Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration

2017

PROLOGUE

One Wintry Night at Tequilas

It took days of calling on the spin-dial phone before Primo picked up with a heavily accented ¿Hola?

I introduced myself in Spanish.

I had been told by a friend in El Paso that Primitivo Primo Rodríguez Oceguera could be the only other Mexican in Philadelphia. Just me and a Jesuit-educated human rights activist with Marxist tendencies. Not the type of guy I’d usually hang out with, but it was my first winter away from home—the U.S.-Mexico border—and I was lonely and desperate.

We spoke briefly and agreed to meet. At my suggestion and because the place was near my apartment, we met at an Indian restaurant and made a tradition out of it, every Saturday. I didn’t know much about Primo but, by virtue of being Mexican, I counted him as my only friend in Filadelfia.

One night, feeling like curry wasn’t going to cut it anymore and yearning for Mexican food, we took a gamble on a place Primo had heard about.

Tequilas, read the sign outside the restaurant.

We swung the door open against the icy wind to a blast of warmth radiating from inside. We entered with a bad attitude, skeptical that this Mexican restaurant could be the real thing. I was greeted by an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe with photos of Cuban revolutionaries Ernesto Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Mexican revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and the leftist Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.

I rolled my eyes.

Another phony capitalist capitalizing on Latin America’s romantic leftist leaders and the revered brown saint. Really, the Virgin of Guadalupe? I imagined my mother and her daily prayers back home, hoping they would be enough to guide me through this new life.

What did this cabrón know about our faith? All this, just to make a few bucks from tacos.

Insulting.

We grabbed two chairs at the bar. It smelled surprisingly authentic. Not quite like my mother’s cooking—but close.

Cruz de Navajas, a popular song about love and betrayal by the Spanish pop group Mecano, was playing, not some generic instrumental mariachi music. Ana Torroja’s angelic voice hooked me. I mouthed the lyrics as we sat studying a menu that seemed straight out of Mexico. In classic Mexican satire, the menu lampooned Tex-Mex food, mockingly listing nachos obligatorios as an obligatory item to appease those who believe that any Mexican restaurant had to include nachos. But the sarcasm wasn’t all. The menu seemed to educate ignorant patrons about the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Genius marketing, I thought. The dishes included mole, complete with trenza de carne, beef in a braided pastry.

Somebody here knows Mexico intimately, I thought. The Spanish pop music and menu began to seduce me. I lowered my guard.

Primo was older than me but I couldn’t place his age—and didn’t dare ask. He had a receding hairline and tiny mustache that gave him the look of a Don Juan with matador instincts. His eyes popped behind his Hemingway eyeglasses when he talked about something that he was passionate about. His top four? Politics, immigration, salsa music and women. But not always in that order.

I had learned from our Saturdays together that he was working to help undocumented immigrants legalize under the generous new amnesty program. President Ronald Reagan had just signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) into law. He called it amnesty during a presidential debate with Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984: I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally. The concept stuck.

Primo and I rarely spoke about anything personal except nostalgia and policy.

I told him about my family’s background, how we emigrated from Mexico, thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act that President Kennedy had advocated for before his assassination. I told him how my family once worked as migrants in the fields of California and how I managed—by luck, I confessed—to nail down this Wall Street Journal gig. From working at a scrappy afternoon newspaper, the El Paso Herald-Post, now here I was, working on the ninth floor of the twenty-one-story redbrick North American Building on South Broad Street commissioned by Thomas Wanamaker. It felt surreal.

On those few first days to work, I’d take the train with my bureau chief, Frank Edward Allen, who had generously been hosting me at his home while I found a place to live. I sat shoulder to shoulder with commuters rustling the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, occasionally sharing a section but hardly ever saying a word.

If all of these people were Mexican, I thought, this train would be so loud every morning. Everyone would know each other, all smiles and laughter. Kisses on the cheek and long, familiar hugs. But, no, Philadelphia felt sterile and soulless.

