1
STREET KID FROM CUERO
“AYEEEEE!” THE BOY soldier shouted as he charged forward and jumped into the void. His battle cry was muffled when he landed in the mountain of seeds—bits of cotton still attached—that were piled high on the floor of the huge tin warehouse near his neighborhood in Cuero, Texas.
It was the fall of 1942, and sneaking into the local cotton warehouse and jumping from its loft into the remains of the recent harvest was a favorite pastime for seven-year-old Raul “Roy” Perez Benavidez. His inspiration was the local theater, where he’d watched newsreels of American paratroopers in World War II jumping one after another from an airplane thousands of feet above the ground. While the airborne soldiers drifted down beneath their silk parachutes, the narrator told of the adventurous lives of the “Battalions in the sky! Specially trained for fighting in the jungle—the kind of wilderness in which the Japs have got to be whupped in the South Pacific!” And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States, filled the screen. He sat at his desk and spoke to the forces fighting for freedom overseas—and to movie house audiences that included young Roy Benavidez in Cuero, Texas, who had paid the same nine cents for admission as the kids in the good seats but was upstairs in the segregated balcony, where clearly posted signs directed him and the rest of the “Mexicans and Negroes” to sit.
But when the lights went off and the screen lit up, Roy forgot about his lot in life—the personal battles, the fears, and how he’d earned those nine cents—and reveled in every minute of the fantasy. He imagined he was right there alongside the troops he was watching on screen, M1 rifle in hand, assaulting an enemy position on a distant shore.
“You young Americans today,” FDR said, staring into Roy’s eyes, “are conducting yourselves in a manner that is worthy of the highest, proudest traditions of our nation. No pilgrims who landed on the uncharted New England coast, no pioneers who forced their way through the trackless wilderness showed greater fortitude, or greater determination, than you are showing now!”
ROY WAS three years old when he moved into Cuero with his mother, Teresa, and two-year-old brother, Rogelio, “Roger,” during the second week of November 1938. Just a few days earlier his father, Salvador Benavidez—a sharecropper and a vaquero (cowboy) on the nearby Wallace Ranch—succumbed to tuberculosis. Roy had been born on that ranch, brought into the world by a midwife in his parents’ bed. It was the same bed he had watched his father’s body lifted from and placed into a wooden box built by a neighbor. He would always remember the pounding of the hammer as the casket was nailed shut, then slid into the back of a pickup truck and put in the ground at the ranch’s tiny cemetery, beneath a wooden cross.
In Cuero, Teresa soon found work tending the household of a well-to-do doctor. A year later she married Pablo Chavez, who worked at the local cotton mill. After another year, Roy and Roger were joined by their baby sister, Lupe, who received all of their stepfather’s attention and most of their mother’s. His stepfather wasn’t cruel, just inattentive, offering little guidance to or affection for the two boys. They did, however, have plenty of freedom.
Situated on a branch of the Chisholm Trail, Cuero had been a frontier town where cowboys once congregated while driving their cattle from the southern plains to markets in the north. There were more automobiles than horses on the streets Roy explored, but the spirit of the Western town remained. Six-year-old Roy would observe a steady stream of men coming in and out of the “houses” strategically placed near the swinging doors of saloons located, it seemed, on every corner. He wanted to see what was going on inside but was always shooed away by the women wearing bright-red lipstick.
With its population of 4,700, Cuero was a thriving hub of business for the ranching, farming, rodeo, and agricultural industries. Roy was just another of the anonymous Mexican street kids who, charged with contributing to their family coffers, provided well-to-do farmers, ranchers, and businessmen labor for odd jobs: a dime shine for their shoes, a five-cent taco for their bellies, and the occasional philanthropic entertainment. Such shows would begin when a man wearing a pressed suit or fancy cowboy boots would gather some friends, then toss a handful of coins onto a street corner where the children were looking for work or selling their wares.
The men would laugh as the kids kicked up a dust storm scrambling for the coins. At first it was a game to Roy, like grabbing candy from a piñata—until, somewhere along the line, he realized the coins weren’t free. They cost him his dignity.
The movies were the reason Roy continued to dive for the money, only now he did it angry. It had gone from being a game to a battle in which he hit and shoved the other kids first and grabbed for the coins second. “If you take them out,” he told a relative, “there’s less hands to grab the money, and you get to see a movie. If you hit really hard, maybe you get an ice cream, too.”
He’d walk away as quickly as he could from the scramble, slapping the dirt off his clothes as if he could brush away the disgrace. The money in his pocket didn’t outweigh the contempt and anger building in his heart. He began to fight with the kids on the street for fun and sport, and because he was good at it. Nothing made him happier than wrestling a kid bigger than him to the ground and making him cry uncle—or, better yet, just making him cry.
