Review of Songs from the Barrio: A Coming of Age in Modesto, California: author, Richard Ríos
By Rosa Martha Villarreal
Extracts follow the review. Editor’s note.
Richard Ríos’s Songs from the Barrio: A Coming of Age in Modesto, CA is more than just one man’s recollection of his coming of age. The book’s narrative provides an intimate, archetypal portrait of “a people cut off from their homeland and their mother tongue, adrift and searching for a port in a foreign land,” the organic evolution of a unique culture of a people so close yet so far from Mexico.
Songs from the Barrioevokes the speech, food, and mannerisms of the Juarez barrio; the joys of swimming or fishing in the Tuolumne river; the terror of a chance encounter with the cucui, the devil, or la llorona; the mischievous episodes of boyhood bravado; and the dreams and longings evoked from a passing train or a moonlit night or a song sung in a fading festival.
The heroic figure in this narrative is Mr. Ríos's mother, Guadalupe, whose courage and love nourish her children as much as the culinary wonders she conjures in her kitchen from simple and humble foodstuff. Abandoning tradition, she strikes out on her own when she has had her fill of her husband’s abuse. Señora Lupe provides for herself and the youngest of her children by working in the cannery.
Despite her humble origins, she educates her children in a manner best described by the Spanish word, formal: the Hispanic chivalric code of elevated personal conduct, good manners, respect of one’s elders, honorable work, and cleanliness. These lessons in character shaped Mr. Ríos’s consciousness and values.
Taking a cue from his mother that no job is too low if it is honest work, Mr. Ríos works picking fruit as a teenager and meets an assortment of characters early in life. It is here that he witnesses human nature at its best and sometimes at its worse: the industriousness of the undocumented workers who risk everything for the betterment of their families; but also the inequalities of life as he watches the sons of the foremen given unearned privileges.
The memoir also documents the archetypal acculturation journey of first generation Americans of Mexican descent such as joining the military, going to college only to find that among many Americans one was still considered a foreigner, and ultimately the ascent into the corridors of power, in Mr. Ríos ase, the academy. It is this space between two cultures that occupies the narrative, the simultaneity of being both American and Mexican but not at the exclusion of each other; the birth of a third, syncretistic culture. Through it all, Mr. Ríos is sustained by the faith and inner-strength instilled by his mother.
Mr. Ríos oncludes his memoir in the classic Mexican story-telling manner, reminding us that it was true what the Aztec philosophers said: that time is not just linear, but circular. “The Last Train to Juarez” is the final chapter, a dream vision of a vanished world. As he sits in an old train, somewhere in the fabric of time-space or perhaps a dream, Mr. Rios returns once more to the Modesto of his childhood. From the window he watches as the train turns into the past, revealing the scenes and place and people he loves. He finally sees himself as he is pictured on the cover of this memoir and is awakened. But awakened to when, which year, he wonders? Thus, we are reminded of the words of the sage William Faulkner: Only when the clock dies does time come to life.
This is an important book for students of Latino culture in the United States, but also for readers seeking insights into the intimacies of a period before pre-modern norms completely disappeared. This memoir is one of the many responses to Emilio Prados’ poem “Página Fiel”:
Nostalgia
Distant sea, do you know your mystery?
There, upon your shore,
the smallest dream of man
does not remain forgotten[.]
Rosa Martha Villarreal is an award-winning novelist and essayist. She is a member of PEN USA and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, CA.
Ríos’s book is available from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and CreateSpace.com and in a Kindle Edition.
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“Walking to School Barefoot in the Snow”
Extract from the book: Songs from the Barrio
By Richard
Not long ago, I visited my old barrio in Modesto. It seemed so much smaller, and I was stunned at how little of it is still standing. Some houses had been leveled, and cyclone fences encircled empty lots. Junkyards had moved in and become parking lots for semi-trucks. Doña Margarita’s house, my mom’s comadre, was gone. The Tidewater Southern tracks had been pulled out and the bridge across the Tuolumne River torn down. Flores Avenue, our street, had been blocked off. As I pulled up to our old house, it was still standing, like an old dinosaur. I kept the motor idling as I fought back a swell of tears. I wanted to go up to the front door, introduce myself to the new owners, tell them I once lived here, and ask if I could go inside, but I was afraid. More than 30 years ago, eight of us had lived in this one bedroom jacál, or shack, as my mother sarcastically called it, How we did I’ll never know, but we did.
As a child, I often heard the elders tell about how tough things were when they were growing and how easy we had it today. It was the old “When I was a kid, we used to walk to school barefoot in the snow” story. Yet, growing up in this house was in a way, my own barefoot-in-the-snow story, though it never snowed in Modesto.
