The first time I heard the word “America” was as a small child when my mom, grandma, and I took my mom’s youngest brother, my uncle Andres, to the José Joaquín de Olmedo International Airport in Guayaquil, Ecuador. My uncle was going to visit family in the United States. I watched him lovingly hug my mom and grandma good-bye.
“May God protect your path every step of the way,” said my grandma in Spanish.
My uncle waved at us as he boarded his plane, and we watched the warm headwind help lift that aircraft off into the bright blue tropical sky. I tugged on my mom’s dress and asked, “Where’s Uncle Andres going?”
“He’s going to America,” my mom replied.
I didn’t take my eyes off the Boeing 747 until I saw the last bit of its tail disappear into the clouds. As far as I knew at four years of age, heaven was the only place that existed in the sky, so I decided that America must be a place in heaven.
This impression was solidified as I got older and began to watch Hollywood action movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Sylvester Stallone adorned our South American TV screens twenty-four hours a day. I had no idea that two of those movie stars were immigrants to the United States, and that the other was a child of immigrants. I did not know any of this because I could not understand what they were saying. I didn’t speak English at the time. Luckily, you never have to translate kicking ass. Seeing Rambo go on a bloody rampage on behalf of the United States meant that America was a place worth dying for. I never saw an Ecuadorian veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder go on a killing spree to defend the honor of fried plantains! But my absolute favorite American hero was American Ninja. American Ninja was a film that starred American heartthrob Michael Dudikoff, who went on to star in other great films such as American Ninja 2: The Confrontation and American Ninja 4: The Annihilation. American Ninja was where it all began for me. I was seven years old when I realized, thanks in part to Michael Dudikoff, that I had to devote the rest of my life to becoming both a ninja and an American.
While Rambo and American Ninja were my favorites, my American role models were not limited to the muscle-bound bravado of action heroes. I was also obsessed with DC Comics, Disney cartoons, and the Lone Ranger. In other words, I watched a lot of American TV as a kid. Most days I was glued to the Spanish-dubbed version of the 1960s Batman TV show. At the time, I had no idea that the Joker was portrayed by Latino actor Cesar Romero, who refused to shave his signature Latin Lover mustache for the show and applied white makeup over it for the duration of the series. I didn’t even know what a Latino was back then. As far as I knew, I was just a white South American boy living a cozy existence in his grandparents’ relatively large house. I would ask one of our maids to make me a bowl of fresh fruit as I plopped down in front of the TV wearing my Batman Halloween costume. Watching how the caped crusader and his young ward saved Gotham City, USA, was everything to me. That and ripe mangos.
My mom had to save up to buy me that Batman costume as a birthday gift, and I wore it everywhere—to the park, to my friends’ houses, to the dinner table. My mom didn’t have much money back then. She was a humanitarian at heart, so instead of following the family tradition of law and politics, she decided to become a doctor. In most places around the world, doctors make a lot of money. Not in Ecuador, where medicine is socialized. The socialization of medicine in Ecuador was not the real culprit for the nation’s economic decline. In fact, it was quite nice to know you could go to any hospital and get medical care no matter who you were. The real problem in Ecuador has always been foreign intervention and the national leaders that embrace it. In 1980, the year I was born, the democratically elected socialist president of Ecuador died unexpectedly in a plane crash before he could reorganize the hydrocarbon sector, a strong threat to US interests, or before he could nationalize the country’s petroleum—the third largest export from Ecuador; and the third largest petroleum source in Latin America. In 1981, the year of my first birthday, the democratically elected socialist president of Panama also died in a similar unexpected plane crash before he could nationalize the Panama Canal, yet another great threat to US interests. Were these “accidental” plane crashes part of Operation Condor, a United States–backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of political opponents? Am I asking too many serious questions for a relatively comedic memoir? Possibly. But, YOLO!
My grandpa, on the other hand, was a very influential judge in Guayaquil. On top of that, he built commercial rental properties in front of his house so that my grandma could have an income once he was gone. From my mom’s point of view, it was bad enough that she was a single mother living with her parents; she did not want to ask her dad for more help than she deemed necessary. And getting a free commercial rental property in front of their house was not necessary! My earliest memories are of my grandma and me hanging out by the window waiting for my mom to return home from a long day of medical school classes.
