A TACO A DAY, KEEPS THE GABACHOS AT BAY...

El Taco

 By Juan Montoya

Every time Andres passes by the old huisache tree, he smiles.

He can still remember the small group of boys sitting in its shade under the scalding South Texas sun at Little Elm munching on their school lunch. The fence of the school yard ran next to the tree, and the railroad was a little further away.

The boys had made it a habit to gather under the tree each day at noon to have their lunch. They could well have gone to the cafeteria, but preferred to gather under the tree and chatter. This suited Andres just fine, since he could not have joined in the conversation inside the cafeteria, where teachers and their favorites were always on the watch for anyone speaking Spanish, which at that time was not allowed on school grounds.

Andres had just come to Little Elm with his family from nearby northern Mexico. Although his father had been born in central Texas, his parents had taken him to rural San Pedro, Coahuila, where the Mexican government had allotted them farm land in its huge irrigation project in the Laguna region. His father Jose had grown up a Mexican, never realizing his true citizenship. He had met Andres’s future mother, Socorro, whose family from Veracruz was also drawn by the government’s enticement of land and work in Mexico’s cotton belt, and they married there.

For a few years, until Andres was six, both families had prospered in the harsh desert climate. During the day, the searing hot sun would cover the little town in a stifling blanket of heat. At night, the cold winds from the nearby hills would chill him and his brother as they huddled under the blankets to keep warm.

After a few years, the desert started to reclaim the land, and the huge cotton yields started to grow smaller, until both extended families - grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins  - left to seek their fortunes in northern Tamaulipas, the neighboring state.

Eventually, his father had joined other men to go work in the cotton fields of South Texas, where the pay was in dollars, and where there was always a need for good cotton pickers and farm workers. Pickers from the Laguna area were specially prized as workers, each one picking three rows at a time and singing in the distance in front of the others.

After a time, his father had moved the family to a Mexican border town. He discovered he was a U.S. citizen when he was stopped by a Border Patrol agent when he was caught swimming across the river as he and the other workers had done so often.

“Why are you swimming the river when you’e a citizen and could just as well have walked across the bridge?,” the agent had  asked him.

“I never knew I was,” his father had replied. After that, it was just a matter of time before his father’s mother produced the birth certificate from among her stash of family documents.

“You were born near Victoria, Texas, Jose” she had told his dad. “But it was so long ago, we never really thought about it. You are a citizen of the United States. So are two of your sisters and one brother. The rest were born in Coahuila.”

And so his father had continued working in the cotton farm in Little Elm, eventually becoming one of the permanent workers there. With steady work, he undertook the task of bringing his family north. His employer told him that if he was able to cross them over, his citizenship would prevent the law from deporting them.

And so it was that during a bi-national holiday celebrated by the both cities during February, Andres’s mother bundled him and his brothers and sisters -  now five in all - to walk across the bridge.

“Mom, why are we putting on three pairs of pants and shirts ?,” he had asked.

“You never mind and don’t go around telling anyone,” she had told him firmly. “Just hold on to your little brother’s hand and don’t let go.”

It had been a long-standing tradition fostered by the local chamber of commerce to allow Mexican residents of the nearby town to cross into the United States to join the celebration. They called it “paso libre” and the Mexican nationals were warned not to go further north than the city limits. However, his father had enlisted the aid of his employer to use his pickup truck with a shell and it was an easy matter to travel through the back country roads to their new home in Little Elm.

Life on the cotton farm was an exiting change for Andres and his family. Each morning, truckloads of laborers would arrive at dawn to work in the cotton fields. Many of them were old and bent with age as they got off the back of the truck, where 20 or 30 more of their fellows were crowded together for the trip from the border town to Little Elm. 

In those days, the Border Patrol turned a blind eye to the daily coming and going of these workers. If they could cross the river -  whether with a permit through the bridge or swimming through the treacherous currents of the water - they could go unbothered about their labor on the nearby farms.

In fact, there were recognized places in the downtown where workers by the hundreds would gather waiting to be picked up by the trucks that would take them to the nearby farms. The Border Patrol would make sure the process went smoothly, assuring the local farmers of a steady supply of labor.

