obtained. The people of the Hills vindicated me.
Work took other turns. At age thirteen, I was hired at a car wash with my brother. We were the cleanup crew. We came to work in the evening after the undocumented guys finished washing cars and had gone home. Rano and I swept, mopped, and picked up around the small office, waiting area and parking lot. We picked up all the dirty rags and threw them into massive washing machines. Then near the end of the evening, we hooked up a monstrous hose and watered down the place. Rano, who was 16, actually washed cars during the day and learned to drive almost every make and model.
“You should have seen the Mustang I pulled out today,” he said, excited.
“Oh, listen,” he’d tap my arm. “Then there was this Firebird!”
I came along to help him in the evening to make more money for the family. Everything we made went to Mama—and we always needed more.
But soon after I started working there, I picked up a foot fungus. I often worked in sneakers and I couldn’t help but get them soaked every night in the soap and water we used to hose down everything. Terrible flowery lesions sprang up on the soles of my feet and through my toes. I also had an ingrown toenail that produced a painful redness on my left toe, forcing me to place steaming hot towels on it every night to lower the swelling.
A foot doctor prescribed medication, but nothing lessened the sores. And surgery on my toe was out of the question. I couldn’t even go to gym classes, which I missed for the rest of junior high.
One day, the sores worsened and I refused to get out of bed. My mother dabbed ointments on them but they were of no use. Then Tío Kiko came over. He examined the sores, staring intently at the petals that seemed to be growing from my feet. Tío Kiko knew a little of the Mexican healing arts, the use of herbs and incantations from old Indian traditions used to treat most ailments. In desperation, Mama asked her brother for help.
“This will hurt you,” Tío Kiko told me in Spanish. “But be brave. It will be over soon.”
He pulled up a chair and directed my mother’s hand.
They sliced each of the milky sores. Blood and pus streamed out. I screamed. I didn’t believe in witchcraft or chants or herbs. I felt I would die. Tío Kiko had boiled water and put together some herbs he had brought from a botánica. Mama covered each open wound with leaves and concoctions as Tío Kiko prayed over my feet.
Was there a God for feet? Would the proper words be strung together to wake it from its sleep? Would the magic of the herbs, the spirit evoked, seep into the sores and bring the feet back to me? These were the questions.
Days passed. I lay in bed as the daily rituals worked their wonder. The sores started to disappear. Soon I hobbled around in slippers. Even the ingrown toenail slid back into a somewhat normal shape. Tío Kiko, this border priest, this master of snake and siren, did what the Anglo doctors could not. Who knows if it’s real magic? There was another kind of magic which made me feel special, to look at my Indian-descended mother and uncle and believe in the power of civilizations long since written off, long since demeaned and trampled. Jesus Christ was a brown man. A Mexican Indian. A curandero. Not a stringy blond-haired, blue-eyed icon. He was like me, like my Tío Kiko. He lived in the earth, got drunk, inhabited the leaves and herbs, not a sanitized doctor’s office—or a church of spires and colored glass and elaborate carvings. He lived in my feet, and with the proper calls and enticements, made them whole again. This is the Christ I wanted to believe in.
Through the bars of a cell, I talk to a deputy as he sits behind an immense wood desk in the Temple City sheriff’s station, the station responsible for Las Lomas. He’s Chicano like me, but I know how much he hates everything I am, as if I represent all the scorn, venom and fear instilled in him since a child.
“We
Work took other turns. At age thirteen, I was hired at a car wash with my brother. We were the cleanup crew. We came to work in the evening after the undocumented guys finished washing cars and had gone home. Rano and I swept, mopped, and picked up around the small office, waiting area and parking lot. We picked up all the dirty rags and threw them into massive washing machines. Then near the end of the evening, we hooked up a monstrous hose and watered down the place. Rano, who was 16, actually washed cars during the day and learned to drive almost every make and model.
“You should have seen the Mustang I pulled out today,” he said, excited.
“Oh, listen,” he’d tap my arm. “Then there was this Firebird!”
I came along to help him in the evening to make more money for the family. Everything we made went to Mama—and we always needed more.
But soon after I started working there, I picked up a foot fungus. I often worked in sneakers and I couldn’t help but get them soaked every night in the soap and water we used to hose down everything. Terrible flowery lesions sprang up on the soles of my feet and through my toes. I also had an ingrown toenail that produced a painful redness on my left toe, forcing me to place steaming hot towels on it every night to lower the swelling.
A foot doctor prescribed medication, but nothing lessened the sores. And surgery on my toe was out of the question. I couldn’t even go to gym classes, which I missed for the rest of junior high.
One day, the sores worsened and I refused to get out of bed. My mother dabbed ointments on them but they were of no use. Then Tío Kiko came over. He examined the sores, staring intently at the petals that seemed to be growing from my feet. Tío Kiko knew a little of the Mexican healing arts, the use of herbs and incantations from old Indian traditions used to treat most ailments. In desperation, Mama asked her brother for help.
“This will hurt you,” Tío Kiko told me in Spanish. “But be brave. It will be over soon.”
He pulled up a chair and directed my mother’s hand.
They sliced each of the milky sores. Blood and pus streamed out. I screamed. I didn’t believe in witchcraft or chants or herbs. I felt I would die. Tío Kiko had boiled water and put together some herbs he had brought from a botánica. Mama covered each open wound with leaves and concoctions as Tío Kiko prayed over my feet.
Was there a God for feet? Would the proper words be strung together to wake it from its sleep? Would the magic of the herbs, the spirit evoked, seep into the sores and bring the feet back to me? These were the questions.
Days passed. I lay in bed as the daily rituals worked their wonder. The sores started to disappear. Soon I hobbled around in slippers. Even the ingrown toenail slid back into a somewhat normal shape. Tío Kiko, this border priest, this master of snake and siren, did what the Anglo doctors could not. Who knows if it’s real magic? There was another kind of magic which made me feel special, to look at my Indian-descended mother and uncle and believe in the power of civilizations long since written off, long since demeaned and trampled. Jesus Christ was a brown man. A Mexican Indian. A curandero. Not a stringy blond-haired, blue-eyed icon. He was like me, like my Tío Kiko. He lived in the earth, got drunk, inhabited the leaves and herbs, not a sanitized doctor’s office—or a church of spires and colored glass and elaborate carvings. He lived in my feet, and with the proper calls and enticements, made them whole again. This is the Christ I wanted to believe in.
Through the bars of a cell, I talk to a deputy as he sits behind an immense wood desk in the Temple City sheriff’s station, the station responsible for Las Lomas. He’s Chicano like me, but I know how much he hates everything I am, as if I represent all the scorn, venom and fear instilled in him since a child.
“We
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