After she graduated from medical school and got a job at Guayaquil’s largest children’s hospital, we continued to live at my grandparents’ house. Everything in Guayaquil was done through palanca (i.e., connections and influences), and my mom getting her first job as a doctor was no different. She and my biological father, Ronald, had gotten a divorce when I was still an infant. In an attempt to win her back after cheating on her one too many times, Ronald, who was working with the national anti-narcotics department at the time, stepped up to get my mom her first residency. He also did so to get back in the good graces of my grandfather, who had sent him to prison a few years earlier for not paying child support on time. Ronald was trying hard to achieve a level of notoriety as a young attorney, but then he met my mom and her litigious family. My mom never took Ronald back. The great irony is that my mom ended up meeting my stepdad at the same hospital where Ronald got her a job.
My stepdad was a pediatric surgeon who lived in the shadow of his more successful pediatric surgeon father. Older surgeons would rather speak to my stepdad’s father than speak to him, and this put a giant Ecuadorian chip on his shoulder. When my mom showed up for her first day of residency, she was warned to stay clear of the hot-tempered head surgeon. Based on this, she expected him to be a towering, grumpy old man. Instead, she was shocked to meet my stepdad, a younger, shorter, skinnier Latin American version of Stephen Colbert. He seemed to be the complete opposite of my biological father: honest, studious, and very direct. My stepdad had a crush on my always-optimistic mom from the moment he met her. Her presence invariably put a smile on his face. But my stepdad had three children with two different women and had just come out of a messy divorce. He figured he should just focus on his surgeries and avoid all the personal distractions.
My mom worked tirelessly through her residency at the hospital. She made time for my birthday, but then I did not see her again. I spent Christmas alone with my grandma and grandfather, wondering what gifts Santa Claus had brought my mom this year. New Year’s Eve crept up really fast. Noticing that he was overworked and maybe even in more need of a break than she was, my mom built up the courage to invite my stepdad to one of my grandparents’ legendary New Year’s Eve parties in Urdesa. He declined the invitation initially, crushing my mom, who was starting to warm up to her superior. But as my stepdad operated alone that December 31 and noticed that the majority of his colleagues had requested time off to be with their families, he thought—Why am I doing this to myself?
My stepdad arrived at my grandparents’ house and knocked on the front gate two hours before midnight. My dashing uncle Antonio greeted him at the door. My uncle Antonio was a lawyer, my grandmother’s firstborn, and even though he was not my grandfather’s biological child, he was the one out of all his siblings who most shared my grandfather’s strong character. The way my stepdad jokes about it, he would have never gone to the party if he knew my mom already had a son. It was not love at first sight for him. It was the fear of one more child to support at first sight!
Still in his medical scrubs, my stepdad stood out in a sea of collared shirts and neatly pressed guayaberas. He walked through the large family gathering until he reached my grandfather. Of course he knew who Agustín Arrata was; everyone in town did. My grandfather did not know my stepdad, but he did like that a medical professional had come looking for his daughter, so he welcomed the young surgeon into his home. My stepdad respectfully greeted my grandfather and then proceeded to wait ten excruciating minutes for my mom to come down the stairs, but when she did, she was a sight to behold. She looked different in her nice-fitting blue cocktail dress and with her hair glamorously done. Even her makeup was striking. My mom grew up with a bunch of sisters and inherited all their best tips for properly doing the perfect smoky eyes. My mom and my stepdad awkwardly flirted for about an hour. Everything was going great until I came crying down the stairs. I was tired and wanted the party to be over already. Why wasn’t it midnight so everybody could go home? My mom took the opportunity to introduce my stepdad and me. From the second we met, my stepdad treated me like an adult. I was six years old. He firmly shook my hand, while my mom stepped away to check on my grandma and how New Year’s Eve dinner, which we usually had around midnight, was coming along. My stepdad and I looked at each other, quietly taking each other in.
I took a quick liking to my stepdad. All the Ecuadorian men in my life up to that point were deceivingly charming. One of my mom’s ex-boyfriends played with me only to convince me to tell my mom how much I liked him. The dude wanted me to be his wingman on my own mother! My stepdad was not like that. Or at least, he did not seem to be. He was stern. What you saw was what you got. I liked that. I respected that.
