Carlos Hernandez
English 104a
Final Essay
Susana Huerta
12/09/2009
Hey You Get Off My Cloud, You Don't Know Me and You Don't Know My Style
My identity is like a puzzle, every experience I've lived, every person who has influenced me, every place I've visited, they are all pieces that fit perfectly to create who I am today as a person, as a student. The experiences I've been through have brought me here, to college, to pursue an education. "If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." Frank A Clark
St. Anger around My Neck
"He was crazy, insane, hating the Mexican flesh he had on his bones" Villaseñor. Just like Juan Salvador felt hatred towards his own people, I too have had the same feeling of hating my own people, but instead of hating the whole Mexican race my hate was focused on men.
At the age of three my heart was full of hatred. Being raised by a victim of domestic violence and being surrounded by strong yet vulnerable women I was confused. I remember not having a strong father figure until I was seven. Before that all I've seen around me were women being mistreated by their abusive husbands or single mothers struggling to feed their bastards. Some of them had become single by misfortune, their husbands had either being killed or died in an accident, and others had been abandoned by them. I wish that would had happened to us, but my mother wasn't as "lucky" as the other women, my "father" always came back home drunk, drugged and for some reason mad at my mother for wanting to give her kids a better future, for going out job hunting or doing someone else's laundry in order to pay the rent. He would beat her up until she lay on the dirt almost unconscious. I hated him for touching my mother but I also hated the men who lived around us, the neighbors, my uncle and my grandfather because they never did anything to stop him. Like Sanders wrote on his essay "The Men We Carry in Our Minds" that the first men he saw when he was a kid determined his destiny to be one of them, I too came to think the same, but after an event different paths opened for us, different opportunities, different destinies. After being exposed to the violence twice or three times a week I began hating myself, I hated being a man. I though that one day it was going to be me beating up my wife, wasting money at the cantinas. Thoughts of suicide came to my head, even though I was pretty young I was well aware of different methods to commit suicide which were taught by TV. I did not want to grow up into a monster. The only man I recall who respected women was my uncle "memo", he was my "father's" youngest brother. He was a soldier so we rarely saw him. He came home one day and saw my mom all beaten up and told her to runaway and so my mother called her mother and a couple of hours later we left never to come back, I was five years old. When I turned seven I met the man I now call DAD, unconsciously he taught me that not all men are turned to monsters as they grew old, he has so much respect for women, thanks to him all my hatred came to an end, we shared the same background, an alcoholic father and a strong woman as his mother who struggled all her life to give her kids a better future. Now that I'm older I've come up with a theory of why the man who impregnated my mother with my brothers and me had so little respect for women. His mother died when he was twelve years old and his dad abused him physically so he filled himself with hatred, accumulated throughout his childhood and took it out in someone "weaker" than him. All of this reminds me of how much respect Lupe and Salvador had for their mothers, the heads of their families.
Sexo, pudor y no lagrimas
"Tony ven vamos a jugar", she said as I walked out of my room, "our mothers have gone to the market and they left me in charge of you" she was no older than thirteen at the time. I followed her to my grandfather's house which was empty for he had gone to work that morning. "Take off your shirt and pants" she said "why? What are we going to do?" I asked, "We are going to play a game" she replied. At the age of four learning a new game seemed exciting, so I did as told and she took me to my grandfather's bed. And there I was, laying on the bed almost entirely naked, she started undressing, she took off the skirt she was wearing and then her shirt, I had never seen her, my cousin, like this. "This game is quite simple actually, all you have to do is imitate me and I'll do the rest" she said, "Ok, but what are playing?" I asked, "Al Papa y a la Mama" she answered. She sat on me and I remember her face was filled with joy and mischief, her face got close to mine, I felt her warm lips touch mine and she kissed me like the couples on movies do. She took off my underwear and…. I can't really remember what happened after that, what I do remember is me playing in my grandfather's living room and finding the Yellow Submarine Album by The Beatles and then my mother and my aunt walked in and I went rushing towards my mom, I was going to tell her about this new weird game my cousin had taught me but my cousin pulled me before I could even say a word and whispered to my ear "Do not tell anybody, this is just between you and me" and again I did as told. I don't remember playing that game with my cousin anymore after that day, after I moved to another town and started kindergarten I learned that that game was actually called sex, so I asked my mother what sex was and she explained me what it was. "Lupe really wondered about this world of sex."-Villaseñor.
I wanted to know what the point of the game was so when I finally learned to read every time I had the chance I would go to the library and read books about sex and biology, but at that age I couldn't understand most of what I was reading. Later in life I learned that people misjudge others by knowing too much or too little about a subject. In my experience, I was called a pervert for knowing a little bit more about sex than the rest of my friends both male and female.
El Extranjero
"Doña Manza and her family decided to to go out, too, but a few days earlier so they wouldn't be a big group and could get out of the mountains without being noticed"- Villaseñor. "Carlos wake up, its time" my mother told me as she got up and got ready to leave, "hide this money in your shoes" she said, I took the money and slipped it between insole of my shoe and my sock. It was still dark outside and I could smell the tension in the air. "He wants us to pay him now" said one the coyotes that was going to smuggle my mother, my brothers, a man and me across the border to the United States. "Te damos una television ahorita y alrato vienes por el dinero" said the owner of the house we were staying at, "esta bien alrato vuelvo" said the taxi driver. The coyotes gave each one of us two gallons of water "para el camino", we got on the taxi and he took us outside of town where all you could see was the desert, mountains and more desert. We had been walking for less than five minutes when out of nowhere three armed men robbed us. "Donde esta el dinero?" the most nervous one of them asked, "We don't have any" my mom answered without hesitation, "Vamos a darle en su madre a quien tenga el dinero", after hearing this I was scared. "Everyone, take off your shoes" another man said, and he inspected each one of them, I was second to last on the line and I guess he thought he wasn't going to find anything because he didn't even took half the time inspecting mine that he had taken with the others. Since they couldn't find anything they eventually let us go, and so our journey began. We walked and ran for seven hours straight, taking five to ten minute breaks every 40 minutes. We were all tired, especially my mom and her legs started to get numb, she just couldn't go on any further, her body was failing her. My oldest brother put her arm around his shoulder and I took her other one, at this point the smugglers decided that we needed to rest so we sat down under a tree and rested our bodies for thirty minutes, we walked for another 20 minutes and waited a little bit longer until the cars arrived for us, "cuando se metan a la ven(van) todos se van a acostar en el piso y no vayan a alsarse, ahi viene, vamonos corranle". Lupe and Salvador both experienced having to move out of the place they knew as home and move to another place way different from the one they had been raised, different people, different language and different cultures, laws and values. We had to take this journey to an unknown land in order to have a better education, a better future.
Y ahora estoy aqui…..
"Si usted supiera lo que es estar dividia no saber cual es su tierra…caminante por eso no tengo bandera representante, da lo mismo mi nombre lo importante es lo que hago, valorar al hombre por la calidad de su trabajo…los paises donde he vivido han unido sus matizes para que me caracterizen"-Makiza
All those events, people and places have made me who I am,
I am an immigrant who hated his gender, believes in feminism and who was exposed to sexuality at a very young age. All these pieces together make my identity and have made a huge impact in my life that I want to know more about them, I can't wait until I take an anthropology class and learn about the social beliefs of human kind, or take a psychology of human sexuality class and learn more, not just about sex but what's behind it.
