We didn't learn - as my kids do today - that he was a second-generation "Zoot-suiter" with an illustrious fashion, cultural and social history of resistance to the racism and know-nothingism of the United States. We simply believed what we were told and judged by what we saw - and what we saw was empirical, namely that chukos started fights and were arrested for thefts while the rest of the Mexican kids who dressed as Americans pretty much kept out of trouble. So we ten- and eleven-year-olds all listened when our largely well-meaning and naive white teachers warned us not to "go chuk" - which I think meant adopting beetle boots, Frisco pants, long and oiled-down hair with a ducktail in back, baggy shirts, armless wife-beater T-shirts, gaudy necklaces, and assorted chains, switchblades and brass knuckles. When my older brother wore Frisco jeans on the last day of school in junior high one year, the principal in a frenzy called home for my parents to pick him up at detention immediately. I asked my parents if he had, in fact, "gone chuk" - to their laughter and slight anger at the school's rigidity.
Our fourth-grade yard monitor, Mr. Kaufman, furious that our intramural Mexican captains were selecting their team members on the basis of familial relationships rather than proven talent, told me, my twin brother and the three other Anglo kids to form our own team - as an object lesson. Then he lectured us on how nepotism and tribalism were a small step from racial prejudice, and how team captains who discriminated against gifted athletes with no blood ties could find themselves the victims of much worse bias in the larger world - and for reasons far more malicious than merely being from a different clan. These teachers were at times insufferable in their condescension, haughty in their assumption that they were giving culture to the new arrivals and thereby lending their "know-how" for "making it in America" - but make it in America most of these immigrants did.
The best speller was Gracie Luna, who alone of our class knew the plural of "phenomenon." Armando Quintana was the most accomplished actor, always beating us out for dramatic parts that were mainly Anglo. My twin and I thought it unfair that the sixth-grade football coach did not demand birth certificates, since we sat the bench while those whom we suspected were really two or three years older played every game. One football whiz, Raul Carbajal, told us that he was sixteen. (How else was he shaving when the rest of us, at twelve years old, had only peach-fuzz?) When I saw him at a local baseball game last year, Raul, now nearly sixty and a veteran of thirty-five years as a skilled air-conditioning mechanic, told that he was actually eighteen at that time. As we watched our sons play ball, he said that our teachers, now long dead, who bought him new clothes and drove him home were "great men and women."
What we knew of Mexico was academic, and came out of geography and history classes, not "cultural studies" - its major exports, largest cities, history before and after Cortes, names of the Mexican presidents and dictators, and so on. Our classmates filled in the blanks about real life in Mexico with patchy memories and exaggerated stories of contaminated water and crooked cops down south. When Ralphie Salinas left at the semester break for a visit to Mexico, he asked me to pray for his safe return. When he got back safe and sound, he sold us illegal fireworks, pornographic comic books and strange candies, warning us in a whisper, "There are even scarier things down there than these."
Apparently, our rather unsophisticated teachers thought the purpose of learning was to master the English language and acquire the rudiments of math and American literature. As I can best fathom it some forty years later, their aim was to create a sweeping egalitarianism, a mass of students who would reach high school all with about the same chances of success or failure. And so we were given demerits for mispronouncing names, writing left-
handed, and other felonies like chewing gum, handing in our papers without our names written on the upper-right-hand corner, and wearing Frisco or Payday baggy pants and pointy boots.
Latinos were asked by the district speech therapist, Mrs. Albright, to say "A Chevy with a stick-shift" - a drill to ensure that there was no sign of a Mexican accent, and that, like Armenians and Japanese, they could filter undetected into mainstream society and prosper in the judgmental world of commerce. "You are judged on how you speak, and a big vocabulary will do you no good if you maul your words," Mrs. Albright lectured us each Thursday morning. The sixtyish, blue-haired therapist added that "looks and diction" were as important for success as raw talent.
Mr. Gronski, our itinerant musician, who rotated to our rural school each Friday for a morning of "Music Appreciation," made us memorize polkas, waltzes, Australian ballads, Mexican folk songs and black spirituals without including a single editorial remark about oppression or exploitation. He was teaching us the music scale, the role of half- and quarter-notes the world over, and how different peoples sought to harmonize, use refrains, and embrace or eschew rhyme. I doubt that many of today's fifth-graders know what "harmony" and a "refrain" mean, or sing many songs from outside their own culture, and yet I imagine that they are certified to be "sensitive," "nonjudgmental" and "diverse," and that they do sing anthems to universalism.
Most of the kids I saw every day - like most of the adults that I now see daily around the farm - were from Mexico, and there was nothing held back about race. Skin color and
