Barrio Boy

40th Anniversary Edition

Ernesto Galarza

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780268080624
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Journey with Ernesto Galarza through time, place, and culture in this stunning memoir of Mexican American identity and acculturation.

Barrio Boy is the remarkable story of one boy's journey from a Mexican village so small its main street didn't have a name, to the barrio of Sacramento, California, bustling and thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century. With vivid imagery and a rare gift for re-creating a child's sense of time and place, Ernesto Galarza gives an account of the early experiences of his extraordinary life—from revolution in Mexico to segregation in the United States—that will continue to engage readers for generations to come.

Since it was first published in 1971, Galarza's classic work has been assigned in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the country, profoundly affecting thousands of students who read this true story of acculturation into American life.

The 40th anniversary edition of this best-selling book includes a new text design and cover, as well an introduction by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished cultural critic and editor of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, which places Barrio Boy and Ernesto Galarza in historical context.

Part One

IN A MOUNTAIN VILLAGE

UNLIKE PEOPLE WHO are born in hospitals, in an ambulance, or in a taxicab, I showed up in an adobe cottage with a thatched roof that stood at one end of the only street of Jalcocotán, which everybody called Jalco for short. Like many other small villages in the wild, majestic mountains of the Sierra Madre de Nayarit, my pueblo was a hideaway. Even though you lived there, arriving in Jalco was always a surprise.

From Tepic, the nearest city to the north, you came down a steep mule track, careful not to step on the smooth round rocks that could send you spinning, or the sharp, flat ones that cut your feet. If you were traveling first class on a mule, or tourist class on a burro, you gave the beast a free rein to pick his way among the rolling stones and small boulders. The trick was to lean back slightly and ride loose so you could fall free if you had to. The trail fell away in front under a high gloomy vault of foliage that hid the sky. The trees made a stockade on both sides that gave the trail the look and feel of a winding tunnel. Loosened rocks rattled downhill, the echoes growing fainter with every bounce, until they got lost in the forest.

Unlike most tunnels, there was no patch of sunlight ahead to spot the end of the trail. It just twisted to the right, and there was Jalco, viewed from the north end of the street.

Coming in from the south end it was uphill for man or mule. The trail, called a brecha, climbed the mountain steadily from the pueblo next below, Tecuitata. In this direction, the forest was less dense. The palisade of pines and cedars was broken now and then where hurricanes had smashed it, leaving jagged gaps through which you could see the blue peaks of the Sierra Madre. The mule path stayed close to a stream that pell-melled its way from Jalco to the sea the year around. At the edge of the village, where the stream spread into a pond of still, hazel water, the trail broke to the left and heaved itself over the crest of the grade. You were looking at Jalcocotán from the south.

Whether you came to the pueblo from Tepic or from Tecuitata, you could surmise at once several things about the village. The Indian ancestors who had founded Jalco intended that it should be a place that would be difficult to get to. They had chosen a narrow rocky terrace parallel to a protecting gully that the arroyo had gouged out of the mountainside. Two humps of the ridge, or cerros, covered the flanks of the terrace. The forest fenced in the hollow, which lay under the open sky like the palm of a long, thin hand cupped to shelter the village and its people. The choice of the founding fathers had been wise. The Sierra was sometimes swept by storms that could wrench huge trees from the earth, roots and all. The sensible thing for a village to do was to squat in some natural storm cellar like the scoop in which Jalco lay, and let the hurricane pass overhead.

Shelter from the summer sun was also important. From May to October it burned, climbing the sky until it scorched, straight down, the adobe cottages and the corrals of the village. Until mid-morning the overhanging fringe of the forest filtered the hot sunlight. The arroyo, springing among the boulders in its course, pulled a cooling draft the length of the pueblo. Where the huge walnuts spread over the arroyo, children waded and men squatted until high noon had passed.

Besides providing shelter from wind and sun, the location of Jalcocotán was meant to give protection against outsiders. The old men of the pueblo told it the way it had been. And it was true, because they had heard it from the old men before them, and they in turn from the old men who had founded Jalco in the days of the Spaniards, perhaps even before that. The first settlers were refugees from the fertile river bottoms and the coast lands, taken from them by force. They had moved into the rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre, founding their villages where attack was difficult. A few hundred yards above and below Jalco, the trail squeezed through natural strong points, bottlenecks where rocks were plentiful and from which boulders could be rolled on approaching enemies.

If the invaders broke through, they would find a deserted village. A hundred footpaths, the veredas, unknown except to the jalcocotecanos, snaked away from the corrals, winding deeper into the forest and higher up the mountain. The families would wait there, watching from hidden lookouts, until the invaders left. These events had happened years—maybe centuries—before I came to live in Jalcocotán.

I also learned very early that the forest, el monte, was a dangerous place. Hunters told of narrow escapes from boars and mountain lions that prowled on the other side of the arroyo. The gato montes, the mountain cat, was a mean marauder. On the trail between Jalco and Tecuitata a five-foot rattlesnake had been killed. These were warnings for small boys, to be heeded until you became a man and learned to get along with the forest.

