The week before I started my new school in Duarte, my mom asked me, “Do you want to go to Disneyland?” She already knew the damn answer. I had been begging her to take me since we got to this country. I was excited. I couldn’t believe that after several years of begging we were finally going to Disneyland. My mom had scraped enough money together to make my wish come true. Disneyland was not anywhere near where we lived. It was in a different county altogether, but a trip to the most magical place on earth was a must. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I kept wondering what Disneyland would be like and if all the characters I had seen in the Disney animated films would be there. My mom had read to me all the Disney stories in Ecuador and then subsequently shown me all the Disney movies in the United States. I was ready to meet Snow White, Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Donald Duck, Sleeping Beauty, Goofy, etc. You name it, and I was ready for them!
The first step inside the park was breathtaking. There was a train station welcoming us with a large Mickey Mouse head made of flowers directly in front of it. The monorail whizzed by us from on high. Inside the happiest place on earth (marketing really does work on me), I asked my mom to please buy me a blue Mickey Mouse T-shirt that I saw displayed in a gift shop’s window. She regrettably said no because we did not have that kind of money. Bummed, I followed her to stand in line for a ride of a Disney character I had never heard of before. I asked my mom out loud: “Who is Peter Pan?” The American families around us gasped. “You never read Peter Pan to your son?” asked one randomly offended mother. “Peter Pan is an essential Disney character,” exclaimed another. Everyone standing within a fifteen-foot radius demanded to know why my mom had never taught me anything about Peter Pan. Feeling mortified, my mom took me out of the line and we went straight to the gift shop to buy me the blue Mickey Mouse T-shirt instead. My mom feels great shame to this day for not having read Peter Pan to me at an earlier age. And quite frankly, she should.
Post Disney, I was finally ready to enter the fourth grade at Royal Oaks Elementary. This was yet another new start for me. I saw it as another chance to get this American student thing right. My previous school had been tough. It took me a full school year to properly learn English. If not for my cousin Choli, I would have been completely isolated. But now that I could speak English, it was easier for me to make friends. Like a lot of the schools I attended in those early years, Royal Oaks was filled with older white teachers trying to instruct a bunch of rowdy minority students. I was starting to feel at home within multicultural America.
I liked school in Duarte. There were a lot more immigrant and Latino kids. That made me feel like I was part of a family, it made me feel safer, and it helped me start my learning process. There was one girl in class, however, who really stood out: Erin. Erin was a white, freckle-faced nine-year-old with bright red hair and sparkling blue eyes. Ironically, Erin was exotic-looking in a sea full of kids of color. Like I mentioned before, I watched a lot of TV as a child and all the desirable people I saw on the screen were fair-skinned, so it’s no wonder that shaped my sense of what made a person pretty. And I wasn’t alone in idealizing this aesthetic. I watched the women in my life make themselves look more like these glamorous white Hollywood actresses. Even my beautiful darker-skinned aunts dyed their hair blond. As I look back on things now, I realize that it wasn’t just Hollywood that promoted Eurocentric beauty. When my parents watched Spanish language television, all its stars, hosts, and news reporters were light-skinned and had light-colored eyes. I wasn’t aware of the politics of it at the time, but I certainly internalized that standard of beauty. Erin was that standard personified.
I had admired Erin from afar for months. I rarely talked to her directly, but when I said something smart or funny in class, I was always hyperaware if she was paying attention. So I was taken off-guard when one of Erin’s girlfriends approached me one morning during recess. This was also unusual since boys and girls were generally segregated—due to cooties and other deadly diseases. She asked me if I thought Erin was pretty. Without thinking, I said, “Yes, of course.” The friend replied that Erin liked me, too, and that she would let her know. “Hold on,” I said, without having any follow-up statement ready. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t let someone I liked know that I liked them. But I had already shown my hand and I didn’t know a cool way to walk it back. Erin’s friend waited for me to say something but I didn’t have anything to say. The friend shrugged, turned, and ran back to the girls’ side of the playground to report her findings. Of course, for the rest of the afternoon I thought of all the things I could have said that would have made me seem mysterious and intriguing. But my fate was sealed and I would just have to wait it out.
Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long. That evening, I was having dinner with my parents when the phone rang. Usually, when we received a call around this time, a family member was on the other end of the line. If we were lucky, it was an international call from my grandma to see how we were doing. My mom picked up the phone and said hello. She listened for a few seconds and then, bewildered, handed me the phone. “It’s for you.” Curious, I grabbed the phone and said hello in Spanish.
“Hi. It’s Erin.”
“Oh, hi.”
There was an awkward beat between us. I had never spoken to a girl on the phone before. I didn’t know what to say. Erin then complained about a kid in class that I thought was annoying, and we were off to the races. Erin and I spoke on the phone for roughly thirty minutes before I heard her mom demanding that she get off the landline. We were both nine years old, so we were really just talking about our friends and the classwork that we both hated. When I hung up, my mom asked, “Who was that?”
“A girl from school.”
“A new friend?” she asked, her eyes twinkling with amusement that annoyed me.
“I guess.”
My mom chuckled, knowing that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.
Erin and I waved at each other at school the next day, but that was it. At home that evening, Erin called me again. This became our routine. I have no idea why Erin liked me. I didn’t even like myself, not since leaving Ecuador. I was chubby and spoke with an accent in the States. I didn’t like girls. I just wanted to play baseball. Erin called my house every evening like clockwork. My parents couldn’t believe it. If the phone was not ringing because of family, they always feared it would ring because of the landlord demanding his rent money. Instead, it rang because of Erin.