My mom and my stepdad started dating right after the New Year’s party. The three of us moved in together a few months later. I was excited when we went to look for new apartments together. The three of us were going to be a nuclear family. I never had one of those before. We found a nice, quaint, small apartment in Alborada. Alborada was a decent middle-class neighborhood of Guayaquil, if Guayaquil actually had a middle class. I spent a lot of time at the neighbor’s house watching the Spanish version of Batman along with El Chavo del Ocho reruns, as my parents worked their long shifts at the hospital. They usually scheduled their hours so one of them could stay with me at night. If you had money in Ecuador, you would pay a maid to raise your children. My parents did not have that kind of money. Only private doctors who had the investment capital (i.e., family money) to start a private practice in Ecuador made that kind of money. Public doctors were at the mercy of Ecuadorian bureaucrats and the state of the national economy.
One night, my mom was working the graveyard shift. I was alone with my stepdad in the apartment when he got an emergency call around 11:30 p.m. A little girl had accidentally been shot with a shotgun from behind, and the hospital needed my stepdad—as the head surgeon—to lead the very complicated surgery. Without a second thought, my stepdad told me to put my shoes on and rushed us both out of the house. We arrived at the children’s hospital in Guayaquil within twenty-five minutes. My stepdad handed me off to a nurse, who was waiting for us out front. My stepdad rushed in the opposite direction I did, as I followed the nurse to a nearby locker room. I didn’t know what was happening. The nurse helped me undress and started putting oversize scrubs on my tiny body. She covered my mouth with an operating mask and placed disposable shoe covers on my feet. She walked me down a bright hallway. Everything felt so big: the neon lights, the corridor, the cold tile floor. We entered a restricted area and stopped to let a surgical assistant run past. The nurse then opened the large operating room door and gently pushed me inside.
Alone, I looked around the operating room. There was what appeared to be a spotlight directly in front of me. It illuminated a surgical bed, where I could make out a few figures hunched over it. I slowly walked toward it and realized they were a bunch of adults in scrubs and medical masks and in the bed lay a child. I could hear my stepdad. I knew he was the man ordering everyone around because of his signature Coke bottle glasses over his surgical mask. I looked over at the person administering the anesthesia and instinctively recognized my mom’s kind eyes. I knew she was smiling at me despite her mouth being covered by the surgical mask. She was smizing before Tyra Banks could even coin the term! Then I looked at the patient. She was a little girl. Six years old. My age. Her chest was fractured and held open by four large steel tongs. I could see her organs pumping to stay alive. My dad was working as fast as he could to ensure she remained so. This entire event could have been a traumatic experience for me, but it wasn’t because my parents were there. I was not scared. I was not disgusted. I was simply amazed. My parents were working frantically to save a child’s life, and because they did not have any money for child care themselves, I was there to witness the entire thing. The whole experience, from where I was standing, felt like twenty minutes. Many years later, my mom laughed, remembering how I stood in that OR for seven hours with no break through one of the most complicated surgeries she and my stepdad ever tackled together. The little girl survived. In my eyes, my parents were real-life superheroes.
My stepdad and I had become close in such a short period of time, but we were close in the same way that a drill sergeant is with a new recruit. Like in the OR, my dad was used to barking orders, and as a young child, I was good at following them. There was never any leisure time with him. He was not the type of dad who would take you to a soccer game. He was the type of dad that mostly complained about why soccer players did not have real jobs. So it surprised me when he invited me to the movies one day. It turned out, my stepdad loved American films just as much as I did. Opening this particular weekend: American Ninja. You already know how this movie changed my life. But what you do not know is that my real dad never took me to the movies. In fact, I had started seeing him less and less in those days. As it was, Ronald was only a part-time dad, but with my stepdad around, he made a point to distance himself even more. Perhaps he was too busy with his blossoming law career. Perhaps he was trying to send my mom a message. For this exact reason, I looked over at my stepdad as he drove and asked, “Can I call you dad?” My stepdad looked over at me with the same austere look I had grown accustomed to. I could see my hopeful face reflected back at me in his thick lenses. He looked back at the road and simply replied, “Yes.” I was ecstatic to finally have a full-time dad. I never called him my “stepdad” again.