Jalcocotán and the forest had always been a part of each other. “El monte,” the old men said, “no es de nadie y es de todos”—the forest doesn’t belong to anyone and it belongs to everyone. Like those of my pueblo, the men of Tecuitata and the other villages on the mountain talked vaguely of boundary lines between their portions of the monte. But when anyone asked how far the village timber extended, the jalcocotecano would answer with a sweeping wave of the hand. The gesture could mean that it all belonged to us, even the farthest ridges of the Sierra Madre, even to Jalisco. It really didn’t matter. The only part of the forest that was useful to us was the farthest point you could walk to and get home by sundown.

El monte was a place of wonders as well as of dangers. The pines, the huge umbrellas of the elms, and the shaggy cedars were the tallest things in the world. The pine kindling was marvelously aromatic and sticky. The woodsmen of the pueblo talked of the white tree, the black tree, the red tree, the rock tree—palo blanco, palo negro, palo colorado and palo de piedra. Under the shady canopies of the giants there were the fruit bearers—chirimoyas, guayabas, mangos, mameyes, and tunas. There were also the coffee bushes, volunteers that straggled here and there in an abandoned coffee patch.

The deep woods also gave the pueblo the songs and colors of the flocks of parakeets, macaws, and loros that chattered and squeaked on the fringe of the forest; in flight over our house they sounded like little rusty hinges. Springing suddenly from the tree tops into the sunlight over the village street, a flock of loros looked like dabs of bright green enamel streaking in formation across the blue sky.

But of all the creatures that carne flying out of the monte—bats, doves, hawks—the most familiar were the turkey vultures, the zopilotes. There were always two or three of them perched on the highest limb of a tree on the edge of the pueblo. They glided in gracefully on five feet of wing spread, flapping awkwardly as they came to rest. They were about the size of a turkey, of a blackish brown color and baldheaded, their wrinkled necks spotted with red in front. Hunched on their perch, they never opened their curved beaks to make a sound. They watched the street below them with beady eyes. Sometime during the day, the zopilotes swooped down to scavenge in the narrow ditch that ran the length of the street, where the housewives dropped the entrails of chickens among the garbage. They gobbled what waste the dogs and pigs did not get at first. These tidbits were enough to keep the zopilotes interested in our town and to accustom them to the presence of people. Grim and ugly though they were, the vultures were regarded as volunteer garbage collectors who charged nothing for their services and who, like good children, were seen but not heard.

The one and only street in Jalcocotán was hardly more than an open stretch of the mule trail that disappeared into the forest north and south of the pueblo. Crosswise, it was about wide enough to park six automobiles hub to hub. Lengthwise, you could walk from one end to the other in eight minutes, without hurrying, the way people walked in the village. The dirt surface had been packed hard by hundreds of years of traffic—people barefooted or wearing the tough leather sandals called huaraches; mule trains passing through on the way to the sea or to Tepic; burros carrying firewood and other products of the forest; zopilotes hopping heavily here and there; pigs, dogs, and chickens foraging along the ditch.

There was a row of cottages on each side of the street, adobe boxes made of the same packed earth on which the houses stood. At one end of the street wall of every cottage there was a doorway, another in the wall standing to the back yard corral. There were no windows. The roofs were made of palm thatch, with a steep pitch, the ridge pole parallel to the street. Back of the houses were the corrales, fenced with stones piled about shoulder high to a man. Between the corrales there were narrow alleys that led uphill to the edge of the forest on the upper side of the village, and to the arroyo on the lower side. The eaves of the grass roofs hung well over the adobe walls to protect them from the battering rains. In the summer time the overhang provided shade at midday, when it seemed as if all the suffocating heat of the heavens was pouring through a funnel with the small end pointed directly at Jalco.

Since there were no sidewalks, from the front door to the street was only a step. Our pueblo was too high up the mountain, the connecting trails were too steep and narrow to allow ox carts and wagons to reach it. Like the forest, our only street belonged to everybody—a place to sort out your friends and take your bearings if you were going anywhere.

Midway down the street, on the arroyo side, there was a small chapel, also of adobe, the only building in the town that had a front yard, a patch of sun-baked clay squeezed between two cottages. Back of the patio stood the squat adobe box of the chapel, with a red tile roof and a small dome in one corner topped with a wooden cross. Once upon a time the walls of the chapel had been plastered and whitewashed, but the rains and the sun had cracked and blistered them. The adobe was exposed in jagged patches with flecks of grey straw showing like wood grain on the ancient mud. The base of the walls, pelted by the rain, was chewed as if beavers had worked on it.

