Juan of Words

¡Bienvenidos a Mi Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México!

Today’s post is a very special one for me!  My writing often takes me back to a different time and place – one where life was always a little calmer, a little more independent, a lot simpler, and just the right dose of cultura and orgullo.  That place, for me, has always been very clearly defined.  It is the place where my parents grew up, where their parents grew up, where our deceased relatives are lying in their final resting spots (in the cerro of El Saúz), and where every summer as kids we spent magical days and nights learning who we were and the importance of where we came from.  That place is Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México!

So yesterday, when I was surfing the net and happened to come across this collection of pictures of Cerritos, of all places on Facebook, my heart literally skipped a beat.  I was excited to have found such a great batch of images that so accurately bring to life the memories in my heart and mind of ‘Mi México’.  Even more excited that I could finally draft this post and say ¡Bienvenidos a Mi Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México! 

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Open Fields in Cerritos - Las Milpas

Pemex Gasolinera - if this isn't the only gas station in town, it is one of only two or three. We definitely don't have any gas stations in the cerros.

This aerial view is new to me also. I had never seen an image like this of Cerritos, but I can tell you I'm already infatuated! I wonder if there are any chopper services in the pueblo these days. It might be a good business... hmmm.

I can't even remember how many times we've walked this street over the years. It's right there next to everything and full of such great food vendors all of the time. As you can tell, the streets in Cerritos are pretty narrow. You might spend a lot of times folding your side view mirrors in and out as you drive through Cerritos.

La Rinconada: this is a church at the top of one of the cerros near Cerritos. The story is that La Virgen de La Rinconada's likeness appeared one day at the top of this hill and then the community built a church in her honor. Every time we've gone to visit her at La Rinconada it has been for very specific reasons, para hacerle nuestras plegarias.

La Virgen en La Rinconada

This is such a great picture. It really captures the feeling of Cerritos at night. Some of our relatives live near this intersection so it really makes me feel very close to my Cerritos.

La Iglesia de San Juan Bautista - named after the real San Juan Bautista, but I've always enjoyed knowing the church and I share the same name. I'm a San Juan Martin though.

Cactus en el cerro. Man, I miss seeing these things!

And finally, a blast from the past of Cerritos. I believe this picture was taken sometime in the 1970s, though I'm not entirely sure. Other than the cars, it really doesn't look that much different from the Cerritos of today.

The Immigrant Advantage: An Inspirational Slice of American Culture -Book Review

Lessons for everyday life.

A couple months ago I got the email.  It was author Claudia Kolker and she wanted to get together to catch up and talk.  We did, and what she had to tell me in that very fast and furious lunch was just as exciting as the book that would eventually make it into my hands as a result of this meeting a couple of weeks later.  Now I’ve known Claudia personally for several years now and from the very beginning, our very first encounter canvassing local neighborhoods encouraging people to register to vote, she has been one of the most impassioned and giving people I know.  I mean she literally showed me the path, complete with who to talk to and what to tell them, to take my love for writing from a farfetched dream to a reality.  To me, Claudia has always been a wonderful mentor… and a very generous one at that.

So it seemed only natural that when she started describing her new book, The Immigrant Advantage, that it was all about helping others in a new way.  What she described about learning from people like my parents, their parents, and so many others like us, Mexican or not, all recent immigrants to this great country, at once struck me as both genius and quite daunting.  I’ll admit, I was a little confused at first at how such an innovative and broad subject matter could be tackled in just one book, but I knew Claudia’s writing well enough to know that if anyone had the finesse and thoughtfulness to put something like this together in words it would be her.

Turns out, I was right!

Not only does the book take the reader through a colorful slice of American culture, from Korean afterschool programs to the conundrum of having your parents literally helping you select your best potential spouse (this would have been a pretty hilarious process in my case), as well as the importance of mothering a mother after she gives birth in the Mexican tradition known as the cuarentena, among several others, The Immigrant Advantage tells these stories in a heartfelt and often humorous tone.  I think that’s what I’ve enjoyed most about the book; that it has made me feel like I’ve been right there next to Claudia the entire time she was visiting and talking to these families and characters about their stories.  I feel connected to them.