The very first day of my new job, Frank and I walked out of Suburban Station, an art deco building with commuter trains underneath. Onward to Fifteenth Street across a park with a statue with the word LOVE in red. On my left was the impressive City Hall, a Gothic-looking brick structure façade adorned with marble. The North American Building was once the tallest in Philadelphia, back when it was completed in 1900, a title it held for a year before being eclipsed by City Hall and its statue of William Penn. Wanamaker housed his own newspaper, the North American, in the building until it went out of print in 1925. Now the building had new, highly esteemed journalism credentials.

The statue of Penn that sits atop City Hall honors the founder of the city and state, Frank said. Ever the teacher, Frank patiently took me by the shoulder and pointed to Penn and said the city was laid out as a holy experiment based on Penn’s Quaker neighborly beliefs.

I nodded, confused as to how I was on my way to work at a place obsessed with stocks, earnings reports, mergers and acquisitions, hostile takeovers, insider trading—all concepts I barely grasped. From my vantage point, I could swear it looked like Billy was pissing on me.

I was now part of the diversity experiment.

When we were inside at the Journal office, Frank took me around the room and briefly introduced me to everyone, all nice and pleasant, all buried in work, most of them from big universities: Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern and so on. In contrast, I had managed to get my education by overstaying my welcome at El Paso Community College before transferring to the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP.

Although I didn’t even have a diploma from UTEP, I told others it was the Harvard of the border—a joke that I often heard back home.

No one laughed.

Thankfully, one colleague stood out: Julie Amparano, a native of Phoenix, who had attended the University of Arizona in Tucson. She covered the new casinos going up in Atlantic City. It was 1987, and the stock market was climbing. Rock-bottom bargains could be had in real estate, especially downtown, so businessmen began flocking to the area, some cutting deals with Italian mobsters like Salvatore Testa, who controlled construction sites. She was new to the Journal and was keeping a close eye on a young playboy and alleged billionaire from New York City simply known as The Donald.

Julie looked Italian, maybe Greek, but she said her mother was from El Paso. Other than the janitors, she seemed to be the only other Hispanic at the Journal’s Philadelphia bureau. She promised we’d grab lunch and share experiences. But I had a feeling lunch wouldn’t happen anytime soon. In her twenties, with short, curly black hair, Julie gave off an air of professional ambition and personal style. She seemed to be afraid that I was going to embarrass her. Embracing a clumsy Mexican American reporter like myself wasn’t in her best interests.

In a country and city obsessed with its black-white racial conflicts, Hispanics like us were flying under the radar, quietly trying to hide, attempting to join the white mainstream. I represented what Julie was running away from. I had no style, and I saw her glance disapprovingly at my sports coat, the only one I had, a once-in-a-lifetime deal bought off the rack at JCPenney at an after-Christmas sale in El Paso. I cut the price tag off but left a cloth tag on the cuff, which came down to the middle of my hands. Frank noticed it, too, and pulled me back into his office with art work of animals drawn with crayons by his three young sons, Zack, Josh, and Nick. They’d often visit to watch their dad work.

That’s a sharp look, he said, pulling out scissors and snipping off the tag.

Frank rattled off the names of the companies on my beat, urging me to do research, to read up on every public corporation, because quarterly reports would be out soon and I needed to be prepared. I would cover corporate news from companies like Hershey’s, Campbell’s, and Black & Decker—names I knew from my school days when I would jump off the bus and run to the corner store in Oro Loma, across the Delta–Mendota Canal, to buy a Hershey’s bar.

I’d sit down at my bare desk and listen to the white noise of tapping on IBM keyboards; journalists conducting interviews in hushed tones, heavy phone receivers cradled on their shoulders; gatherings in conference rooms to talk to editors back in New York City. The furniture was made by Steelcase, all metal and done in shades of gray, fitting for a newspaper with no photos or color at the time. The desks had laminate tops with fake colored patterns made to look like wood.

