Mexico, even though it no longer has it, believes in the Spanish authoritarian state, which acts unilaterally for the good of all
now there are thirty thousand colonists of U.S. origin in the río grande, río bravo, and only about four thousand Mexicans,
conflict is inevitable: “Mexico must occupy Texas right now, or it will lose it forever,” says the Mexican statesman Mier y Terán,
Desperate, Mexico seeks European immigrants,
but nothing can stop the Texas fever,
a thousand families a month come down from the Mississippi, why should these cowardly, lazy, filthy Mexicans govern us? this cannot be God’s plan!
the pyrrhic victory at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad: Santa Anna is not Gálvez, he prefers a bad war to a bad peace,
here are the two face-to-face at San Jacinto:
Houston, almost six feet tall, wearing a coonskin cap, a leopard vest, patiently whittling any stick he finds nearby, Santa Anna wearing epaulets and a three-cornered hat, sleeping his siesta in San Jacinto while Mexico loses Texas: what Houston is really carving is the future wooden leg of the picturesque, frivolous, incompetent Mexican dictator
“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” another dictator would famously say one day, and in a lower voice, another president: “Between the United States and Mexico, the desert”
Sitting on his Harley-Davidson on the Yankee side of the river, José Francisco watched with fascination the unusual strike on the Mexican side. It wasn’t a sit-down but a raising up — of arms displaying the muscle of poverty, the sinew of insomnia, the wisdom of the oral library of a people that was his own, José Francisco said with pride. Perched on his bike, the tip of his boot resting on the starter, he wondered if this time, with the fracas going on on the other side, both patrols might stop him because he looked so weird, with his shoulder-length hair, his cowboy hat, his silver crosses and medals, and his rainbow-striped serape jacket. His only credible document was his moon face, open, clean-shaven, like a smiling star. Even though his teeth were perfect, strong, and extremely white, they, too, were disturbing to anyone who didn’t look like him. Who’d never been to the dentist? José Francisco.
“You must go to the dentist,” he was told in his Texas school.
He went. He returned. Not a single cavity.
“This child is amazing. Why doesn’t he need dental work?”
Before, José Francisco didn’t know what to answer. Now he does.
“Generations of eating chiles, beans, and tortillas. Pure calcium, pure vitamin C. Not a single cherry Lifesaver.”
Teeth. Hair. Motorcycle. They had to find something suspicious about him every time in order to admit he wasn’t odd, simply different. Inside he bore something different but he could never be calm. He bore something that couldn’t happen on either side of the frontier but can happen on both sides. Those were hard things to understand on both sides.
“What belongs here and also there. But where is here and where is there? Isn’t the Mexican side his own here and there? Isn’t it the same on the gringo side? Doesn’t every land have its invisible double, its alien shadow that walks at our side the same way each of us walks accompanied by a second ‘I’ we don’t know?”
Which is why José Francisco wrote — to give that second José Francisco, who apparently had his own internal frontier, a chance. He wanted to be nice to himself but wouldn’t allow it. He was divided into four parts.
They wanted him to be afraid to speak Spanish. We’re going to punish you if you talk that lingo.
That was when he started singing songs in Spanish at recess, until he drove all the gringos, teachers and students, insane.
That was when no one talked to him and he didn’t feel discriminated against. “They’re afraid of me,” he said, he said to them. “They’re afraid of talking to me.”
That was when his only friend stopped being his friend, when he said to José Francisco, “Don’t say you’re Mexican; you can’t come to my house.”
That was when José Francisco achieved his first victory, causing an uproar in school by demanding that students— blacks, Mexicans, whites — be seated in the classroom by alphabetical order and not by racial group. He accomplished this by writing, mimeographing, and distributing pamphlets, hounding the authorities, making a pain in the ass of himself.
“What gave you so much confidence, so much spirit?”
“It must be the genes, man, the damn genes.”
It was his father. Without a penny to his name, he’d come with his wife and son from Zacatecas and the exhausted mines that had once belonged to Oñate. Other Mexicans lent him a cow to give the child milk. The father took a chance. He traded the cow for four hogs, slaughtered the hogs, bought twenty hens, and with the carefully tended hens, started an egg business and prospered. His friends who’d lent him the cow never asked him to return it, but he extended unlimited credit for as many “white ones” as they liked— out of modesty, no one ever referred to “eggs” because that meant testicles.
There, here. When he graduated from high school they told him to change his name from José Francisco to Joe Frank. He was intelligent. He would have a better time of it.
“You’ll be better off, boy.”
“I’d be mute, bro.”
To whom if not to himself was he going to say, as he gathered the eggs on his father’s little farm, that he wanted to be heard, wanted to write things, stories about immigrants, illegals, Mexican poverty, Yankee prosperity, but most of all stories about families, that was the wealth of the border world, the quantity of unburied stories that refused to die, that wandered about like ghosts from California to Texas waiting for someone to tell them, someone to write them. José Francisco became a story collector.
he sang about his grandparents, who had no birth date or last name,
he wrote about the men who did not know the four seasons of the year,
he described the long, luxurious meals so all the families could get together,
and when he began to write, at the age of nineteen, he was asked, and asked himself, in which language, in English or in Spanish? and first he said in something new, the Chicano language, and it was then he realized what he was, neither Mexican nor gringo but Chicano, the language revealed it to him, he began to write in Spanish the parts that came out of his Mexican soul, in English the parts that imposed themselves on him in a Yankee rhythm, first he mixed, then he began separating, some stories in English, others in Spanish, depending on the story, the characters, but always everything united, story, characters, by the impulse of José Francisco, his conviction:
“I’m not a Mexican. I’m not a gringo. I’m Chicano. I’m not a gringo in the USA and a Mexican in Mexico. I’m Chicano everywhere. I don’t have to assimilate into anything. I have my own history.”
He wrote it but it wasn’t enough for him. His motorcycle went back and forth over the bridge across the Río Grande, Río Bravo, loaded with manuscripts. José Francisco brought Chicano manuscripts to Mexico and Mexican manuscripts to Texas. The bike was the means to carry the written word rapidly from one side to the other, that was José Francisco’s contraband, literature from both sides so that everyone would get to know one another better, he said, so that everyone would love one another a little more, so there would be a “we” on both sides of the border.