shrimp soup to share.