ROY WOULD remember his sixth year as the year he turned into “a tough, mean little kid…a general nuisance for anybody who got in my way.” That was also the year his mother began coughing, just as his father had. There was blood in her handkerchief, and lots of people came to their little house, including the nuns who taught at his school and the priest from his church. They’d light candles and say prayers, and one day in early fall a nun gave him a dime to go to a movie.
Sitting in the balcony, Roy tried to forget the conversations he’d overheard between the visitors and his stepfather, who had made it clear that he would not be shouldering the burden of raising “Teresa’s boys.” In the darkness Roy tried to keep his mind off his uncertain future. Would he and Roger be sent to an orphanage or a labor camp? Would they be separated to live with strangers? All of his trying not to worry reminded him of what he most wanted to forget—that his mother was dying.
After the movie let out, Roy recruited some friends to sneak into the cotton warehouse and play war. He climbed the ladder to the loft and strived to be brave like the paratroops as he leaped into the unknown.
IN HER final weeks, Teresa sent word to Nicholas Benavidez, her late husband’s brother, that his nephews would soon be orphans.
She died in the fall and was buried in the Cuero city cemetery following a service at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The funeral was a fog of anxiety and sadness for seven-year-old Roy, until a tall stranger introduced himself to the boys as their uncle.
He told the grieving brothers they would be coming to live with him and his family in El Campo, a small city eighty-five miles to the southeast. The boys packed their few belongings—including a small black-and-white photograph of their mother and father—and said brief good-byes to their half sister and stepfather, then headed to the bus depot, where Uncle Nicholas bought three tickets. Roy had never been on a bus before. He put his arm around his brother, gave him a squeeze, and, just like that, the road ahead brightened a little.
As they sat together in the back of the bus, Nicholas described the boys’ new family: his wife, “your aunt Alexandria,” and their eight children, “your new brothers and sisters.” Grandfather Salvador, “your father’s father,” also lived with them, he said, then added, “He will tell you many stories.” By the time they pulled into the El Campo bus depot, things were looking up. Roy couldn’t imagine how a day that had started out so terribly could get any better. Then, noticing his nephew’s worn-out shoes, a hole on one sole patched with a piece of cardboard, Nicholas told Roy, “Tomorrow we’ll buy you a new pair of shoes.”
WELL AFTER dark, Roy and Roger timidly entered their new home. An older man with a warm smile shook their hands and told them he was their grandfather. Then Nicholas introduced Alexandria and their children, ranging in age from seven to seventeen: Maria, Miguel, Eugenio, Nicholas, Elida, Evita, Joaquin, and Frank.
Grandfather Salvador said, “You must always remember that you are a Benavidez. You must always bring honor to our name.”
“We are not rich,” Nicholas continued. “We all work, and we share what we have. You will work alongside us.”
“They go to school and study hard,” said Salvador. “So must you. There are opportunities in this country for people who get an education.”
The quick-fire assertions by their uncle and grandfather after they’d barely gotten inside the door constituted Roy and Roger’s swift introduction to the rigid order expected in the Benavidez household.
“Tienes hambre, Rogelio?” Aunt Alexandria cut in. Roger nodded yes. “They are hungry,” she said to her husband, ushering the boys into the kitchen for plates of tacos. Then she showed them to the attic bedroom, where the seven boys would be sharing four beds.
The following day, Alexandria added two envelopes to the eight she kept for each child’s contribution to the family food, clothing, and school supplies fund, and Roy was assigned his first job: to shine shoes and cowboy boots at the bus depot after school and on weekends after church. With each shine—a nickel for shoes and up to a quarter for cowboy boots—his envelope thickened, as did his bond with his family members.
ROY ATTENDED public school with his siblings in El Campo that school year, until April 1943. That was the month when the Benavidez kids collected their final report cards, cleaned out their desks, and headed for the sugar beet fields of northern Colorado. All ten of them were pressed tightly together in the bed of the family truck, which pulled a trailer loaded with wooden boxes and milk crates Alexandria had packed with household essentials: bedding, cooking utensils, pots, dishes, a small red radio, and the family Bible.
This was old hat for the adults and older siblings, but for Roy and the other young children, it was high adventure. At a gas station stop late on their first day of driving, Nicholas told Roy he had a very important job for him: to relieve Eugenio, Gene, who had been keeping an eye on the trailer. If the ball hitch started rattling or the trailer swerved oddly, he was to knock on the window of the cab.
