Tag: Childhood

A Trip to the Motherland

My first trip to El Salvador comes in bits and pieces. I certainly remember the 6-hour flight feeling like an eternity. I also remember liking the food on the flight, but I’ll chuck that up to my inexperienced palate. The descent into the airport and subsequent landing is something I do remember; something I remember from every airplane trip. The anticipation of finally reaching the destination, watching the tiny city below grow bigger in scale as we got closer filled me with excitement. The feeling of falling was always something that scared me and excited me all at once. There is a hill on Hoover St. that a driver hits coming from Pico toward Washington that my dad always drove over when coming back from Ague’s house or when coming back from the best taco place in town, El Taurino. I always loved the sensation I got when the car stopped going uphill and rapidly descended down Hoover. The plane landing was scarier than anything else. Strange things went through my mind when I felt the first impact of the tires hitting the runway and the plane leaping off the ground a couple times. “I’m going to die,” ran through my mind. That’s a lot of stress for a 5-year-old.

While still up in the air, I looked out the window as the plane was circling the airport waiting for clearance to start the landing process, I was in awe of how green everything was. Fields and jungle as far as the eye could see. L.A. certainly looks nothing like this place. When I walked off the plane and stepped into the airport I was smacked in the face with instant heat and humidity. It is hot in El Salvador and ridiculously muggy. As a cute kid raised on a combination of an American and Salvadoran diet, the mosquitoes found me irresistible… and there are a lot of mosquitoes… a lot.

One of my uncles on my mom’s side picked us up in a microbus. He loaded us up and we took the 31 mile drive from San Luis Talpa to Soyapango, which is right next to the capital, San Salvador. The route was beautiful. I got a closeup look at all the vegetation I saw from the plane. There was lush jungle everywhere I looked. Roadside hut restaurants were strewn along the side of the highway, along with fruit stands, cows, and goats. It was like nothing a city boy like myself had ever seen.

When the scenery changed to the towns along the way, the buildings and the people were all different; the colors of the buildings were different from what I was used to, the style of the trim on them was different from anything I had previously seen in real life. I might have seen similar things in the novelas my mom watched. Every town we passed had dirt roads; only the highway was paved. Sure, there were sidewalks, but the road itself wasn’t paved. The same was true when we reached Soyapango; dirt roads. The main streets that led to the city’s main commercial areas were paved, but not the ones in residential areas.

We arrived at my grandma’s house in the neighborhood that I’ve heard my parents refer to as La Vieja Jesús, which translates to ” the old Jesus” or “the old woman Jesus” whichever makes more sense. The street the house is on has a gate at the entrance, probably a remnant of the civil war that had taken place earlier that decade and the decade precluding it. Every house had a steel screen door and all the windows were barred. Every house was made of brick and mortar and this being a country with tropical weather, every house had tin shingled roofs. The symphony that played on those roofs on rainy nights was spectacular.

When I walked into the house, my grandmother, Mama Tilde, was eating her lunch at the dining table that was situated in the living room. I was shy at first, but she urged me to go over to her. To this point I had only heard her voice over the phone and had seen pictures of her in our family albums. I walked up to her, she gave me a hug, a kiss on the cheek and asked, “¿Como estas, hijo?” (“How are you son?”)

“Bien,” I said in a timid voice (“Good”)

She had a very soft voice. She was in her late 70s, skin was a slightly reddish brown and wrinkled. Her hands had grown rough, not only from age but also from a lifetime of working with her hands. She wore a dress, the traditional dress that working-class women in El Salvador wear; at least women of her generation and women of the generation of my mom’s older sisters wore those dresses. Mama Tilde always wore an apron. She owned and ran a pupuseria for decades and the apron was her cash register, her purse, and just general area to store anything anyone else would need to carry with him at all times. And she had short curly hair; a little salt and pepper fro.

