mi ninez loca

terra is 14 months and it is odd to realize how deficient her long term memory is at this point. soon, she will lose all recollection of this time, of these first three years or so, really. (Ah, but i will remember.)

this and a friend's blog entry have had me thinking about my earliest times of consciousness, specifically what i remember and how different the world was through my eyes.

when i was three and four i lived with my grandpa and his next wife after my grandma, lupe. lupe was from mexico and for all intents and purposes, she was my mother figure from 3-8.

i remember spending my days at lupe's feet. wherever she was in the house, i tended to play on the floor near her, and this was usually in the kitchen. the smell of albondigas and menudo and pozole were so familiar to me i thought something was wrong when i would go into someone else's house and it did not smell the same.

i remember holidays, how i had to get up early with lupe and go from one end of la puente to the other to aunt virginia's house so they could start making tamales at 4:30am. aunt virginia's tv seemed to only get channel 9, which in those days was known as khj, so i would get a blanket and curl up on the floor in front of shows that were not cartoons and held no value to me whatsoever, (but everyone was sleeping and the outdoors was frosty so my choices were limited.)

i remember my cousin rudy eventually waking up on those holiday mornings and emerging from his room for me to pester. he was a bohemian, i think now in retrospect. i mean, he fits all the criteria. he was never in good standing with his family. he played the guitar. he was smarter and more insightful than everyone else as far as i was concerned. i remember years later when he moved to el monte and we visited him once and his tiny apartment was overrun with clothes and junk and food wrappers and how everyone verbally chastised him for this behavior. i think his mind was on higher things than tidiness.

rudy taught me how to play chess. he taught me well, too. we played virtually every time i showed up at his house, on east prichard street, and i remembered all through my adolesence and still play and have taught others. i read somewhere that chess exercises the brain in such a way it allows certain synapses to remain working substantially later into life than what happens in the brains of those who never played the game.

thank you, rudy. what ever happened to you? my inner child misses you.

i remember wrestling with lupe's youngest son, the only one who was still around for me; luis. everyone in the family called him squeaky-i do not remember why. it is a sad thing to lose memories. it is not so sad it makes one want to cry but it is sad. you feel as though you didn't care so much to have lost your grasp on the handles of factoids, to have let these little treasures slip away when you weren't paying attention.

luis used to torture me affectionately. he'd pin me and tap my sternum until i thought my head might explode. he'd let loogies drip out of his mouth and dangle over my face before sucking them back up, (usually.) in addition to pendejo, cabron, puto, dont-do, and chinga tu madre, he most definitely taught me how to say "tio?!"

relatives tell me i was fluent in spanish when i was four and five, but i don't recall that. i remember being comfortable with certain words for certain times of the day or certain events but both of my vocabularies were fairly limited in those days.

my best friend on greycliff avenue in those days was raymond, who lived down the street and was one year younger than me. no one in his house spoke english except him so when i showed up at his door, there was always a limited conversation of recognition and fetching raymond. i think he learned his english from me and he never could say lupe. for some reason he called her snoopy.

there were twins a few houses up the street from me named rafael and gustavo but they were two years older than me. still, they were good friends to me and i wonder what happened to those guys.

i loved that neighborhood. years later i moved to downtown la and lived there and in hollywood from 9-11. my mom's husband was mexican and the neighborhood was mexican and all of our friends were mexican but it was different from la puente. puente trese was like a street gang on training wheels compared to alpine, the members of which were ubiquitous in my life during those years. some got shot, some went to jail, but always the turnstile of people arriving and leaving and when those years concluded and i moved in with my uncle mark, he had just bought the house on greycliff avenue from my grandpa so lo and behold, i was back in la puente. back at del valle elementary school, (except on thursdays when i bussed to nelson school for an extra learning period.)

but lupe was no longer with me. she and my grandpa had moved to montebello. i came to a startling conclusion when i returned to my old neighborhood, i now lived with white people. to compensate for such misfortune, i did everything i could to look mexican. i begged for a black pair of hush puppies and i tried hard to wear an outfit with a button-down, blue shirt that i most identified as the uniform of my people.