And best of all, after finishing The Immigrant Advantage I feel like I have so many new tools at my disposal.  Honestly, I can’t wait to try out a lot of these customs for myself.  I might be hitting up some of you to join my tanda (money saving club – one of the chapters in the book) pretty soon… so beware!

If you could use a little help in any of the following subject matters, this book is definitely a must read: saving money, making time for a family meal, supporting a college education, maybe even fending off diseases, financing home ownership, and/or building a buffer from the physical and psychological assaults of poverty.

NOTE: Author Claudia Kolker will be visiting this blog on Monday, October 24, 2011, to review your messages and answer any questions you might have, so please feel free to leave all comments below.  I will also be giving away a copy of The Immigrant Advantage to one lucky reader.  For a chance to win this free copy please leave a comment on this post, along with your email address so that I can contact you if you are the winner.  The winning commenter will be selected at random.

This post is an official tour stop of The Immigrant Advantage Book Tour.

Monday, October 24, 2011: Juan of Words – http://www.juanofwords.com/
Tuesday, October 25, 2011: Chicano Soul -http://thechicanosoul.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, October 26, 2011: Spanglish Baby – http://www.spanglishbaby.com/
Thursday, October 27, 2011: Latinaish – http://latinaish.com/
Friday, October 28, 2011: TikiTiki Blog – http://tikitikiblog.com/
Tuesday, November 1, 2011: Voto Latino - http://www.votolatino.org/
Wednesday, November 2, 2011: Motherhood in Mexico – http://www.motherhoodinmexico.com/
Thursday, November 3, 2011: Atzlan Reads – http://www.aztlanreads.com/
Friday, November 4, 2011: Multicultural Familia – http://www.multiculturalfamilia.com/

Claudia Kolker

About the Author: Claudia Kolker has reported extensively from Mexico and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, Japan, India and Pakistan. A former Los Angeles Times bureau chief and member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board, she has also written for The Economist, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, Slate, and Salon. She lives in Houston with her family.  For The Immigrant Advantage, Kolker visited Korean and Chinese afterschools, West Indian multigenerational households in New Jersey, and Chicago’s “Little Village,” among others.

About the book: The Immigrant Advantage is a fascinating look into the lives of immigrant enclaves in the United States that we so seldom gain access to, and an inspiring exploration about how these customs can enrich our own lives.  You may purchase a copy of this book at Amazon.com

FTC Disclosure: Juan of Words received a free copy of the book from the author as part of a Simon & Schuster book tour. Juan of Words was not required to write a positive review. The opinions expressed are my own.

My Almost Big Fat Mexican Wedding…

You be the judge. Whose version do you believe? Although that look on my face doesn't really help my version of this story very much... (I'm standing up. She's sitting down.)

We never actually had a wedding.  We sort of talked about it, and talked about it some more, and then finally opted for the low key exchange of nuptials instead.  I mean we literally just showed up at a retired judge’s home in a nearby little town one day and asked him to marry us.

Well, wait, let me correct myself.  It wasn’t just any old day.  It was Valentine’s Day!  And we didn’t actually just drive up, we had to get our marriage license at the courthouse first and then make an appointment with this viejito of a judge.  Still, there probably wasn’t as much romance as there should have been.  We didn’t even take a picture to commemorate the occasion.  The thing is, though, we’ve never actually been one of those cute “typical” couples that does everything according to custom.  Me imagino that we would have had a blast in a Big Fat Mexican Wedding, as we had talked about for so long, and hey, no one says we can’t still do it one day, but our approach was much more practical.

You ready to get married?

Yeah. 

Okay, let’s do it!     

We did it, went to dinner at a swanky restaurant to celebrate, texted our families that we were now married, took in everyone’s varied reactions (both our moms were kind of upset for a little while… uuyy), and then were done with it.  The next day we were back to just being Juan and Anjelica, and that’s the way it’s been ever since.  What’s more interesting and kind of ironic is how we actually met.

