Barrio Boy

“Books were rare. My mother had one, which she kept in the cedar box. It had a faded polychrome drawing on the cover with the title La Cocinera Poblana, a cookbook which had belonged to Grandmother Isabel. We did not need it for cooking the simple, never-changing meals of the family. It was the first book from which Doña Henriqueta ever read to me. The idea of making printed words sound like the things you already knew about first came through to me from her reading of the recipes. I thought it remarkable that you could find oregano in a book as well as in the herb pot back of our house. I learned to pick out words like sal and frijoles, chile piquín and panocha—things we ate. From hearing my mother repeat the title so often when she read to us, and from staring at the cover drawing, I guessed that the beautiful girl in the colorful costume was the Cocinera Poblana. The words above her picture were obviously her name. I memorized them and touched them. I could read.”

While the memoir only goes until Ernesto is in high school, Galarza went on to become a respected academic and professor. His interest in books and learning is expressed throughout the memoir. In this scene, Ernesto recalls his mother teaching him how to read from a cookbook. His family values education and encourages him to study despite the upheaval in their lives.

“We moved to Jalco—my mother, my uncle Gustavo, my uncle José, and I—several weeks before I was born. They walked, with a few clothes and some food, from Miramar, about twenty miles away down the mountain. Under the circumstances, the journey was no problem for me.”

Despite the serious subject matter—the revolution, the breakup of his extended family unit, economic struggles—Galarza’s tone is often humorous. In this quote, he describes his mother and uncles moving to Jalco while making a joke that the journey was easy for him because he was in his mother’s stomach.

“Important things happened in the cottage, on the street, in the corral, along the arroyo, and on the edge of the forest, Not only that. Most of the things that happened, happened every day.” 

As a boy, Ernesto is fascinated by the world around him. The life of the village is very predictable, but to Ernesto, that does not make it less important. Part 1 outlines many small slices of life in detail, emphasizing the wonder he felt as a child.

“People spoke of El Diablo and of La Muerte as if they were persons you might run into any moment. The Devil could descend on you from a tree in the shape of a monstrous lizard or block you on the trail dressed in flames and aiming a spear at you. Death was a gangling skeleton who perched her rattling bones (Death was always a She) on the roof ridge of your cottage or signal you with a bony finder to follow her into the forest.” 

A theme in Barrio Boy is the cultural differences between the village Galarza grew up in and America. The Mexican village Ernesto leaves behind is rooted in traditional ways of life. The folk traditions and lore, or dichos, are frequently invoked as one such difference. It is important to keep in mind that Ernesto is a child when he hears these stories, which would inform how seriously he took them.

“Out of the forest a man took only what he and his family could use. Not all the campesinos in Jalcocotán, or in all the pueblos on the mountain together took out so much that the monte and the arroyo could not replenish themselves. In the conversation of the townspeople there were ancient sayings—dichos—that showed how long the people and the forest had lived together.” 

In the village, people live a subsistence existence. They gather what they need from the forest and the land around them. Ernesto makes a brief mention of haciendas, where landless peasants worked for wages, but his immediate family does not earn money this way, so it is not a major theme. Very few people in the village work as wage laborers or earn money. The villagers live in harmony with nature as people are careful not to take more than they need. Galarza draws a distinction between the ways of life in the village and industrial, modern life in Sacramento.

“Guessing at what people meant, I came to feel certain words rather than to know them.” 

Ernesto is only a boy when his family makes the life-changing decision to leave Jalco because of the revolution. He listens carefully to adult conversations and picks up the feelings that lie behind the words, like suspicion and fear. His ability to guess at the meaning of words becomes helpful when he immigrates to the United States and has to learn English.

“I caught the awe of the older people who were listening to Don Cleofas tell that a comet foretold something important, and serious. He said that this one meant La Revolucion.” 

Haley’s comet passes over Jalco shortly before Ernesto and his family leave. Right before the comet passes through the sky, military guards came to Jalco to draft young men to fight in Don Porfirio’s army. José and Gustavo leave the village, so they are not drafted. When Gustavo and José return, the family makes the decision to leave. The comet is a symbol of larger forces.

“Everything had already been said and decided.”

