My parents were both able to find full-time employment, which meant we could afford to get our own apartment once more. We said good-bye to the Espinozas and Panorama City, packed our cars, and headed to Monrovia, California, where I was to start middle school. Between the extremes of Thousand Oaks and Panorama City, I felt ready for whatever Monrovia public schools would throw at me.
Santa Fe Middle School was not as bad as I’d feared. Yes, there were some kids who were developing faster than others. There was a lot of sex being talked about in the bathrooms, and some boys even pulled out their penises in the back of the class so that the giggling curious girls could touch them. But despite that, the majority of us were just dorks at heart. We simply wanted to play basketball. The big problem was that I wasn’t good at basketball. I peaked when I kicked Oliver Stone’s son’s ass, and it was all downhill after that.
It was 1992. The era of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. A lot of kids in our LA County middle school were wearing Chicago Bulls gear. That felt blasphemous to me. I was a hardcore Lakers fan. Well, more specifically, a Magic Johnson fan. When my grandfather came to stay with us in San Clemente, we would watch a lot of basketball games together. It was how my dad, grandpa, and I bonded. My grandfather’s nickname in Ecuador was El Negro (i.e., “the Black Man”), but my grandfather did not like Black people. I’ll give you a second to digest that. A darker-skinned Ecuadorian who was called “the Black Man” but did not like Black people. My grandfather was filled with a lot of self-hate that could fill an entire book. But I mention it because I want you to understand how impacted I was when he said during a live Lakers game:
“I love Magic Johnson.”
I was speechless. I was more stunned by my grandfather’s comment than I was of Magic’s no-look pass on live television. Magic Johnson changed my grandfather’s view of Black athletes, and subsequently of other Black people. He no longer criticized them or made backhanded remarks when he saw them on TV. He proudly cheered them on as the Lakers played, and it took the greatest point guard ever to play the game to accomplish that.
All the cool kids at school played basketball, so if I was going to fit in, in seventh grade, I would have to learn to play the game, and play it well. Fortunately, our new apartment complex had a basketball hoop in the parking lot, which could be accessed once there were no cars parked under it. I shot hoops every day from the time I got home from school until the first car parked under the basket. I put in the work, I was highly dedicated, but I was still terrible. I didn’t have anybody to show me the proper shot form. My dad was good at basketball, but he got a new job at a vocational school teaching previously incarcerated individuals how to work as surgical assistants, so he was gone all the time. He caught me shooting hoops once, grabbed my rebound, sank a three-pointer, and then left for work without teaching me how he did it.
I nervously stood by the court at lunch the next day waiting to be picked on a team. I really wanted to be wanted, but nobody picked me. I was afraid I would go friendless at this school. That’s when Rodney, a charismatic Black kid with a million-dollar smile whom everyone wanted to be friends with, and who also happened to be the best player on the court, decided to take a chance on me.
“I’ll take Rafael,” said Rodney. “Why not?”
Rodney was so good, he knew he could win with me as a disadvantage. The game started and I stayed in the back court. The ball got stripped out of Rodney’s hands by the opposing team. They were on a fast break down the court and would have made it, if not for me being there to block the shot. I was big for my age, so I was an imposing defender just by standing there. Rodney ran back, grabbed the rebound, and tossed it to the other end of the court, where a teammate made an easy layup. Rodney turned to me and said, “Good job.” I smiled, not realizing how clever my choice to focus on defense was. No kid ever wanted to play defense because everyone just wanted to show off on the offense. I exclusively began playing defense, and Rodney continued to pick me on his team. As a result, everyone started accepting me at school simply because I was one of Rodney’s boys.
Walking home from school one day, I discovered that Rodney lived in the apartment building behind mine, so we walked home together. We started to hang out more. Rodney would come over to our apartment and we would do homework together, we would watch TV together, we would even listen to the new Boyz II Men and Kris Kross albums together. It was safe to say that Rodney and I were friends. Then April 29, 1992, happened. We were told to stay home from school as we watched Los Angeles burn in the news. My mom and I were glued to the TV. She called my uncle Ivan to make sure he was safe after seeing his work building up in flames. Time and time again, the news referred to what was happening as “a riot.” I was eleven years old and nothing that I saw on TV made any sense to me.
When we eventually went back to school, Rodney was a little distant. He was still nice to me because that was his nature, but there seemed to be some kind of new invisible barrier between us. “Hey,” I would wave. Rodney would nod his head and keep walking. Nobody played basketball at lunch for a week.