One morning, I asked my mom if she could please buy me a ninja costume. I still reserved a special place in my heart for Batman, but American Ninja was on a whole other level. My mom was uncharacteristically silent that morning as she looked out our small kitchen window. I shrugged it off and went back to eating my fruit salad, knowing that I could always beg my grandma or her maid to sew me one. After a few moments, my mom turned to me and asked, “How would you like to live in America?” I stared up at my mom and wondered if she was serious. She smiled, relieved to finally share what she had been holding on to this whole time. I took a deep breath. Forget the costume, I was about to be a real American! I finished my mangos with visions of the American flag adorned with ninja stars dancing through my head.
It turned out my aunt Teresa, my mom’s oldest sister who had been living in the States since I was born, had petitioned for us to come to America via the family reunification program. My parents were excited by the prospect of becoming doctors in the United States and making a good living at it. It seemed that all you needed to get ahead in the States was to be good at your job and be willing to work long, hard hours. In Guayaquil, a city nearly five hundred years old that was founded and looted by Spanish conquistadors, English and French pirates, and international merchants alike, you had to be slicker and more opportunistic than my parents ever cared to be. The United States seemed like a good change of pace for them. This country’s family reunification program, by the way, is something we are familiar with today as “chain migration,” a disparaging term that gained popularity when it became more closely associated with Black and brown people. Nobody seemed to care when the immigrants arriving on American shores were Northwestern European. Since Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “white persons” in 1790, and then passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as the first general immigration law in the United States, measures (i.e., quotas) restricting immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been long-standing in the land of liberty. Talentless landscape artist Adolf Hitler wrote about his admiration for the American immigration system by marveling: “The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.” With that frightening cheerleader of the American immigration system, and on the heels of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States’ immigration quota approach was rightfully attacked for being racially discriminatory. And in 1965, family reunification became the basis for the reform legislation that allowed my parents and me to come to this country.
In the following weeks there were a lot of international calls with my aunt Teresa. My mom had a revolving door of in-person conversations with my grandparents, my uncles, and my aunts. My grandfather looked particularly sad to lose his daughter to the Yankees. He was very solemn. I’m sure he was sad to lose me as well. The two of us had been inseparable since my birth. To me, he was “Tata,” which was the noise I made as an infant when I first saw him: “ta-ta.” Tata was one of the first people to move into Urdesa, the town I grew up in, and was a Supreme Court justice for all of Babahoyo, which is the equivalent of a California State Supreme Court justice if the California State Supreme Court were run by a bunch of drunken Ecuadorians. My grandma loves to tell the story of the time when I was three years old and I protected Tata from her wrath. My grandfather had come home drunk one night and she was furiously confronting him about it when out of nowhere I ran in between them, pushed her away, and said, “Leave my Tata alone!” She was still angry, but being shoved by a three-year-old boy made her laugh, and she had to leave the room to compose herself. Moments later, she came back with my mom, and the two of them could not believe that my grandfather and I were jabbering nonsense to each other, deep in conversation—confident that the other knew what we were each saying.
I was torn over how to feel about moving to America. I did not want to leave my grandparents, but I did want to live there. I had dreamed about becoming an American ever since I saw Rambo tie that red bandanna around his head. And the bonus was I would get to see my aunts and uncles and meet all my cousins, some of whom were my own age! I could not wait to play cops and robbers with them, but the American version, which I assumed was just a constant police state from the American action movies I watched. That’s when my mom pulled me aside and whispered, “But you can’t tell your father.” She added poignantly, “This has to be our secret, or else he won’t let you go.”
My biological father would pick me up from time to time and take me out with my other half siblings. I was the youngest of his four children. We were not close, but I knew I was special to him because I was the only one of his children who looked like him. To him, this was important because he grew up not looking like anybody in his family and he was treated differently than his siblings as a result. His earliest memories as a child were of his dad pushing him away when he asked for a hug, and he was eventually sent to live with his aunt and uncle at a large hacienda far away from the city. His uncle, Rafael, who I am named after, became his real father figure. Years later, when my biological father was in his mid-twenties and opening his first law practice, a stranger walked through his new office door and announced himself as his biological father. In an instant, everything made sense. He was the by-product of an affair.
