The Outsider

I

I’ve always been an outsider, an alien, a stranger in every tribe. That’s not a complaint or a boast or a plea for sympathy. And it’s certainly not a condition uncommon to others. Some feel like outsiders for obvious reasons, some for reasons more complex, some for reasons utterly and ever unknowable. In my own case, blood heritage and a borderland childhood no doubt played their parts.

I am of the fourth generation of men in my family to be born in Mexico, all of us descendants of an American who himself was sired by an English pirate. But I’m the sole member of those generations who was raised in the borderlands--that long brute region flanking both sides of the Mexican-American frontier for roughly a couple of hundred miles in either direction and ranging for more than 2,000 winding miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande at the Gulf of Mexico to its western terminus at the shore of Alta California. All along this frontier, the outlands of two countries come together to form a culturally sovereign province. It is almost entirely desert country, stark and shadeless and short on mercy, and, with few widely scattered exceptions, sparsely inhabited. From the scrublands of south Texas and Coahuila to the fierce basins and ranges of the Big Bend and Chihuahua to the desert dunes of Arizona and Sonora, its people are mostly of a nature less wholly Mexican or American than an amalgam of both, a nature as distinct and remote and isolate as the borderlands themselves.

It’s the sense of remove from the world around him that defines the outsider, but this feeling of apartness goes beyond mere geography. Even in his own country, among his own fellows, in the midst of his own family, the outsider feels himself a stranger, a keeper of an alien heart.

II

The pirate was my great-great-great grandfather Robert Blake, the black sheep of a landed English family. He came to the United States via New England, where he was married and sired a son before sailing south to plunder in the Gulf of Mexico. He was captured in 1826 and executed in Veracruz and was thus the first Blake buried in Mexican ground. His son John married a woman of established New England family whose fortune derived from paper mills, and he gained appointment as U.S. Consul to the Mexican state of Jalisco. Thus, like his father before him, did John Blake venture to Mexico, albeit to a better fate. He fell in love with the country and established a profitable mill he named the Hacienda Americana, which remained in the family until the Revolution of 1910. He fathered three sons, but only one, Carlos Enrique, lived to maturity. Carlos was already managing the mill when his father was stabbed to death on the church steps one Sunday morning by a foreman with a grievance. A photograph of great-grandfather Carlos shows a quintessential patron whose stern mustached visage and hard eyes bespeak no tolerance whatsoever for fools or disrespect. He is flanked by his family--by his four daughters, his two sons and his Creole wife, Adela Arrias, born in Mexico of pure Spanish bloodline, and the first Mexican woman taken to wed by a Blake. One son, Tomas Martin, would be killed at 18 when his mount fell on him. The other, Juan Sotero, was my grandfather. He rose to the rank of colonel in the Mexican army engineering corps, married a Creole poet named Esther Hernandez, and begat two sons--Juan Jaime and Carlos Sebastian. Carlos would become my father.

III

My father was, like his father, a civil engineer, more particularly a builder of roads. He loved the profession not only for itself but as much for the way of life it allowed, and he reveled in that life for 10 years before he got married. It was fitting that he built roads, for he loved to travel on them, loved to drive his Model A Fords, his Buicks, his Packards--all the cars he came to own in those wild free years--loved to drive them hard and fast over roads however rugged and raise great plumes of dust behind him.

As a young man, he went to work for his father in the borderlands and over the next few years built roads to Piedras Negras, just across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas; to Villa Acuna, across the river from Del Rio; to Ojinaga, across from Presidio. He built roads in various portions of the Sonoran desert including the brutal Desierto de Altar, comprising the whole region between the southwest corner of Arizona and the Sea of Cortez. He had by then formed his own company, and he and his crews played as hard as they worked. Whenever there was a town within 30 miles of their camp, they would head for that town’s cantinas at the setting of the sun, and there drink and gamble and frisk with the girls and fight with other construction crews and generally have a fine time.

He loved the desert towns--Agua Prieta, Nogales, Sonoita, Mexicali. Loved Baja California above all places on earth, loved Tecate and Tijuana and Ensenada. Sometimes they went to towns on the American side of the borderland--Calexico, Tucson, El Paso, Las Cruces--just for the novelty of it, to flirt with the blonds. At a time when few Mexicans traveled more than 50 miles from home in their lives, my father and his crews were men of vastly traveled experience, worldly men of the borderland, and not one of them yet 30 years old.

