Mom and Nana seemed to think Mexico was something pretty important, but for some reason my father either didn’t think so, or had some reason for not talking about it.
It’s true that most of what I knew about Mexico I learned from Mom or school. Most of what I knew didn’t seem very important. We ate a lot of Mexican food. Actually, I didn’t really know that was unusual until I started eating at friends’ houses. They usually ate roast beef and their idea of exotic food was tacos made with those hard shells that came out of a box, not the soft corn tortillas fried in oil that Mom made.
I knew stuff about holidays and music, very basic stuff. Even though my teachers said I had Mexican “culture,” I really didn’t know much about Mexico, the country. I did know that it was about two hours away from my house by car, but I hadn’t been there since I was a baby and I certainly didn’t remember that.
I figured the best place to start was the library (Mrs. Alva, the librarian, would be so proud). I woke up early on Saturday and surprised Mom by passing up the Saturday morning pancakes. I wanted to go to the library to do a little research. Mom’s jaw dropped and then she said, “You must really be sick, Cesi.”
I laughed as I ran out the door into the sunlight. The library was only a few blocks away, but I could hardly wait to start. I knew that I would find my answers there. If I knew a little more about Mexico, I thought I could figure out why my father seemed to hate it so much. I could also learn a little more about me.
This was the first time I had been to the library on a Saturday before noon. I loved walking through the automatic sliding doors and into the cool air-conditioned lobby. The smell of libraries always made me happy. They smelled like millions of books. Books everywhere, just sitting there, smelling up the place with their yummy aroma. Whenever I went to the library, I always pictured those cartoons where they show the scent from really good food tempting the little cartoon guy to follow. The smell of books just made me hungry.
That day I wasn’t going to be able to just wander through the stacks like I usually did. I had some work to do.
I walked straight to the geography section in the children’s room and pulled out a world atlas. It seemed like a good place to start. I flipped pages until I found a map of Mexico.
All the other maps I had seen showed Mexico hanging off the United States like a giant icicle. Now here it was all by itself, like a hat dropped by an elf. At the same time, it had so much ocean around it, as if it were an ice-cream cone licked skinnier and skinnier by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Hmm . . . maybe I should have eaten breakfast.
I spent three hours in the library looking up all kinds of interesting facts about Mexico. I wrote them down in my journal, hoping that when I got home, they would tell me something I wasn’t figuring out on my own.