When Ernesto, José, and his mother leave Jalco to meet Gustavo in Tepic, the mood is quiet. They say goodbye to the Lopezes and then leave before dawn. The family intends to reunite later, but Ernesto suggests that in such a significant moment, there is very little to say.

“It was a gift my mother had, explaining things in such a way that out life seemed only be taking a different shape, not coming apart.” 

Ernesto and his mother prepare to leave Tepic to travel to Mazatlán, where their cousin Doña Florencia lives. He is caught up in the flurry of activity as they get ready to leave, and his mother’s straightforward attitude is calming. As an adult, Galarza reflects that the period should have been more stressful but that his mother’s way of explaining things made everything make sense, even in the unpredictable situation they were navigating.

“We watched the guards from the top of the hill, hated them and President Diaz and wished with all our might for the revolution.” 

The revolution is what causes Ernesto’s family to migrate, but the details of it are hazy and unspecific. Ernesto doesn’t fully understand what is going on around him, and the worldview we see the story through is limited to what Ernesto experienced as a young boy. In this scene, Ernesto is in Mazatlán as soldiers are posted around the barrio. He and his family are sympathetic to the cause of the revolution. Galarza doesn’t supplement in his own recollections with historical context, so the specifics of the revolution are not addressed in his memoir.

“In a pushcart José trundled our two straw bags, bedrolls, and carefully wrapped cedar box. In it were the family letters, my report card from school, the sarape, the three rifle shells, some fine embroidery of my mother’s, and our books. José carried a money belt around his waist, under his pants, with part of our money. The rest was in a pouch sewed inside Doña Henriqueta’s blouse where she also tucked away an envelope with the railway pass for the two of us which Gustavo had sent. We walked behind José and his cart to the railway station.” 

The family leaves Mazatlán after José is not paid for a contract job. The revolution is coming closer, and they move north to see Gustavo. This is one of a series of a migrations the family takes, and each time, Ernesto documents the small number of belongings they brought with them that linked them to their old life.

“It took further explaining to clear up certain points to my satisfaction. The North was the same place as the United States, and we had finally arrived.” 

In Part 3, Ernesto and Doña Henriqueta take the train north to Nogales. When they arrive and get off the train, Ernesto is confused by the “gringos,” English speaking, and American flags. He quickly learns that they are in America and experiences some culture shock.

“It was the closest thing we did to saying good-bye to our country.” 

Like many immigrants feeling war or revolution, Ernesto leaves quickly and doesn’t fully process what changes are happening. He is surprised to learn he is in the United States, and like his departure from Jalco, there is little ceremony in saying goodbye.

“Beds and meals, if the newcomers had no money at all, were provided—in one way or another—on trust, until the new chicano found a job. On trust and not on credit, for trust was something between people who had plenty of nothing, and credit was between people who something of plenty. It was not charity or social welfare but something my mother called asistencia, a help given and received on trust, to be repaid because those who had given it themselves were in need of what they had given.” 

The chicanos who migrated to America had very little money. Support networks were essential to getting newly arrived immigrants settled. Throughout Ernesto’s journey, a number of people help his family. He describes this mutual aid as a way of life in the barrio, a bond between people who have very little except trust.

“With remarkable fairness and never-ending wonder, we kept adding to our list the pleasant and the repulsive in the ways of the Americans. It was my second acculturation.” 

Culture shock is a common theme in the memoir. The plazas of Ernesto’s childhood, complete with concerts, bandstands, and processions, are replaced with parks where there was nowhere to sit but on the grass. Markets that smelled like fresh pineapple and lime are replaced with grocery stories, where food comes in cans or cardboard boxes. Other things are more positive, such as garbage collection, electric light, and the dishes that are included in boxes of rolled oats. Life in the barrio remains very Mexican, but Ernesto is exposed to American culture and begins to acculturate.

“The school was not so much a melting as a griddle where Miss Hopley and her helpers warmed knowledge into us and roasted racial hatreds out of us.” 

When he arrives in Sacramento, Ernesto enrolls in school. The school in the barrio is multi-ethnic, and Ernesto makes friends with people from many different ethnic backgrounds. Galarza invokes the analogy of America as a melting pot where immigrants assimilate into the larger culture. Instead, he suggests that students maintained their cultural difference but learned racial tolerance.