Directly across the street from the chapel, the row of cottages was interrupted by the plaza. In any pueblo of some importance this would have been the zocalo, or the plaza mayor, or more grandiloquently, the plaza de armas. In Jalco it was a square without a name, about forty steps wide along the street and as many deep. Once, so it was said by the oldest people in the village, there had been a fountain in the center of the plaza, and a collection had been taken to buy a bust of Benito Juarez for a centerpiece of the park. When I knew the drab little plaza, there was no fountain and no bust. The surface of the square was, like the street, a sheet of hardpan. Holes had been chopped in it and some trees planted. An acacia shaded one corner of the upper side of the lot. Three smaller trees lined one side of the square; in the spring they flamed with brilliant crimson blossoms like cups of fire, which is why they were called copas de fuego.

In a village like Jalcocotán there was little use for either the chapel or the plaza. We had no resident priest; jalcocotecanos with serious matters to lay before their patron saints or the Virgin of Guadalupe walked to Tepic, forty kilometers to the north, with its magnificent basilica. If it was a matter in which the whole village was concerned, a pilgrimage was organized to the shrine of Nuestra Señora de Talpa, where couples were married and babies baptized. Even less ever happened in the plaza than in the chapel. There was no police, no fire department, no post office, no public library. No one was ever elected mayor or sheriff or councilman. There was no jail or judge or any other sort of Autoridades, which explained why there was no city hall in Jalco. The shrunken, sun-beaten plaza was there nevertheless, solitary except when children played in it or passing mule drivers rested under the shade of its trees. It was a useless spot in our everyday life, but just by being there, the public square, like the chapel, gave our one and only street a touch of dignity, the mark of a proper pueblo.

Like the plaza, the street had no name. On a nameless street the houses, naturally, had no numbers. The villager was indoors and in bed after dark so there was no need for lights, of which our street had none.

Having a single gutter in the middle of the street instead of one on each side was a piece of simple and practical engineering. The shallow ditch made a slightly crooked dividing line through the center of the town. On either side of it each family took care of its frontage on the street, sprinkling it to settle the dust in the dry season, or sweeping the litter into the ditch. When it rained the trench collected the runoff, making a small torrent that scoured the gutter clean. During a downpour people stood in the doorways to watch the stuff that passed bobbing on the chocolate water—corncobs, banana peelings, twigs, an old huarache, or a dead rat drowned in the flash flood.

Whatever happened in Jalcocotán had to happen on our street because there was no other place for it to happen. Two men, drunk with tequila, fought with machetes on the upper edge of the village until they were separated and led away by the neighbors. A hundred faces peered around doorways watching the fight. When someone died people joined the funeral procession as it passed by their doors. If a stranger arrived on horseback, the clopping of horseshoes on the rocks of the trail announced his arrival before he could turn into the street. Arriving in Jalco was like stepping on a stage. The spectators were already in the doorways, watching.

The narrow lanes between the corrals on the lower side of the street led to the arroyo which ran the length of the village. The turbulent waters, even in the dry season, twisted and churned among the boulders, slapping them and breaking into spray, or dividing around them in serpentines of blue-green foam. Below the village the arroyo was checked by a natural dam of rocks and silt, over which it dropped into a quiet pond before rushing on to the sea.

On both sides the arroyo, here and there, had slammed boulders into the bank or against the trunks of trees. Downstream from these rocks the water formed small ponds over a floor of white sand and speckled pebbles. In these nooks the women of the village washed clothes, kneeling waist high in the water.

On the edge of the pond, at the far side, there was an enormous walnut tree, standing like an open umbrella whose ribs extended halfway across the still water of the pool. The scars on the trunk of the mighty bole showed where the arroyo had bashed it during storms of former years. But the nogal had always won these battles. The arroyo, when the storms had passed, gave up and backed away, leaving around the trunk a small beach where the pond lapped gently on the gravel.

The arroyo was as much a part of the pueblo as the street. Like the street, it had no name; it just tumbled into town from the timber stands up the mountain that fed it the year round, and tumbled out from the pond to pick up and carry to the ocean the seepage of the forest below. It could rage dangerously in the summer freshets, called avenidas, pounding at the lower side of the village with boulders and ramming it with tree trunks a man could hardly circle with his two arms. Most of the year, it brought driftwood downstream and delivered it to the jalcocotecanos who chopped it into kindling. It supplied the pond with fish, but most important of all, it piped the sweet seepage of the forest to our town, always cold, transparent, and greenish blue. We called it agua zarca, good for drinking and washing.

Like the monte and the street, the arroyo was common property. Those who lived along the upper side of the street used the lanes between the cottages on the lower side on their way to wash, to fill their red clay cantaros, or to water their stock. Going to the arroyo from the street was called bajar al agua. Going up the lanes to the forest was called subir al monte. Taking the trail to Tepic was cuesta arriba. Taking it down to Miramar was cuesta abajo. These were the four points of the compass for Jalcocotán. If you followed them you could always find your way back home.

It was in the evening, when dusk was falling and supper was being prepared, that Jalco shaded itself little by little into the forest, the arroyo, the sky, and the mountain to which it ...