Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Bakersfield, California, 1970–72

43 My father gave up boxing a few years before I was born. According to my mother’s sisters he wasn’t a very good contender anyway. Their assessment was based entirely on the only match they ever saw him fight. This was also his last match. His humiliation at being knocked out seconds after the first-round bell was so great that he never returned to the boxing ring. My aunts wouldn’t let him forget the day he had wanted to impress my mother’s family and they lorded this failure over him as a tactic to keep him from coming around to ask for my mother in the evenings. “You should have seen your father,” my aunt once told me, pleased that she could keep this story fresh after all these years. “He barely had time to lift his glove when his opponent floored him with a right hook. Even the referee thought it was a joke and nudged him with his foot before he realized he should start counting. Isn’t that right, you?” My father grinned sheepishly from the corner. My father’s post-boxer years are the beginning of my story. Since no level of ridicule could keep him away from my mother, my father continued to court her. On their dates they had to take a chaperone, usually one of my mother’s sisters, who had to bring back a full report to my grandmother to insure the honesty of his intentions . But my father suspected that my grandmother and aunts were scheming to break up the relationship. My grandmother wasn’t 6 Bakersfield, California, 1970–72 too keen about having her oldest child marry a farmworker/defeated boxer, and a probable drunk to boot. Wasn’t he a bit quick to accept an offer for a drink? And what of those awful tattoos? Had he needled them in himself ? So my father, out of desperation, did what any young man from Zacapu, Michoacán would do in a situation like this: he skipped town with his girlfriend. My parents eloped the summer of 1969, leaving Michoacán behind and shacking up in an avocado-colored one-room house in Mexicali, where they planned my mother’s crossing into California. My father had his work permit, so he crossed the international border every day to work the fields of the Imperial Valley, usually picking beets. Every paycheck brought him one step closer to earning the fee for borrowing a passport for my mother. In front of the house grew a dwarf palm, across the street stood a bakery, and across the international border awaited the promise of a better life. The goal grew in urgency once my mother realized early the following year that she was pregnant. As my father tells it, by the middle of spring my paternal grandparents were already following the grape route north into central California, but my mother had reservations about joining them since she wanted to start a family independently of her in-laws. My father convinced her that there was safety in numbers and that they should live near family, especially in a foreign country. So before my mother became too big to travel they crossed over using a borrowed local passport for my mother and once it was returned, favor paid for, they simply drove north, past the Coachella Valley, past Los Angeles, and into the county of Kern. When night fell they took to driving through the back roads because the highways and the speeding cars with their maddening bright lights frightened my mother. They came across a fork. “Which way should we go, you?” my father asked my mother. My mother contemplated the two paths before them for a few seconds. The roads were dark and neither gave any hint about where 44 childhood and other language lessons 45 Bakersfield,California,1970–72 it was heading. My mother said that it really didn’t matter. Both roads were going north. Since she was pregnant and an undocumented alien, she only wanted to make sure that her child was born a U.S. citizen. Any city would do. “Which way then, Avelina?” my father pressed on. “Go right,” my mother said, pointing. And right they turned, arriving in Bakersfield, California, where I was born on July 18, 1970, and where my brother, Alexandro, was born almost two years later...