Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Indio, 1983–88 (“El Campo” Years)

119 As the story goes, my mother had been picking grapes along with her crew at one of the Freeman fields in the Coachella Valley. The harvest season had just begun, but already the day temperatures were uncomfortably warm. She became thirsty, nothing out of the ordinary , so she informed her coworkers that she was going down to the end of the field block to have a drink of water from the supervisor’s water tank. Ten minutes passed and she hadn’t returned. The grape packer grumbled: Was she taking a drink or a vacation? Ten more minutes went by. Did she go home? After half an hour, the coworkers became alarmed. Jesús, María y José. This absence was more than atypical; it was threatening. A quick reconnaissance confirmed that my mother was indeed missing, so the supervisor improvised a search party. When the men spread about the block in groups of threes and fours, the women huddled together in a protective circle. The foremen didn’t even bother sending anyone back to work, fearing the worst when a woman disappears. She’s over here! a voice called out from the center of the sea of grapevines. She’s over here! And a dead calm settled over the farmworkers as if the very air they breathed had frozen. My mother was found wandering through the lush vines, incoherent , the victim of a stroke. She was taken to the Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio, and then eventually transferred to Eisenhower 6 Indio, 1983–88 (“El Campo” Years) Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, just a short drive away. When my brother and I arrived home after school, we climbed up the wooden steps and found ourselves locked out of our little home on top of the garage. We banged on the door, expecting one of our parents to come out at any moment to scold us for making such a racket. No response . Suddenly, the landlord’s wife came out and waved us down. In the time we had been living next to her, she had never spoken to us even though her children came over quite often to invite us out to play. The softness of her voice was disconcerting, not at all what I imagined her sounding like after all those stories her children told us about how much she yelled at them. “You must be strong, children,” she said to us. “I have some bad news to tell you.” Her tone and diction disoriented me further. She had called us children, but she was talking to us in that polite way adults speak when they address strangers. “Your mother has been hospitalized. Again. She suffered a small accident at work, so she won’t be coming home tonight. Your father called me, and he gave me specific instructions. I will be looking after you this afternoon until one of your relatives arrives to pick you up. Please wash up before you come in.” She walked back into her house, robot-like, leaving my brother and me speechless and numb with shock. But we did what we were told. We spat-combed our hair, washed our hands and faces with the hose behind the garage, and then knocked timidly on the back door of the landlord’s house. I was surprised at the size of the house. The dining room alone was larger than our entire home, and this made me feel smaller still. While we nibbled on the bland sandwiches, none of the landlord’s children came to eat with us, and then the landlord’s wife went on and on about her own misfortune with a broken pinky and the brief episode at the hospital that followed her traumatic incident. “How my children cried for me,” she said. “And there I was in my hospital bed, crying out for them as well. The whole family was 120 adolescent mariposa 121 Indio,1983–88 in tears. The whole world, it seemed. But I’m so pleased to see there isn’t any of that theater here.” Between bites I cursed her. And then I cursed my father for entrusting this sow with our care. And then I cursed the rest of the family for leaving us with the sow longer than we could possibly bear. Alex and I sat in those clean chairs, eating off those clean plates, refusing to let the...