Top Quotes: “The Distance Between Us” — Reyna Grande

Childhood

“I was two years old when my father left. The year before, the peso was devalued 45% to the U.S. dollar. It was the beginning of the worst recession Mexico had seen in 50 years. My father left to pursue a dream — to build us a house. Although he was a bricklayer and had built many houses, with Mexico’s unstable economy he would never earn the money he needed to make his dream a reality.

Like most immigrants, my father had left his native country with high expectations of what life in El Otro Lado would be like. Once reality set in, and he realized that dollars weren’t as easy to make as the stories people told made it seem, he had been faced with two choices: return to Mexico empty-handed and with his head held low, or send for my mother. He decided on the latter, hoping that between the two of them, they could earn the money needed to build the house he dreamed of. Then he would finally be able to return to the country of his birth with his head held high, proud of what he’d accomplished.

In the meantime, he was leaving us without a mother.”

“Back then, I didn’t know what was on the other side of the mountain, and when I’d asked Mami she said she didn’t know either. ‘Another town, I suppose,’ she said. She pointed in one direction and said Acapulco was somewhere over there, about three hours away by bus. She pointed in the opposite direction and said Mexico City was over there — again, a three-hour bus ride. But when you’re poor, no matter how close things are, everything is far away. And so, until that day, my 29-year-old mother had never been on the other side of the mountains.”

“Abuela Evita didn’t send me to kindergarten because she said it was too expensive to have all four grandkids in school, as if my parents hadn’t been sending money to pay for uniforms, school supplies, and the monthly tuition. Even though we went to public school, there was nothing free about it.”

“My school was small. It was laid out in a square, with all the classrooms facing a courtyard. It had two bathrooms but no running water. We had to fill up a bucket from the water tank inside and dump it in the toilet. But still, at least there was a toilet, although it was hard for me to get used to it after having to squat on the ground my whole life.”

“Every few days, Abuela Evita washed [cousin] Elida’s hair with lemon water because, according to her, lemon juice cleans the impurities of hte hair and makes it shiny and healthy. In the afternoons, she’d fill up a bucket from the water tank, pick a few lemons from the tree, and squeeze the juice into the water.

Mago, Carlos, and I would hide behind a pink oleander bush and watch their ritual through the narrow leaves. Abuela Evita washed Elida’s hair as if she were washing an espensive silk ebozo. Afterward, my grandmother would brush it in small strokes. She spent half an hour running the comb through Elida’s long hair while we watched.

Our hair was louse-ridden, our abdomens swelled with roundworms, but my grandmother didn’t care. ‘I can be sure that my daughters’ children are really my grandchildren,’ Abuela Evita often said to us. ‘But one can’t trust a daughter-in-law. Who knows what your mother did when no one was looking.’”

“My father had a brother who died at seven years old. My grandfather would take Tio Carlos to the fields to work, and since they left very early in the morning, Tio Carlos would be too sleepy to stay awake during the ride to the fields. My grandfather would tie him to the horse to keep him from falling. One day, the horse lost its footing and fell, crushing my uncle beneath it. But my uncle’s death didn’t save my father from the fields. When he was in third grade, he left school to harvest crops alongside my grandfather.”

“My grandfather and aunt were sitting at the table in the kitchen. Carlos, Mago, and I sat on the two concrete steps leading from the kitchen to my grandmother’s room since the table was only big enough for four people, and those seats were already taken. Abuela Evita gave a pork chop to Abuelo Augorio, another to Elida, the third went to Tia Emperatriz, and the last she took for herself. By the time the frying pan came our way, there was nothing left. Abuela Evita scooped up spoonfuls of oil in which she’d fried the meat and mixed it in with the beans. ‘For flavor,’ she said.

If Papi were here, if Mami were here, we wouldn’t be eating oil, I thought.

‘Isn’t there any meat left?’ Tia Emperatriz asked.

Abuela Evita shook her head. ‘The money you left me this morning didn’t go very far at el mercado,’ she said. ‘And the money their parents sent is gone.’

Tia Emperatriz looked at our oily beans and then got up and grabbed her purse. She gave Mago a coin and sent her to buy a soda for us. We thanked our aunt for the soda and took turns sipping from the bottle, but the sweet taste didn’t wash away the oil in our mouths.

‘What’s the point of our parents being in El Otro Lado if we’re going to be eating like beggars?’ Mago said after our meal, once we were out of earshot.”

“When the teacher told us to write our names down: R-E-Y-N — I felt a stinging on my hand, and it took me a second to realize that el maestro had hit me with his ruler.

‘You are not to write with that hand,’ he said to me. He took the pencil from my left hand and made me grab it with my right. ‘If I see you using your left hand again, I will have to hit you again, entiendes?’

I wrote and erased, wrote and erased, and no matter how hard I tried, the letters didn’t come out right. It was like trying to write with my feet.

