by Jock Soto
As soon as his mother admitted this to him, Pop and his brother Chico (who actually is Don Lolo’s son, and has the short stature and big ears to prove it) had set off on a trip into the mountains to find the man who used to live next door to them. And they succeeded. Pop said it was amazing—the guy was six foot two, with my dad’s same hair, same face, same green eyes. “Chico couldn’t believe it—he looks exactly like me!” Pop crowed. “He’s ninety-six now, but he’s all put together. He looks real good.” The man’s name was Luis Cortez, and when Pop explained who he was and asked Mr. Cortez if perhaps he was his real father, the old man smiled and nodded.
It was touching how excited and happy my father sounded about all of this—almost proud. When I pointed out to him that this meant that technically he was a Cortez, not a Soto, he started laughing. Of course, this also means that we should all be named Cortez, not Soto—including my mother. As if I wasn’t already confused enough about my identity…
FOR YEARS I have struggled with a feeling of anxiety about falling between the cracks when it comes to the big traditional categories in life. On the reservation as a child I was a half Puerto Rican among pure Navajos; and on the reservation as a grown man I am an outsider from New York. As a teenager in New York I was a half Navajo, half Latino in the predominantly white world of Balanchine’s ballets, and a neophyte in a high society of worldly sophisticates. But my confusion about my mix of cultures and heritages and life experiences, and the loneliness and feelings of displacement that have sometimes weighed me down over the years, seems to be growing less oppressive the more I learn. I suppose in an age when our forty-fourth president, Barack Hussein Obama, can casually refer to himself as a “mutt,” we may even begin to find reasons to celebrate blended blood.
There have been moments in my dance career when people have pointed to my humble beginnings and saluted me as someone who has accomplished a great deal against great odds. This seems ludicrous to me now as I consider my mother and father and the unusual arc of their lives. It seems to me they accomplished much more against much greater odds. I have a new admiration for them, and I am beginning to understand how much I owe them. They may not have started with much, but they sure did their very best, and they sure gave me everything they could—which turns out to have been quite a lot.
A few months after he had discovered the truth about his own father, I invited my father to join me in Santa Fe for a weeklong stint I was doing as a guest teacher and choreographer for a modern dance troupe called Moving People Dance. It was the first time we had seen each other since Mom’s death, and my goal was to take some of the sadness out of Pop’s face. We stayed together at the apartment where my hosts were putting me up, in a community for retired gay people called Rainbow Vision. (Was there a hidden message here?) I cooked his favorite foods for him all week, and he drove me back and forth to my dance classes, the way he always used to when I was a kid. It almost felt like old times—although I did notice Pop had developed a new habit while driving, of reading signs out loud as he passed them. Once when he wasn’t thinking, he automatically started driving us to the A-1 Storage facility where he and Mom used to live and work, instead of to our Rainbow Vision apartment. When I called him a homing pigeon, he said he was more like a faithful old dog that had been left downtown and was trying to find his way home.
Overall it was a quiet and healing week for both of us, and when my teaching duties were over we drove to Eagle Nest to see the house I had started building for Mom before she died. To distract us both from the sadness of Mom’s absence I cooked a huge dinner featuring what I dubbed Enchiladas à la Cortez and told Pop the meal was in honor of his newfound biological father. He seemed pleased.
A little later he turned to me and asked me if I liked the way he had styled his hair. It was sort of curly looking, greased up with some new gel he had discovered. The question made me feel odd, as if I were somehow becoming a replacement for my mother. But I just nodded yes, and served him another helping of Enchiladas à la Cortez.
Later, as he was driving me to the airport, Pop turned to me again and said he was really proud of me and happy we’d spent this time together. I told him I felt the same way. It seems sad that it has taken until Pop is in his seventies and I am in my midforties for us to begin to trust in our love for each other—but then, I tell myself, when it comes to finding fathers, better late than never.
In Celebration of Finding Fathers
ONE OF MY father’s favorite meals, one I often make when I am visiting him out west, is an enchilada dish my mother taught me. After Pop made his fateful trip to Puerto Rico and went digging for his “roots,” I renamed the dish Enchiladas à la Cortez—in honor of my father’s finding his real father. Originally this recipe involved frying the tortillas first and then rolling them into enchiladas. I always love a shortcut, so I decided to save time (and calories) by skipping the frying and rolling steps, and instead layering the tortillas with the meat sauce to make a casserole. I love this easier version of the traditional recipe—and so does my father, José Anthony Soto à la Cortez.
Enchiladas à la Cortez
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SERVES 8
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 pounds ground sirloin
1 large onion, chopped
2 jalapeño peppers, diced
4 10-ounce cans enchilada sauce
1 10¾-ounce can condensed cream of mushroom soup
Salt and pepper
6 cups grated cheddar cheese
24 6-inch corn tortillas
Get a large skillet nice and hot. Add the vegetable oil and then add the ground sirloin. Brown the meat for 5 minutes. Add the onion and jalapeños, and cook for about 5 minutes over high heat. Add the enchilada sauce and the cream of mushroom soup, and add salt and pepper to taste; simmer gently for about 20 minutes, covered.