I felt uncomfortable not telling the man who had given me life that I was leaving the country. My mom taught me never to lie, but then here she was asking me to keep this major secret from him. I felt anxious around my biological father. I tried not to speak unless spoken to. He figured I was having a bad time with him so he bought me some yogurt and yuca bread, and then dropped me back off with my mom shortly thereafter. I let out a big sigh of relief when I got home. I ate my yuca bread and wondered if the American yuca bread tasted as delicious. Spoiler alert: there is no yuca bread in the States! When would I have yuca bread again? When would I see my grandparents again? Was Gotham City even a real place? I questioned if I even wanted to leave Ecuador at all. I started to realize that life was pretty good for me in the middle of the world. Not only did my grandma have maids that could cook for me whenever I was hungry, but my grandfather was a big deal in Guayaquil. His brother was an admiral for the president of the Republic, which meant that my Tata had a lot of palanca. There was no real need to leave my posh Ecuadorian existence for the uncertainty of the United States. Would there even be maids for us in the States? Did my grandfather have any connections to the president of the United States? And what about this damn yuca bread!
We gave up our apartment in Alborada and went back to my grandparents’ house for a few days. My mom bade farewell to my dad, who was packed for the long trip. He was going to the United States before us to try to get us situated. Time was clearly running out for me to voice any concerns. I didn’t even have time to say bye to my friends, either. If the Irish Good-bye was when someone left a party without saying bye, then the Ecuadorian Good-bye was clearly when someone left the country without saying bye! Once my dad had left, my mom and I found ourselves alone in our old room—the same room that all my aunts and uncles had once called home. I told her, “I don’t want to go to America anymore. I want to stay in Ecuador.”
My mom looked at me warmly, taking in my concern. She then replied, “We’re only going for a few months.”
Fully convinced that we’d be back in no time, I happily started packing my bags for our American vacation. My mom folded up my Batman costume and started to place it in my suitcase, but I stopped her. “It’s okay, we don’t have to take it. It’ll still be here when we get back.” Secretly, I wanted my mom to buy me a ninja costume on our trip, but I didn’t want her to know that.
We came to the United States the week of the Fourth of July weekend in 1988. My dad actually arrived on the Fourth of July itself. I know it sounds like I’m saying that for literary effect, but it’s true! My dad arrived early to connect with his cousin who was living in LA County at the time. His cousin had come to Los Angeles, married a Filipina American for papers, got caught by immigration officials for lying, and ended up falling in love with the Filipina American anyway. How did they get caught? The immigration officials separated them during their home interview and asked each of them what kind of underwear my dad’s cousin wore. She said, “Boxers.” He said, “Briefs.” That’s why I always go commando!
My mom and I arrived in Los Angeles on a Friday night. As I sat next to her on the plane looking out at all the Fourth of July fireworks lighting up the LA night sky, I was convinced that they were there to announce our arrival. Little did I know that this was no vacation, and that this flight was really a one-way trip. To this day when I see Fourth of July fireworks, I envision an excited but clueless little ethnic kid on a plane thinking that the celebration is all for them.
My parents and I arrived in America with only five hundred dollars in our pockets. It was really in my dad’s pockets, but what was mine was his and what was his could barely afford one month’s rent. Once in Los Angeles, we moved in with my aunt Teresa and her husband, Sergio. Aunt Teresa and Uncle Sergio lived in a California ranch-style home in Walnut, California, with their three young children and a toy dog named Pacha, and they had a guest room in their garage that was meant to be our new residence. For me, this was like entering the Twilight Zone. Where was the red carpet announcing my arrival? Where were the maids to help us get settled in? Where was our freshly baked yuca bread? I didn’t get it. Why were we constantly downgrading our living conditions? We went from a large house in Urdesa, to a small apartment in Alborada, to a literal garage in Los Angeles. Luckily, I thought, this is just a vacation.
My aunt Teresa was my mom’s oldest sister and my godmother. Fun fact: Aunt Teresa was not present during my infant baptism because she was already living in the United States at the time, which officially makes her the first woman ever to stand me up. Aunt Teresa was a former beauty queen and a current mechanical engineer at McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor. My aunt Teresa’s garage guest room could have seemed like a makeshift sauna that smelled of Armor All and Castrol GTX, but it didn’t to us because it was our new home. More important, it didn’t to me because I did not have to live in it. I was allowed to stay in my cousin Chochis’s room inside the house. Chochis was two years younger than me, born one day after me in the same month, and by the unwritten laws of the immigrant family hierarchy, he was forced to look up to me. At least I liked to remind him of this as he ignored me and played his Nintendo by himself.