According to my older brother Jesse, my Dad helped our neighbor and my mom’s compadre Ventura, build our house about 1935. The exposed 2x4 studs in our tiny kitchen were used as shelves. It had no indoor plumbing and no insulation in the walls. The kitchen, about 10x10 ft., had no sink, no hot water. A single faucet jutted through a hole in the wall. My mom placed a small tina (bucket) on top of a wooden stand to catch the waste water, and when it was full we took turns dumping it in the yard, or to water her plants of Yerba Buena (mint), cilantro or shrubs. We had an old wood stove that Mom used to cook on. I often chopped and carried armloads of wood from the pile in the backyard, into the kitchen for cooking or heating water for bathing.
We had no shower or bathtub so Mom used two tinasfor bathing, one large enough to sit in, and a smaller one for warm water to rinse with. Our baths were taken on the floor of the kitchen. “Muchacho cochino”, she would admonish, as she vigorously scrubbed my dirty ears, elbows and knees with the “estropajo”, a course fiber scrubbing pad. “Ow, Mom that hurts!” I would protest but she only scrubbed all the harder. The dirty water was also disposed of in the yard.
Our refrigerator was what we used to call an “icebox,” which my mother kept on the side of the house. The top opened upwards and contained the ice. Every few days, the “ice man” would deliver a large block of ice, carrying it on his back. We used an ice pick to make our ice cubes. Perishables were stored in the underneath compartments on its front.
We had no indoor bathroom and this was for me the hardest inconvenience to deal with. Like most of the families in our barrio we had an escusado, or “outhouse” in the yard. It was a single-seater; I say this because some of my friends’ families had two-seaters and I could never figure out why. I could not imagine doing my business, sitting alongside another person. We used newspapers or old Sear’s catalogues to wipe ourselves with, but in summer, my Mom brought us real toilet paper, which she would stuff her purse with from restrooms at the cannery where she worked.
The worst part about the outhouse was, of course, the stench. Sometimes I preferred to go in the orchard in front of our house rather than to use it. My fears worsened when my mother told me one day, “A Doña Luisa, le pico una araña negra en la nalga! Tuvieron que llevarsela al hospital!” The thought of the poor old woman getting bit on her behind by a black widow as she sat in her outhouse tormented me! From that day on, I never dipped my behind completely into the hole, and sat on my haunches a technique many of my buddies had perfected. The more advanced outhouses had real toilet seats on them. Without saying, those were much more comfortable.
There was no lighting in our backyard, so my mom kept a tin commode under her bed for night use. Lying in bed in the dark, I could hear the scraping sound of someone sliding the pot from under the bed, and cringing at the sound of a chorro (stream) of urine spattering on the floor, after one of my older brothers, back from a night of drinking beer with his buddies, would miss the pot! My mother would brutally scold them the next day. Even worse was having to dump the full pot in the morning. We took turns and I dreaded mine. Full, it was extremely heavy and the smell, revolting. I would hold it out from my body as far as I could, but it was about a hundred foot trek to the outhouse and you had to walk slowly or risk spilling some on yourself on the way!
But as my brothers and sisters grew older, one by one, each moved out, lessening the congestion in our tiny house. After most of my brothers and sisters had all moved out, Jesse and I continued to sleep in a bunk bed in one corner of Mom’s bedroom. He and I were the last to leave. But when he married, he contracted my nino, godfather, Panfilo to build a small room in our back yard, where he lived with his wife for a couple of years before they got their own place. My ninowas a kindly, ruddy-cheeked man with a built-in smile who would have made a great Mexican Santa Claus. The room was about 8 x 12 feet in size, with no indoor plumbing. For a while, after they left, I used it as my own bedroom, though it was detached from the house. When my mom asked my brother-in-law, Abe, if there was anyway the room could be attached to the main house, he nodded saying “Yo se lo hago, cuando quiera, señora.” In those days, people in the barrio kept stringing rooms to the main house, like a row of boxcars attached to a single train engine, as more and more kids were added to the family.
In time, our house would be “modernized” with a gas stove, hot and cold running water, and a shower and bathroom inside, thanks in large part to Abe. There was nothing Abe couldn’t do and the respect he showed to my mother was something special. How the bedroom was attached to the main house was a feat akin to the Egyptians moving a 2000 lb. block of stone for 60 feet. When the big day came, Abe was the chief barrio engineer.
In the days leading to the moving the room, Abe had constructed a track made of wooden planks and laid 6” metal pipes across it, sliding them under the foundation. The room was then jacked up, the cement piers it rested on removed, and the building slowly lowered onto the track atop the pipes. Then, putting sheets of cardboard against the back wall of the room, Abe slowly edged the front bumper of his car against it, and as the car slowly pushed from behind, and the rest of my brothers pulling it with ropes from the front, inch by inch, we rolled it towards the house until it connected, all the while Abe, biting down vigorously on his dangling cigar! In the months that followed, he dug a hole for a septic tank in the backyard, then he built a small bathroom with a shower and a laundry room with a hot water heater in it, attaching them to the room. And that was that. We finally had a real flush toilet, and hot and cold running water and I was king in my new bedroom!
