I wasn’t
the only Mexican in town, but I was the only one like me. The Maria sisters, they
were real Mexicans– each with long straight sandy brown
hair, each sister a different shade of brown. There were four of them. Each
named Maria something. If you saw them they were usually together, or in pairs
wearing roomy, button down blouses and boxy skirts worn below the knee. They
lived in very small, splintery, unpainted, clapboard house behind the baseball
field. I often passed by their casita on my way to town with my brother or
alone on my yellow Schwinn bike – a gift from my blonde sister’s
grandparents. A Maria sister never walked around town without one of the other
sisters at her side.
A couple of other Mexicanas,
Rosa and Martha Espinoza, lived on the other side of town where the houses had
patches of lawn and sometimes a fence but fewer oak trees. Rosa and Martha had
thick, wavy black hair. Rosa wore hers short like her mother’s
-- a mass of curl and fluff. Martha's
hair was thick and long, and she usually wore it in braids. She had dark
almond-shaped eyes and a dark birth mark above her lip. They had a cute little
brother named Victor; he was shy and spent most his time hanging around their
mom who spoke English with a very heavy accent. When she spoke English, I
noticed that she sounded an awful lot like the Maria sisters. Martha’s English was only lightly
accented, Rosa’s a bit more. I had been to their
house after school a few times, and I marveled at how neat and tidy it was.
Martha wasn’t cool, but it was pretty cool to hear
her speak Spanish to her mom, then English to me in practically the same
breath. Rosa wasn’t cool at all.
When Martha and I were in
second grade, Rosa was in fourth. Apparently, her only friend was Martha, which
meant she had to sit with us at lunch. The only saving grace was that fourth
graders were excused from class later than second graders, meaning Martha and I
did get a little time to ourselves, but then just a bit later she’d
arrive with her class, Rosa, in the lunch line, gripping her tray, eagerly
scanning the cafeteria, trying to locate her younger sister. Even the way she carried her tray and set it
down on the table next to us annoyed me. Martha and I would go from giggling
about something that had happened in class or talking about boys to quiet and
serious about macaroni casserole faster than Rosa could say enchilada.
One day as Rosa
worked quietly on her grilled chicken, the din of child chatter and the sound
of silverware clanking seem to grow louder and louder around us. Martha and I
were sitting quietly, obediently waiting for Rosa to finish when I picked up
the wizened wing still on my tray, inspected it closely for no particular
reason then tossed it on Rosa’s plate. Gasping as if I had thrown a cockroach
in her face, Rosa said, “I hhhhhhhate when people put food on my plate!” She
took the wing between thumb and forefinger from her plate and tossed it back.
“Hate plate, hate plate,” I said, laughing and dancing in my seat.
Martha sat watching wide-eyed and she didn’t laugh; she didn’t even smile. I didn't get too many more invitations to her
house after that, but we did still sit together at lunch though less and less
over time. The Espinoza family eventually moved to Sonora, only seven miles
away, but an actual town with its own police department and more grocery stores
than bars.
Luckily, I met Amelie Sanchez just as
Martha began phasing me out of her life. Amelie was Mexican too, even though
her mom was not. Her parents had been divorced for several years already and
she only saw her dad Jess, short for Jesus and pronounced the Spanish way,
about once a year – usually during summer and sometimes around Christmas. Amelie’s mom, Shawn Sanchez, formerly Pauline
Hutcherson had grown up in Tuolumne in the very same house that she lived in
with Amelie, and Amelie's grandmother, Buggo, as we called her. Amelie’s mom was really smart and she liked
helping us with our homework. She went to UC Berkeley for a semester before
dropping out to bum around the Bay Area where she waited tables and met Jess. I
liked being around Amelie and Shawn. Their house wasn’t messy, but not too
clean either, and they paid for their groceries with food stamps like we did.
Amelie and I had seen each other around
school before fourth grade, but she and her mom had been living in Carson City
for a bit before returning to live with Buggo on Carter street. Amelie played
the flute like I did and joined Mr. Lark’s school band. She began getting more
of the solos or harder parts, as she was a better musician, but I didn’t care.
I introduced her to Martha and Rosa and we all occasionally sat together during
lunch, but Rosa made it pretty clear that she didn’t want her sweet little
sister hanging around a bad-mannered pocha and her unusually tall tomboy pocha
friend. I wondered if Rosa liked anyone. She didn’t even associate herself with
any of the mild-mannered Maria sisters, not even the ones close to her age.
Amelie was cool. She spoke differently than anyone I knew and used words I
rarely heard kids our age use, words like “evidently” or “tubular” and she was
good at English and math. She didn’t speak Spanish either, which I didn’t think
was cool, necessarily, but it made me feel better. Secretly, though, we both
wanted to be bilingual – to be able to speak our grandparents and both our
fathers’ first language. Much later in high school, even though Buggo told her
she ought to study a more civilized language like French, Amelie and I enrolled
in Spanish together Freshmen year.
By the time Amelie and I were in fifth
grade, we were hot shot band members who were occasionally pulled out of PE or
Art for special band events or to do special projects for Mr. Lark, like
sorting through years and years worth of sheet music in the band room. We went
through dusty filing cabinets and put sheet music in alphabetical order
according to composer. Amelie, who was much taller than I was, would pull the
music from the top filing cabinets and hand it to me.
One morning while sorting music alone,
Amelie pulled a single sheet from a top file drawer and began roaring with
laughter, falling backward on the chair near the filing cabinet, the foot of
the chair making a loud scraping noise on the freshly waxed floor.
“B, b, buy my,” she sputtered, laughing
too hard to tell me what was so funny.
“What?” I said, laughing only because
she was.
“Buy My Tortillas,” she said, finally
able to get it out. “This song is called “Buy My Tortillas,” she said, doubling
over with laughter once again.
I grabbed the sheet of music out of her
hand and studied it for a second.
“I wonder how that song goes?” I said,
and we laughed harder, both of us grabbing our stomachs in pain. I looked
toward the door hoping that Mr. Parker wouldn't come in right then and think
that we were just messing around.
For months, all Amelie and I had to do
to send the other into a fit of uncontrollable laughter was utter the title to
the Chilean folk, “Buy My Tortillas.” It definitely wasn’t one of the songs we
were playing in 1982, 83, and 84. We were working on more important tunes like
the theme songs to Rocky or MASH, which Mr. Lark secretly told us was really
titled, “Suicide is Painless.” Rosa and Martha would have never understood any
of it.
There was plenty not to understand in
those days, but I found it all much easier to face with Amelie at my side
helping me sort it out along the way. Still, I didn't understand why people had
to ask me, “what are you,” all the time. It was a question that I got asked a
lot but never got used to answering. What are you? I knew people were asking
because my skin was brown, that they wanted to know about my background. I knew
I was supposed to say Mexican, but saying that didn't feel quite right
either. I wasn't Mexican like Martha and
Rosa or the Maria sisters. I didn't speak Spanish and neither did my mother. I
had been born in East LA like my mother, and I was growing up in a gold rush
town where Mexicans from Sonora Mexico and other mining states were invited to
help work the mines and who were run off when townships were being settled. I
didn't know that either, but there I was.
