Olga García Echeverría
I have a fond memory of my father. In the 11
th
grade, as part of a school fundraiser, I had to sell glazed donuts. I took home
4 dozen with nothing but good intentions, but since donuts are a weakness of
mine, I ate one and then another. Originally, this was not a big concern. Each
donut was .50 cents and I figured I could afford a few dollars worth. But as
the days passed, I sold nothing; I didn’t even try. Instead, I peered at the
aging donuts in the cardboard box, whispered “sorry” to some invisible Donut
God, and devoured another. Before I knew it my debt had skyrocketed. When I did
the math, I owed the school close to $20.00. This was a lot of money for a
teenager in 1986. I had no idea how I was going to pay. My father, who
understood the pressure of debt, must have picked up on my anxiety. I had about
five donuts left when he said,
Ya comételas,
mija. ¡Yo te las pago todas! And he did, all 4 dozen.
I can share this story now, but there was a time when I was so angry at my father that I believed I had no
good memories of him. For years, I completely blocked memories like the one
above. Yes, it was a bit dysfunctional of him to simply pay for all the donuts I had eaten (encouraging my emotional eating like
that), but it was also tender, especially for someone who rarely showed
affection. For most of his life, my father was a hardcore alcoholic. Although
he could
sometimes
be a harmless drunk mumbling to himself at the kitchen table, he was more often
than not explosive. Yelling curses, breaking things, and raising fists in the
air were a few of his fortes.
Mostly this was due to his childhood wounds. My paternal grandfather had been shot and killed when my dad was just a toddler, and later my grandmother remarried
and “lent” my father out as a farmhand to an uncle who beat and berated him
regularly. I don’t know why my grandmother “lent out” my dad or if she did it
willfully—there are many gaps in the story--but I do know my father lived with
a deep sense of abandonment thereafter. The years he spent with that uncle also
scarred him for life; they crippled his ability to give and accept love; they
filled him with pain and rage.
Alcohol
became his life-long anesthesia.
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| Wallet & toy gun found in dad's old suitcase |
Patriarchy screwed my father. It gave him a limited and
oppressive definition of manhood. In short: guns, liquor, lots of women, and
violence. Patriarchy rooted him on, encouraging irrational,
destructive behavior. I’m remembering him drunk on our porch in
East LA, shooting bullets into the night sky on the 4
th
of July. This made him feel like a
real man.
I’m also remembering him packing his gun into a leather bowling bag and
insisting on taking it grocery shopping. According to my father, one never knew
what could go down at the local Johnson’s market on
Whittier Boulevard. Once, he actually got
into a showdown in the parking lot with someone else’s alcoholic Mexican father
who, like my dad, had packed a gun to go shopping. Hijole! Were they from the
same pinche rancho or what? Both of them had probably seen way too many John
Wayne movies. Nobody got shot or maimed that day thanks to the women and children on both sides of the showdown; we had to literally drag our fathers into their respective station wagons.
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| Picture of Indio-looking dad |
I can laugh now, but growing up with my dad was
crazy. Aside from patriarchy, colonization también lo chingó. It taught him
caste and color. It fed him self-hate. In his eyes, everything wrong with my
mother was a result of her
pinche sangre
Yaqui. He talked a lot of Yaqui shit, my dad, but at times in the middle of
a Yaqui curse, he’d go into a monologue about how fierce they were, what great
warriors, how they resisted the Spanish and then the Mexicans like no other
tribe.
Buenos para luchar los Yaquis!
There was an overtone of awe and respect. My father wasn’t an Aztec, or a
Toltec, or a Yaqui. He was a colonized Mestizo (and a borracho to boot) who’d
long lost the thread of his own indigenous ancestry. When he cursed the Yaqui,
he was cursing the long-lost
Indio
in himself.
I have a folder titled DAD that is full of all
the scraps of poems, letters, essays, stories I’ve tried to write about my
father over the years. When I sit down to tackle my papa drama in words, there
is always an initial outpour of red-hot emotions—hurt, anger, wounded love—but
before long, the momentum fizzles (red-hot emotions are exhausting) and another
unfinished piece gets stuffed into the folder.
In a recent interview on PBS, Bill Moyers asked Sherman Alexie if his writing was cathartic.
Alexie chuckled and answered, “No.” There was
something cathartic about hearing Sherman Alexie say that his writing was not
cathartic. He added, “I think it can be healing for readers. You know, I have
been helped and healed by other people’s words. But I, my own words for myself,
oh man, I don’t think so.”
Perhaps I was laughing because a part of me understood. Although I
believe writing can be healing, there is also that other side of writing—the
one that claws at the most vulnerable parts of us. The one that haunts and
hurts like the jagged pieces of my father stuffed into a manila folder.
