I was strange and everyone knew, but it took Blake Putnam to sing about it. It was 1973. He and I were eleven and listening to Cher’s song “Half Breed,” which had gone gold that year. The way Cher sang, you’d believe her to be part pissed-off Cherokee. Blake and I hurled the words across the living room.
Half Breed! That’s all I ever heard. . .
Both sides were against me since the day I was born!
Somewhere in the chorus Blake stopped, looked at me, and had an epiphany. “Hey,” he said, “that’s what you are, a half breed!”
Now, Blake was my best friend. We’d grown up together since the tricycle years. He wasn’t insulting me. I don’t doubt there might have been a little jealousy to his statement, that I had something special about me, a thing that Cher, with her throaty, voracious singing, celebrated. We figured she was a half-breed too, from a short film we saw of her during the Sonny and Cher Show. She was sitting on a black horse, dressed as a sexy squaw, with a white cutoff top that enhanced her cleavage. Her skin was my El Salvadoran mother’s color. We didn’t know that was body makeup.
I hadn’t been called a half breed until that day. But something was in the air and always had been. My family was different from all the white families in our neighborhood—a completely white neighborhood. I knew this, but couldn’t articulate it. But Blake did, and he did it in praise of who, or what, I was.
We were in the Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee, my white father’s world. Ours was a small town, around forty-five hundred souls, mostly white with a small and rather hidden African-American population. As far as we knew, my mother was the only Salvadoran in the territory.
We had an old shoebox of photos of the days that had passed long before I came along. As a kid, I’d pull out the box out of the closet and study the deckle-edged pictures of their honeymoon days, the ones of them traveling on a 1947 Harley Davidson Knucklehead motorcycle, and try to imagine their lives. What was it like for a white Appalachian man and a Salvadoran woman to ride across America in 1947? How were they accepted by each other’s families? How did they survive the laws of U.S. racism? In the pictures, they look like they didn’t give a damn.
World War II had brought them together. In 1942 my father, Ralph, had joined the Navy and served in the South Pacific. Two years later Mamá Amanda and her family immigrated to the U.S. from El Salvador. The Villatoros moved to San Francisco, where my mother got a job in a sewing factory. There, she sewed bullet holes closed and washed blood off Navy life preservers that were then sent back to the ships in the Pacific Theatre.
After the war, Dad was discharged in San Francisco. They first saw each other in a coffee shop. Dad was peeking over the edge of the San Francisco Chronicle and giving her glances. “¡Ay, esos ojos tan verdes!” Mamá told me—he had green eyes. She fell for him like a rock. Dad didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. Mamá had studied English, but couldn’t understand Dad’s Appalachian voice, with its elongated words and drawn-out syntax. Within the year, they married.
Dad put her on the back of the Harley and took her to his family in Tennessee. It was the first of seven trips across the U.S. on the motorcycle. They wore leather all over: chaps, jackets, gloves, even their helmets that hugged their heads tight. They wore goggles and black riding boots. They followed their whims: my mother would miss my grandmother, who lived in San Francisco’s Mission District, so they’d ride back. Dad would get a construction or mechanic job in Tennessee. They mounted the bike and returned to the Appalachian Mountains. Seven cross-country trips on a motorcycle, with a couple of treks to the races in Daytona. When I was sixteen, the photos and their stories were a bit too much to handle, because it hurts a teenager to know that his parents were bigger bad-asses than he will ever be.
They might have been too blind with love in the beginning to worry about any racial concerns, but in Tennessee, they got a heaping dose of it. My McPeek grandparents couldn’t make heads or tails out of who (or what) my mother was. She wasn’t black but she sure as hell wasn’t white. They’d never heard of El Salvador. They believed their son had brought a blemish to the family, and worried about grandchildren, in a world where laws against miscegenation still dwelled in the southern mind.
After seven trips between California and Tennessee, they wrecked just outside of Knoxville. Five years of riding twenty-one-thousand miles, and a small patch of gravel ended it. The Harley slung them off and skidded on its side over the shoulder. The dump onto the highway was enough to shake the wildness out of them. They patched up the cuts where the road had torn through the leather and jeans, and rode back into Appalachia, where Dad sold the motorcycle, bought a very used Chevy, and built a house in a small neighborhood. They didn’t get down to miscegenating until well into their marriage.
I was born in 1962. We were living in San Francisco (The Harley wreck hadn’t quelled all their wanderlust. We just made the trips by car). I was born in the Mission District and that pleases me. It legitimizes me. For my home city was an outpost of El Salvador.
