Clovis

Ah Clovis!

I learned so much there! I went from being an alien to being an immigrant. I went from speaking an implausible approximation of English - I thought the sentence out in Portuguese then translated it word for word into English which I then pronounced as if the words were Portuguese - to speaking a facsimile of American teenager English. It was good enough to get by with by the last months we were there.

How long were we there? Two and a half years.

I was dropped into the sixth grade and left to make a place for myself. How else are you gonna be a boy? I learned an approximation of baseball. I learned an approximation of American football. (The rest of the world calls soccer futbol. It confuses some people of mixed heritage.). I was never good at either in the real world, but damn I worked at them. I was successful enough that I became one of the middle ones chosen for a team, not one of the last.

Clovis was a farming town. I think the farmers called themselves wheat ranchers. Seriously. If I remember correctly, there were three categories of citizens: ranchers, townies, and basers. The basers were the families of Air Force base soldiers and officers who either lived on base or in the town. There were plenty of basers, there were plenty of townies, there were few ranchers. There were at least three classes of citizens: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. I was an honorary member of the middle class. My father was paid enough to keep us out of being poor.

Oh my goodness! And then there were the Mexicans. Well, no, the rich Mexicans were just part of the rich. The middle class Mexicans were sorta second tier middle class, usually made to feel their Mexicanness. The poor Mexicans didn't belong. But then the rest of the poor didn't belong either. They were there as cheap labor, easy targets, prey. Don't trust me on this, I was no sociologist, just a foreigner falling into his teens and trying desperately to learn a new world.

My brother Charles wrote about Clovis:

There were Black people there too. I know because I used to walk through the Black part of town on my way home from school. My best friend in first grade was named Mack. He was Black and his parents were the nicest grownups I had ever met - always laughing and hugging each other. They made me feel right at home. Every afternoon after school I went to his house on the way home, and his mother had popcorn balls ready for us to eat as soon as we arrived. His father was a big stocky man who worked on the railroad. Big, booming voice and he'd roar with laughter when we told him about our day at school. A few years later, when I learned about John Henry (the steel-drivin man), I knew exactly what he looked like.

Did I learn my way around in my new world? No. But well enough that I could almost pass for a white teenager when we moved to Albuquerque. My foreignness gave me away in certain pronunciations, my faux pas, my unawareness that I was blundering.

But my fellow kids often overlooked them or only snickered and then went on.

Shall we?

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