In her poem, “Tepalcate a tepalcate,”
Elba Rosario Sánchez writes about how Spanish colonization in the
Americas broke
us, both physically and spiritually. Tepalcate,
Elba
notes at the onset of her poem, is a Nahuatl word which means “fragmento de una
pieza de barro quebrada.” Through the generations of violence and racism, we
became broken pieces of clay, dispersed. At the end of
Elba’s
poem, we (esos pedazos rotos) stand before each other as if standing before a
mirror,
tepalcate a tepalcate. We
recognize one other through time and space. “Somos caras en relieve,” writes
Elba, “de una misma pieza.”
When I open my DAD folder, this is what I
see—tepalcates. The fragments are not only reflections of me; they are
splintered pieces of American history. My father first migrated from
Mexico to the
U.S. in the late 1940’s, when he
was in his early twenties. It was a time of overt racism, “unofficial
segregation,” where signs that read
No
Dogs or Mexicans Allowed reflected a national, deep-seeded fear and hate
for Mexicanos.
Like many migrants of his time, my father did
not join the Bracero Program. Instead, he crossed and worked illegally, sin
papeles. Much like today, deportations were rampant, and my father recalls
being deported numerous times.
Pero yo siempre regresaba al siguiente día, he says defiantly.
For years, my father followed the crops up and down
California, working in
pesticide-sprayed fields and in slave-like conditions. He tells stories of
being “promoted” in the fields at some point and becoming a migrant camp cook,
feeding close to a hundred workers a day. For several years in the 1960’s he
worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. And later, when he settled in
Los Angeles, he
was gardener and handyman for White man, warehouse packer, factory worker,
security guard.
Through the years, I’ve recovered other memories
of my father that challenge my previously held belief that he was a
one-dimensional monster, like memories of him sacrificing to take us to the
most elegant of downtown restaurants—Clifton’s Cafeteria. We were ecstatic as
we slid our food trays along the silver rail, scanning the steaming meats,
mashed potatoes, gravy, cake slices and bright-colored gelatins.
Agarren lo que quieran, my father would
say as if we were rich, and our small hands would reach out, grabbing.
Or the memory of him in the kitchen baking cinnamon bread from
scratch. He’d shed his machoness then, put on an apron and play chef. He had sazón
and everything he made was delicious.
Chile chipotle salsa. Birria.
Barbacoa. Tortas de camaron con nopalitos. Homemade chorizo. Deep fried donuts
(the root of my donut obsession).
There is the memory of him coming home after a long day of work and throwing himself on the couch like a falling giant, moaning,
Aiii, Aiii. ¡Quítenme las botas! He gave us quarters, nickels and dimes for taking off his heavy boots and pulling out his blooming grey hairs, all our fingers eagerly digging into his scalp, searching. I loved the feel of his dark wavy hair and the smile of surrender on his face.
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| Portrait of dad with wavy hair sans canas |
There were also the fruits and vegetables he seeded in
whatever little niche of dirt he could find. We lived right by the 710 freeway
where concrete and smog ruled, but he made of our immediate surroundings a
small garden. We had corn, sprawling chayote, an orange tree, sugar cane stalks
that grew twice our size. He sliced open the stalks with his navaja and gave us
and the neighborhood kids pieces to chew. We sucked on the sweet juicy stalks
until they became stringy mush in our mouths.
My father wasn’t a monster. True,
when he staggered around the house unable to express himself he reminded me of
Frankenstein. When he beat his fist against his inflated chest he reminded me
of King Kong. When he threw his fits and roared, he resembled Godzilla. But in the
end, weren’t these monsters misunderstood and mistreated beasts? Poor Frankenstein,
created and then abandoned. King Kong taken from his homeland (for capitalistic
interests) and displayed as a freak in the good old
U.S.A. Even Godzilla, the most destructive
of monsters, was conceived by the Japanese imagination post the nuclear bombing
of
Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Destruction breeds destruction and even “The Bad” are multilayered
stories waiting to be told and understood.
Which brings me to the act of excavating and piecing
together tepalcates in an attempt to get a more comprehensive picture. I was
going through one of my father’s old suitcases a few days ago, organizing. I
found some treasures. Among them a Father’s Day card I gave him when I was a
child. I have no recollection of making him this card and it’s not dated, but
gathering from the writing and bad spelling, I’m guessing early elementary
school. What child doesn’t want the fantasy “Best Dad In the World”? Despite my
home reality I gave my father a card that reflected that deseo, esa fantasía.
The funny thing is I misspelled “dad” and instead the card reads:
To the best bad in the world. Happy Father’s
Day! Freudian slip?
I’m not sure whose terrycloth I massacred in the making
of this card and it’s obvious that colonization también me chingo a mí, since
my father appears as a pink-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed beach boy in striped
shorts. There is so much more to say, but I will leave you with these few
sentimental fragments and with a shout out to all the fragmented fathers,
daughters, and sons out there who are trying to put themselves back together
again, one tepalcate at a time.