Sometimes there was trouble with the American Border Patrol, and on one occasion my father was jailed in Tucson for a night as the result of a misunderstanding involving an American girl he’d taken for a visit across the border. So bitter did this experience make him for a time toward all things American that he refused to speak English, poorly as he did, for nearly a year afterward. And several years later when the U.S. State Department sent him a notice that, according to the U.S. Nationality Act of 1940, he was entitled to claim American citizenship on the basis of his American parental lineage and had only to fill out the enclosed forms to do so, he tore up the papers. In Mexico City his brother Juan received the same forms and also threw them away. They knew themselves as Mexican and no argument about it.

IV

He met my mother, Estrella Lozano, at a dance in Brownsville, Texas, and the ensuing courtship was whirlwind. She’d grown up the only child of a Mexican horse rancher whose ranch encompassed thousands of acres just south of the border in Tamaulipas state. But her mother hated ranch life, and so her father bought them a house in Brownsville. She attended Brownsville schools and learned to speak English so well that her mother, who spoke no English at all, often chided her for learning it better than Spanish. She became a true borderland Mexicana--did the jitterbug and sipped black cows at the drugstore and thought Clark Gable was the living end. And then she met my father, and next thing she knew, she--who had never ventured farther from Brownsville than her high school graduation trip to Galveston Island--was waving goodbye to her grim-faced mother as her husband of less than three days gunned his yellow Buick from her house on Levee Street and toward the international bridge. Two weeks later she was in Baja California, as far from home as the moon.

She was at first thrilled by the adventure of it all, but my father often had to leave her alone in whatever house he rented in whatever pueblo was closest to the construction camp where he had to spend most of his time. Sometimes they were apart for days, and she’d become terribly lonely. Her only companions were the young maids my father hired to help around the house. The maids were sympathetic to my mother’s plight and tried to keep her entertained with stories of the region, with accounts of ancient legends and tales of the haciendas that had long ruled that portion of borderland Mexico. In years to come my mother would tell those tales to me.

Yet there was no assuaging her loneliness, and in one of her frequent letters home to her mother, she signed off by writing, “Sometimes I think this is the world,” and drew a long arrow pointing to a circle the size of a quarter at the top of the page--and then drew another arrow down the margin of the paper to point to a tiny pencil dot at the bottom of the sheet: “And this is me.” The first time I saw that letter I was a grown man, but the sense of isolation it conveyed struck me with a keen recognition. It well described how I’d felt most of my life, except that I had no idea where that large circle at the top of the page--which for her was both her father’s ranch and her mother’s Brownsville home--would ever be for me.

My father came home from the job as often as he could. Sometimes he could stay a few days, sometimes only for hours, for even less time than it took to make the drive from the camp. But whenever he and my mother were together, they had wonderful times. They went to nightclubs if there were any in town, to cantinas if that was all there was. They drank and danced and made each other laugh, these young lovers who were as much in thrall to their passionately romantic natures as they were to one another, whom in truth they hardly knew. In photographs from those days my father is deeply tanned and lean-muscled in his short-sleeved work shirt. His hair is black and curly and his grin, bright white. He sports a roguish pencil-thin mustache, and his eyes are full of daring. My mother’s pictures show a girl, dark-haired and fair-skinned, sensuously slight, beautiful. She looks as if she could ride her father’s strongest stallions with a sure and easy grace.

One of her favorite places during that series of Baja California jobs during their first six months of marriage was Santo Tomas, more a hacienda than a town in those days, set on a tableland flanked by high jagged sierras. In later years she often described to me the region’s spectacular golden sunsets and blood-red cactus flowers, its strange mountain winds, its richly green vineyards so beautiful in their contrast to the surrounding desert and mountain rock. In that old borderlands estancia, I was conceived.