Each reporter had a lockable file cabinet next to the desk. In the back of the office we had a small room with one desk and one chair. We called it the Writing Room, where reporters could go, one at a time, to work on their Page One features. It was quiet. No phones ringing. No spot news hassles to bother the reporter.

Yes, this was the center of economic and political power, I was told, but something didn’t feel authentic. It was as if the rest of the country didn’t exist—this was the only thing that mattered, not the fringe. I looked around and saw a cookie-cutter existence.

I missed the heat from the Herald-Post. The Wall Street Journal had a different vibe. Every day felt the same. I would stare out the window from the bus or train at Broad Street, at the new buildings going up and up in a city that, like me, was in the midst of an identity crisis. My soul whined. Nothing about Philadelphia seemed familiar. Hoagies, Philly cheesesteaks and Rolling Rocks replaced enchiladas, huevos rancheros and a Coors. Homesick, I kept my watch on El Paso time. Frank once missed a deadline because I was on the wrong time zone and he was glancing at my watch, sitting next to me, covering a corporate forecast.

At my desk, I would wait for the janitors to walk into the restrooms to follow them, just to say buenos días, buenas noches, to hear the sound of Spanish again. They were mostly Puerto Ricans, and they were as stunned as I was that a Mexican had found his way east of the Mississippi.

At night, back at my apartment, I found bitter solace in the music that took me home. When nostalgia ached even more I turned to Juan Gabriel and pushed play on Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez, reminiscing about the same place and the same people, the lyrics of a song I believed was dedicated to Ciudad Juárez.

I had never lived alone. I kept the volume low, concerned that my neighbors might hear my Mexican music. Yet I began to tap my foot to the music they listened to—the soulful sounds of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, whose song Haupe would set me off on an endless search for sleep. My furniture was limited to a rocking chair and a rectangular sleeping bag that Frank’s father used in his days of elk and moose hunting back in Wyoming. I couldn’t wait to snuggle inside the bag filled with goose down and a zipper that ran all the way down the side and across the bottom. Both were gifts from Frank and his wife, Maggie. I was plain broke. I’d turn the lights off and hear the wind roar, the snow gathering in a hush. I would imagine the white powder swallowing up the brick stone façade and I’d lie in bed, listening to the traffic clatter outside, wondering whether I would ever be a part of Philadelphia.

Stop complaining, I’d tell myself. You could be picking cantaloupes.

The chips and salsa soon arrived, interrupting my daydreaming and debate with Primo about whether immigration reform would really lift millions out of the shadows and signal the end of Mexican migration, or whether the stream would go on forever. Mexico was in the midst of rapid demographic change; women were having far fewer children. There had to be a limit to the northward flow, right?

Ever the reporter, I took notes that, unbeknownst to me, my mother would meticulously preserve in plastic containers for decades to come.

A waiter swooped in with our plates of enchiladas rojas. They looked and smelled amazing. I took a bite and swallowed. For a second I wasn’t sure I knew where I was anymore. Whoever was doing the cooking must have taken a class from my mother. Miguel Bosé was now singing La Gran Ciudad (The Big City), a song about leaving—no mamá, no llores asi, papá mío dame bendición—that my brothers and I had listened to in sadness before I left for Philadelphia. Mother, don’t cry for me; Father, give me your blessing. Whoever had put on this music shared my pain, my longing for home, and was as miserable as I was in Philadelphia.

As we dug into our food, I watched the waiter, who had turned on his heel with an empty tray and headed to the kitchen, calling out to the bartender, a young man who looked about my age but was far more handsome, fiddling with glasses and wiping the bar counter. He eyed us intently, apparently trying to listen to our conversation. I figured he was Italian, cleverly disguised as a Mexican to give his restaurant authenticity—complete with a bushy black mustache across his upper lip and a long mane of black hair that hung over his ears. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and built like a linebacker. Puffy chest.

Clever marketers, I thought. They think of everything.

That mustache is right out of that picture of Zapata, I told Primo.