I remember when my grandmother introduced me to the prostitutes. I was around four at the time. I remember my hand, stretched upwards, clasped in hers. We were walking down Capp Street in the Mission District. Two young women were standing at the corner, talking and looking up and down the street. My abuelita called out to them, and we stopped to have a chat. The two rented a room in abuelita’s house and always paid on time. They made over me, called me all the things a Salvadoran woman calls a little boy, ¡Ay mi corazón, rey de mi vida! They bent down and kissed me on the cheeks, leaving lipstick on both sides of my face.
I lived my first four years in the Mission. I have memories from there, though they are scant. Yet they’re enough to keep my love for the barrio alive. It was a Latinx world: Mexicans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans and, in my grandmother’s three story Victorian house on Capp Street, guanacos, or Salvadorans. Abuelita had bought the home three years after leaving El Salvador. She had paid it off by renting all the rooms. There was a constant hustle and bustles of tenants—mostly Central Americans—living under the same roof. And how the women loved me. I was the gringo-guanaco child, a special mix of Salvadoran and white blood, as though I had the best of both worlds.
San Francisco was the Salvadoran diaspora that fed me all things guanaco. I still hold on to that, though, except for the first few years of life, I’ve not lived there. But it was and, during times of personal, racial anxiety, still is my Salvadoran Emerald City, a place of the other language, a world of brown people who cooed in Spanish over the off-white newborn son. San Francisco was loud and frisky, with Spanish spoken up and down Mission Street, and vendors hawking tortillas and tacos on every corner. There was music: Manny Chavez, Carlos Gardel, Ritchie Valens, all tumbled out of kitchen windows and passing cars. And the odors: every shape and cooked form of corn you can imagine, always with the heat and smell of rice and beans.
The final move to Tennessee ended that world full-stop. I don’t know why we moved. Maybe Dad had gotten a job, or he felt obliged to be closer to his parents. All I know is that we were suddenly three thousand miles away from the voices and communal protection of the Salvadoran women. Tennessee, where the second childhood began and tried to kill off the first one. In Appalachia, Dad said to Mamá, as if he had spoken for the first time after the San Francisco years, “Never talk to this boy except in English. No more goddamn Spanish, not here, not in this house.”
This hurt Mamá, but didn’t surprise her. He was an Appalachian white man to the bone, and even though he had married outside his race, he lived a southern white man’s ways. Maybe he did so because of his white treason: cutting his boy off from the other heritage may have been a way for us to be accepted by the locals. Or maybe he had simply felt left out in San Francisco, with everyone talking Spanish. But according to Mamá, he had turned against her native language in a snap, as though having thought of it for a long while. My mother has never been one to cower. Dad tried to slam the door on San Francisco, but he couldn’t strip his wife of her culture. She couldn’t talk to her son in Spanish. But she had other strategies.
The stubbornness of a Salvadoran woman is something to behold. Although we lived in a deep corner of a monolingual region, in the hermetically sealed Appalachian Mountains, Mamá, as much as she could, sowed her El Salvadoran customs in the Latinx-parched land of Tennessee. The pulse of her small country ran through the house. We ate rice, black beans, tortillas, tamales and pupusas (my grandmother mailed sacks of cornmeal flour to her daughter, something you couldn’t find in the local grocery stores). Mamá decorated the entire house with artifacts from the Central American countries: gourds, maracas, a fishing net that covered an entire wall, like a gigantic blue and white web. And we danced, she and I, an act that, in an evangelical world, made us minions of Satan. Mamá had the old records from San Francisco. She sang in Spanish. She cooed at me with the old Salvadoran phrases, “Vení mi corazón,” as she had me climb her lap for a sudden hug. She talked with my grandmother on the phone every Saturday. Through these acts of trickery, I heard, from time to time, the forbidden language.
My mother’s dancing and Salvadoran cooking must have blinded me to what she saw beyond the walls of our house. She had to send me out into that world, and dreaded doing so. I didn’t know how painful this was to her, until, at age ninety, she moved in with my family and me. We were drinking coffee together and talking, In Spanish, about those old days. “I was so scared,” she said, “the first day I took you to school.”
“Why?”
She seemed surprised I asked. “Because of the way I knew they were going to treat you.”
Over that coffee, she told me how people had thought about us, the miscegenist family with a mother who was from Way Out There. She knew that, once I was in the school system, the Southern world would get to work setting the record straight.
She was right. It was Hazel Walker who broke the racial ice. I remember that it happened early on, in the first days of second grade. She looked at me over the short table in the classroom and said, “My daddy says you’ll never go to college.”
I had no idea what college was, so I said, “Okay.”