On one of our many evening calls, Erin finally asked, “Do you want to be my boyfriend?” I didn’t know what that meant. Would being someone’s boyfriend add more chores to my day? Confused and slightly weary, I still replied, “Sure.” That reply would define my view on romantic relationships for the next twenty years. I always just went with the flow.
One pleasant Sunday, I rode my bike to Erin’s house. This was the first time we’d be together outside of school. Erin and her brothers were going to play Dungeons and Dragons, a board game I had never heard of before, and she thought it would be neat if I joined them. Sure, I thought. When I got there, I was surprised to discover she lived in an apartment building just like I did, yet I had never run into somebody that looked like Erin. I walked in and said hi to Erin, her mom, her grandma, and her two younger brothers I didn’t even know existed, and we sat down to play the board game together at the dining room table. I was handed a character sheet that looked very puzzling. Then an elaborate map of the world was placed in front of us. It started to feel like they were giving me homework on a Saturday, and I was not happy about that. After one of Erin’s brothers pompously declared himself the Dungeon Master, the lead storyteller, and the rule maker, I completely checked out of the game. The only reason I did not leave was because I was Erin’s boyfriend. And since I didn’t really know what that meant, I thought it would be best if I just hung out with her and did what I was told. Another relationship lesson I wish I would have remembered as an adult! Erin had two brothers—both younger. And while it is supposedly Hispanics who have large families, there I was—an only child—hanging out with a white family that was bigger than mine. Perhaps they were Catholic as well.
My dad always complained about my mom’s siblings. I didn’t understand why until I played Dungeons and Dragons with Erin’s brothers. They were annoyingly obsessed over the game and how to choose the proper race and class of your character. I remember thinking that maybe I didn’t want Erin’s younger brothers as in-laws, in the way that my dad didn’t want my mom’s siblings as in-laws. I don’t know how I knew this at nine years of age, but the Dungeon Master struck me as the type of brother-in-law who would always be asking me for money.
After two excruciatingly long hours, I finally said good-bye to Erin and her family. I was glad to be done with Dungeons and Dragons forever. I walked outside and picked up my bike. Before I could pedal away, Erin rushed out and stood between my bicycle and the sidewalk. She smiled at me coquettishly, and then slowly leaned in. I didn’t know what she was doing, or why she was leaning so close to my face. Erin closed her eyes. I wondered, Was she trying to smell my shirt? My mom was using a new fabric softener that smelled splendid, but how could Erin know that? I could barely smell it myself. Erin puckered her lips, stopped waiting for me to get a clue, and just went in for the kiss herself. I was stunned, but I did not complain. It was my first kiss. Not even a Dungeon Master could have written it any better.
While I was busy tangling with the Dungeon Master, my parents were on an adventure of their own. It started when they decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. When you don’t have much money, long walks are the pastime of choice. In an outdoor strip mall next to our local gas station, my parents saw a sign they had never seen before. It was a poster of Uncle Sam pointing directly at them. This drawing of a chiseled man with a white top hat and blue jacket was calling my parents in. I did not know it at the time, but my parents and I had overstayed our tourist visas and we were in the country without documentation. That put us at great risk for deportation, and added a lot of stress to my mom and dad’s daily work lives. They kept all this from me, allowing me to live the life of a normal American kid, but their anxiety about it haunted everything they did. That was why my parents thought that perhaps joining the United States military was the best way to rectify the immigration mess they found themselves in.
My mom and dad anxiously sat across from a military recruiter. He was a tall, clean-cut, African American officer. At the time, the United States desperately needed soldiers to enlist for Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, and this military recruiter had just hit the jackpot with my medical doctor parents. On most days he was lucky to get a high school dropout or two to walk into his recruitment station, but standing there before him on this day were two adults in their prime—both doctors—and both willing to go to war for this country. “You are exactly what the military needs,” exclaimed the recruiter as he picked up his telephone and started dialing. He wasted no time in calling his superior. My parents looked at each other; it was all happening so fast. There was so much hope and anticipation behind this one phone call, but would they check with immigration? Without saying anything to one another, it was clear that if they were going to get anywhere on this day, they would have to come clean. They steeled themselves and said: “We need to tell you that we do not have our immigration papers.” The recruiter nodded his head and said, “Don’t worry—we’ll make this work.” My parents looked at each other and smiled. For the first time since landing in this country, they finally let out a sigh of relief.
As hard as he tried, the recruiter could not get any of his superiors to sign off on my parents’ enlistment. Their lack of immigration papers turned out to be more of a complication than he had ever imagined. It was now evening, but the recruiter was determined. He refused to let my parents leave—he even offered to buy them dinner. By this point, my parents had filled him in on everything: how they came to the country with tourist visas and then overstayed. He also knew they were a pediatric surgeon and an anesthesiologist living in the United States without proper work authorization. He knew that they would do anything to right that wrong, and that they were ready to go to the Middle East and serve as doctors on the front lines for this country to do so. The recruiter thought it was a no-brainer. He saw it as a fair trade: the United States did not have to invest any money in my parents’ formal education and subsequent residencies to become doctors, yet would benefit fully from all of their medical expertise. But no matter how hard he tried, or how much he begged over the phone, he could not get any supervisor to sign off on my parents joining the service. That was the evening my parents learned their situation was impossible—no matter how well intentioned they were, there was no clear path to documentation and their son’s future was at risk because of that. Defeated, the military recruiter apologized, said his final good-bye at the door, and felt worse than my parents did for not being able to enlist them in the United States Armed Forces.
My mom and dad arrived at our small apartment that evening feeling drained. Their concern over how long they would remain in this immigration limbo was taking a toll. They found me sitting on the couch watching TV. I had just had my first kiss—in this country or any other. My dad brought out his wallet and saw that he had only five dollars to his name. He looked up at me and asked, “Do you want to go to ampm?”