“You cannot fall asleep,” Nicholas said, and Roy positioned himself for what he considered a great honor—his uncle trusted him!
Soon the drone of the road began to lull the Benavidez children to sleep. One by one they dropped off, sprawled like a litter of puppies as they slept the miles away. Gene was the last to fall asleep and, an hour later, the first to awaken, with a jolt. He glanced to the rear.
There was the trailer, still following them with the hypnotic sway of its dance on the road. And there was Roy, sitting upright, his head swaying back and forth in rhythm with the trailer and his eyes wide open, battling the weight of his eyelids. He had one hand under his chin, keeping his head up; with his free hand he was pinching himself on the arm to the point of bruising—determined to stay awake during his appointed vigil.
THEY DROVE for several days, camping at night, before reaching the fields near Timnath, Colorado. The migrant camp was a collection of one-room shacks built from scrap wood, with tin roofs, wood stoves, and no indoor plumbing or hot water.
The family slept and worked shoulder to shoulder, from sunrise to sunset. On their hands and knees, they weeded around and thinned the sugar beet plants with short-handled hoes—backbreaking work that was often reserved for the young. But Nicholas had a strong back, and if his family was on their knees, he was beside them. Nobody complained, so neither did Roy. It took weeks to thin what seemed to be oceans of fields.
The days were long, and he looked forward to the nights, when the children would play around the camp, its grid of dirt roads lit by the glow of kerosene lanterns and the fire rings that were the social gathering spots and where Grandfather Salvador told the stories that taught Roy about his heritage. Benavidez was a name that Salvador described as respected in the community—a hardworking, cultured family of God-fearing vaqueros and sharecroppers who first sank roots in Texas in the early 1800s and fought for their independence from Mexico as Texans and Americans—no different from the Europeans who had fought for independence from England. “You have Benavidez cousins who are fighting for America right now,” he said to the children.
Roy grew to understand the distinction between his family and the hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers they competed against for jobs and wages during World War II. Because men were needed in the military, there was a labor shortage, so in 1942 Congress enacted the Bracero Program (brazos is the Spanish word for arms), which encouraged Mexican migrants to cross the border and work legally in U.S. agriculture and industry.
“The name Benavidez is Mexican,” Salvador said, “but we are Americans.”
He also shared—often at the request of the kids—the stories of his days as a vaquero, when he would drive stock from pastures in the high mountains of Colorado or ride miles and miles of fence, stopping for repairs. A favorite of Roy’s was the time his grandfather rescued a fellow vaquero whose horse had gone off the ledge on a narrow path, leaving the man hanging precariously to the slope.
Salvador would reenact how he’d gotten on his knees and leaned over the precipice. Unable to reach the man, he lay flat and used his belt as a rope to pull the cowboy to safety.
There was a moral in many of Salvador’s stories, and this one was simple. “If someone needs help,” he told the children, “you help them.”
AT NIGHT Roy lay on his bedroll listening to Hank Williams and other country-western singers on the red radio. This same radio would broadcast—during nine-year-old Roy’s third “tour” in the Colorado beet fields—that victory in Europe had been proclaimed on May 7, 1945.
While there was a peaceful quiet in the hedgerows of Europe the next morning, it was business as usual for Roy when his uncle jostled him awake in the dark to attack the remaining beet rows. Standard rows were a quarter to a half mile long; sixteen half-mile rows equaled an acre, and an acre brought the family around five dollars—a day’s work, depending on how hard the ground was. When the morning school bell rang for his classmates back in El Campo, Roy had already been digging in the dirt for two hours.
Once the beet plants were thinned, the family would pick up work—harvesting onions or some other crop in the area—for the few weeks until the beets could be harvested. The youngsters’ job was to gather the beets that were plowed from the ground and cut their leafy tops off; older children and women then loaded the beets into crates that were lifted into trucks by the men and hauled away. Roy marveled at the crates stacked like building blocks on the trucks; he knew the sweat that went into the filling of each and every one—the acreage required, the blisters, and the sheer boredom. Vaguely, he understood that every crate filled meant more money to sustain his family until the next harvest.
With the beet fields cleared, the Benavidez family moved south to the West Texas cotton fields, where the days were longer, the sun was hotter, and the rows of cotton seemed to stretch to a horizon Roy would never reach. When he finally did, he’d turn around and head back, picking cotton and pricking his fingers, over and over again. They dragged behind them dingy white sacks that fattened as they were filled. Emptied, they reminded Roy of the parachutes in the newsreels he’d watched.
On July 16, 1945, far beyond the horizon of Roy’s imagination in a little country called Vietnam, seven operatives from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) parachuted into a jungle encampment near Tan Trao, northwest of the city of Hanoi.
