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95 Chapter 6 Transformations Nova “ Marjorie!” I looked up from my lunch in this restaurant frequented by university faculty on this first day of a return visit to the Midwest, startled to see “Nova” standing straight and tall in a waiter’s white pressed shirt and red tie, looking and sounding professional, confident, mature, and at home in this position and setting. After I registered my surprise to see him here, Nova told me of his activities: working as a waiter; designing web pages for cyberspace clients who paid for his services (with a business partner from Mexico); playing on the volleyball team (despite his father’s preference for him to play baseball); forming a Latino club at his school; teaching salsa lessons; and yes, still translating, especially for his dad. He talked about his college search and noted that he was researching art schools in Italy and hunting for scholarship money on the Internet, but he was also being recruited by the army (aggressively, from Nova’s description) and was tempted to join because he’d like some day to be an astronaut and he knew that is one pathway to NASA. I remembered the shy boy that I first met in the park near my house six years ago, a boy who had moved to the Midwest from a rancho in Mexico the previous year, and who was just learning English. I wondered at his transformation into the outgoing, articulate , and worldly young man I saw in front of me. Junior Junior’s family had moved twice—just like I did—in the time since I moved away from this town. His mother apologized for this new home: “es muy 96 translating childhoods pequena” [it’s really small]. But all I could think is that it was bigger than my apartment in Los Angeles and that small can be cozy and cozy can be nice. Photos, lining the room, allowed me in one fell swoop to see Junior at ages four, eight, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, as well as the three children in various constellations together and alone. The television show, “The O.C.,” was playing, and I wondered what sense this family of Mexican immigrants living in the heartlands of the United States made of the opulence and decadence of the lives that the died-blond cast of characters lived under blue skies and brilliant sunshine along the shores of the Pacific—a show that I knew only through my daughter, who introduced me to its opening song when we moved back to California from Chicago: “California, here I come, right back where I started from. . . .” When Junior entered the room I barely recognized him. His baggy clothes belied the thinned out frame, but his face had thinned out, and he was taller than his father by at least four inches. Junior was wearing a heavy silver chain with a metal cross, loose fitting jeans, and shiny white tennis shoes with laces undone. He spoke to me in both English and Spanish, as he told me that he wanted to be a car redesigner and that he was joining an after-school club at his high school where they fixed up and redesigned cars. He had already learned a lot from watching his father: “My dad fixes his car, so I kind of learn from the things he does to it, like when he does tune-ups to it. I’ll go find the pieces he needs, change the oil, (see) what kind of oil it needs, where he puts it in.” Junior said that he translated more than he used to “because there’s more stuff to do around the house.” He told me about some recent translation work for his parents: calling the phone company to change their service; reading information about a new law on car emissions so his father could renew his car’s license plate; researching information about digital cable on the Internet to help his family choose cable service; and translating at his own parentteacher conferences. It seemed that from their dress, talk, present activities, and future ambitions that Nova and Junior—neighbors and friends, whose families migrated from the same farming community to the same Chicago suburb at around the same time—had taken up very different kinds of teen identities and perhaps different trajectories of development. Nevertheless, for both, translation work continued to shape their daily lives, and both used their bilingual skills as well as their...

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