For years we’d actually known each other without knowing it.  I was a print reporter in those days and she worked with one of my sisters at a local nonprofit.  Because of the beat I was covering, of course Hispanic issues, I’d often stop by at their offices for a quick visit… or a rather long one, depending on what my mood was.  Yet in all those years of playing hooky from my beat and just hanging out I never actually met her there.  We never even saw each other.  It wasn’t until we were throwing a going away party for mi hermana a couple of years later that we actually met.  De ahí the rest is history… albeit recollected in somewhat different versions.

Anjelica claims I was drunk and wouldn’t leave her alone, and that’s how she ended up giving me her number.  What actually happened though, at least according to me, is that she was just as flirtatious as I was and gave me her phone number quite willingly.  Dare I say, with as much anticipation as I had for getting it!  We can debate about this for hours so let’s not even get started.  The craziest part about all this though – and we both agree on this part – was that after we started spending more and more time together we realized we had actually been pretty close to meeting earlier on several occasions, and somehow something always managed to keep us apart, I guess until the time was right.  It’s still kind of wild to think about.  In one picture my sister had taken – months before her going away party – Anjelica and I are actually both in the same photo.  Their agency was having a pubic town hall meeting.  She was working the event.  I was sitting in front of the panel of talking heads taking notes, and neither one of us had any clue that in a couple months our lives would be in sync.

Who knows what would have happened if we never met at that party?  How would our encuentro have been?  Would there be alcohol involved inevitably?  I’m convinced it would have happened no matter what.

Como quién dice: siempre hay un roto para un descosido.

Burla: The Act of Laughing at Oneself… and Others

¡Burlona! La Chupitos

There’s a time to play.  And there’s a time to stop.  That line you cross when you’re no longer laughing with someone, but laughing at them.  When it stops being funny, and turns into something kind of offensive.  Now, tampoco soy nigún santo, so my philosophy has always been that in small doses a little fun at someone else’s expense can be pretty harmless, even a little fun.  Okay, a lot of fun!  Unless they find out about it, and then, well, you’re pretty much on your own… left to save face as best you can, or in the worst of cases, to save your own face from una buena cachetada. 

My parents called it being burlista, burlon, burlona.  Someone who criticized and poked fun at everyone around them all of the time for no specific reason… sort of as an addicting out-of-control-hobby.  For this gente snickers, whispers and dirty looks were the main forms of communication they employed to get their points across.  That is when they weren’t running there mouths.  And boy did they like running their mouths.  It was always fulanita de tal or fulanito quién sabe quién who were at the tip of there tongues awaiting to be the topics of endless conversation, from this sentence to that sentence, then a couple of dozen more after that first pair.  For a child as metiche as me, it was my entertainment.

I’d even venture to say a very important part of my education… or miseducation, however you choose to look at it.  Not only did these exchanges keep me informed of pretty juicy details about everyone around me, but they also allowed me to hone my skills as an observer on life.  I would have made an excellent sociologist!  Too bad I decided against this major in college.  Besides, all of those memories of me and my younger brother mimicking other people, arremedandoles en todo, cracking ourselves up until we were at the point of falling off the bed, crying from laughing so hard, or almost about to pee in our pants, are priceless.  He was like one of those celebrity impersonators on Sábado Gigante or Siempre en Domingo in those days.  Now, we can’t ever get him to do one of his characters anymore.  I’ve cut back a pretty great deal myself.

It’s not that we grew out of it.  We just figured out it was in our own best personal interest to keep our burlas to ourselves.  Every once in a while, though, we still give each other that look and smile.

We know what we’re laughing about!       

The bonus: now there are so many other people who understand our silent exchanges también, which either means they are experienced burlistas themselves, or they have managed to somehow crack our “highly top secret” code of glances and giggles.  Just remember, in small doses people!    

Growing Up, Growing Old, and Holding On to the ‘Niño Terco’

That was me then... (in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas)

Get up.  Get ready.  And go.  That’s the way we always lived life.  Never having any time to really stand still, at attention, free, just to enjoy the moment.  Other than when we lived in the Rio Grande Valley, and that was just for a couple of years in between getting deported and always hiding from la migra, once we were in the city it was always working for the next paycheck.  Without the jobs we couldn’t get the money.  Without the money we couldn’t pay the rent or do anything else.  Without the rent they were going to put us de patitas en la calle, at the mercy of whatever relative would be willing to take in a complete family of nine.  Luckily it never came to that.  Who knows how long such a temporary living arrangement could have really lasted.