Supongo que sí, I suppose so, he responded.

The bartender walked toward us like an oversized teddy bear with a big smile on his face.

Caballeros, ¿en qué les puedo servir? the man asked in polite, flawless Spanish. How can I help you?

Estamos buscando al dueño, I said, in shock, asking for the owner.

He speaks Spanish. Putísima madre. I’m so, so fucked, I thought.

I was momentarily horrified that he might have been listening to my doubts and earlier jabs about his mustache. My theory that he was a fake Mexican. I told him we wanted to know where the owner had gotten the idea for this place, because it felt like the real thing.

David Suro-Piñera a sus órdenes, he said, indicating he owned the place and adding courteously that he was at our service.

Primo and I looked at each other, unsure how to respond.

No se asusten, he said. Don’t be frightened. I was just eavesdropping. Didn’t mean to, but this is a new place, just a few months old. It’s my place, and I want to make sure the service is up to your standards, jóvenes. I’m trying to build a business from the ground up. You seem to know your food, and your … music.

We looked at him suspiciously. He said all the graceful things a Mexican would say, in the standard passive-aggressive manner to which we were accustomed. We looked away quietly, not saying a thing, overcome by the joy of eating real Mexican food again in a restaurant owned by what appeared to be a real Mexican in this cold city where, until very recently, we had felt completely alone.

We finished our enchiladas and were about to leave, when David blocked our exit with a skip in his step. He looked persistent, like a goalie who wasn’t about to let anything get through.

Stay for another drink, he said, and then rattled off the most complete list of tequilas I had ever heard in my life—not that I knew anything about tequila at the time. I liked beer, preferably Budweiser or Coors. He began mentioning tequilas he didn’t even have in stock, the ones he really liked but couldn’t find in the United States. In fact, he confessed, his supply was so bad, he refused to even drink what he had stocked on his shelves, yet he knew detailed information about their different origins and distilling processes.

He didn’t belong in a restaurant, I thought. He should be roaming the wild blue agave fields back in Mexico’s northwestern state of Jalisco.

I later discovered he was from Jalisco’s capital, Guadalajara.

It’s cold outside, he insisted. The tequila is on the house.

Primo and I hesitated for a split second. What were we going to do, say no? David walked us to a table near the door. He sat us at Table 21, the first of many nights in the very same spot. David poured a generous serving for each of us, smiled mischievously, then headed back to the bar with its thatched-palm-frond awning. He looked happy with himself.

I tossed back the tequila, much the way I did back at Juárez’s Electric Q discotheque, and much to David’s dismay. He stared at me in shock from behind the bar and quickly came back with the same bottle and poured another. He shook his head as if saying, Don’t you dare toss it back again or I will slam this bottle across your head. Pendejo. Moron.

Despacito, he said. Kiss it slowly. Savor it. Don’t slam it. I drank it slowly, not sure what had just happened. He seemed pleased. We both nodded, as if I had just been baptized.

I remembered looking at Primo sheepishly. But Primo’s eyes were already locked elsewhere. Raul Yzaguirre, perhaps the most influential Latino in America, the man making news nationwide over amnesty for immigrants, was headed our way. A Texan born to Mexican American parents, Raul was head of the National Council of La Raza, the leading powerful lobbying group that advocated for the rights of Hispanics and immigrants in the United States. Under Raul’s leadership, NCLR was a key player in the immigration debate. La Raza was now under fire: How could an organization that advocated for immigrant rights be aligned with giant corporations, having lobbied for amnesty alongside the men and women who preyed on the cheap labor of these workers? Raul had been dining with what looked like a banker or lawyer or politician.

On his way out, Raul recognized Primo—a well-known immigrant organizer in his own right—and stopped at our table. He was a consummate D.C. insider, a mover and shaker, and greeted us in Spanish.

I gave Raul my business card and solicited an interview about the challenges of representing a group radically changing the face of America. He readily accepted the request and told me that on my next visit to Washington we could sit down and talk politics alongside his deputy, Cecilia Muñoz.

