Shock Waves

At the conclusion of Torero, a feature-length documentary my father wrote and directed in Mexico during the blacklist, a matador, Luis Procuna, is triumphantly brought home on the shoulders of ecstatic fans after a superb faena in the Plaza México. But even as he embraces his wife, his joy is displaced by fear because "I know," his voice informs us, "that next Sunday I face the bulls again."

This knell of recognition was certainly not unique to Procuna. For the cost of a ticket, a cigar, and a couple of Coronas quaffed from waxed-paper cups, my father might enjoy two hours' diversion every Sunday at the bullfights, but on Monday, glancing at the Mexico City News, he could hardly avoid the reminder that five hundred miles to the north lived millions of U.S. citizens who wouldn't have thought twice about rounding up his family, his friends, and their families too and jailing every one of them.

One sunny afternoon in 1951—I hadn't seen him for several weeks—my father proudly parked an immense black car outside our rented house in Hollywood. He didn't explain why he'd traded our '49 Chevrolet for a ten-year-old Cadillac. He hadn't explained why he and my mother had sold the wonderful house on Briarcliff that we'd formerly lived in. Now, evidently, we were leaving the Serrano house too. At this juncture, we, in addition to Hugo and Jean, meant me and my three younger sisters: Susie, Mary, and Emily.

With a luggage rack clamped to the Cadillac's roof, we headed south to Ensenada. Here the Trumbos eventually met us, Trumbo having been released from prison.¹ When we'd all recovered from a series of obligatory typhoid shots, our caravan—three vehicles, a trailer, seven children, four adults, a sheepdog, and a cat—set out for the heartland of Mexico.

If you were to ask me when the blacklist ceased to be an abstraction, I would try to describe a cold November night on a hilltop half an hour's ride by car and burro from the town of Uruapan. The ponchos we're wearing have been borrowed from the campesinos who have brought us here. In front of us is an arroyo whose opposite side is actually the slope of a volcano named Paricutín. The volcano has been rumbling intermittently and hurling incandescent magma high into the sky, but when the real event occurs the sky is pale gray with dawn and the volcano has been briefly quiet. Then, like ripples spreading from a pebble's impact with a pond, a number of immense dark circles—crescents really—appear in the airborne dust above the cone of the volcano, moving outward at unthinkable speed. The circles disappear as suddenly as they'd materialized, and now—our hilltop being half a mile from the summit—the appalling sound of the eruption hits us.

I was ten years old, and it may not be stretching the truth to assume that the shock waves generated by HUAC are resonating still.

I can no longer recall what I knew then about the path my parents had chosen. To be sure, religion was a sham and money was vile; those potent bills and cunning coins were carriers of maladies unnamed. I wasn't aware that on several occasions the FBI had knocked on our door in the hopes of finding my father at home and serving him with a subpoena. I was aware that Trumbo and Ring were in jail, but the why of their imprisonment was hard to fathom.² They were friends of ours. I knew they hadn't committed a crime to the extent that I understood crime from my weekly attention to Sky King and The Lone Ranger on the radio. Apparently we were leaving Los Angeles because my father was part of something that Trumbo and Ring were part of. I had no idea what it was.

Arriving in Mexico City, we rented a house in the Lomas de Chapultepec area. One morning, six of us children—three Trumbos and three Butlers...