Abuela Evita said that the left hand was the hand of the devil and I was evil for using it. Sometimes during meals, she’d hit my hand with a wooden spoon and tell me to eat with my right hand.”

“By the entrance of our school, women were selling food. The smell of the chile quajillo sauce, fresh cheese, and onion wafted toward us, and I asked my brother and sister why we weren’t getting in line to buy food. ‘Our grandmother never gives us money,’ Carlos said. ‘You better get used to it.

We watched the women put the food on paper plates and hand it to the students who did bring lunch money. We weren’t the only ones drooling over the enchiladas. At least half of the children in the school were leaning against the classroom walls, grabbing their empty bellies while looking at the food stalls. I felt my eyes stinging with tears. ‘I hate school,’ I said.

El Otro Lado

“Papi woke us up at sunset, and we took a bus to the meeting point where the coyote was waiting for us. We crossed the dirt path, slipped under the hole in the fence, and immersed ourselves in the darkness that had quickly fallen around us. We followed the coyote in a single file. We walked along a small path, the thin moon curved into a smile, and I thought that if the moon was smiling at us, it must be a good sign.”

“At first it sounded like a kitten purring. Then the sound got louder, and the coyote yelled, ‘Corranle!’ In the darkness, I saw him take off without us. My father grabbed my hand and ran, too. I couldn’t keep up with his long strides, and I fell flat on my face. He scooped me up and ran with me in his arms. Mago and Carlos followed close behind.

A light shone in the darkness and the purring got louder. ‘Helicopter.’ Carlos tripped on a rock, but Papi kept on running and didn’t wait for him to get up. ‘Wait, Papi!’ I said, but Papi was like a frightened animal. He scampered through the bushes trying to find a place to hide.

‘Get down!’ the coyote yelled from somewhere in the dark. Papi immediately dropped to the ground, and we became lizards, rubbing our bellies against the cold, damp earth, trying to find a place to hide. Pebbles dug into my knees. I couldn’t see Carlos in the darkness, and I cried and told Papi to wait, but he pushed me into a little cave created by overgrown bushes. Mago and I sat by Papi’s side, and he held onto us tight while we listened to the roaring of the helicopter right above us.

The beams of the searchlight cut through the branches of the bushes. I yanked my foot back when a beam of light fell on my shoe. I wondered if the people in the helicopter had seen my foot. I tried to hold my breath, thinking that even the smallest sound could give us away. Please God, don’t let them see us. Please God, let us arrive safely to El Otro Lado. I want to live in that perfect place. I want to have a father. I want to have a family. Finally, after what felt like hours, the helicopter left.”

“Papi said we’d broken the law by coming to the U.S., but back then I didn’t understand much about laws. All I could think of was why there’d be a law that would prevent children from being with their father. That was the only reason I’d come to this country, after all.

‘And you three better do well in your classes, because if you don’t, I won’t wait for la migra to deport you. I’ll send you back to Mexico myself! I brought you to this country to get an education and to take advantage of all the opportunities this country has to offer. The minute you walk through the door with anything less than As, I’m sending you straight back to my mother’s house.’

‘Don’t worry about us, Papi,’ Mago said. ‘We won’t tell anyone we’re illegals, and we’ll get good grades. We promise.’”

“‘Espanol,’ the teacher asked again. At first I didn’t realize that she had spoken to me in Spanish.

‘Si,’ I said, feeling relieved she spoke Spanish. The knot in my stomach began to loosen. ‘Disculpeme, maestra, por llegar tarde.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘No entender mucho,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed that she didn’t speak that much Spanish. She pointed to a table in the corner and gently pushed me forward. There were four students there and a man with black hair which was spiked with so much hairspray it looked as if he were wearing a push broom on his head. ‘I’m Mr. Lopez,’ he said in Spanish. ‘I’m Mrs. Anderson’s assistant.’ He had us introduce ourselves and asked me to go first. ‘Me llamo Reyna Grande Rodriguez.’

He glanced at his roster, and then looked at me. ‘Here in this country, we only use one last name. See here,’ he said, showing me the roster. ‘You’re enrolled as Reyna Grande.’ ‘But I’m Rodriguez too,’ I said. ‘It’s my mami’s last name.’ He asked me to keep my voice down so that I wouldn’t interrupt Mrs. Anderson, who was speaking to a class of twenty students. I wanted to tell him that I had already lost my mother by coming to this country. It wasn’t easy having to also erase her form my name. Who am I now, then?

‘I’m sorry,’ Mr. Lopez said. ‘That is the way things are done in this country. From now on you are Reyna Grande.’ The students at my table laughed. One of them said in Spanish, ‘But she’s so little, how can she be a queen, and a big one at that?’

Mr. Lopez told them not to tease. They were all from Mexico like me, except for Gil who was from someplace called El Salvador. I didn’t know where that was, but he spoke Spanish, too.

