B0061QB04W EBOK (47 page)

“I know you want to go,” she said. She handed her credit card to the travel agent and purchased our tickets.

Mago, Mami, Leonardo, Betty, and I went to Mexico a few weeks later. Carlos couldn’t come because of his new responsibilities as head of his own household. Papi was furious when he found out I would be missing a week and a half of school to go on the trip, but Mago told him he was going to have to let me go because our tickets were nonrefundable. I felt awful about having to miss school. I could count the times I had missed on one hand: in fifth grade when I had lice, seventh grade when I had the chicken pox, eighth grade when we had to go to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana to process our paperwork for our legal residency, and now, a visit home in my senior year. In the end, Papi gave in when I came home with the assignments my teachers gave me so that I wouldn’t fall behind while I was gone. As much as I hated missing school and not getting that perfect attendance certificate I loved to get at the end of a semester, I was desperate to return to the country of my birth.

I didn’t know what to expect when I returned to Mexico. Two months from then, I would be celebrating my eighth anniversary in the United States. I was seventeen years old. I thought I was no longer that little girl who had once lived there, although now I realize that little girl will always be inside me.

As we made our way to Abuelita Chinta’s house, we drove over the bridge above the river in which my cousin Catalina drowned. It was no longer much of a river but a dumping ground for trash.

“That’s gross!” Mago said as we got hit with the smell of stagnant, putrid water.

We passed by the train station, and I was shocked to see it completely empty.

“Where are the vendors? Where are the travelers?” I asked the taxi driver.

He told us that a year before, the Mexican government had privatized the railroad system, and the service to Iguala was suspended. There were no more passengers coming through every day. There were no more vendors who sold their wares and food. There were no more people from neighboring towns who would go there to catch the train. Men like my uncles, who had unloaded the freight trains to make a living, had found it even harder to survive.

As we sped down the road, I turned to look at the train station, feeling my eyes burn with tears. It was no longer one of the most important places in Iguala. Now, it was just a relic, an open wound that would never let the community forget that there once had been such a thing as progress.

Since we had too many suitcases, the taxi driver had no choice but to leave us at Abuelita Chinta’s doorstep, instead of dropping us off at the main road. But that meant he now had to drive over the unpaved road that was full of holes and jutting rocks. I felt as if we were on a ship being tossed around by a storm.

“Jesus Christ,” Mago said. “I can’t believe these roads. They would ruin my Tercel for sure!”

As soon as we got to the tamarind tree by Doña Chefa’s house, I knew we were almost there. My heart started to beat faster. We pulled up in front of my grandmother’s little shack. I knew that I had been in the U.S. for too long when the sight of my grandmother’s shack, with its bamboo sticks, corrugated metal roof, and tar-soaked cardboard, shocked me.
Had I really lived in this place?

A few feet away from the house was an abandoned freight car left to rust on the tracks. There were five children playing in it, and I felt a pang of sadness that they would never know the Iguala I had known, the lively place travelers would visit. They would never hear the whistle of the evening train or taste the wonderful chicken quesadillas that Mago had once sold at the train station. Seeing those kids’ dusty bare feet, dirty hair, and torn clothing, I knew how my father
had seen us those many years ago when he’d returned. I wondered if he had also felt his heart break.

Tía Güera and Abuelita Chinta came out to greet us. My aunt had built herself a shack next to my grandmother’s. She had returned to her no-good husband even though he would drink his wages away, beat her, and cheat on her. She held a baby girl in her arms. Then she called out the names Lupita and Angel and two of the kids who had been playing in the abandoned freight car came running.

“Say hello to your cousins and your aunt,” Tía Güera instructed them. I hadn’t recognized Lupita. She was a year younger than Betty, so that put her at eleven. Angel was seven, Leonardo’s age. But both my cousins were so skinny and tiny, whereas by then both Betty and Leonardo were overweight from all that junk my mother fed them. Here, next to my cousins, who barely had enough to eat, that extra weight was even more shameful to look at.

My grandmother’s face was mapped with more wrinkles, her hair was mostly gray now, and a few more teeth had fallen out. But when she hugged me, I breathed in her scent of almond oil and epazote, and I couldn’t believe I was back in my grandmother’s arms. Her scent was all I needed to feel that I was home.

