The East Side

Coming from an Anglo neighborhood to a Mexican neighborhood was not easy at the age of seven. Back in the Anglo 'hood, our next-door neighbors the Torres children were Mexican-American, and Catholic, and they spoke Spanish to their parents, but the culture was contained within the precincts of their severe but brightly colored home. Theirs was a home of rectitude. Everything was right, according to the tradition of Mexican order. Father sat at the head of the table, but the real power, we all knew, was Mamá, and her children were her kingdom. When she announced dinner, they ran calling, “Mandé!” I asked my father what “mandé” meant. He corrected their pronunciation—it should be “Mande Ud.” and said, “It means command me.” Command me! A child asks his parent for an order. My father never made me ask him to command me, and while my mother was clearly the boss of me, she would have been offended at the suggestion that this relationship be framed into language. But they were speaking Spanish, where hierarchic relationships are openly expressed. They were truly “a good family.” If the barrio had been peopled by their sort, there would have been no shock for me but the strangeness of eating candy made of cactus or milk.

But this was not the case.

Most of the children and the families we met were good Mexicans, bounded by Church, family, and the opinion of the neighborhood. But those few who weren't were feral in ways that my mother couldn't have predicted and my father couldn't have dealt with in the funk he was in. We kids were on our own.

Girls followed me home, asking to fight. Boys followed me home, asking to fuck. At ten, I escaped gang rape by kicking the initiating boy in the gonads and running. “We'll get you next time!” They never did, but I knew girls they did get. They laughed about it and teased the girls. We were all in the social soup of the barrio, with no penalties within the law for such offenses.  In the seventies, crimes against women were seldom dealt with in the criminal justice system.  The only—and real—penalty was within the community.

When I was eleven, a boy named David took a shine to me and began to call me on the phone. My father had awakened by this time, and knew what this meant. He went over to David's house and told him not to call. I have no idea what threat was implied, but my father was a large man for the 1970s, six foot tall with an enormous muscled torso, which was almost unheard of for a Mexican--he had a very imposing presence, even menacing. He was a war veteran with the crazies of a person who has been trained to kill, faced death, and come back home.

David never called me again.