For the rest of the day, I stayed at the table in the corner. Mr. Lopez taught us the English alphabet. It was difficult to pay attention to him when Mrs. Anderson was speaking loudly to her students. Most of those kids looked just like me. They had brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. They had last names like Gonzalez and Garcia, Hernandez and Martinez, and yet they could speak a language I could not. Mrs. Anderson didn’t tell them to keep their voice down. Sometimes it was hard to hear what Mr. Lopez was telling us. Then he couldn’t hear what we told him because we had to whisper.

I wished I could understand what Mrs. Anderson was saying. I wished I didn’t have to sit here in a corner and feel like an outsider in my own classroom. I wished I weren’t being taught something kids learn in kindergarten.”

“One evening, Mila made spaghetti for dinner. At the sight of those long white strings I felt like throwing up. I held on tight to my chair and looked away from the plate and tried to think of something besides Pablo and his worms. In Mexico, most of the children I’d known had the same body shape: a big, round belly full of roundworms and really skinny legs and arms. There was one kid, Pablo, whose abdomen swelled beyond anything we could imagine. He looked as big as a pregnant woman. I used to have nightmares of his belly exploding and hundreds of white wiggly worms spilling out.

Sometimes Abuelita Chinta would give us unripe guavas blended to a pulp. We’d drink this concoction unwillingly because sometime later the pains would come. Horrible pains as if our intestines were twisting and twisting like wet clothes being wrung out before going up on the clothesline. We ran to the outhouse and emptied our bowels. No sooner had we come back into the house than we had to run back out again. Once, Carlos, started screaming, and when we went to check on him, he was squatting on the ground as a worm wiggled out of him.”

“Mago had changed her name at school because even back then she hadn’t like being called Mago by strangers. She also claimed that her teachers had trouble saying her real name, Magloria, and her history teacher had started calling her Maggie. So now she was known as Maggie everywhere but at home. But there was more to the story than that. It was the beginning of her assimilation.”

“After seeing a guy she liked on the street, Mago was disappointed. ‘After I told him my name, he started asking me more questions, and very soon he figured out I don’t speak English well. He caught up to his friends and didn’t look at me again.’ ‘I could understand his questions,’ Mago told me, ‘I just couldn’t answer them. And I was so nervous.’ She was close to tears.

A few days later, Mago ran into him and his friends again. To Mago’s surprise, they started throwing gravel at them from across the train tracks, yelling, ‘Wetbacks! Wetbacks!’ Mago told me her heart broke at the sight of her crush yelling and pointing at her and Carlos. She was so mad she had yelled one of the few cuss words she knew in English, ‘You motherfockers!’”

“I missed the books I left behind in Mexico, the ones I was given at school. I loved the stories in those books. My favorite one was of a little pine tree that wished his needle were made of gold. He got his wish and his needles turned to gold, but a robber came at night and stole them. Then he wished for his leaves to be made of glass, but they broke when a strong wind came. Then he wished his needles to be big glossy leaves, but the next day goats came and at them. The little pine tree then learned to like himself as he was.”

“At the end of the class, Mrs. Anderson held up the books she selected for the competition. Out of the eight books she chose, not even one was written by one of the kids at my table, the non-English speakers.

‘You kids did a great job on those books,’ Mr. Lopez said to us in Spanish. ‘Just because they weren’t chosen doesn’t mean they weren’t good.’ ‘Just not good enough,’ I said under my breath. Mr. Lopez looked at me, and then at the other four students at my table. He said, ‘There’s no reason for any of you not to get ahead in life. You will learn English one day. You will find your way. Remember, it doesn’t matter where you came from. You’re now living in the land of opportunity, where anything is possible.’

“Papi said, ‘You know, when I was in third grade, my teacher brought some drums to class and started to teach us how to play them. We couldn’t take them home, but still, it was nice coming to school and having the chance to learn to play an instrument. I hoped to join the color guard when I got to sixth grade. But a few weeks later, when I turned nine, your grandfather said I was old enough to join him at the fields, and he pulled me out of school. I never got to play the drum again. And I’ve been working ever since.”

“Every Friday before heading home, I’d stop at the Arroyo Seco Library for books. The max I was allowed to borrow was ten, and I’d read them all during the week. At first, I mostly read fairy tales, which reminded me of Iguala, of story time on the radio. When I was done with those books, the librarian led me to the young adult section and handed me books she recommended. They had titles like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club. I enjoyed them, but those books had nothing to do with my life. The Sweet Valley characters were twin sisters who had sun-kissed blond hair, a golden tan, dazzling blue-green eyes, perfect size-six figures — characters whose world was so different from my own. And yet, I kept reading those books because I was seduced by the twins’ lives. Those books gave me a glimpse into a world I wished to belong to, where there were no alcoholic fathers, no mothers who left you over and over again, no fear of deportation. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. That world was the perfect place I’d imagined the U.S. to be.”