My aunt Teresa loved American animated films, which I did as well shortly after coming to the States. Like all children, I loved Sunday-morning cartoons, but animated films were another magical experience entirely. These weren’t ongoing episodic stories. They were confined to a time and place, which made them that much more special—and easier to collect. That is why one unexpected night, she had us all sit down as a family to watch An American Tail. If you are a young immigrant to the United States and have never seen An American Tail, don’t! Directed by Don Bluth and produced by Steven Spielberg, this sweeping animated feature film about a young Russian mouse that migrates to America with his family and subsequently loses them along the way, fucked me up. I cried that night in fear that I, too, would be separated from my parents in this country. Why would anybody show this traumatizing piece of family separation propaganda to a seven-year-old boy a few weeks after arriving in the United States? My aunt Teresa and Steven Spielberg owe me money for all the years of therapy that film caused me. Luckily, I can play “Somewhere Out There” to this day and happily cry myself to sleep at night.
The garage guest room eventually got a new twenty-inch color TV. This high-tech entertainment system was only possible because of my dad’s new American job, which his cousin got for him. My dad’s job was not at a hospital, but still I found it strange that he left for work not wearing his medical scrubs. Up to that point, I figured every adult wore medical scrubs to go to work since that was what both my mom and my dad wore in Ecuador when they left the house. But becoming doctors in the States was not going to be easy. They discovered the hard way their medical licenses meant nothing in this country. They were forced to start from scratch. But that was not going to stop them. They were determined to work their way back to becoming doctors, even if it meant learning a new language, going back to school, and retaking the medical exam. But first, my dad left for his first day of work dressed in old blue jeans and an oversize white T-shirt. My dad’s appearance is best described as “poor man’s chic.” Thanks to his cousin, my dad put his pediatric surgeon’s hands to work on brand-new 1988 Nissan Maximas. Not on their engines, but on their wax detail. True to California immigrant tradition, my dad’s first job in this country was at a car wash—the Alamo Car Wash in West Covina to be exact. The sad thing was that my dad made more money in tips at the car wash than he ever did saving children’s lives in Ecuador, where he would more often than not be paid with live hens.
My mom, however, was shockingly close to hitting the jackpot. At least in my humble opinion. As I sat with her trying to translate the classified job listings in the newspaper, I saw that Pizza Hut was hiring. It dawned on me that if I could get my mom to work at Pizza Hut, then we could eat pizza every night. Let me explain: At the time, Pizza Hut was considered fine dining in Ecuador. Globally, fast-food companies don’t change their prices. So given the standard of living in Ecuador, you could afford a plate of meat, rice, and beans for three dollars in 1988, but you could not afford a Quarter Pounder, let alone the cheese. In my eyes, if my mom got a job at Pizza Hut, it would be a boon to our social status. I encouraged her to apply every chance I got. Unfortunately, my mom did not agree with corporate America’s nutritional standard of living, so Pizza Hut was a nonstarter with her. I was condemned to eating delicious and laboriously prepared Ecuadorian food at the risk of being seen as lower class by our new American neighbors, since we clearly did not have the kind of high salaries it required to afford pizza on a daily basis.
I eventually got to meet the rest of my extended family. My uncle Ivan, my mom’s older brother and the reigning champ of all Spanish language dad jokes; his lovely Mexican wife, Lucha; and their three kids. Three kids seemed to be the going rate for Ecuadorian Americans in Los Angeles. As luck would have it, one of my uncle Ivan’s kids, Choli, was my exact age. Choli and I became best friends from the moment we met. There was no small talk between us. We just ran outside and started playing basketball. As a soccer-prone South American kid, I didn’t know how to shoot a basketball, but Choli took the time to teach me. It was amazing to have a cousin my exact age. It felt like finding a long-lost brother, except one of us could speak perfect English. One of our favorite pastimes was acting out Hollywood films in front of my aunt Teresa’s living room TV. Our go-to was always John Travolta’s Grease. I would play Danny Zuko, Choli would play Kenickie, his sister Diane would play Rizzo, Chochis’s older sister Jessica would play Sandy, and Chochis himself would be forced to play all the other supporting characters. I wish I could say we knew how to perform the whole movie, but really we just rewound “Summer Nights” over and over again. It was a wonderful out-of-tune ethnic production that no adult in our family ever had time to watch.