My mother was large with me when my father took her to meet his family in Mexico City. She wanted me to be born in Texas, but my father was still smarting from his experience with the gringo legal system in Tucson and was not keen on this ambition. They were still at odds on the issue when they departed the capital for the Gulf coast, where my father had to attend to a brief business matter--and where the highway to the border awaited their decision about my place of birth. I can envision them as they drove down the winding mountain roads and debated the nationality I should be born to, my mother arguing for the U.S. and all the advantages of American citizenship, reminding my father of his own Anglo roots; my father countering with assertions of his Mexican nature and nationality and the necessity of his son being Mexican as well--and knowing he was losing the debate. I see him stealthily choosing the least direct routes toward the coast, in no hurry at all to reach the highway to the north, hoping, perhaps, that given more time my mother might yet capitulate. And then nature decided the matter--my mother went into early labor. They rushed to the hospital in the miasmic and piratical port of Tampico, and there I was born Mexican.

I can imagine my mother’s disappointment, my father’s wide grin.

V

We lived in Tampico but a short time before moving south to other coastal towns--Veracruz on the bay of Campeche, Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec--where over the next few years my father built roads along various shorelines. We did not live anywhere for longer than four months in the first six years of my life.

My earliest memories of the natural world are of seashores with tall palms and long sand beaches and trees full of squalling parrots, of wet heat and dense foliage dappled with green sunlight, of a series of different houses and all of them white and bright and high-ceilinged, with wide windows open to the sea and the sound of breakers. I was often in the charge of mestizo maids who laughed like little bells and had brilliant white teeth and warm brown skin that seemed always to smell of charcoal and sugar. They would take me to the beach to play in the surf and at naptime would sing me to sleep with songs I would never hear anywhere else thereafter.

I was still two years shy of school age when my father moved us to the western frontera he so loved, and I can recall my wonder at the dramatic change in the look and feel of the world. The land now barren and sand-blown and dust devils rose and whirled across it. Long red mesas shimmered in the rising heat. The desert stretched to the ends of the earth under skies of stunning vastness, under a demonic sun that made blood of the horizon at every rise and set. For the next two years, we lived in many of the border towns already familiar to my parents, but now, whenever my father went off to the camps and left my mother behind at home, I was there, as well the maids, to keep her company. Some of the servant girls were from the high country and said they had come to the frontera to get away from the earthquakes that so often shook the mountains. I never forgot the tale one of them told of a temblor that opened the ground of her village and swallowed her family’s hut while her brothers were yet inside.

Sometimes when my father was home from the job for a day or two, he’d take us to the nearest town for dinner in a restaurant, and sometimes, as we were driving to or from town along those isolated roads, we’d see groups of people--usually all men but sometimes there were women and children among them too--trudging over the desert hardpan with rope-lashed bundles and small bags on their backs. The first time I saw such a group I was amazed that anyone would be walking so far out in the desert and I asked my father who they were. “Mojados,” he said. That’s what they were called along the eastern region of the border, all along the Rio Grande, mojados or espaldas mojadas--wetbacks--because they got soaked in their illegal crossing of the river to get to the American side. But most of the western region of the borderland was open country and without fences and people could simply walk through the desert and into the United States. My father thought all of them, no matter how they sneaked across, should be called estupidos for wanting to go to the U.S. in the first place.

On that car trip I heard for the first time about the desperate things some people were willing to risk in order to get to the United States, to el norte--to what they were sure would be a better life than they would ever know in Mexico. Before long we would move to Texas and I would see these people--my countrymen, yet seeming as different from me as moon-people--stooped and dragging long bags behind them in the cotton fields, picking vegetables on their knees, toting boxes of produce on their shoulders from field to truck. There would come a day in south Texas when my mother would see me looking out the car window at a field of cotton pickers and she’d say, “We’re lucky, Jaimito. We’re very lucky.”

VI

My mother was now trying to instruct me in the rudiments of English, but I was steadfastly opposed to learning the language of Americans. I’d often overheard my father and his friends talking about them--gringos, they called them, enunciating the epithet like it had a bad taste--and I refused to learn the language of such a mean and brutish people. No amount of my mother’s reasoning against such bigotry could sway me. Whenever she tried to teach me so much as a phrase in English, I would put my hands tightly over my ears and sing Mexican songs at the top of my voice. It maddened her no end and vastly amused my father.

