The Genius of Creative Flexibility

When my father died last year, a piece of my heart died with him. My father, that supreme sentimental fool, loved my brothers and me to excess in a kind of over-the-top, rococo fever, all arabesques and sugar spirals, as sappy and charming as the romantic Mexican boleros he loved to sing. Dame un poquito de tu amor siquiera, dame un poquito de tu amor nomas . . . Music from my time, father would say proudly, and I could almost smell the gardenias and Tres Flores hair oil.

Before my father died, it was simple cordiality that prompted me to say, “I’m sorry,” when comforting the bereaved. But with my father’s death, I am initiated into the family of humanity, I am connected to all deaths and to their survivors. “Lo siento,” which translates as both “I am sorry” and “I feel it” all at once. Lo siento. Since his death, I feel life more intensely.

My father, born under the eagle and serpent of the Mexican flag, died beneath a blanket of stars and stripes, a U.S. World War II veteran. Like most immigrants, he was overly patriotic, exceptionally hard-working and, above all, a great believer in family. Yet, I’m aware my father’s life doesn’t count, he’s not “history,” not the “American” politicians mean when they talk about Americans.

In part to make his life count, I worked with community volunteers to create a gathering of Latino MacArthur fellows in my city. For three days last November, San Antonio hosted free workshops, lectures and discussions among the “MacArturos,” whose genius range from creating affordable housing to labor organizing. It was during the culmination of that weekend that I realized this truth: Our community may be poor and bien fregados politically, but we have two extraordinary gifts: the gift of generosity, which engenders more generosity, and the gift of spirituality, two powerful forces we sometimes forget we have.

The MacArthur weekend was an outpouring of these twin blessings. A cultural anthropologist learning from kid muralists; an audience of theater lovers--actors, writers, seniors and teenagers--sparked by a designer’s experiments with sets; a voting-rights lawyer sharing strategy with young law students; life histories exchanged among a room full of Latina activists and an art critic--and I catch a glimpse of the new millennium. If we’re ever to get anywhere, I’m convinced, we need to organize like this, across disciplines, across generations, across sexualities, across everything. It makes perfect sense.

After that success, anything seemed possible. Then we heard the news. On Christmas Eve, 45 unarmed Mayans were slain while they prayed in a chapel in Acteal, Chiapas; 21 of them were women, 14 were children. The Mexican president was shocked and promised to hold all those responsible accountable. The Mexican people aren’t fools, everybody knows who was responsible, but it’s too much to wish for the Mexican president to fire himself.

I know the deaths in Chiapas are linked to me here in the U.S. I know the massacre is connected to removing native people from their land, because although the people are poor, the land is rich, and the government knows this. And the Mexican debt is connected to my high standard of living here, and the military presence is necessary to calm U.S. investors, and the music goes round and round and it comes out here.

I have been thinking and thinking about all this like a person with comezon, an itching, a hankering, an itch I can’t quite scratch. What is my responsibility as a writer in light of these events? As a woman, as a mestiza? As a U.S. citizen who lives on several borders? What do I do as the daughter of a Mexican man? Father, tell me. Lo siento. I have been searching for answers.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, I attended a Latino leadership conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., a first-ever gathering of U.S. Latino leaders modeled after the Renaissance weekend that President Bill Clinton attends annually. It was a rare opportunity for Latino leaders across the country to meet one another.

Forty-five are dead in Acteal. My father is gone. I read the newspapers and the losses ring in my heart. More than half the Mexican American kids in this country are dropping out of high school, more than half, and our politicians’ priority is bigger prisons. I live in a state where there are more people sentenced to death than anywhere else in the world. Alamo Heights, the affluent, white neighborhood of my city, values Spanish as a second language beginning in the first grade, yet elsewhere lawmakers work to demolish bilingual education for Spanish-dominant children. Two hours away from my home, the U.S. military is setting up camp in the name of bandits and drug lords, but I’m not stupid; I know who they mean to keep away. Lo siento. I feel it. I am reverberating like a bell.

I’m thinking this at the conference in Scottsdale. I don’t know what I expect from this gathering, but I know I don’t want to leave without a statement at least about what happened three days before in Acteal. Surely, the Latino leaders recognize that the 45 are our family. It is like a family, one Arizona politico explains. But understand, to you it may be a father who has died, but to me it’s a distant cousin.

Is it too much to ask our leaders to lead? You’re too impatient, one Latina tells me, and I’m so stunned I can’t respond. A wild karaoke begins, and a Chicano filmmaker begins to preach: There’s a season to play and season to rage. He talks and talks till I have to blink back the tears. After what seems like an eternity, he finally finishes by saying: “You know what you have to do, don’t you?” And then it hits me, I do know what I have to do.

I will tell a story.

When we were in college, my mother realized investing in real estate was the answer to our economic woes. Her plans were modest: to buy a cheap fixer-upper in the barrio that would bring us income. After months of searching, mother finally found something we could afford, a scruffy building on the avenue with a store that could serve as father’s upholstery shop and two apartments above that would pay the mortgage. At last, my mother was a respectable landlady.

Almost immediately a family on the third floor began paying their rent late. It wasn’t an expensive apartment, something like $100 a month, but every first of the month, they were $5 or $10 short and would deliver the rent with a promise to pay the balance the next payday, which they did. Every month it was the same . . . the rent minus a few dollars promised for next Friday.

Mother hated to be taken advantage of. Do they think we’re rich or something? Don’t we have bills, too? She sent father, who was on good terms with everybody. “You go talk to that family, I’ve had it!”

And so father went, and a little later quietly returned.

“I fixed it,” father announced.

“Already? How? What did you do?”

“I lowered the rent.”

Mother was ready to throw a fit. Until father said, “Remember when $10 meant a lot to us?”

Mother was silent, as if by some milagro she remembered. Who would have thought father was capable of such genius. He was not by nature a clever man. But he inspires me now to be creative in ways I never realized.

I don’t wish to make my father seem more than what he was. He wasn’t Gandhi; he lived a life terrified of those different from himself. He never read a newspaper and was naive enough to believe history as told by la television. And, as my mother keeps reminding me, he wasn’t a perfect husband, either.

But he was very kind and, at some things, extraordinary. He was a wonderful father. Maybe I’ve looked to the wrong leaders for leadership. Maybe what’s needed this new year are a few outrageous ideas. Something absurd and ingenious like my father, whose kindness and generosity teach me to enlarge my heart.

Maybe it’s time to lower the rent.

Dame un poquito de tu amor siquiera . . . Ever since the year began that song runs through my head; my father just won’t let up. Lo siento. I feel it. Give me just a little bit of your love at least, give me just a little bit of your love, just that . . .