I turned to my left, coming from the hallway and out of his room was a tall kid with a face I recognized from photo albums. He was tall for a 12-year-old and lanky. He walked over with a sheepish grin on his face which accompanied the black fro he had on his head.

“Mira, ese es tú hermano Richard,” my mom told me. (“Look, that’s your brother Richard.”)

Without hesitation, I ran over to him and gave him a hug. He didn’t quite know how to react and only halfway hugged me back. I was fine with that. I now had a brother and that was pretty cool.

I didn’t meet my sister until later on that night. Once we got settled into my grandma’s room, unpacked our clothes, and set up mosquito nets over the beds, we headed to my grandma’s pupuseria where my Tía Dora (mom’s younger sister) was running the restaurant. She had a darker complexion than the rest of us, a deeper brown, closer to a darker hue of caramel. Her hair was short and curly, but not quite as curly as Mama Tilde’s or my brother’s hair. She had a mouth that just spewed profanities.

“¿Puta vos, ya llegaste?” she greeted my mom and offered all of us some pupusas. (“Fuck, you finally arrived.”)

The pupusas weren’t like anything I had tasted in my 5 years of existence. Talk about farm fresh. The pupuseria was a stand alone cinder block building, just four walls, some tables and the stove top. It was right next to the mercado where farmers of produce and livestock sold their goods; freshly butchered, freshly picked.

I’m pretty sure that the pupuseria was the place I first met my sister, but I can’t remember it happening there. The first scene I remember of my sister is at one of my uncles’ houses. It was dark out, the light was shining from the doorway of the house out onto the dirt street. She was standing outside in the glow of the light filing her nails. She looked over at me and I stopped in my tracks. Zulma was about 12 or 13 years old at the time and I remember admiring how beautiful she was. One of my female cousins, Elsi, teased me.

“¿Te gusta verdad? Si está bonita,” she said laughing (“You like her, don’t you? She’s pretty.”)

I looked away in a feeble attempt to hide my embarrassment. Zulma laughed, called me over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Everything else about that month-long trip faded away from my memory as time passed. My birthday was celebrated, we went to Apulo to the Lago de Ilopango, played with goats at one of my uncle’s houses and listened to stories about the war.

When we came back to Los Angeles we were joined by my brother and sister. How they got to the U.S., I have no idea. The important part is that they were here and I was no longer alone.

Be careful what you wish for.

When I continue my story, I’m going to jump a couple of years. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more about my life.

In the Beginning There Was One

There isn’t much I remember about being a toddler, not sure that most people do, no residual memories left over from before I was five years old. My parents were a couple of immigrants trying to make their way in Ronald Reagan’s America, I guess the earliest situations I can recall took place sometime in ’87 or ’88. I was a single child, or so I thought. There were a couple of pictures hanging on the bedroom wall of the one-bedroom apartment we lived in, an apartment that was the perfect size for a young couple with one child. The faces I always looked at were of two toddlers, they were maybe about one and two years old at the time the photos were taken. Zulma and Richard. Those were the names of my sister and my brother. Despite having seen pictures of them as preteens, I always had the idea in my head that they were younger than me. I thought myself the older brother. Maybe them not being there physically allowed me to imagine myself as the one in charge, that I was the older one looking out for them.

Back then my parents’ work schedules didn’t sync up. My mother worked in the mornings at a sweatshop, sewing clothes together while my father worked graveyard at a big printing press. Mom would drop me off at a nanny (Ague, we called her), she was the mother of one of my mom’s coworkers. That lady became a big part of my childhood, she was my nanny since I was a couple months old and a sort of surrogate grandmother. Somewhere around noon my dad would pick me up from Ague’s house, she lived in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles, and take me home to spend the rest of the day with him. He’d make me lunch, take me to Hoover Park and he’d play basketball while keeping an eye on me as I played in the sandbox and on the slides. I always loved the sandwiches my dad made me. He would cut a pan Francés (bolillo roll to you non-Salvadorans) in half like a torta, slather the two halves with mayo, add slices of Kraft’s singles, freshly cut ham from the carnicería that was on the way home, add some leafs of lettuce, and slices of tomatoes. To drink, nothing washed a meal down like a nice big cup of flavored drink. We always had two gallons of the stuff in the fridge. Every week my dad would buy two one-gallon plastic jugs of it in whatever flavor he was in the mood for that week; grape, cherry, strawberry, pink lemonade, lime. If you could make an artificial flavor of that fruit, it was found in a gallon jug at the local mini market or liquor store for a dollar. Sure we could have bought Kool-Aid and made our own, but these “juices” were mixed right every time.

