JOSÉ ANTONIO VILLARREAL was the first writer I ever met. His first novel, Pocho, was published in 1959 and he was a friend of my high school English teacher’s and came to speak to our class after we had all read it, just before graduation in 1962. Being a pocho meant your parents had come to the United States from Mexico, during the Depression, and he wrote about growing up spinning between two cultures. I thought it was a wonderful book, and I was embarrassed by our questions. Had he really been a migrant worker? Yes, and his father had been one after he had fought with Pancho Villa in the revolution. The class knew all about migrant workers, and couldn’t believe that anyone who picked row crops could write a book. He said he had always wanted to be a writer.
Me too, I thought suddenly. Maybe that’s what I’d been thinking about, without really thinking about it. I don’t mean unconsciously thinking about it, I mean thinking about specific stories and details of my own life and the lives of my friends, just not as a writer.
I would remember my mother as young and pretty, a girl with nice legs getting out of a Ford convertible on the edge of a cherry orchard in Mountain View, California, in 1949. Husband dead, shot down, gone. No one talked about the war, but there was a trunk full of uniforms somewhere and she would show the medals to me and I would turn the wings over in my hands.
When I was five and my mother was twenty-nine we had driven out from Minnesota. I went to PTA meetings with her because she couldn’t find a babysitter and we didn’t know any of our neighbors yet. I was afraid the other parents wouldn’t like my mother because she was a new teacher and she’d brought her own kid along. I listened to what they said and felt better because all they were talking about was how smart they were to have made it to California. California had the best weather and the best fruit and the best new roads and the best new schools. And my mother was smart to be a schoolteacher because it was a job that didn’t depend on the weather, like construction or fruit and row crops. Most of her students came from Mexico, and, like one of characters in Pocho, she taught them reading although she didn’t speak Spanish.
When I was in high school I had a friend who had come up from Mexico and said he had fought a professional fight when he was fourteen. That same year he found out what happened between his father and his sister, and a lot of other things he told me I didn’t want to know but was glad later I knew about. He went to jail for a while but did not die there. Another friend was Fillmore Cross, a Gypsy Joker, who got chopped into little pieces up on Skyline Boulevard in a meth deal gone bad. Other guys I knew burned a house down up there once. When we were all seniors they started stealing cars—taking the keys out of ignitions on used car lots and then finding that make and model on the street. Even Chevrolet model years had only had five different keys. It was no big deal. I rode with them sometimes. Wild because wild was the best way to be. We had all been Cub Scouts together.
This was in the Santa Clara Valley, when Cupertino was still fruit orchards. Our town was Campbell, next to San Jose. My mother’s school was San Tomas Elementary, out near Saratoga. These are all Silicon Valley addresses now, so when I visited years later—trips to Apple, Google, et al.—I still knew my way around. The gentrification was like a thin fabric over what had been a tough place.
On one trip from Time Inc. to Google in 2009, my development meetings ended early in the afternoon and I had an extra hour before my flight back to JFK. I drove to Mountain View High School, where we used to play night games. The football field I remembered as rough with dirt patches was now beautiful, manicured almost. Maybe all the gardeners and the janitors were still Mexican. We had never thought about them. The Shockley Semiconductor Labs were only five miles away, but none of us knew what silicon was in 1962. The Byte Shop, where Steve Jobs sold his first computers, wouldn’t open until 1975, but it was just down the road. For a while, way back, I had thought I’d write about California. Then I’d remember that José Antonio Villarreal had already written about it in as true a way as there was.
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