During this time you can shred your cheese—or to make life easier you could just buy shredded cheese—and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
When your meat sauce is ready, turn off the heat and prepare your assembly line. Ladle a cup of sauce onto the bottom of a large casserole dish. Layer tortillas to cover the sauce and add a layer of cheese. Repeat the sauce-tortilla-cheese layering, ending with sauce and cheese.
Cover the casserole dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes. Then remove the foil and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes, so that the cheese gets bubbly and a little golden brown—but not burned.
Remove the casserole from the oven and let it sit for about 10 minutes before serving with white rice—and a salad if you like.
CHAPTER FIVE
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Saturday Nights and Sunday Picnics in Paradise Valley
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
—MAX LERNER
In the documentary about me, my mother says, “Jock was dancing in my tummy, before he was even born.” After reading her account of my birth I realize that her remark may have been a polite reference to the week of contractions and four days of painful labor she endured before I finally arrived in the Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico, one hundred miles from the reservation where she and my father were living. Mom and Pop picked my first name from a pamphlet of names (“of Hebrew origin,” my mother notes rather oddly) that was lying around the hospital, and decided that my father’s middle name could do double duty as a middle name for me. “Jock Anthony Soto. Who, at the time, would have imagined his destiny?” my proud mother writes as she describes my birth.
At the time, my mother was working as a secretary for the principal at the Lukachukai Boarding School on the Navajo Reservation and my father had a job driving trucks, and they were living in the octagonal hogan on my grandfather’s land. Sometime after my birth my parents started a small Laundromat on the reservation, but apparently this venture was short-lived. “Joe and Jo have always been travelers,” my mother writes br
eezily as she launches into a dizzying description of the year after my birth, during which she and my father yo-yoed from Chinle, Arizona (where they were living with my mother’s parents), to Philadelphia (to live with my father’s parents), to Utuado, Puerto Rico (to live near my father’s grandparents), then back to Philadelphia for a while, and finally back to Arizona, where they “settled.” My mother got a job with the local telephone company and my father worked loading and transporting cotton, and Kiko and I were entrusted to a woman named Zita—the first in a series of Spanish-speaking babysitters who watched us while our parents worked. “Zita’s grandson taught Kiko how to do the ‘Monkey’ and he entertained us with the new dance all evening,” my mother writes. “Jock came home talking gibberish, thinking he was talking Spanish.”
When I think back to these earliest years of my life I have a difficult time pulling up clear images of the various houses and apartments we inhabited. I remember a living room with a brick mantelpiece, on which I split my head open when Kiko pushed me during a game we had invented called “Vampire,” and a spacious kitchen where in the evenings my mother and father would play their salsa and merengue music and dance. I remember our dogs—a dachshund named Heidi (who got run over and killed), a beagle named Freckles, and a boxer named Pebbles (so named for his odd habit of gobbling small stones). But my most abiding sense of these early years is one of constant movement. We were a restless little family, always packing up and heading somewhere. We made frequent trips back to the reservation to spend time with our relatives, and we traveled a seasonal circuit of rodeos and powwows, where I would perform the hoop dance and we would set up our family’s concession booths. Kiko and I would cook and sell Navajo Fry Bread and Navajo tacos alongside my parents, who sold the kachina dolls and painted pottery that Mom had made. Kiko was always a favorite with our customers, because he was so handsome and flirty. I loved to watch him as he won the girls over.
In her later years my mother sometimes would try to make the case that our constant movement as a family was owing to the fact that historically the Navajo have always been a nomadic tribe—but of course Mom was the only full-blooded Navajo among us. Whatever their reasons, my parents did shift back and forth between the reservation and various homes in the Phoenix area in the early years of my life, and this section of my mother’s “family history” reads like a catalog of local addresses. It was in the fourth or fifth of these homes, a little brick house on Ninth Street in Phoenix, while watching The Ed Sullivan Show on an old black-and-white television, that I saw my first ballet. The segment featured the amazing Edward Villella dancing the “Rubies” movement of Balanchine’s Jewels.
“It surprised Mama Jo that both Kiko and Jock were enthralled by the performance,” writes my mother, referring to herself in the third person as she so often did. “They both went to bed immediately after; however, the next morning Jock came to Mama Jo and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ Mama Jo asked, ‘What are you talking about?’ and Jock described the ballet, mimicking the leaps and jumps of the dancers he had seen. He was about four and a half at the time.”
Whenever I try to return to that pivotal moment when I was watching Ed Sullivan, what I remember most is feeling spellbound by what a real guy Villella was, and being fascinated by the virility he projected while dancing so magnificently. It amazed me that these two qualities—supreme maleness and beautiful movement—could be combined to make something so powerful. What now strikes me as equally amazing as I think about the famous family anecdote is the fact that my mother and father took their four-year-old son’s request seriously and immediately set about finding a ballet school. “What would it be like to have a little Indian-slash-Spanish boy dance ballet?” my mother remembers asking a Ms. Timona Pittman at the Phoenix Children’s Workshop. “Who?” Ms. Pittman asked. “How old is he? Ballet boys are hard to find.” A minute later Ms. Pittman was on the phone arranging an audition for me at the Phoenix School of Ballet.
