Tag: pocho
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Gracias, México, for Saving My Salvadoran Soul
Once my Uncle Paco–the pain-in-the-ass Salvadoran revolutionary in exile in Mexico–saw how much books meant to me, he backed off. After I shook the novel Cien años de soledad in his face and swore I’d read it until I understood it, I holed up in his guest bedroom and started on the first paragraph, with a…
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The Uncle Who Kicked My Salvadoran Ass
My great Uncle Paco was a pain in the ass. He had been all his life. In the 1930’s, he had joined with the Communist movement in El Salvador, during the rise of a dictator they called El Brujo, the Warlock. They had planned for an uprising of the poor against the corrupt and bloody…
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Mexico, My Mexico
The woman, in her fifties, had draped a black, webbed veil over her head. Her dress might have been from Sears, bought at a thrift store, but the scarf around her neck was from a thousand years of Nahuatl stitching. Her skin was Oaxacan-brown, with the native folds in her cheeks. She clenched her hands…