“No tiene uno que ser rico, para ser limpio”, she would say with pride, as she kept her yard spotless, without a single weed. In the summer, she would rake her yard of any leaves or debris with a lightweight rake, making patterns in the dirt, then lightly sprayed it with a fine mist of water from the hose. The yard looked like a poor man’s baseball diamond. Indeed, one did not have to be rich, to be clean. But it’s funny when you’re a kid. I really never thought of us as being “poor”, though Mom always did. She came from poor people in Mexico and she never let us forget it.
Sitting in my car outside our old house that day, the only thing I could think of was the line from an old commercial they used to show on TV of a beautiful young woman taking a drag from a Virginia Slim cigarette and a dubbed voice saying “You’ve come a long way baby.” As I drove off I was immersed with a huge sense of gratitude and sadness. I had indeed, come a long way.
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Family Portrait
By Richard Ríos
It’s an old, black & white studio portrait
with the seven staring stiffly at the camera;
not a smile in the bunch, before an innocuous
hand painted screen, a forest in a 30’s style.
In the back row, standing from left to right
are my two sisters and a brother.
On the left, is John the oldest, probably 17;
The tallest, standing rigidly, a soldier at attention.
Handsome Johnny, red-haired and freckled in a suit and tie;
John who never smoked, or cussed, or drank a day in his life,
who always brought me a pair of socks for christmas, looking
so much like his father, Jacinto; always the last to leave on
Christmas and mother’s Day gatherings.
Who called our mother “Madrecita.”
To his left, in the middle, is Mary, about 12, dark skinned,
indian features, almost afraid, in a neatly buttoned sweater,
and collared white blouse; Mary the nurse, who spent
her life in hospitals attending the sick, who put up with the antics of
my crazy brother-in-law, a veteran of the calles. How many times
would she help us load him into the car after family gatherings?
To her left, on the far right, is sister Shirley, about 15,
angelic, pale skinned, red-haired and freckled too;
Kind-hearted Shirley who sent me $10 bills
in the mail while I was away at college. Shirley, who
mailed me a shoe box full of tamales one Christmas
when I was a lonely soldier boy stationed in Germany.
In the front row, sitting in chairs are my mom and dad;
At the far left, is the patriarch, my macho father, Jacinto;
His right leg crossed over his left, right hand spread out
on top of his thigh, a white collar folded over his coat;
Jacinto, who drank too much, the life of the party,
who played guitar, and sang like an angel they said.
He who abused my mother, until she threw him him out;
who bragged to his drunken buddies at Fajardo’s Bar
on Seventh St. when I asked him for money,“Este es mijo.”
To his left is my brother Jesse, about 8, the shortest,
looking scared, his lips pursed, as if holding marbles
in his cheek; his jet black hair, slicky combed to the side,
His left arm dangling. Jessie whose shyness belied his wit,
his intelligence, astuteness, who told me in Juvenile Hall
one day when I was arrested for stealing hub caps:
“Damn, Brother, if your gonna steal something, why don’t
you steal something worthwhile?” Who recently called to say:
“Hey Brother, just called to say Merry Christmas,
Happy New Year and all that shit.”
To his left is Eddie, the Lady’s Man, about 12,so handsome,
Charming, debonaire, with a voice that wooed the girls
Older and standing taller than Jesse,
Eddie, who loved Cadillacs and fine clothes, and Whiskey 7s
A bit too much. Moms favorite, though she never admitted
It; the one she really made enchiladas for on Mother’s Day.
Last my mother, Guadalupe, who married at 15, and
had her first child, at 16, who knew poverty intimately
the ravages of the Mexican Revolution, who pressured
my father to leave Mexico to the U.S. so she could better
the lives of her children, who gave her back to Tillie Lewis
Cannery, a single mother raising the seven of us, who realized
her life-long prayer to die before any of her children.
They all stare glibly, imprisoned by the lens, expressionless
unaware of the drama, the triumphs and tragedies that
awaited them in a new country. But conspicuously missing
from the photo am I, still in my mother’s womb, the baby
of the family, an addendum, an afterthought, the
exclamation point to a story, a saga yet to be written.
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| Richard Ríos |
Richard Ríos, a son of Mexican immigrants, lives in Stockton, California, and is a retired professor of English and Chicano Studies after 33 years at San Joaquin Delta College. He is also an accomplished artist and guitar player.