I will never forget my first visit to this ballet school, run by the talented Kelly and Isabel Brown, and my first sight of the old studio with its wooden floors. My father had been entrusted with the chore of shopping for my audition outfit, and he had grabbed whatever he could find to improvise his notion of a ballet costume. When I arrived I was dressed in little shorts, a white T-shirt, and blue fishnet stockings—the closest thing he could find to tights. My parents and my brother had all come with me, and they watched as Kelly took me to the front of the class and showed me different positions, stretching my arms and legs this way and that. Kelly impressed me with his animated and happy presence, and the way he demonstrated everything with an exaggerated style. It was fun to try to copy his movements. And I loved the music that Kelly played for us, starting and stopping it as needed by lifting and lowering the needle on a record player in the corner of the room. I had never heard anything like it before. I knew right away that I wanted to come back to that studio as often as possible.
“Of course, as parents, Mama Jo and Papa Joe were the nervous ones,” my mother writes of the moment when she watched her fishnet-stockinged son enter a ballet studio for the first time. “We watched Jock enter—no fear. Kelly put Jock up front where he could keep an eye on him, and during class he took the time to correct his positions, stretching Jock’s limbs and working with him for an hour.” After class, Kelly came out and told my parents that he expected me for classes every week, and that he was putting me on a full scholarship. I was the only boy ballet student at the school. “Jock quickly left his classmates behind,” my proud mother claims. “Choreography, he picked up on one walk-through, and he was doing pirouettes perfectly without a pause by the age of 8 or 9. Kelly choreographed several ballets for him, which he performed in and around Phoenix and Tucson. Mama Jo and Papa Joe could hardly keep up with the tights, shoes and gasoline.”
IT OCCURS TO me now that the six years when I was a student at the Phoenix School of Ballet were probably the longest and most stable stretch my parents and my brother and I ever had together as a family. Maybe my classes with Kelly and Isabel Brown, and my parents’ commitment to help me pursue my newfound passion for ballet, helped anchor us a little—or at least contained our wanderings to a smaller area. Not long after I began attending ballet classes my parents decided to move from our little brick house in Phoenix to a new housing development called Paradise Valley that had been plunked down in the desert outside Scottsdale. Paradise Valley was a considerable distance from downtown Phoenix, and it had the eerie look of the community from the movie Poltergeist in that five different house designs were repeated over and over—so you see your house, then four more houses, and then your exact house again every five houses, over and over all the way down the street. We had a garage and a carport and a fenced backyard, where my parents optimistically planted grapevines. We all had water beds in our bedrooms (mine used to undulate ominously whenever the ghost woman came to visit me at night) and an assigned seat at the kitchen table. It definitely felt like we were coming up in the world, and it even seemed possible that we might stay put for a while.
Unfortunately the commute from Paradise Valley to my ballet school was brutal—almost two hours each way, and usually it was my father who drove me. This was the beginning of a long commuting relationship between the two of us—he would always drive, and I would always ride—that has persisted to this day. Long stretches of travel together in a car can do odd things to two people—it’s as if over time all kinds of unspoken feelings take shape and ride along like additional passengers. I cannot count the number of hours of my life that I have spent alone in a car with my father, and it makes me wince now to think how many of those hours in my youth—and especially my adolescence—were spent in complete and somewhat hostile silence.
Paradise Valley had all the trappings of a typical suburban community, but it was surrounded by empty, wild desert where there were rolling tumbleweeds and wandering herds of horses and the eerie howl of the coyote echoing through t
he darkness every night. Nature performed herself dramatically in this desertscape, serving up sudden dust storms and flash floods that seemed to come from nowhere and immense dark rain clouds laced with fierce bolts of lightning that you could watch advancing from miles and miles away. In the summer, temperatures would get up to more than 120 degrees during the day, and you didn’t dare venture outside your house until well after sundown, when things had cooled a little. I can remember strapping on my roller skates after dinner. I would play the compilations of classical music that my father picked up for me at swap meets on an old record player in our garage, and skate around the carport, practicing my ballet moves in the pale moonlight. (My poor brother, Kiko, would often hide inside during such exhibitions.)
When we first moved to Paradise Valley, Kiko and I were enrolled at Arrowhead Elementary, and every afternoon Kiko would take me by the hand and walk me either home or to our babysitter Hortensia’s house if we were supposed to spend our afternoon there. My loyal brother walked me home from elementary school every single day, and in later years, when the word got out that I was dancing ballet, he became my protector, sticking up for me when the other kids teased me. I worshipped Kiko—he was the ultimate older brother, strong and handsome and hugely popular at school. I watched with awe as he navigated a social world that was completely mysterious to me. Looking back, I realize that my brother was a stud—tall, athletic, and very muscular, with naturally wavy hair. (He didn’t have to ask my mother to feather his hair!) All the girls were chasing him, and I was vaguely curious about what he must be doing when he sometimes brought one of them home and disappeared into his room for long periods of time.