He presented his dinner companion, Kenneth I. Trujillo, or Ken. He wore a sharp three-piece suit and stylish round glasses. Of course he was an attorney. He had wavy hair, a square chin and smooth skin; he also talked fast and flashed perfect teeth, the kind that made me insecure about my own. I was glad the lights were dimmed for that reason, and also to better hide my acne-scarred face.

I forced a half smile.

The guy looked like a Hispanic Tom Cruise, I thought. His face was still caked with powder. Earlier that evening both had appeared on a TV show debating local and nationwide efforts to make English the official language of Pennsylvania. We offered Ken a seat and he quickly took it, as Raul had to run to hail down a cab back to Thirtieth Street Station to catch the last train for Washington.

Ken spoke Spanish far from perfectly, but we admired his effort. Mine wasn’t so great, either, so I felt comfortable with him. At times he sounded Puerto Rican, but I later discovered he wasn’t from Puerto Rico or Mexico but had been born and raised in New Mexico. There, people need to remind outsiders that the border crossed their Mexican family, not the other way around. His family had been cut off from the homeland for generations. Like many New Mexicans he felt more wedded to his Spanish heritage than any roots to Mexico. He didn’t know anyone back in Mexico. He never missed his cousins or felt the familiar heartbreak many Mexican immigrants endure during birthdays or holidays, because he was already surrounded by family. Ken’s family had never actually left. Like me, Ken missed the sunsets in the Southwest that color the skies purple and orange.

David strolled over again and introduced himself to Ken. He poured him a drink, happy that he had met three other homesick souls all in the same evening. At our insistence, he poured one for himself, too. With our glasses full, we looked at each other and tried to size one another up. We quickly adopted an Old World tradition that became our own, looking into each other’s eyes when saying cheers—salud.

In that brief moment we must have sensed a common heartbreak. We forged a bond conversing in Spanish that evening over music, cuisine and our shared roots, thousands of miles from the southern border. The four of us, the unlikeliest of friends, had nowhere else to go that night. It was late, almost midnight, and the tables were mostly cleared of guests. With every round poured, the tequila bottle became lighter and we became louder as we began to pick apart every aspect of the historic migration sweeping the country. We dug deeper into the currents reshaping America.

Except for Ken, we were the sons of a failed and incomplete revolution in Mexico now living in Philadelphia, which was supposed to embody the best of a revolution and where the nation’s Founders drew up a constitution that would be the envy of the world for centuries over. We were testing the tolerance of a city founded in 1682 by William Penn, an aristocrat turned rabble-rouser who saw in his new landholdings a haven for refugees fleeing religious persecution and immigrants looking to reinvent themselves.

David spoke of his passion for food and how he sought to seduce Americans with Mexican culinary culture and spirits—soft power, a term I would later learn. Ken talked of judicial justice, a vision for a more equal and inclusive country. Primo only hinted at what he was up to: secretly connecting workers on both sides of the border and devising efforts to empower Mexicans in the U.S. I told them I just wanted to go home, to find a way back to the border or the Mexico of my childhood, hopefully as a foreign correspondent for a big U.S. newspaper, an illusion that felt like a pipe dream at that moment.

Years later, looking back on that evening in Philadelphia, it felt as if we were destined to come together that night, in that moment, at Tequilas’ Table 21. Four strangers bound for the unknown, unhinged from our old comfort zones, embarking on a chaotic journey. Three immigrants from prominent migrant-exporting states in Mexico: Jalisco, Michoacán and Durango. Ken, the New Mexican, an unwitting ambassador of mainstream America, still searching for his Mexican roots along the way. Our friendships would withstand the passage of time, some better than others.

That night we began a conversation that has lasted more than thirty years, turning on a fundamental and deeply personal question: How do we fit in? What does it mean to be American and become part of its diverse mainstream, integrate into its colorful tapestry, its noble ideals and timeless democratic principles? Whenever we thought we had figured it out, somehow the entire concept would again escape us. We seek the original idea, then destroy it—a cruel irony.

