The Book of Unknown Americans(24)

I couldn’t take it anymore. When I was twenty, I decided to leave. I attempted to persuade my mother and my brothers to go to México. I made the argument that because of my father, we had a claim to it. But my mother was stubborn. She said if I didn’t like the way things were, I shouldn’t run away. I should stay there and commit myself to fixing them. But that’s what the guerrillas had been trying to do for decades and I saw no progress. “No,” I told her. “I need to go somewhere else.”

I went to México on my own. I believed it would be easy for me to make a new home there, but no one in México wanted anything to do with a Guatemalan. The Mexicans look down on us. They believe Guatemalans are stupid. To tell them I was half-Mexican only made things worse. They were offended to think that any Mexican man would have stooped so low as to be with a Guatemalan woman to create me.

I was living in Córdoba. Things were terrible for me there—I couldn’t find a job unless I was willing to let myself be taken advantage of, working sometimes for only a few pesos a day—until I met a woman named Isabel, who changed everything for me. She was Mexican, from Veracruz, and her parents disapproved of me. But we fell in love and decided we would be together no matter what anybody said.

We married in 1982 and had two children—first a boy and then a girl. We were so happy. I was still treated poorly sometimes, but I had gained a different sort of confidence since being with Isabel, and the poor treatment didn’t bother me as much.

Seventeen years after we married, Isabel passed away. She had cancer of the breast. Here, I find that everyone knows about this cancer. Last fall, there were pink ribbons in the movie theaters and in all the stores, and someone told me it was for this type of cancer. But at that time we lived in a small village called Tehuipango where the medical care was very basic. We found a doctor who told us what she had, but he could not tell us how to fix it. He said, “She needs to rest. She will die soon.” I did my best to take care of her. By the time we found out, she was already very weak. I put bags of ice on her chest to help numb the pain. I gave her aspirin to ease the aches. Nothing helped. Three months later, she was gone.

The children were very upset. They were both in high school at that time. Isabel and I were so proud of them. They studied hard. They wanted to go to college. My son wants to become a businessman and my daughter wants to become a nurse.

After Isabel died I didn’t know how I would make this happen. Isabel was a cook. She made desserts for everyone in our village—dulce de camote con pi?a, empanadas de guayaba, palanquetas de cacahuate. When someone wanted a birthday cake, they came to her. When someone was throwing a party, they came to her. Every day, she sold fresh soups straight out of the pots on our stove. I worked, too, harvesting maize and fava beans. But the money she made from cooking helped support us. Without it, we didn’t have much.

I came to the United States to earn more money for my children. They are living with a family friend now while I’m here. I did not think of it so much as a choice as an obligation. It is my obligation to provide a good life for them. My son is in college now, and my daughter will start college next year at Universidad Veracruzana in Orizaba. This makes me happy because I believe it means they will both get to do what they want to do. There are not many people who can say that.

I thought it would be very difficult to cross. It was after September 11 and the security was supposed to be high. I crowded with a group of men into the back of a van with tinted windows. We were all on the floor, under a heavy black burlap blanket and, on top of that, a lot of empty cardboard boxes that were meant to look like freight. We drove right up to the checkpoint. A guard examined the driver’s papers, which were legitimate. The guard did not know we were in the back of the van. He did not even look. The driver simply told him he was transporting construction supplies for a job in El Paso. There was a long pause. All of us in the back held our breath, waiting to be discovered. And then the guard let the driver through. That was it. It was almost unbelievable to me.

I found a job as soon as I could and began sending money back to my children. I started off in a mattress warehouse, dragging mattresses down metal ramps at the back of the store and loading them onto delivery trucks. When a mattress was defective, sometimes one of the employees kept it. The bed I have today is from that job.

For a while, I worked at a canning factory where we packaged chiles and salsa. It wasn’t very clean. There were maggots everywhere. The owners blamed the conditions on the workers. Besides that, I didn’t like standing in one place for ten hours. We got only one break for fifteen minutes.

Now I have two jobs. Five mornings a week I work at the Newark Shopping Center movie theater, cleaning the bathrooms and the theaters. I make sure there’s toilet paper in the stalls. I mop the floors. I have a wire brush I use to clean the sinks. In the evenings I work at the Movies 10 movie theater in Stanton. That job is harder because there are so many theaters. If too many movies finish all at once, it’s a challenge to clean the theaters before the next group of people comes in. I have been reprimanded for leaving an empty cup in the seat arm. Usually I don’t have time to go home between my shifts, so many times I eat popcorn and soda for dinner.

But I am very grateful for these jobs. They allow me to send money to my children to pay for their schooling. When both of them graduate, I would like to go back to México to be with them. My wish is that they’ll do something worthwhile with their lives, something more important than sweeping popcorn. I have done what I can for them. I would like to see them give something back.