A quick point of clarification: I didn’t know I was seen as ethnic at the time. Please understand that at this early stage of my life I didn’t know what ethnicity was. I had never heard the term “Latino” or “Hispanic” in Ecuador. My cousin Choli had light skin and blue eyes, for crying out loud! What was my elementary school brain to make of all this? I was a privileged little white kid (with a beautiful olive tan) in South America, so to me, everyone was either rich (white) or poor (people who couldn’t afford pizza).
As much as I was having fun with my cousins, I looked forward to going back to be with my grandparents. Like most kids in Latin America, I was essentially raised by Grandma and Grandpa. I missed them terribly. I figured my parents and I would head back to see them real soon. Then my birthday came, and my mom made the biggest mistake of her young adult life. She conspired with my aunt Teresa to celebrate Chochis’s and my birthday on the same day as a way to save money and not have to overspend on two parties. I had no idea this terrible plan was hatched. My mom said we were going to Chuck E. Cheese for my birthday and I took her at face value. I did find it odd when I saw some of Chochis’s younger friends at Chuck E. Cheese with us, but I assumed they just wanted to celebrate my life. Back in Guayaquil, my birthdays were the thing to do. My grandfather would use it as an excuse to throw a big party and invite the whole town. One year, he rented an electric train to take me and all the neighborhood kids around the block. In other words, as far as I was concerned, my birthday was my day and nobody else’s. That was the attitude I carried when the birthday cake finally came out and I saw both Chochis’s and my names written on it. Oh hell no. When everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” I went out of my way to repeat “Rafa” twice so that it sounded like: “Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday Rafa and… RAFA!” My grandma would have never allowed this travesty to occur. To this day, Chochis and I still have not recovered.
If birthday parties were going to be like this in America, then I wanted no part of it. American Ninja didn’t have to celebrate his birthday with other ninjas, but then again I didn’t see his birthday in the film. In any case, I immediately asked my mom when we were going back to Ecuador. She said, “Soon.” I asked her a week later, and she said, “Soon.” She repeated the lie so often that I stopped believing her, and one day I just started to cry. I was disheartened. I missed my friends. I missed my grandparents. Chochis was no longer talking to me because I had refused to acknowledge his birth. This entire vacation was starting to feel like a debacle. That’s when my mom leveled with me…
“We came here to start a new life. Your dad and I are going to school to learn English, so that we can both become doctors here. And you’re going to go to school here, too.”
My mom had misled me. She had never lied to me before that moment, so this was a lot to take in. On the one hand, the way my mom spoke to me as an adult at eight years of age was very sobering. On the other hand, she had lied—and she taught me never to lie. Ultimately, this country made my mom lie to me, which meant America and I now had ourselves a problem! I decided to toughen up. No more nice little Ecuadorian boy. It was time for me to grow up and adapt. Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution in Ecuador—in the Galápagos Islands—so the least I could do was try to adapt to my new surroundings. I learned to use a microwave. I also learned to take out the trash. I needed to stop acting like a privileged little white South American kid. I stopped complaining that there were no chauffeurs to take us to the park. Walk to the park? No problem. I was no longer insulted by my aunt Teresa’s suggestion. I even stopped resenting the garage guest room for its lack of amenities. Everything seemed to be going great until I attended my first day of public school.
Up to that point in my life, I had only been enrolled in private schools. Catholic guilt, hideous school uniforms, and a lack of diversity were what I had grown accustomed to. I assumed American public schools would be the same. My mom and I arrived at Oswalt Elementary at 7:30 a.m. on a Monday morning. As all the white kids ran past us screaming in English, it became clear to me that I would be the only white kid at school who did not speak the language. Luckily, my cousin Choli was already attending Oswalt Elementary, so I was going to have someone to hang out with at recess. That was when I saw a few African American kids run by. Then some Asian American kids. I had never seen this much diversity in one place in my life. It was overwhelming. The American film and TV shows I watched growing up did not have this many minorities in them. Perceiving them as danger, my inner Michael Dudikoff wanted to come out and defend America for some reason. And then I saw them: the Mexican American kids. And by God, they looked more like me than I did the white kids. This truth was hard to comprehend. I was about to have a brain aneurysm.