Outside Tequilas, dawn began to envelop Philadelphia. Workers headed home, while others were about to begin as the city slept. Trucks plowed piles of snow, clearing Locust Street between Broad and Rittenhouse Square, exposing all that was left of a wintry darkness: four strangers searching for their own shadows at dawn.

SECTION I

Leaving Home

1.

El Pajarito & Superwoman in El Norte

The realization that I would have to leave Mexico for the United States startled me from a dream.

I was just a young boy in San Luis de Cordero, napping in the middle of my maternal grandmother Nina’s courtyard, filled with parrots and plants, dahlias and geraniums. The sweet scents and sounds of birds chirping were drowned out by the mournful whimpering coming from my mother as she and my grandmother plotted our new future. My mother told Nina she needed her to join us: she couldn’t make it alone raising the family; plus, my father insisted that she join us.

News of the impending departure was met with fierce resistance by inconsolable tantrums, my mother recalled many years later, those of my five-year-old self and my brother Juan, a year younger than me.

But what choice did we have?

We didn’t really know our father. As a child, I never called him papá—just señor. I didn’t even know his real name. Pajarito was his nickname, an homage to his band. He loved music. As a bracero, part of the U.S. guest-worker program, he lived in Texas and later California like his other siblings. They had been inspired to go north thanks to their eldest sister, Felicidad, known to us as Tía Chala. She was the first immigrant in the family if not the town. She had been forced to close down her small grocery store because the latest drought meant her clients were forced to ask for store credit. They had no money. She originally left for the northern city of Monterrey, but once there she headed for the border because she was told opportunities were greater. Stories of her grew to legendary proportions: a woman who found her freedom sewing clothes, earning dólares. Tía Chala arrived on the border in Ciudad Juárez in the 1940s with her daughters: Odelva, Alicia, Irma and Olga. And now, thanks to a provision in the Bracero Program, we qualified for green cards. My mother wanted my father to be part of our lives, to guide us and lead us in the right direction.

At night Tía Chala would head to bed and eye the city of El Paso from her battered home in Juárez. She pledged to her daughters they would all cross someday. A fiercely independent woman, she fulfilled her promise and made it to El Paso in 1948. The stories inspired many back in Durango but none more than her brothers. Juan Pablo, the youngest, was particularly fascinated by Tía Chala. Sure, some of his brothers had already left, but if a woman could make it in the United States, he thought, his chances were even greater.

In a rare moment, my father, who wasn’t very affectionate, sent me a postcard of California’s state capitol. Are we there yet? my brothers would ask each time the bus rumbled into a new town. I’d take out my crumpled postcard, look at it and compare every house in front of us. No, I’d respond. Go back to sleep. I grew worried, as no home looked like the postcard. But faith reigned in that Bible my mother carried.

When we arrived in California in 1966, the population was about 196.5 million and whites made up about 85 percent of the population. The remaining 15 percent was overwhelming African-Americans, with Mexicans quietly in the mix, small and nearly invisible, unless you were out in the fields under the earth’s elements. The Sosa, Perez, Jiménez, Ramirez and Corchado families—some of whom I knew back home—had already settled in. Imagine my disappointment when we finally arrived and in front of us wasn’t even a home but a dilapidated trailer house where two of my uncles, Mundo and Eutemio, and a cousin, Chalio—lived and worked alongside my father picking cantaloupes. My parents lived inside and my brothers, my uncles and I would sleep outside with weeds and rats around us. We’d cry in unison and beg my parents to take us back home to San Luis de Cordero, to walk those friendly cobblestone streets that felt like they belonged to us. I’d angrily confront my father after work and point to the fields around us, the trailer house on its last legs, and shout, ¡Esto está gacho! This is garbage! We want to go home again. We’re so lonely here. Lost.