Instead, the sunlight hit y orale cada quien a lo suyo.  My dad running out the door when his ride showed up; my mom finishing up in the kitchen and rushing us all to hurry up and get ready to go to school; my sisters heading out before us, they were in high school and were into fashion and boys by then; then my brothers and I doing the same – well not into boys or fashion, but leaving the Bali Hai apartments by foot también on our way to our elementary school.  The only ones who got to stay home were my two younger sisters who weren’t old enough to go to school, and that was when they were lucky.  When mamá had to go to work it was over to Doña Pilar or whatever other trustworthy neighbor was around.  My sister Linda especially hated this part of growing up.  She’d sit there quietly all day, wherever she stayed, not talking much at all and almost always refusing to eat anything until my mother would come home.  Still, even she wasn’t as resistant as the baby in the household, Blanca, who rarely ever spent the day anywhere without crying the entire time from the moment my mom walked out of the door until she came back.  Even with my older sisters she would throw a fit if mamá was not around.

Fuera lo que fuera, we still needed the extra income and mom had to go to work.

Those times are really quite a blur.  Not sure whether that’s because I’ve chosen to block them from my memory or because things were really moving at such a fast pace that my mind couldn’t entirely grasp and record all of them at once.  I know we never had the chance to play like we did in the Valley.  We didn’t have any sand to kick around.  There wasn’t an acre of land at our disposal to discover, to explore, and to grow up in.  We were confined to the walls of brick and cement around us.  Our playground was our apartment, the property around it, especially in the back of the parking lot next to the garbage can where we all dumped our trash, and the little “tree house” in between the bushes and the fence we’d managed to claim as our own.  In truth, it wasn’t really a tree house at all.  It was a small open space underneath all of the overgrown tree branches that were falling over around the gate on the other side of the parking lot.  We weren’t allowed over there, but we always managed to climb over anyway.

That was the only place we had any true sense of privacy.  And even then, once word got out about our “tree house” it wasn’t very private anymore.  Other kids started showing up and they needed the time alone, away from everything around them, just as much as we did.  It wasn’t the same and I stopped going there all together.

In those days it didn’t seem like so little.  We were kids and everything was a new experience to us.  A new opportunity to discover something brand new, to make it our own, and somewhere along the way, without our even knowing it, to discover something brand new about ourselves también.  We were fearless.   Unafraid to fall flat on our faces and get back up; unafraid to be ourselves regardless of what others might think; unafraid to just be a bunch of mocosos finding our own individual places in this life.  Try as I have in the years since I’ve never truly managed to be as brave as I was back then.  Maybe that’s just what happens when the years start to pass you by?  No sé.

The one thing I haven’t lost is the capacity to be that same terco over, and over… and over again.

I’m determined to keep trying.  Hope you’re willing to do the same.

Just Another Manic Monday…

What do you do when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?  You’re mad, you’re in a terrible mood, and you’re just not feeling another new day… otra semana más.  That’s precisely my situation this lunes.  Not for any particular reason.  Just because.  So, borrowing from the many “pushers” of positive thinking, both online and offline, let me compile a list of things that always make me happy.  If you’re in the same mood as me this week I hope this list is especially useful.

Coffee

The bigger the mug, the better

Who doesn’t feel better after their morning coffee!?  I’ve had my fill this morning.  Pitch black just the way I like it.  And today, the coffee was already made so nadie tuvo que ver mi mala cara.

Música

Since I’m also borrowing from The Bangles – who still remembers this group? – for the title of this post, why not make their song the official soundtrack of it as well.  I don’t know that they would have normally been my first choice for mood-changer-of-a-song, but tampoco puedo negar that a good song always puts me in a better mood, eventually.

Un Buen Chisme

Tanto así no, pero casi...

And of course, nothing like a good bishin session (La Hora del Chisme as I like to call it) to get one laughing and talking about the silliest things that don’t matter at all, and for some reason still have the capability to make one feel more at ease.

Ya hasta se le quito el coraje a este corajudo… Good morning everyone!!