That’s me. The one in the middle. Three Mexican American babies growing up living the “American Dream” in sunny Northern California. This was AFTER the five years my mom and dad spent working as migrant farm workers after immigrating from Cuidad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. This was when they had graduated to scrubbing the toilets and running the fancy Kirby vacuums at the sprawling homes of dentists and doctors in Palo Alto. This was just before my dad became a full time graveyard shift janitor at Stanford University. Bending to pick tomatoes, bending to scrub toilets, bending to wring a mop out– those were just metaphors for how far my parents had bent so that the three of us could be born on American soil.
“The story always starts in the same way when people ask me the simple, yet most difficult question to answer: “where are you from?”
Louis Yako
My mother had lived an upper middle class life in Chihuahua, the capital, where she attended private schools and giggled with her girlfriends and eventually went on to college at the Universidad Autonoma de Juarez, where women in the 50s could study banking, teaching or nursing. Pretty much just that. She chose banking, and got a job as a teller. She’d work her 9-5, and then spend the weekends strolling the park with girlfriends or going to the local roller skating rink, which is where she ran into a 3rd grade dropout from the ranches outside of Juarez who was working as a pseudo-security guard riding herd over raucous teenagers on skates and directing traffic around the rink. She had caught his eye over the weeks, and he started skating near her, in the hopes he could rescue her from a fall. When that didn’t happen (she had played college basketball and led her team to a state championship), he finally knocked her down, and she agreed to a date. Eventually they realized manual labor jobs on the Mexican side of the river would not be enough for them to raise a family, and my dad did what so many healthy 20-somethings did at the time. He crossed the river and came to America. He believed that America would provide the opportunities to build a good life with my mom, and eventually a family.
Mom stayed in Mexico for a while, with dad dutifully sending money for the household, but when she became pregnant with my sister, she decided to join him. Pregnant belly swelling, my dad mounted her on his back to wade across the shallow part of the river, and my sister was the first of three to be born on American soil. Despite the first few years of our lives where our daycare was the muddy rows in between the tomato plants, we soon started American day care (“Mother’s Day Out,” where we made felt Christmas ornaments and drank milk from a carton), and eventually we were just our average American teenagers, hanging posters of Shawn Cassidy and walking to the manicured park with our friends Diana and Jennifer and Mikey. It wasn’t paradise, and we weren’t rich by any standards, but for my mom and dad, THIS was the life they would bend over backwards to give us, whatever it took.