“The Americanization of Mexican me was no smooth matter.” 

School is Ernesto’s main exposure to American culture, as life in the barrio remains quite tied to Mexican culture. In this quote, Galarza reflects on his struggle to translate his childhood experiences in this new context. For example, he corrects a fellow student who says that roosters say “cock-a-doo-dle-doo,” saying that it is actually “qui-qui-ri-qui.” After school, he is taunted by another student who tells him Mexican roosters are crazy. Stories like this show the co-existence of his Mexican cultural traditions and his new life in the United States and how Ernesto navigates these two different worlds.

“Prowling the alleys and gleaning along the waterfront I learned how chicano workingmen hammered the English language to their ways. On the docks I heard them bark of a slip or a pill: ‘Oh, Chet,’ imitating the American crew bosses with the familiar ‘Gar-demme-yoo.’ José and I privately compared notes in the matter of ‘San Afabeechee,’ who, he said, was a saint of the Americans but which, as I well knew, was what Americans called each other in a fist fight.” 

Language is one of the main things that separates the chicano workers from American culture. While Ernesto learns English quickly in school, many migrants picked up the language slowly and developed their own idiosyncratic uses of it. The discussion between José and Ernesto on whether “San Afabeechee” is an American saint is a humorous moment of cross-cultural confusion.

“In our musty apartment in the basement of 418 L, ours remained a Mexican family. I never lost the sense that we were the same, from Jalco to Sacramento.”

Immigration does not mean the loss of cultural identity. Ernesto’s family remains Mexican, continuing to speak Spanish, cook Mexican food, and live among Spanish-speaking people. When they move to a bungalow, they move into a fully American context. Even here, Galarza reminds us, they remained Mexican.

“With the intense, dark face of Duran, the celebrations of the Sixteenth and the Cinco de Mayo, the family get-togethers, the evening conversations at 418 L, the readings in Cacaseno and Amado Nervo and Genoveva, it was not easy for the Mexican images in my mind to bleach away. But over them new experiences were being laid, pleasant or interesting things the Americans did.” 

Over time, Ernesto becomes more enmeshed in American society. He joins a YMCA band, attends school, and makes friends outside the barrio. Throughout the memoir, Galarza describes how he balanced his Mexican heritage and his family traditions with his increasing participation in American culture. The evocative language of “bleaching” away his Mexican identity highlights that he has conflicted feelings about his increasing acculturation.

“We could not have moved to a neighborhood less like the barrio. All the families around us were Americans. The grumpy retired farmer next door viewed us with alarm and never gave us the time of day, but the Harrisons across the street were cordial.”

Ernesto’s family, including his mother, his uncles, his new stepfather, and his three siblings, move into a bungalow. This is Ernesto’s first exposure to suburban life, and the neighborhood is very Americanized compared to the culture of the barrio. The family plants a garden, goes to the amusement park, and enjoys their new life. Ernesto transfers to a new school that is much less multi-ethnic than his previous schools, and his family encourages his studies.

“As the jefe de familia he explained that I could help earn our living but that I was to study for a high school diploma. That being settled, my routine was clearly divided into schooltime and worktime, the second depending on when I was free from the first. Few Mexicans of my age from the barrio were enrolled at the junior high school when I went there.” 

When José and Ernesto move back into the barrio, José insists that Ernesto remain in school, despite their poor financial situation. It is unusual for teenagers in the barrio to attend high school, but Ernesto’s uncles encouraged him to study and remain in school.

“There was never any doubt about the contractor and his power over us. He could fire a man and his family on the spot and make them wait days for their wages. A man could be forced to quit by assigning him regularly the thinnest pickings in the field. The worst thing one could do was to ask for fresh water on the job, regardless of the heat of the day; instead of iced water, given freely, the crews were expected to buy sodas at twice the price in town, sold by the contractor himself. He usually had a pistol—to protect the payroll, so it was said.” 

In the summer, Ernesto does seasonal work as a farmworker. The working conditions are terrible, and the workers are exploited by the contractors who hired them. Ernesto becomes aware of the inequalities that migrant workers face.