OSS Special Operations Team 13, code-named Deer Team, was cut from the same cloth as the daring three-man OSS Jedburgh teams that had parachuted into German-occupied France, Belgium, and Holland to train and work alongside the French Resistance and other anti-Nazi movements during the months prior to the Allied invasion on D-day. Their top-secret mission in the jungles of Vietnam was to provide weaponry, including M1 rifles, Thompson submachine guns, mortars, grenades, and bazookas, to approximately one hundred Vietminh guerrillas. The Americans would train the guerrillas, and in exchange the Vietminh would assist the Americans in gathering intelligence, carrying out sabotage, and ultimately fighting the Japanese who occupied their country and much of Indochina.
Vietnam, as well as neighboring Laos and Cambodia, was a colony of France, an ally of America, as well as the stated enemy of the Vietminh fighting for their independence. The second-in-command of this four-year-old national independence movement went by the name of Mr. Van but would soon—after proper weapons and guerrilla tactics training by the Americans—rise to prominence as General Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap’s boss, the leader of this fledgling band of guerrillas and the man with whom the Americans worked directly, was Ho Chi Minh.
In the battlefields of a young boy’s imagination that same summer, Roy kept on picking, passing the time with a stick in his belt for his gun, a cotton sack for his parachute, his adopted siblings in adjacent rows for his allies. While Roy’s daydreams of being a paratrooper at war kept him going, Nicholas motivated the kids with a gumball that waited at the end of a row, a swim in the farmer’s pond after a truck was filled, or an ice cream on Sunday if a field was cleared by Saturday night. He’d always point to Frank, the eldest, who could pull a thousand pounds of cotton in a day, as an example of what was possible. “No matter what you do,” Nicholas said, “always try to be the very best.”
If you were trying hard, and Uncle Nicholas noticed, he would acknowledge you with a nod, such as he’d given Roy for watching the trailer on that first long drive, or a pat on the back for good marks on a test at school. But for something exceptional, like pulling a thousand pounds of cotton in a day, you might get the highest praise of all from Uncle Nicholas: “I’m proud of you.”
A MONTH after Roy’s tenth birthday, on a September night in 1945 that was too hot to sleep, the little red radio announced to the Benavidez family that Japan had surrendered. World War II was over.
The multitude of soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who had been stationed in Europe were welcomed home with parades. The Dallas Morning News ran a cover story of a celebration in San Antonio—one of hundreds that took place in cities across the nation—with the headline “300,000 Extend Wild Welcome to Heroes Returning from War.”
For the previous three seasons, Nicholas had seized any opportune moment—passing a “Buy War Bonds!” poster in town or seeing a man in uniform—to point out that the food crops they’d harvested and the cotton they’d picked helped feed and clothe the troops. The most decorated soldier of the war, he informed his kids, was Audie Murphy, a young Texan from a sharecropper family, who had picked cotton before joining the army.
Roy returned to El Campo that October and started school like every other fall, with a brand-new jacket on his back and new shoes on his feet. In a small way, he felt he’d done his part to defeat the evil Axis powers, though he wished, as only boys who haven’t seen battle do, that he’d actually gone to war.
A FEW weeks into his school year, Roy began pining for the fun they’d had in the fields. He was proud of his tough, callused hands but was embarrassed when he was unable to answer questions most of his classmates knew the answers to. Leaving school two months early and starting two months late meant he was always behind.
He was placed in groups of almost exclusively Hispanics, who, like him, were struggling to catch up with their grade level. The teachers might have thought they were helping by separating the class based on ability, but this practice promoted unjust stereotypes. The taunts Roy weathered over the years about the color of his skin or the food his family ate—“pepper belly” and “taco bender”—were bad enough, but nothing angered him more than “dumb Mexican.”
He would take note of which kid said it, and at recess he’d exact his revenge. It didn’t matter how big the kid was: the work in the fields had made his body strong and anger powered his fists. If it was a girl, he might kick dirt on her instead. Then the girl’s brother or boyfriend would step in, usually with his own racially slanted taunt, and Roy would end up in the principal’s office trying to justify the fact that he’d decked another kid because the kid wouldn’t stop calling him or others disparaging names.
“Names are one thing,” the principal would tell him. “Fists are another.” But to Roy, the names hurt worse, and stung far longer, than a punch in the face. They made him meaner and madder, to the point that he would go after anybody who even looked at him wrong. In his words, he fought mostly “with white kids who had new shoes, or had money to buy whatever they wanted.”
