A Cool New Piece & Big Hugs to Helena

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . .  My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.