My father would look to my mother, embarrassed that a little twit like me would raise his voice and question him. Rather than address my concerns, he asked her to calm me down. Tell me something. Make me stop screaming. Tell him life will get better. My mother was seven months pregnant, so she pleaded for peace. She was just as depressed.

It was the summer of 1966 and we had no babysitter—didn’t even know what that was—so my brother Juan and I joined our father and our aunts in the fields, helping them pick tomatoes and filling our father’s buckets, child labor laws be damned. When my brother David was born, we’d carry him with joy and pick rocks that looked like cars and pretend we were driving back to Mexico. Some rocks were bigger, and we piled smaller ones on top to make it look like large trucks pulling cargo all the way to Mexico. We told him that somewhere south was a place that was beautiful. A place where people were friendly and didn’t work all the time. They worked to live.

The more my parents talked about the American dream, the more we rebelled against the notion. I wanted nothing to do with this American dream, not if we had to go to sleep fearful that rats would jump on us. Not if that meant I would lose my parents to work.

Months after David was born, we hardly saw my mother anymore.

We lost her to the fields.

Gone were the days when she’d serenade us at home or spend the day planning what we would eat for lunch and dinner—those simple days when she would stock our tiny grocery store with the dollars my father sent from up north.

Following in my father’s footsteps, she, too, became invaluable to and inseparable from work. Mama became the queen of the tomato fields, filling up bins in record time. She was so good that contractors, including her two sisters, fought for her, quibbling over five cents or ten cents more per bin: one penny more meant everything to her. She filled her sacks with lettuce and oranges, jumping off ladders, defying gravity. We tried to imitate her on weekends or during summer, only to make her work double, triple and more as she bailed out my three brothers and me, forcing her to take over four rows, leaving us out.

My mom was Superwoman and Batwoman rolled into one. She was also a wizard with the long hoe and short hoe, working through the fields in a blink of an eye until the California Supreme Court banned the short hoe in 1975, calling it an unsafe tool, as it required workers to stoop over as they used it to cultivate crops. In fact, the short hoe led to long-term health consequences for her: a bad back and bad bones.

Politically speaking, my mother came of age in the fields. Shortly after she arrived, she took part in the fight for equal pay and justice for farmworkers led by union leader Cesar Chavez, who saw Mexicans as a hindrance, an obstacle to making the union stronger, as illegal Mexican workers were bringing down wages for union members. Not my mother. She supported the union’s goal of fair wages, justice and respect. Quiet and even meek at home, in the fields my mother would lead sit-ins and urge workers to rise up. My aunts were mortified by the mutiny orchestrated by their sister, Herlinda, the meek one who was afraid of cats, who made a living selling gorditas on weekends and afternoons.

The patrones needed workers more than the workers needed them, she’d tell them. Their precious crops would rot because the fields would spoil without us. Have courage, she would whisper as workers gathered around her seeking direction.

At home she dedicated her time to us but she would go to sleep by eight. Her day started at 3:30 a.m., when she’d wake to prepare lunch, a couple of egg-and-bean burritos, and she was off to the next field, greeting sugar beets at dawn. My mother would not let us get used to California. She prohibited us from the beach in Carmel, Monterey or Santa Cruz for fear we’d drown like my sister did back in Durango, or Disneyland because we were too busy, particularly my parents, working sunrise to sunset, making sure Americans had vegetables on their tables or fine wines for their fancy parties. California was temporary, she reminded us. Bigger dreams awaited us closer to Mexico.

Back in Durango, a terrible drought showed no mercy. The exodus from Mexico grew, on both sides of the family. Two, three or six would arrive at a time. We were increasingly surrounded by cousins, uncles and aunts. One night Javier, Abel, Joel, Edmundo, Roberto, Armando, Richie and Rosa arrived and shared a room in Eagle Field, sleeping on mattresses on the floor.

Later came cousins Hector, Abel, Geno, Leticia and Carmen. They moved in our cramped government housing, fresh from Ciudad Juárez, and stayed with us for nearly a