“One of those huge mistakes…”
Extract from Manuel of the Americas - Historia de Fuertes Amores: author, David Roybal
This excerpt from Chapter 7 tells of Manuel Rodriguez's return to his home in La Peñita de Jaltemba after working in the farms of California.
Chapter 7
If crossing into the United States earlier that year had been costly, filthy and otherwise difficult, crossing that same border into Mexico was an entirely different experience. “There was no trouble crossing back,” Manuel said. “The bus had a lot of gringos going to Tijuana and a lot of Mexicans coming back home. The officials here on the Mexico side are almost happy to see us coming back.” (In Manuel’s part of Mexico, the Canadians who visit regularly in large numbers are referred to as Canadienses. People from the United States are called gringos.)
Manuel’s bus ride to La Peñita took approximately 35 hours. It sped through some of Mexico’s most-desolate acreage and also through some of its most-scenic and fertile lands. It is, largely, the same course traveled by El Caballo Blanco in José Alfredo Jiménez’s popular corrido of the same name, although Manuel was traveling south and the fabled horse in the songstruggled to the north. The course traveled by Manuel on his return to Nayarit was much as it is today.
From Tijuana, Manuel’s bus traveled briefly through Baja California Norte before entering Sonora along the upper tip of the Golfo de California. Just south of Nogales, the route gets onto central coastal Highway 15 that begins its dip through the Sonoran Desert. Relatively little land here is suitable for agriculture so for long stretches, central attractions might be little more than occasional saguaros and old wooden posts holding electrical wires just off what is often a narrow, poorly maintained road. Fathers and sons regularly labor in the hot sun, swinging machetes or pulling on sickles to harvest tall grass that grows wildly along the road to feed the few horses or cows that they rely on for work or food at home. The grass is loaded onto old pickups or onto wooden wagons hitched to some of the very horses that will feed on the grass later.
Highway 15 continues southward beyond the small community of Santa Ana and onto the more industrialized cities of Hermosillo and Guaymas. In Ciudad Obregón, halfway down the Golfo de California, evidence of larger-scale farming begins to be seen. The highway enters Sinaloa state and suddenly large-scale agribusiness and international farming is almost everywhere. The road gets wider, smoother, faster as vehicles move past huge tomato farms, where tens of thousands of plants are secured by seas of wooden stakes that rise several feet into the air just above the vegetation. Well-fertilized farms of corn and other grains flank the highway as it moves along Los Mochis and Culiacán near the beach and across the gulf from Baja California Sur. Beyond the gulf along the Pacific and about four hours from Culiacán waits Mazatlán. Just below the Tropic of Cancer, the highway skirts Mazatlan’s huge port, high-rise hotels and bustling nightclubs, winding instead through the community’s far-less glamorous side, where graffiti overwhelms walls of homes, tire repair shops, unpretentious restaurants and motels advertising inexpensive rooms.
Rolling hills filled with blue-green agave plants escort the highway south with just more than half a day’s ride remaining before arrival at La Peñita. Palm trees are increasingly evident, as are large trees of mangos and smaller orange trees. Intermittent colonies of people, mostly women and children, hawk small plastic bags of dried shrimp from small roadside stands made hastily of wood or sun-bleached canvas. Vegetation on the hills is thick as the highway veers into a bustling, metropolitan Tepic. Huge fields of sugar cane rise from hills just outside the city in multiple directions, creating an agricultural patchwork to behold from multiple elevations. Beyond await numerous hairpin curves after Highway 15 gives way to a narrow two-lane Highway 200 that quickly drops thousands of feet to be greeted by less-assuming communities of Compostela, Las Varas and finally La Peñita de Jaltemba before heading further south to Puerto Vallarta and beyond.
It was a long ride that gave Manuel ample opportunity to contemplate his arrival, to anticipate his reception as darkness fell. It was around eight or nine when Manuel disembarked from the bus with one small suitcase in hand. As he stepped off, he wanted to smell the air and feel the sea breeze on his face. He wanted to hike up the steep hill to where he left his family and see what new signs of life might have sprung up along the way. He wanted to see the cursed fence that had been strung around part of the little house that he had secured to shelter his loved ones before leaving for the United States. And he wanted to address the confusion that apparently had led the respected Rentería family to put up the wire.
But first and foremost, he wanted to see his family. He wanted to kiss and hold his wife close, to taste her lips anew and feel her warmth. He wanted to see how much his daughter had grown, to look into her dark eyes and hear the heart-warming sounds made by a one-year-old girl, sounds that he would imagine before falling asleep some nights in California. He anticipated unpacking his gifts; envisioned wide smiles and imagined the air being filled with calls of, Amor! Papi! Hijo! Hermano!
He told no one in La Peñita that he was coming. His arrival would be a surprise, giving his imagination license to frame a joyous reunion.
It was the kind of reunion that I expected Manuel to describe when the two of us sat down under a tightly woven palapa for him to tell me of his return to Mexico. We sipped coffee at a brightly draped table at his sister Lorena’s open-air restaurant in Rincón de Guayabitos. We could hear every vehicle passing only yards away on the very highway that he had taken to get home from California 30 years earlier.
“Who was there to greet you?” I asked, smiling with anticipation.
