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4: The Girl from Across the Street, 1944–45
- University of New Mexico Press
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✩ 35 ✩ C h a p t e r F o u r The Girl from Across the Street, 1944–45 By late August of 1944, I was back in Barrio Logan. The war was raging in both hemispheres, but the result was no longer in doubt. We were going to win. My country and its allies had pulled off the world’s biggest and riskiest invasion on the beaches of Normandy. Our armies, firmly entrenched in northern Europe, were slogging toward a certain, if costly, victory. In the Far East, we were advancing, island by island, toward another sure and equally costly victory. Ahead lay tremendous battles in Belgium and Okinawa, and places hitherto unknown, such as Iwo Jima, but the Allies were not going to be stopped. The United States had a terrible weapon in the works. Two years earlier, scientists at the University of Chicago had produced the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a nuclear pile. This would lead to the development of the atom bomb that ended the last war to end all wars. On our way to defeating two of the most despotic regimes in the history of the world, we had opened either Pandora’s box or the door to a technological explosion, the likes of which the world had never seen. The answer is still out on that question. During my time in the army, I had changed. I was now a citizen and an eligible voter. I was much more mature than when I had boarded that bus to San Pedro in December of 1942. My stint in the army gave me an understanding of the world I’d never had before. I had seen parts of my country and the world that were as alien to me as another planet. I had traveled to the only country in the hemisphere 36 ✩ chapter four where neither of the languages I spoke was the official language. I lived with folks who had never met a person of Mexican descent. Upon my return, I was a changed man. I was ready to take my place as an adult in this burgeoning country I had sworn to defend. I wanted to be ready. I would get the higher education that my parents wanted me to get and I’d always dreamt of. But more importantly, I would marry the girl who would be with me for the rest of my life. This story is slightly out of sequence, but I am including it here because important events tend to overlap, and our marriage won’t fit into a nice, neat time frame. Also, it was the happiest event of my life, and I am, as my Anglo friends might say, busting my britches to tell it. I didn’t exactly discover the woman who would be my wife. After all, she was born across the street from me when I was almost ten years old. To me, Beatriz Serrano was always just a kid, and a girl at that! What guy in the barrio really gave a hoot about little girls, even if the grown-ups thought they were cute? Beatriz was there, but who cared? But that was before she grew up. As I have mentioned before, Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) were pretty much the center of social life for Latino youngsters in my neighborhood. I’d played baseball on CYO teams and attended chaperoned dances held by the organization . Although I wasn’t always so keen on the chaperones, the dances proved to be a sensible way to introduce kids to adult life. Indeed, chaperoned or not, the CYO dances were a highlight of my youth well into my twenties. One night a few years after my army discharge, I saw a young beauty at a CYO dance. Could she dance! She was so graceful and light on her feet. I was a bit leery of even asking her out onto the floor—she was much better than I, and she was that little girl from across the street. My goodness! When I was in high school, she was just a skinny little kid with curly black hair, of little interest to a macho dude like me. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. Beatriz Serrano was now sixteen , a young adult. She and her sister Consuelo had been accomplished dancers and singers for most of their lives, starting about the time I...