“I have prayed for this moment for so long,” Abuelita Chinta said, squeezing me tight. “God has finally answered my prayers.” By then
I had grown to my full height—five feet, zero inches. I was so used to looking up at everyone that I felt awkward having to look down at my tiny grandmother, who was three inches shorter than me. How tiny and fragile she seemed to me now.

We went into the shack with her, and not long after we had sat down to eat the meal Abuelita Chinta had prepared for us, Mago began to complain. “Look at my shoes,” she said. “They’re covered in dust. Ugh.”

“Get over it,” I said, thinking about Abuelita Chinta’s feet. Hadn’t Mago seen the layer of dust on our grandmother’s feet, the dirt caked under her toenails? Abuelita Chinta gave her a rag, and Mago went to the washing stone to wipe her shoes and wash her feet.

After our meal, Tío Gary arrived with his children in tow. I was shocked to see how skinny my uncle was. He had a rope tied around his waist because he didn’t have a belt to hold up his pants. After my cousin Catalina’s death, he and his wife had divorced, and now he had remarried and fathered more children. At that time he had four boys; the youngest would eventually die from leukemia because my uncle did not have the resources to help his child.

While we sat outside the shack, we heard the familiar sound of Don Lino’s truck. We turned to see it bumping and jerking its way down the dirt road. All the neighbors’ kids, including my cousins,
ran out to meet the truck, just as I had done while living there. For a moment, I felt like running to climb on it. As the truck passed by us, I smiled at hearing the laughter of the children on top of the truck. I waved at them, and they waved back.

Mago scrambled out of the way when Don Lino’s truck sent a cloud of dust toward us. “Ugh!” she said, and went into the shack.

“Why don’t you go to El Otro Lado, Gary?” my mother asked my uncle. “You can give your children a better life if you do.” I watched the kids get off Don Lino’s truck. My uncle turned to look at his own children who were making their way back to us. He shook his head.

“I’d rather be poor, but together,” was my uncle’s reply. I didn’t know then that my mother encouraged my uncle to go north every time she visited. I didn’t know that his reply had never changed. I thought about my father, the choice that he had made to go north, and the price we had paid for that decision. But I also knew that something good had come from that decision. As Papi often said, my siblings and I had been given the opportunity of a lifetime. How could we let it go to waste? As I looked at my cousins walking down the dirt road, I thought of my father, of what he wanted our future to be like, and I understood.

I took advantage of being there and quickly set out to look for the friends I’d left behind. Some of them were already married and had children! Others were still living at home and working as maids, or at the U.S.-owned garment factory nearby, or whatever else they could find. But things had changed. When you come from the U.S., people look at you differently. They treat you differently.

The boys looked at me as if they wanted to marry me there on the spot so that I could take them back with me to El Otro Lado. My girlfriends didn’t invite me into their houses like they used to. Instead, they stood outside with me and blocked the entrance to their houses with their bodies, and I knew it was because they didn’t want me to see the poverty they lived in. They didn’t offer me anything to eat or drink because they couldn’t afford to feed themselves, let alone a guest. They didn’t tell me much about their lives because I knew that they thought it could never compare to
my
life, now that I was living in that beautiful place they all yearned for.

Instead, I awkwardly stood with my seventeen-year-old friend Meche in front of her shack. I didn’t know what to say to her as she held her baby in her arms and tried to wipe the dirt and mucus off his face with the corner of her blouse. She didn’t look at me. She looked past me, at the huizache trees behind me, her cheeks reddened with the shame of knowing that no matter how hard she wiped, the layer of dirt would never come off.

I was determined to make her see that I was still the same Reyna, but I didn’t know how to do that. In the U.S., the only people I spoke Spanish with were my mother and father. With everyone else I communicated in English, with Mago, Carlos, Mila, and my teachers and friends at school. And as I stood there trying to have a talk with Meche, I kept stumbling on my Spanish words. She laughed and said I spoke like a pocha.

It was an awkward conversation. I tried to think of something else to talk about beside school, marching band, my writing, books, and the colleges I had applied to the semester before. I was afraid to admit that perhaps I might not be the same little girl who used to make mud tortillas and whose only dream of the future was to one day have her parents back.

As I walked away from Meche’s house, I realized there was something else I had lost the day I left my hometown. Even though my umbilical cord was buried in Iguala, I was no longer considered Mexican enough. To the people there, who had seen me grow up, I was no longer one of them.