One day, not long after we’d settled into yet another rented house, my mother took me with her on a shopping trip to town, chauffeured by the driver my father sent from camp. The town was Calexico, on the American side of the street that marked the border between it and Mexicali, and there, for the first time in my life, I saw gringos by the dozens and heard their growling language everywhere. And I couldn’t help but remark that most of them looked more like me than most Mexicans did.

In a small eatery whose air was thick with strange wonderful smells, my mother bought me my first hamburger. As he set our plates in front of us, the American proprietor said something to me in English and then smiled and spoke to my mother, who laughed and said something to him in return. When he went to wait on another customer, I asked her what he’d said. She started to tell me, then stopped short and smiled sweetly and said she’d be glad to teach me a little English so I wouldn’t have to depend on others for the rest of my life to find out what people around me were saying.

The ploy worked. In the year that passed before we left the western borderland and moved to the lower Rio Grande Valley, I learned to speak English well enough--and, strangely, without a trace of accent--to make my mother smile and my father shake his head and mutter.

VII

We moved to the United States--Brownsville, Texas, the geographical bottom of the republic--for two reasons: I was of age to begin my formal schooling, and my mother was again pregnant. She not only insisted that her next child would be born American but also that I would be educated in American schools. I didn’t like the idea very much, but for reasons it would take me years to understand, my father had come to agree with her. So we settled into a house on Zaragoza Street in a dusty oak-and-mesquite neighborhood at the edge of town and I was enrolled at St. Joseph Academy.

Now did I begin to learn about the complexities of nationality. Even though about half of the families in the neighborhood were clearly of Mexican descent, many of their members had been born north of the river and were therefore Americans, a word which in my mind had always conjured images of fair-skinned people who spoke only English. Those people, I was informed by my Mexican neighbors, were Anglos.

The Anglo kids of Zaragoza Street--most of them native Texans, all of them Southerners--were the first I’d ever known, and my acquaintance with them roused deep confusions about my own identity. My first exchange with them was in front of our new house on the day we moved in. When they asked where I was born and I said Mexico, they thought I was joking. When I insisted on my Mexican birth, some of them got irritated, and one said, “Then how come you don’t look like it nor talk like it neither? You ain’t like them.” He pointed at a bunch of kids watching us from the front porch of a house down the block, a group of mestizos, typical brown-skinned Mexicans of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, and to these Texas boys what all Mexicans looked like. They didn’t believe I was Mexican because I didn’t look or sound like one. And they had not yet met my parents, not yet heard my pale complexioned mother addressing me in Spanish, not yet caught an earful of my father’s movie bandido accent, which the years would never abate.

“If you really Mexican,” one said, “let’s hear you say something in Mexican.”

Now I was getting irritated at having to prove to these peckerwoods who I was, so I said: “Ustedes son una bola de tontos.” They looked at each other as if any among them might certify that what I’d said had indeed been said in “Mexican.” But none in the group had any understanding that I’d just called them a bunch of dummies. I turned to the Mexican kids down the street and hollered, “Que tal? Me llamo Jaime Carlos y ahora vivo in este barrio tambien.”

The Mexican kids showed white grins and hollered back their welcomes, and the Texas boys’ mouths hung ajar. For a moment nobody said anything, and then blond Danny Shaw, my new next-door neighbor, said, “Dang if you ain’t the un-Mexicanest Mexican I ever seen.”

VIII

They never really knew what to make of me, the Anglo kids, both in the neighborhood and at school. Although they didn’t often mingle with Mexican kids, they didn’t shun me at all even after I’d proved to them I was a Mexican myself. And so I was able to pal around with both groups. Before long, I was speaking the slangy sing-song border Spanish of the Mexicans when I was with them, and falling into a Texas accent whenever I spoke English in the company of the Anglo kids. It was the start of a lifelong habit of trying to fit in with the people around me by assuming their modes of speech, a practice reputedly common to misfits, con artists and liars of all sorts, which of course includes writers.

Over time, some of the Mexican kids came to resent that I buddied with the Texans so often and so easily. And some of the Texans were always ready to remind me that I was not truly one of them. Although my English was improving in school every day, I often made mistakes with the language during my first years with it, and the Texans would leap at the chance to make fun of me for it. Sometimes they merely laughed for a moment and I merely felt embarrassed. Sometimes it went past that and the fight was on.