The adults would tease the kids on the farm - many of them there illegally like Andres and his brothers - when the familiar green and white trucks of the Border Patrol would approach on the road.

“Run! Run! Here comes the migra!,” they would shout as the kids ran and hid under the tractors  and other implements in the open sheds. The agents shared in the fun as they passed by smiling at the children hiding behind the machinery and the large metal disks attached to the tractors.

When the cotton plants were two to three inches tall, the workers would arrive early in the morning, some carrying worn leather knee pads, to thin the crop. After having some hot coffee, they would be dispatched to their respective fields and set about to thin the rows, spacing the plants uniformly by pulling the shoots with their hands. In the evenings when they clambered aboard the trucks, they would haul their weary bodies onto the bed. Their callused hands were stained a dark green from the day-long pulling of the plants.

Eventually, school started and Andres and his brothers and sisters were enrolled in Little Elm Elementary. A bus would pick them up each morning and deliver them home after school. Since he didn’t know a word of English even though he was seven, Andres was placed in the second-grade class. His teacher, an elderly lady perhaps 70 years old, didn’t know a word of Spanish. Since Spanish was prohibited on school grounds, there was very little to be done to teach Andres how to read or understand his lessons.

Unable to place him in any of her three reading groups - A, B, or C -, Mrs. Stroman had him sit behind each group as she gave the children their daily lessons. All Andres did during the day was to sit in the back of the groups and try to follow the lessons by glancing at their books and following along on the pages.

After a few days, his two older sisters complained to their parents that the Anglo students and some of the others  would make fun of them when they took out their lunch in the cafeteria.

“They tease us because we have tacos,” they told their mother. “All the other kids have baloney sandwiches and we have tacos. They’re mean.”

Bowing to the pressure, his parents soon sent all of them to school with baloney sandwiches in their brown paper lunch sacks. Even though they never ate sandwiches at home, they dutifully bought them for the kids so they would not be teased anymore. On the bus on the way to school, Andres soon made a few friends who asked him his name and what grade he was in. 

Although some of the kids were in third grade, they soon became buddies. The driver did not enforce the English-only rule on the bus. Andres soon found out that his family wasn’t the only one in Little Elm who didn’t eat cold sandwiches. In fact, he became a minor celebrity because he took sandwiches for lunch while the rest of the kids took tacos.

“What did your mother make you for lunch?,” he asked his friend Paco.

“Papas con bacon,” Paco replied. “You want to trade?”

“Sure,” Andres said.

He couldn’t get over his good fortune. Paco’s mother - whoever she was - was a master at making flour tortillas. They were soft and fluffy and shaped themselves snugly around the food. The potatoes were diced and soft and the bacon pieces gave the tacos a delicious taste. Since he didn’t want his sisters to tell his parents - or to get teased in the cafeteria - he convinced Paco to have their lunch under the huisache tree.

When lunch time came around, he and Paco were joined by another four or five boys and made their way to the tree. There, he asked them about some of the lessons he didn’t understand as they shared their lunch, or rather, they took turns munching on the baloney sandwich he had traded with Paco.

“Where do you guys go when you tell the teacher ‘maybescuze’?,” Andres asked them once.

“To the bathroom, al baño,” Paco said. “You can go in there and speak Spanish and everything.”

When he returned to his class, he decided to try it on Mrs. Stroman.

Walking up to the elderly lady, he stood before her as she glanced up from the reading lesson she was giving the B group.

“Maybescuze?,” he asked.

The old lady stared at him incredulously and pointed merely down the hallway to the bathroom.

Sure enough, inside were four or five other students laughing and joking among themselves in Spanish.

“How did you do it?,” they asked Andres.

“I just said ‘maybescuze’ and she let me come,” he replied.

Years later, Andres got a small satisfaction when he passed by a national Mexican fast-food franchise and saw it was full of non-Hispanics craving what they thought was traditional Mexican food. Personally, the brittle taco shells filled with minced meat never appealed to him. He still remembered the potato-and-bacon tacos Paco’s mother had prepared and which he traded for his baloney sandwiches some four decades before.

“Now that was real food,” he thought.  

 Every time he drives past that old huisache tree, Andres smiles.