The Permit that Never Expires: Migrant Tales from the Ozark Hills and the Mexican Highlands

The Expatriation of Miguel Sevilla O

fl fl fl TheExpatriationofMiguelSevillaOñates, akaElPájaro Because he practiced English day and night, he was ready the morning the state university called. They needed someone to interpret for an investigator , a certain doctora in her fifties—khaki shorts, briefcase, sandals— who went around asking questions about the local diet. She had a grant to study it. That much he knew from a sister-in-law who hosted this lady for two nights on a cot. La Doctora never complained, his sister-in-law said. In a knapsack, she carried a toothbrush and mosquito netting. She ate trail mix and bathed, as she could, under a driveway faucet. El Pájaro and La Doctora were on an ejido an hour outside Morelia , in the kitchen of another one of his aunts, at a table with four Sras. Rain hammered the corrugated metal roof, a naked lightbulb dangled, and in the center of the table sat a jar of Nescafé and a sugar bowl. It got so quiet you could hear the guzzling where a new mother stood with a towel draped over the infant she held at port arms. Kindling crackled under the stove lid. A rafter creaked. From the beginning, he thought of La Doctora as his ticket to el norte. She was an escape route from the small-town life he was sure was going to suffocate him. He’d had it with gossipy neighbors, pothole streets, and the same bedraggled parades every year passing the same spray-painted statues. He was desperate. He hated everything about his hometown—beginning with the nickname it stuck on him one afternoon when the family dog, up on the roof, went into convulsions from what they figured was poison. So young Miguel was sent up to seize the dog’s tail and spin the dog until it got dizzy and vomited, except that he got dizzy first and fell off the roof and broke his arm, and after that people called him El Pájaro, “the Bird.” One by one now, prompting each other, the women at the table were recollecting the week’s meals. Behind them stood another dozen señoras, wary, watchful. 82 the permit that never expires Quelites, responded the elderly señora at the table. She waved away her momentary forgetfulness—one finger was missing two joints—and hissed for emphasis, Quelites. The investigator looked at El Pájaro, who thought and shook his head. He looked unprepared, and he knew it. He wished he had the dictionary he’d left behind, the one he didn’t want to look like he needed. Well, he frowned, it’s like when you pick plants, you make a salad. Greens, she nodded, producing a yellow pencil. She checked a column in a notebook. Ask what she ate with her salad.¿Qué más comió? he said, and shrugged at the quizzical look the elderly woman gave him. Salad only, he said. Ask if the family consumes dairy products, please.¿Comen Uds. productos lacteos?¿Productos . . .?¿La leche, por ejemplo, el queso? Cosa muy eventual, Sr. Rarely, she says. The pencil didn’t move, so El Pájaro pressed for more detail. ¿Cada cuándo? Pos’ sabrá Dios, desde que la vaca se metió en la carretera, que se nos extravió.¿Y? Pos’ la plancharon bien y bonito. Not since their cow got run over, El Pájaro deadpanned. The investigator shot him a look over her notebook—a smile or a bit of indigestion? Then the rain got so loud he had to read lips to interpret. Then it veered off so fast it left him shouting what someone had for lunch the day before. Crowded into a corner, he couldn’t lift his hand to see his wristwatch, but judged it must be after four. The Sras. took their time. They were very thorough. The last informant, a tiny, wrinkled grandmother, went absolutely speechless at her daughter’s suggestion that she, the week before, had consumed a pork chop at a wedding. Que soy aventista—she reminded all present that her Adventist faith boasted rigid dietary restrictions—y no comemos de eso. En absoluto. Miguel Sevilla Oñates 83 Amá, por favor, a middle-aged woman broke in. Somos puros católicos, she addressed the investigator, en primer lugar, y en segundo, le encantan los chicharrones. Now was the moment to press the limits, El Pájaro figured. The family...