The Flavor of Us

One day while in the third grade I woke up. I don’t know how it happened, or why, but it did. Before that I don’t remember how I thought about things. I remember many things before third grade, of course, but I don’t remember what I thought about them, or if I had any opinion at all. But some time during the third grade, in a science class I think, everything changed.  I saw the planet differently first. I understood how things grew and died around me. I saw how the sun and the moon affected everything. Shortly after that I saw people differently. Married, single, old, young, white, Mexican, ugly, pretty, poor, rich, sick, dying…I saw all of them. I had seen them all before but I never knew what they were and I certainly didn’t have these labels for them. And now, because I labeled these things, they started to affect me differently. I no longer had little child eyes.

I wondered if my friends felt the same. Alma Serda, San Juanita Fuentes, Dalila Gomez, Elvira Serrano, Robert Alaniz, Bobby Andrade, Velma and Norma DeLuna, Juan Martin Gonzalez…they never said anything. But then again I didn’t either. I wouldn’t have known how to explain it anyway.

One day this lady came into our class and called out some names. All those on the list were told that twice a week they were going to go to a special reading lab. I was a pretty good reader so I thought this was a class for good readers. Those of us on the list started going to the lab twice a week and sitting at a computer that would read to us. We had these huge headphones on and listened to stories and then answered questions. I actually liked it. I felt special about being picked out as a “special reader.” The adult instructing us told us that the class was only for the best readers in the school. One day, while in the special reading lab, I got ahead in the reading and requested to go to the higher levels of the reading instruction. I was told that I wasn’t allowed to do that and that I should just redo the last levels I had worked on. The instructor was right behind me talking to another teacher. I started the level again but my headphones unplugged from the computer. Behind me I heard the instructor say: “This mojado thinks he can read.” I can’t even explain how much that hurt and how confusing that was.  I could read. I knew that. I didn’t understand. It became more confusing later when I found out that the white kids in our class had their own reading lab and they were allowed to read at the higher levels. I didn’t get it.

I talked about this with some of my friends but none of them had anything similar happen to them. They were happy with everything. Especially Juan Martin Gonzalez. He didn’t speak much English but understood most of it. Even his Spanish sounded funny. He said, “…not to worrying” about any of it because we are all mojados.  He said that we all might have crossed a river to get here but those white people crossed an entire ocean. You could not get more mojado than that. “Then why do they hate us?” I asked. He said that they don’t hate us. He tried English again, “They don’t like….the…the flavor of us.”  I begged him to stop talking English. He went on to explain that what I had experienced he experiences all the time at school, at church, and especially on the welfare line with his mother. It’s not hate. He said that adults don’t like things that are different: different colors, different smells, and different flavors. And the Mexican flavor was their least favorite. It was as simple and as complicated as that. I did not understand what the hell he was talking about and I made a mental note never to ask him anything important again. The only place I ever saw white people was at school. There were no white people in my neighborhood. Nearly all of my teachers were little old white ladies. Mrs. Corpestein, Mrs. Lyons, Mrs. Carpenter, Mrs. Payne, Mrs. Espensen…if I had any teachers other than white ones I don’t remember. They were all great teachers. Of course I didn’t know that then. At the time they were just a bunch of old ladies trying to make me white, but I figured that was their job and they had to do that.