My mom walked me over to the front office. As she finalized my student paperwork, my mother stumbled onto a question she had never seen before. The question asked: “Is your child a special student?” Well, my mother, not knowing that “special” had a double meaning in English, and knowing that I was on the honor roll at my previous school, and—let’s face it—since I was an only child, of course my mother considered me to be pretty damn special, she wrote: “Yes. Mi hijo is a special student.”
Needless to say, on my first week of school in this great nation, I was placed in special education classes. From the beginning I sensed there was something off about my new lessons. Granted I didn’t have a complete grasp of the English language but I knew something was terribly wrong when the teacher stood in front of our third-grade class with one orange in her right hand and one orange in her left and proceeded to say, “One orange plus one orange equals two oranges.” It’s not just that I thought it was a little offensive to be teaching an immigrant child with oranges! I was more befuddled. Were all the kids in this class “special” or did we just not speak English? I tried to communicate with my blond teacher that I was three levels more advanced in math and science than my entire grade, but she didn’t know what I was saying. They pulled my poor cousin Choli out of class so he could translate for me. Choli walked into my class completely embarrassed to be associated with the one non–English speaker. His Kenickie swagger had all but disappeared. He translated what I said to my teacher: “Ms. Summers, I don’t belong in this class.” Ms. Summers let out an audible aww, and then chimed in: “I know. Nobody does.” Choli went back to his class, and I went back to my seat, confused.
On the work front, a family friend had told my dad about a clinical job at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. It was for a technician position at their sleep disorder center. My dad was overqualified with his background, but at that point, my dad would have taken any job that would get him out of hand washing any more automobiles. The new job required a social security number. Luckily, when they arrived in the States, my aunts and uncles explained to my parents that they would need social security numbers as adults. It would allow them to work and drive in the country, so they were able to get theirs before laws on who was able to acquire a social security number changed. My parents, however, did not get me a social security card because, according to everyone’s logic, I was a child and was not going to work anytime soon. Why would I need a social security number? More on that later.
My dad got hired at the sleep disorder center, which meant he could leave the car wash work in his rearview mirror. Because my dad’s new job required him to stay up late at night while his patients were asleep, my mom would accompany him while my dad monitored the brain waves of his patients. His new employers didn’t know my mom was there, but it was the graveyard shift and there was nobody around to say anything. My mom was really there for moral support. My dad was in a new country, in a new job, and barely knew the language. My mom’s presence calmed him a great deal.
This was my parents’ routine that first year in this country: attend Mt. San Antonio College for English as a Second Language classes during the day and then head over to the Good Samaritan for the graveyard shift. I rarely saw them. I would stay up late at night wondering where they were. Their absence, ironically, gave me a sleep disorder! I thought the whole point was to come to America for a better life. Things seemed to be worse here than they were in Ecuador.
With my mom accompanying my dad to work every evening, my parents and I were like ships in the night. We would see each other in the mornings, but then not again until the weekends. I spent most of my nonschool hours with my cousins, while the adults in the house all worked full-time. By the time the weekend rolled around, everyone seemed exhausted—my parents most of all. America was a different way of life and they were barely getting accustomed to it. In Ecuador, not everybody had the privilege of finding work, but at least everyone made time to be with their families. Maybe it was because of all the free time they had from not working!? In the States, however, any capable body could find menial work, and you could keep that work for as long as you were able to produce. Unfortunately, there was no real time for family in this country.
If my mom regretted coming to America, she never showed it. She took on this new tiring experiment for her husband and son, and she never once complained about it. My dad said they would be doctors in America one day, maybe even at UCLA Medical, and by God, she believed him. They both worked tirelessly toward that goal. First Monday through Friday, but eventually seven days a week. It’s heartbreaking to think that they were never able to become doctors in the United States. Because the greatest lesson my parents ever learned in this country was that the American Dream is not for you, but for your children.