Bu she had more to say. According to her parents, because of my background, I probably wouldn’t make it through high school. My dad, according to Mr. and Mrs. Walker, was poor white trash who had been born in a sharecropper’s shack in the middle of a tobacco crop. My mother was a foreigner. “That means you won’t go to college.”
It didn’t occur to me that I was worthy of such table talk, especially in the Walker home. They weren’t well to do, but they were a class or two above our station in life. Mr. Walker sold cars at the local Chevrolet dealership. His wife stayed home. They did all right, better than we. My father, a mechanic, was unemployed much of the time. He also struggled with alcohol and depression, especially when he had no job. Mamá had to work in order to cover the bills.
Dad landed a job as a school bus driver. I remember feeling some pride about that. It was a thrill, when I boarded, so see him in in the driver’s seat. “Morning son,” he’d say to me in his gravelly voice, and smile.
The pride ended the day Hazel and her best friend, Bethany Callahan, sat in the seat opposite mine. They didn’t need to raise their voices, but they did, and parroted what they had heard at home. Had their parents also taught them how to sneer? No longer did they refer to their mothers and fathers, no “My daddy says. . .” They spoke of their own accord. They owned the words. “I’ll be surprised if we get to school alive,” one of them said, followed by the other’s, “I don’t doubt he took a couple shots of whiskey the moment he woke up.” I barely turned my head to them. They were smiling, looking ahead, and kept talking about my father. Their talk drifted to my mother. I don’t remember what they said about her. Perhaps I don’t want to. But I feel the jagged-edge incision still. Then they tired of the subject and slipped into being second graders again, talking about a new doll, a mean older sister, and what they hoped to get for Christmas.
They were both gorgeous. I had an interchangeable crush on each of them, depending on which one was in the room. Hazel had long, straight, blonde hair, blue eyes, and porcelain skin. Bethany had curly blonde hair, blue eyes and porcelain skin. They were friends with other porcelain-skinned girls, though not all of them were blonde. They all were beautiful, but Bethany and Hazel were the pinnacles of beauty. I had seen their kind in Coca Cola commercials: gorgeous teenage boys and girls throwing Frisbee, eating picnics in a park, all of them drinking Cokes, all of them with porcelain skin and, in my mind now, blue eyes and sun-hair. Those were Bethany’s and Hazel’s people. The clarity of beauty, the paragon of purity—yes, purity—how that thought manifested in me. They were angels. They were whole. No mix of bloods. Something was becoming clear, but just to make sure there wasn’t any confusion, both girls, for what reason I don’t know, approached me on the school playground.
“What’s your mom?” one asked. I said El Salvadoran. “What’s that?” said the other. I stumbled through some words. They turned to each other, suddenly ignoring me, and got to working figuring out this racial problem. Dark mother, white father. Then it dawned on them. They turned back to me. One said, “You’re a mongrel.” She said it in the same tone as “Pass the salt.”
This was a few years before Cher, when I would sing along with Blake and relish his racist epiphany over what I was. That was in fifth grade. Mongrel happened in second. Once they’d figured me out to their satisfaction, the girls walked away, as though having completed a mission.
I stayed in love with both girls for years. I loved others as well, but those two were simply impossible not to steal a look at. Hazel and Bethany were all over, on TV shows, the commercials, the movies. But according to themselves, they weren’t all the same white people, even though they shared the same skin. As much as folks like the Walker and Callahan families vilified non-whites, they could also be brutal to their own. My father wasn’t, according to them, just one of the town’s drunks. He was a shoeless sharecropper turned unemployed mechanic who had married outside the race. White trash, the type of people who sleep in trailers next to creeks, who live off the government dole and are simply an embarrassment to Caucasians everywhere. His offspring was an anomaly, the product of an act of racial treason. Nothing to be feared, just despised or, in most cases, pitied.
*****
I have never really known my skin. I can’t tell what color it is. I’m not white like my father, but I’m not that brown either, unless it’s summertime. Then I get a little closer to my mother’s tone. I have some of Dad’s facial features, the Scotch-Irish, European bone structure. I’ve got my mother’s near-jet black hair (well, with a substantial amount of white in it now), the dark brown eyes, the thick eyebrows that are common in the Villatoro family. I have, when angered, my mother’s glare.
I live in Los Angeles now, in a neighborhood mostly composed of Central Americans and Mexicans, where I can speak Spanish every day. But the conversations depend on the sun. During the hot seasons, a cashier at the grocery store will greet me in Spanish, with no hesitation. In the short, cold months, January and February, she might speak in a broken English until I whip out an “No hay much tráfico en la tienda hoy, ¿verdad?” She’ll stumble for a second, and in that second I know her mind is going through the machinations of figuring me out. Maybe she’s comparing me to a relative who is as light as I am, a chele, a canche, a gringo lookalike. She hears the Central American lilt in my voice then happily joins the conversation, telling me that yes, the store’s quiet now, “Pero si usted hubiera estado aquí en la mañana, ¡ay púchica!” The movement into a Spanish conversation loosens up the conversation. We meet in our shared, linguistic territory.