THE LIFE of Roy Benavidez could have gone in any of a number of directions but for the wise counsel of his uncle, who later joked that he’d clocked more hours in the principal’s office with Roy than he had at either of his two jobs—the barbershop where he gave haircuts and the garage where he turned wrenches.
“He wasn’t a rabble-rouser,” Roy later told a friend. “He was a peacemaker.” Nicholas did all he could to extinguish the flames of anger, bitterness, and resentment burning inside Roy. He never condoned the racism—never said it was right that Roy was not allowed to dine in or use the front door of the restaurant where he washed dishes, or sit at the counter and order a soda at the malt shop, or choose a good seat in the movie theater—but neither did Nicholas believe a fight would make the world change any quicker.
He explained to Roy that there was honor in restraint, that a response to a racial slur did not have to be physical. He could take it in stride and “fight” to better his station in life, living within the law and getting an education. Nicholas also pointed out that racism was an individual choice: there were Anglos who dished out slurs, and there were others who respected the Hispanic community and treated them as equals, just the way the Benavidez family considered the white cotton pickers they sometimes worked alongside. “Cada persona tiene su historia,” Nicholas would say. “Every person has a story.”
“Someday,” he told Roy, “someone will open a door to you, and you must be there saying, ‘Let me in.’ My future and yours will be in a different world than Grandfather Salvador’s. We will not give up our heritage, but we won’t let it hold us back either. We will be judged by the way we act and by the respect we earn in the community.”
As a bilingual barber and mechanic, Uncle Nicholas was an open ear for conversations from all walks of El Campo life, and when asked his opinion he always gave it straight. One afternoon two men—one Anglo and one Hispanic—got into a fender bender on the street outside the barbershop, where the sheriff was having a haircut. Without any witnesses, the sheriff had a difficult time getting to the bottom of the accident as the drivers yelled at each other in English and Spanish. Nicholas stepped in, heard both sides, translated the Spanish, and conferred with the sheriff, who then rendered the accident to be without fault.
And so, Nicholas “became known for resolving problems between the communities,” Roy said. “He didn’t do it with his hat in his hand and his eyes on the ground asking for favors, and he didn’t do it with threats. If our folks were wrong, he’d say so and stick to it. If the Anglo side was wrong, he’d talk sense until their ears fell off or they agreed, just as he sometimes preached to us.”
Soon after, a long-closed door at the Wharton County Sheriff’s Office swung open and Nicholas was invited in. He was offered a part-time job as a deputy—the first Hispanic deputy in the history of the county.
It was 1947. Roy was twelve when he and Gene accompanied Nicholas to pick up his new badge and sign some documents. At the station a deputy told Nicholas that he would have the right to arrest Hispanics and blacks, but not whites. If a situation warranted such an arrest, Nicholas would have to bring in another deputy.
“No,” Nicholas said. “If I wear this badge, then I will have the authority to arrest any person who breaks the law.”
The deputy shook his head. “That’s not going to fly, Nicholas.”
“Then,” said Nicholas, “I cannot accept the job.”
“I’m going to have to speak with the sheriff,” the deputy said.
Nicholas was called back to the station the following day. He came home with a badge—and the authority to arrest anybody who broke the law, regardless of the color of their skin.
ROY LEARNED just how serious his uncle was about fairness within the law when Deputy Benavidez was called upon to break up a brawl a few months into his new job, during a time when gangs were forming in El Campo and knives were starting to replace fists. After a firm talking-to, Nicholas sent the group of offenders, mostly teenage boys, on their way, except Roy and his younger brother, Roger, who had been doing their best to hide their faces in the crowd. Nicholas spotted them immediately, took them to the station, and locked them up for the evening.
His brief stint in the pokey did little to dissuade Roy, who continued to run with a group of older teens. He was arrested for burglary and, according to his military records, was “to be sent to Gatesville State School for Boys,” a notorious labor camp in Texas that implemented hard labor to reform juvenile offenders.
On his way out the door from El Campo Middle School to the sugar beet fields the spring of his fourteenth year, Roy informed his teacher he wouldn’t be returning in the fall. She tried to dissuade him, telling him he had potential and urging him not to throw his future away. But Roy never returned. After the harvest, when his siblings went back to school, he led the life of a school dropout, working odd jobs and giving more than half of his pay to his uncle and aunt. He still slept most nights in the attic with his brothers and ate at the family table.
One night his uncle caught him banging his way up the stairs, drunk after a night of too much beer. While Roy threw up, Nicholas launched into a lecture, pounding home the moral for what seemed like the thousandth time.
“Bad habits and bad company will ruin you, Roy,” Uncle Nicholas said. “Dime con quien andas, y te dije quien eres.” (“Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are.”)