Manuel is a gregarious and animated storyteller who customarily requires little prompting. But a dark cloud enveloped him as soon as I asked about his reunion. Only a foot or two away from me, he sat peculiarly still for a couple of moments after hearing my inquiry. I knew he had heard it so I, too, sat silently, waiting to see what would unfold. I took a sip of coffee that was laced with canned milk, slowly, gently placed my cup back on the table; waited some more, then took another sip, glancing without expression in Manuel’s direction. A minute or two went by but it seemed like much longer. Silence between Manuel and me was not common. Suddenly, Manuel began rolling a tiny scrap of paper between a thumb and forefinger alongside his coffee cup. Still more silence. The paper scrap became a tight, hard wad that Manuel continued to hold between his thumb and finger. He began flicking his wrist downward somewhat forcefully at the pine table; only a second or two separating staccato thuds made on the table by the wadded paper, the thumb, the finger.
Finally, I felt a need to speak. I reached over and clasped my hand around Manuel’s wrist that was closer to me, the free wrist. “No hay apuro,” I told Manuel, encouraging him to take all the time he needed to collect his thoughts, to phrase his response.
The pounding on the table continued free of any other sound except for the cars and trucks speeding along the road nearby. More sips of coffee. More silence. Finally, Manuel spoke. His lips were tight; his entire face was tight. His eyes focused ahead, at the table, at nothing. I had never seen him like this. Then the silence broke.
“There was this little door with tiny flowers painted on it,” Manuel said very softly, emotionally. “I opened that door … and nobody was there.” He began to weep, no matter how hard he had struggled not to in the moments that had just passed.
Elena, too, had little difficulty remembering that evening in one of our own conversations apart from her husband. As with Manuel, there is pain in much of what she recalled. “I had been caring for the family all that time and didn’t know that my husband was coming home. He hadn’t told me,” she said. “It was the Christmas season, and one of Manuel’s little sisters said, ‘Let’s go to the church for Las Posadas.’ I never liked being out in the street like that, but I said, ‘Let’s go. I’ll keep you girls company.’ I think what they really wanted was to go get candy at the little fiesta.” Manuel’s brothers already had left for La Peñita’s church and plaza. His father’s whereabouts at the time apparently were unknown.
“When the girls and I returned to the house, there was a suitcase inside the room where we slept,” Elena said, recalling her surprise. “I wondered if it was Manuel’s. I also found some notes on the suitcase. They were from him. He wrote, asking where I was. Was I in the streets? Where was I?”
“When I saw that the suitcase was his, we ran out with such happiness to find him. We asked around for him but we didn’t find him. Finally, we returned to the house to wait for him.”
Manuel walked in five or ten minutes later. The tension only mounted. “My baby ‘Cecy’ stayed close to me and said Manuel was el Diablo because she had never seen another (grown) man there inside the house who wasn’t her grandfather. She would push Manuel away,” said Elena.
Manuel, in his conversation with me at his sister’s restaurant, had told me of the unexpected reception from his daughter, who he had not seen since she was four months old. “The house was dark at first so ‘Nena’ or I must have turned on the light when we began talking,” he said. “My daughter, ‘Cecy,’ didn’t want to come with me. I told her, ‘Come here mija. Come here.’ She’d run away to the bed. ‘Nena’ would say, ‘It’s your father. It’s your father.’ But ‘Cecy’ wouldn’t come. She didn’t let me hold her that night.”
Little changed the following morning, even after Manuel showed ‘Cecy’ the small doll that he had brought for her from California. “It took three or four days before she let me hold her,” Manuel said.
In the meantime, Manuel saw conditions under which his family had been living. Some of his siblings were sleeping on cardboard. The little kerosene burner on the floor that was intended for cooking didn’t have fuel. There was no firewood for cooking outdoors. “I’d have to go out to find wood to cook something for the children,” Elena recalled. “And we didn’t have water from the faucet. I would go out to get water from the houses around us.”
Manuel was appalled and it didn’t take long for him to confirm that there was no savings from the money that he had been sending to his father.
Even amid the despair, Elena was glad to have her husband at her side once again. She wanted to feel that things would get better now just as she and Manuel had dreamed when he left for the United States. But she couldn’t deny the reality that surrounded them so she turned yet again to her faith in a higher power, a faith that she still holds on to today. “When Manuel returned from el norte, I said, ‘Let’s see how life is going to change for me.’ It had been a very difficult time when he was gone, very difficult. I don’t regret it because with the help of God we survived and with His help here we are hechandole adelante.”
If the time that Manuel spent away was hard on Elena, Manuel asserts that it was extraordinarily difficult for him, too. “They were the hardest eight months of my life,” he has told me on multiple occasions. He hasn’t said so directly but I have sensed that he recognizes that some of the suffering that he assigns to those times was self-inflicted.
By his own admission, the accusations that he hurled at his wife when he didn’t find her at home upon his return from California were even angrier than what Elena recounted. “I told her, ‘Did I take risks to go work in the United States so that you could stay here and become a woman of the streets?’ I was wrong to say those things ... Without my wife I would have nothing.”
The tension in the house during those first hours must have contributed to the apprehension and doubt that kept young “Cecy” away from her father for days.
Manuel has no excuse for the distrust that engulfed him when he walked into an empty house that night of his return, only regret and an explanation. It is the same explanation he offered to me earlier while telling of his ill-fated decision to send less of his U.S. earnings to Elena than what he sent to his father: “It is one of those huge mistakes that a man makes in his life.”
Each time that he expressed the sentiment he sounded grateful that the consequences of his mistakes were not even greater than what they actually had been.
David Roybal, a New Mexico native, has won state and regional news awards as an editor and journalist focusing on government, politics and diverse social conditions. Manuel of the Americas, which is available at amazon.com and the third biography he’s published since 2008, is based in Nayarit, México. David is working on his fourth biography and an historical novel.