It took years, but I thwarted my father’s command of No-goddamn-Spanish by resurrecting it in me. There must have been enough of it from my San Francisco days to work with, along with the whispers of Spanish my mother gave me in Appalachia, when Dad wasn’t around. In order to regain it, in order to rescue it from the oblivion of an English-only-speaking world, I moved to Central America in my twenties and stayed there for years, working as an organizer in poor communities in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. During the days I worked. At night I studied columns of vocabulary that I wrote in my journal, words that I had collected throughout the days. I plowed through two grammar books. I learned the past perfect subjunctive until it leapt through my conversations like trained horses jumping fences. Newspapers, novels, poetry—I read only in Spanish. I even got an editorial published in a Latin American newspaper.
The Spanish, along with my choice to live in Latinx communities, helps to clarify. But my skin still confuses me. What color is it, to me? Soiled. Sometimes I think it looks like old, used cooking oil. When I first began the trek back into my Salvadoran culture, I used to curse God for making my skin so confounding. I don’t do that now, one, because I’ve left the notions of deities behind, and two, it’s just tiring. But still, I don’t know my skin.
The deep stings of childhood prick at us forever. I look back at my grade school days and see, more clearly, the racism that had set out to define me and my family with its own set of brick-like rules regarding what is normal, acceptable, and what is not. I see that there were specific terms used—background, for instance. That’s southern code for a variety of birthed sins: Mixed-blood; poverty; white treason; mongrel. Hazel made that clear in second grade, when she predicted that my background would knock me out of high school. By the time she turned seven, she knew very well, had been taught so thoroughly by her parents, the laws against racial impurity.
People have asked, “Do you hate your white side?” Side. As though I were split in two. I want to explain to them that, due to the racial laws taught me in childhood, I cannot, by U.S. racist thought, be white. But I have also fallen into the bifurcation conversation, and though I’ve told them that no, of course not, I have indeed hated “the white blood that flows in my veins,” yet another example of racial thinking expressed in an old, overused metaphor.
I’m older now, approaching sixty. I am more comfortable in my skin, though I still cannot see it very well, as though the teachings from childhood sewed a murky lens over my eyes. I don’t make any more trips to Appalachia. There’s no family there to visit. My father is dead, and Mamá moved in with us in Los Angeles. Do I hate those distant mountains? Not at all, for I grew up in some of the most beautiful territory in the country. It wasn’t all racism. I had buddies whom I went trick-or-treating with, and later, toilet-papered houses in the middle of the night. I have good memories from then, such as fishing and hunting with my father. But, there’s just nothing there for me anymore. It has, in retrospect, become a strange place, foreign, though I know it like I know the back of my hand.
One of the last times I visited, I ran into Hazel. We were both forty-five. She had two children with her, they might have been in middle school. She was glad to see me. We stood on the sidewalk and chatted for a spell. I asked how old were her two kids “My kids?” she said, “Lordy no, these are my grandkids!”
Blake had told me that Hazel married right after high school and had her first child before she turned nineteen. I hadn’t known this, for I had gone off to college. Hazel was no longer the epitome of my racial concept of beauty. She was normal, human. We spoke about our kids, our living and dead parents, and how quickly the years pass. She asked me what I did. I told her I was a professor at a university in Los Angeles. That was too much. She turned her head slightly in that certain Appalachian humility. I wondered, did she remember? For a moment, I enjoyed her discomfort. Success is the greatest revenge. But not for long, for it was clear, she was working through something, maybe the past, maybe regret over childhood words. Or perhaps she simply felt uncomfortable before an old schoolmate who had lost his Appalachian accent, who had taken on a new, clipped, English voice, one from a world Way Out There. I don’t know.
She looked tired, the weariness that comes from a hard life. But she also looked genuinely happy, with her grandchildren running around us as we spoke. Forgiveness came to mind, but there was no need for it. We had been children when she had parroted what she had heard in her home. Yes, meanness had bloomed out of that as she got older, and I’m sure she blossomed into a full-out racist. Of course I’m sure; for she is white. But even that notion, and the memories of childhood, didn’t bother me as much as it could have. Because in that moment on the sidewalk, I felt superior, and I don’t apologize for that. It was one of those precious moments for a socially defined non-white, a droplet of vengeance. A triumph.