Rodney eventually stopped walking home with me after school. Instead, he preferred to hang out with other Black kids. He stopped coming over to our apartment altogether. I tried so hard to get Rodney to like me initially that when he actually did, I thought nothing could ever break that bond. I wasn’t ready for race to be a topic in our friendship, or in my life in general. A lot of us were privileged enough not to think about race if we didn’t want to. American students like Rodney, however, had no choice but to deal with it every day—simply due to the color of their skin. From all the previous schools I had attended in Southern California, I knew that I was not white. But after April 29, 1992, I also discovered that I was not Black. Unfortunately, the concept of race in America is mostly understood as a black and white paradigm. Anything outside of that dichotomy gets ignored. I did not know where I, as a young Latino, fit in, in all of this. Our school system did a poor job talking about race. No teacher at school brought up what had happened after the Rodney King verdict. We all saw what happened on TV, but nobody talked about it. A few students bragged about how they knew people who were “down there jacking stuff.” As immigrants, my parents were just shocked that things could get so violent on the streets of America. They had left the political turmoil of South America in part for that reason.
I was an immigrant kid yearning for his friend. I did not understand the generational trauma that Rodney must have been going through. I did not understand why Black people took to the streets to begin with, the history of policing in communities of color, or what the murder of the young Latasha Harlins before the verdict that acquitted the LAPD officers who had clearly used excessive force against an unarmed Rodney King had to do with any of it. I wanted my friend back, but all I got in return was a lot of racial tension that continued to go unaddressed. Rodney and I stopped hanging out. He stuck more with the Black kids, and I in turn had no choice but to stick with the Latino kids. We all further segregated ourselves.
At this time, my dad was working a full-time job in East LA with people who had previously had a difficult time with the criminal justice system and wanted to turn their lives around. He was working at a vocational school teaching nontraditional students to become surgical assistants. The job was great for my dad, who loved to pretend he was still the head surgeon in his mock emergency rooms. The problem was that my dad had a thick accent, and these first-generation ex-gangbangers were not having it. They were quite infuriated that my dad did not speak perfect English. It affected their learning, which in turn affected their future prospects. There was clearly a communication breakdown between both parties.
One tense day in class, during an excruciatingly long technical lecture that even my dad hated giving, the MCIC (main chola in charge) shouted: “Stop talking!” My dad froze. He didn’t know what to do. Also, no one ever yells at the head surgeon—they are the ones who do all the yelling. The MCIC continued: “These lectures are a joke. We can’t even understand you!” Concerned that his students might get violent, my dad asked in his broken English, “What do you suggest we should do?” The MCIC stood up, walked to the front of the class, and got up in my dad’s face. Now nose to nose, my dad knew too well this battle-hardened woman from the streets could cause him great physical harm. The MCIC looked my short, skinny dad up and down. “We’ll make you a deal. You teach us how to work in the ER, and we’ll teach you English. Deal?” “Deal,” said my dad, letting out a sigh of relief, not knowing this would be the best deal he would ever receive in this country.
As the months passed, my dad got in sync with his tough, ex-gang-banging students. He even learned how to say, “’Sup,” without looking like a dork. My dad got better and better at speaking English thanks to them, which in turn made it a lot easier for them to learn. The MCIC was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant by this point. She was huge. One bitter day, my dad got home incredibly late from work. When my mom asked where he’d been, he told her the most remarkable story ever. This is the one story I cannot verify, but think it is important to share.
My dad claimed that he was teaching the difference between a surgical scalpel and a needle driver when the MCIC’s water broke in the middle of class. She went straight into labor and nothing was going to stop that baby from entering the world. My dad ran over to the MCIC to make sure she was okay, and right as he commanded for somebody to call an ambulance, she made one simple request of him: “I want you to deliver my baby.” Without taking a second to consider, my dad turned the entire class into a makeshift operating room. Everybody got around him and they each put into practice what they had been learning all those past months. The MCIC screamed, which attracted outside attention to the class. A short cholo quickly locked the door to prevent anybody from entering. My dad was helping the MCIC push while the short cholo told the people outside the door to please call an ambulance. When it was all said and done, my dad delivered a healthy seven-and-a-half-pound baby boy—one with no police record and full of potential. The MCIC took the newborn into her loving arms and thanked my dad, who then climbed out the window so that he wouldn’t get fired for practicing medicine illegally. My mom and I were made speechless by this story.
My dad got a reputation for being “down,” which meant being cool in street slang—one with the pack. My dad started hanging out with his students outside of class a lot. He never took my mom or me near his vocational students, so we never knew what he was up to. Then one day he came home pale in the face. He was fired from his vocational teaching job. My mom and I were shocked. He told us that he gave a sick janitor an antiviral injection, and that the school administration used that as grounds for him having practiced medicine illegally. Since he was not a doctor in this country, my dad said he was fired on the spot. It was yet another remarkable story. I looked up at my mom to see if she believed him. She did. This time my parents did not have to say anything. My dad losing his job meant that we were moving again.