The first time it happened was on my neighbor Danny Shaw’s front porch, when I was looking on with him and Nicky Welch at a magazine cover photo of a horse wearing a beautiful saddle. Without thinking, I said, “That’s a pretty chair.”

The two of them gave me puzzled looks, and Danny asked, “What chair?” I pointed to the saddle--in Spanish called a silla, which also is the word for chair--and they burst out laughing. “That’s ain’t no chaairrr,” Danny said, “that’s a saaadle!”

My face burned with the vocabulary error, one which seemed all the worse to me because I was grandson to a horse rancher. And then Nicky Welch, who always went for the extra bite whenever he could, said, “Only some stupid greaser would call a saddle a chair.”

My father had been teaching me to fight since before I entered school. He knew what would be in store for me with the Texan kids sooner or later and knew he couldn’t protect me from it, he could only prepare me. Whenever my mother had seen him showing me how to deliver a proper punch, how to use knees and elbows in a fight, she’d chide him for it, and he’d stop--until she left, and then we’d resume our lesson. I always suspected that she knew we continued with them, and that she secretly approved. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word “greaser” was in her company. We were on a shopping trip in Mexicali and heard an American yell it from his car at a Mexican cab driver who’d nearly run into him. The cabby didn’t even look the man’s way, but my mother glared at the Anglo and muttered that somebody ought to smack that damn gringo’s face--and my mother rarely used the word gringo and even less frequently swore.

I had been in little-kid fights in Mexico, a lot of shoving and wrestling and no real meanness intended, but this was my first fight with anger in it, with a desire to inflict pain. Nicky Welch was bigger than I was, but he fought in the clumsy awkward manner of the beefy and untutored, and by the time Mr. Shaw came stomping out of the house to pull us apart, I had pretty well bloodied Nicky’s nose and puffed his eye and, best of all, had him bawling. Mr. Shaw demanded to know what the fight was about, and when Danny told him, he just looked away from me and softly told Nicky and me to get on home. I felt sorry for him because I knew him for a kind man, and I could see that the word “greaser” embarrassed him. But what I mostly felt was exultation, felt it all the rest of that day and through the evening and as I lay in bed that night looking out my window at the stars. The next afternoon I saw stars of another sort when Nicky’s big brother Ruben got hold of me as I was coming home from buying a comic book at the drug store. My mother nearly screamed at the sight of me when I limped into the house.

There were plenty of other fights to come. I had more fights with gringo kids than my Mexican friends did for the simple reason that I spent more time with them than they did. Whenever some Texas kid made a crack about greasers or spics in my presence, I usually shrugged it off because I knew that was how Texans talked and there was no personal insult intended. I thought only fools got angry at insults not directed at them personally. I still think so. When the insult was personal, there was of course nothing to do but fight. Sometimes, though, as I was punching and kicking and scrabbling around in the dirt with some other kid, I’d hear the Mexicans cheering in Spanish and the Anglos rooting in English, and I’d have the strange feeling that the only one in the fight was me.

The fights fell off over the next few years, and one reason for that was my growing facility with English. The better I got with the Anglos’ language and the more I sounded like them, the easier it was for them to accept me as one of their own. By the time I was in fourth grade even the Anglo kids were asking me for the answers on spelling and grammar tests.

In the brief rest of our time in Texas, I came to feel fully at ease in both cultures, was fluent with both languages and had more of a sense of being at home than I’ve ever had since.

IX

One day my father announced we were moving to Florida for reasons of business and within the month I left the borderlands behind me.

But not really.

In years to follow I would come to understand that although outsiders can be defined by displacement or dispossession, by differences in language or culture or religion or race or any number of others, such differences are not necessarily the determining factors. I came to realize that a borderland is as much a region of the spirit as a physical locale and that some of us are always in the borderlands no matter where we might be on the map. I learned that there are borders of the heart and soul as forbidding or beckoning, as dangerous or liberating to cross as any borders of geography anywhere. And I came to know that even though I am hardly alone in lacking a sense of place in the world, I always feel that I am.

So do all outsiders feel.