to the kids in la puente, i wanted them to know i had came from la. i wanted them to know i had done time in mclaren hall in el monte. i was 11, this was the 6th grade, and i needed to out-mexican these kids by being harder then them. sure enough, with an attitude like that, i started getting into a lot of fights. i beat up a white kid named mark and two days later his older brother and another kid pummeled me but good. (i had to make up a skateboard accident to hide my new tendencies from an aunt and uncle i needed to impress.)

the culmination of all this was a fight with the school bully, a kid named jimmy who was seriously a foot taller than me. he had stalked me for about a week and i got tired of looking over my shoulder so one day after i school i tore of in his direction, sprinting from across the playground and screaming at the top of my lungs too. he turned and adopted an odd look. he was surprised and it was like he didn't know what to do. he put his hands up as if to box and braced himself and i remember jumping up on him, clasping my legs around his torso, (we fell,) and i started punching him on both sides of his grotesque chranium. it didn't last long. the screaming and the interminable sprint attracted much attention and i was pulled off him quickly but he had a bloody nose and was crying, literally, crying, in front of everyone who was there. i was still raging but i can remember the recognition that he was crying making me feel like quite the little champ.

not long after that a kid popped me in the eye and i had to tell my uncle it was from a fight. i painted myself the victim and wasn't punished in any way but i think my aunt and uncle moved us to covina in part because they thought the brown neighborhood was a little rough. . .

and it was in covina i lost my mexijo. (my mexican mojo.) covina had maybe 20% mexican families but the other 79% were white. white like dirt bikes and boats and long hair on boys and baseball not beisbol. white like led zeppelin-these people had never even heard of the chi-lites. the vitalis, ricky ricardo flip i had in the front of my hair was suddenly out of style and i'm pretty sure i was voted on to covina people magazine's ten worst dressed list.

but then one day i realized, i really am white. i really am, and was. the 25% of me that is of filipino descent may have given me a skin color similar to that of my mexican brethren and i suppose the white kids identified with me even less than the mexican kids, but 75% of me is white. (mostly irish with perhaps a bit of either german or english or welsch, or all three, and possibly a sliver of native american cherokee a few generations back on the white side but basically, a big mix of paleskin.)

i adapted quickly. i ran for class president, (basically as "the new kid,") and lost by 3%, (to the white girl i had a crush on; sally.) i played little league baseball and because of my own personal development, everything was just getting better in those days.

my little chicanito self fell away from me like a favorite coat that suddenly lost its lustre and just didn't quite fit anymore. in my heart, it remained; my love of the mexican culture, (as i knew it.)

i often tell people today i was mexican from 3 to 11, or that i was once a mexican, migrant farm worker. i cherish the memories i retain. i hold on to the idea that as a 6 or 7-year-old boy i lived in a mobile home in nipomo and bussed into santa maria to go to school and we picked strawberries when they were in season and potatoes when they were, and my uncle george dug for clams at 5am at pismo beach and how ricky went off to the marine corps and suzy drove a little blue karman ghia and how connie used to take me to the beach with her and the smell of fresh tortillas and authentic mexican foods and the sounds of their rolling r's when they would refer to the barrrrrio or when luis taught me to say viva la raza and the 'r' was hard, rolled like a taquito, and 'z' sounded like the 's' in style.

i don't miss it. i only cherish it. i miss my people, the ones i lost contact with because of the behavior of ridiculous adults.

i heard both uncles and one of my aunts all succumbed to diabetes. both my uncle manuel and uncle george lost limbs before ultimately dying. my aunt aurora is supposedly still living in santa maria, likely in the same house right across the street from the park with the rocket with the slide in it. i hope she is well and i hope robert and isaac, my once "cousins," are also thriving.

i have not seen nor heard from connie nor luis nor any of the others in close to 20 years.

in my 30s i remember looking around one day and realizing all of my friends i hung out with on a day-to-day basis were mexican and it did not surprise me.

my mexican friend who writes like garcia-lorca and who wears his mexicanness right next to his heart on his sleeve like a badge of honor, takes me back with his writing. (every time.) and i have to say, it's good to remember. it's good to have a history even if it is just your own and not that of a race of people.