Sometime around 4 or 5 p.m. my mom would come home from work. My parents only had about an hour to spend together before my dad had to go off to work. They basically had enough time to eat dinner together.

Nights with my mom weren’t as eventful. We didn’t live in the worst neighborhood in L.A., but it wasn’t the safest either. That apartment on the corner of W22nd St. and Magnolia Ave., a large two-story purple house that was divided into four apartments, was still a better bet than where my parents previously lived. I’m not too keen on the exact details, I just know that their apartment was somewhere on Broadway in Pico Union. One night, coming home from the movies or a dinner date, my parents were attacked by a mugger with a knife. My mom was abiut 8 months pregnant with me at the time. The whole thing was going down just a few feet away from the front security gate to the their building. My dad pushed the guy off enough for him to grab my mom by the arm and start running for the gate. He got to it and opened it and bolted for the door of the building. In his haste to get the door open and both of them into safety he didn’t realize that my mom was still at the gate struggling with the assailant trying to get the gate door shut. The mugger had managed to wedge his foot in the way of the door, keeping my mom from being able to shut it. The gate and front door were only about 20 feet from each other. When my dad realized what was going on, he rushed to help my mom wrestle the gate door closed and the couple were able to make it safe inside. Needless to say because of prior experience, my mom wasn’t going to advertise that there was a woman alone with a toddler in that apartment. So, we stayed in, I played with my toys and my mom watched novelas until it was time for bed.

Religion didn’t ever really play a part in my house. Both my parents were raised Catholic but we never went to church. Hell, in my immediate family, the only ones that haven’t been baptized are my dad and myself. My mom has always believed in God and my dad never really spoke about it, at least not while I was growing up. He always wore a crucifix, so I always assumed he had some sort of belief. Someone had given me a Bible storybook, written in Spanish, that contained all the Bible myths in illustrated children’s story book style. When you have drawings of a man fighting a lion with his bare hands, no story is ever boring. Something of the sort is always going to grab the attention of a kid right away.

Right before bed, I used to pray. I used to pray for the well-being of my family in El Salvador (people I had only heard of but never met); for my grandmother, Mama Tilde (mom’s mother); the grandfather whom I never met, Papa Marcos(mom’s father); the two uncles I had met because they lived in L.A., Tio Tulio (mom’s older brother) and Tio Jaime (dad’s older brother); for the only cousins I knew at the time, Patti, Claudia and Jenny (Tio Tulio’s daughters); and for all my cousins, aunts, and uncles in El Salvador. Mostly, I used to pray for my baby brother and sister, the two photos framed up on the bedroom door.

I don’t know if my parents ever corrected me, if they did, I don’t remember. I just went on thinking for a while that because I was the only child physically in the house, I had to be the oldest. Right before I was about to turn five years old my parents planned a month-long trip to El Salvador, I was finally going to meet my family and I was going to celebrate my fifth birthday there in the neighborhood my parents grew up in. Also, by some perverse way the Universe likes to mess with me, about a month before we went on that trip, my mom got pregnant with my little sister. At this point in time, my dad’s work schedule was more in sync with my mom’s, he had switched over to a morning/day shift and they were able to find the time to go ahead and make my sister.

This is the news I went into my trip to El Salvador with. I’ll get into that trip next time.

So come back and I’ll tell you more about my life…