Masquerade

Masquerade

103 Masquerade 1 Caught twice and sent back by the Border Patrol, Roberto was sixteen when he finally made it from Guadeloupe to Riverside, California, the last address the family had for his father who had gone to America to earn the money for a small farm. He washed windshields, picked grapes and strawberries , apricots and cotton, dug ditches, poured cement, unloaded fifty pound sacks of feed and fertilizer. Wherever he worked he showed the photograph his father had taken at a traveling fair that stopped at the village one year. Most people shook their heads, one said he saw him fall when goons charged into a line of union pickets, another remembered seeing him escape into the corn fields during the violence. A woman searching for her missing son thought she saw him in the morgue, but the face had been badly beaten and she couldn’t be sure. The authorities looked the other way when cheap, illegal labor was needed, so Roberto stayed close to wherever he was working. Hunger persuaded him to gamble that he would be safe at the festival Acion de Gracias, held every year in Catholic Churches throughout the area. People brought what they could to give thanks to god: a chicken, an armful of corn, a sack of wheat, home-made delicacies. Everyone was welcome; there would be crowds, he’d be a pebble in a field of corn. 104 Masquerade The slim, dark-haired girl handing out tamales, was about his age. Her hands bore the calluses of hard work. “They’re made with blue corn. It only grows in the summer.” “Gracias.” “You can come back for another one if you like it.” Her smile was easy and friendly; her name was Esperanza . Although she worked in the fields, she was a citizen of the United States. Her father, a third generation Latino, disappeared after the union accused him of informing for the growers. Her mother, unable to face raising a child by herself, deposited the three year old at a cousin’s house. It was believed she joined her husband somewhere far away. When he was eighteen, Roberto gave up the search for his father, and married Esperanza. Hoping to find a better life in the big city, they moved to Los Angeles. Esperanza found work cleaning the homes of the rich; Roberto waited long and patiently on sidewalks scattered throughout the city, where people came seeking illegals who asked no questions and did menial work others shunned. More than once he was taken outside the city, worked ten or eleven hours, then was stranded without being paid. When he understood enough English he got a job at the Bel Air Country Club. He set poison and disposed of rats that infested the property, laid sprinkler pipes, cleaned the sand traps and mowed the greens on the golf course. He never saw himself as exploited or underpaid, and accepted as natural that the only people of color seen on the grounds were the gardening and cleanup crews; even the caddies were white. When he became assistant to the supervisor of the grounds crew, he saw to it that those beneath him strictly obeyed the club’s codes of behavior and dress. 105 Edward Lewis 2 After two miscarriages, Esperanza gave birth to a daughter they named Maria. Consumed by the demands of mere survival, there was little time to supervise the joyous, exuberant child. In the second grade she was given the IQ test. Spanish being the preferred language at home, Maria was less than fluent in English, and unfamiliar with the nuances of Anglo culture important in understanding the questions. She scored low on the test, and was labeled a slow learner. It would mark her permanently, as surely as the brand on a concentration camp inmate’s arm. She grew taller than her parents, had the grace and figure of an artist’s model, green eyes shaped in the manner of a cat’s. Believing that she was of lesser worth than the other students, Maria was like a coin tossed in the air, unpredictable which side would turn up: one side moody and confrontational ; the other enthusiastic and cheerful; one stubborn; the other a willing follower; one Maria unrealistically upbeat; the other bitter in the belief she was doomed to a lifetime of shit work. As immigrants find their countrymen, so Maria fell in with...