The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (3 page)

It was amazing. She could tell if we were putting our backbones into it, and if we didn’t—
pow!
We would get it. Now we appreciate what she did, because she created a certain thing that all my sisters and brothers and I have—a pride in what we do and in our family. But back then it was tough. My mom was really intense to live with. We were both the same kind of intense. She questioned everything, and so did I.

I remember one time she was angry at me for some reason, and I just took off. I must have been all of five or six years old. I left the house, pulling this little toy crocodile on wheels behind me. I wasn’t crying or sad, I was just exploring and getting away from Mom, thinking about avoiding the rocks with my crocodile and not hitting certain lines in the pavement. I got involved with people in the market and the horses passing by. I was also thinking, “This is really cool—I can put a distance between my angry mom and myself for a little bit.”

When my sisters found me, they ran up to me. “Weren’t you afraid, being by yourself? Didn’t you get lonely or scared?” Truth is, I didn’t have time to think about it. I think I was born living in the now, not being concerned with what’s up ahead. I think that experience planted a seed in me so that in years to come I wouldn’t limit myself or be so self-absorbed with fear. I would feel welcome walking into new and strange places, like, “Oh, I’m in Japan!”—and my eyes would get bigger as I would start noticing the beautiful temples. Or, “Oh, I’m in Rome; look at this street; look at that one!” and I’d be off exploring.

When you’re a child everything seems new and wonderful—even the scary stuff. I first saw a fire when the local supermarket burned. Apparently even back then somebody wanted to collect insurance, so he burned down his own store. I had never seen flames so big. The sky looked red and everything.

Another time I saw a man almost die when he was badly gored by a bull. I must have been five or six. I remember a bunch of men walking through town with posters announcing a bullfight. That weekend my mom dressed me up, and we went to the Plaza del Toros, which was on the other side of town from our house. I walked in the parade at the start of the event—marching to the
pasodoble
next to this little girl who was also dressed up. Years later I was able to tell Miles Davis that he and Gil Evans got it right when he did “Saeta” on
Sketches of Spain
. That’s the tempo and feel at the start, when everyone walks around the ring.

You only have to see a few bullfights to know that when most bulls enter the ring they run to the center and look around, snorting and angry. But that day a bull came in and just looked at the toreadors. He was cool, like a fighter sizing up his opponent—like Mike Tyson before he had money. Then he ran. But he jumped over the fence, and people were leaping out of their seats and running for their lives!

They somehow got the bull, opened the gate, and led him back into the ring. He went running into the middle again and stopped and just stood there, still saying, “Okay—who’s got the guts to come and deal with me?” One bullfighter stepped up with his red cape, but this was no idiot bull—he wasn’t going for the color. He was going for the guy. The bullfighter got too close, and one of the bull’s horns got him right in the side. They had to distract the bull so they could rescue the man. The guy lived. I don’t know what happened to the poor bull.

I remember when I started going to Autlán’s public primary school, the Escuela Central. There were paintings of all the Mexican heroes on the walls—Padre Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez,
Emiliano Zapata—and we began to learn about them. I liked the stories about Juarez best because he was the only Mexican president who had worked in the fields as a peasant and was a “real Mexican”—that is, part Indian, like my dad. My favorite teachers were the best storytellers: they would read from a book and make it all come alive—the Romans and Julius Caesar, Hernán Cortés and Montezuma, the conquistadors and the whole conquest of Mexico.

Mexican history is a hard subject to talk about now, because as I grew up I quickly learned that it’s pretty much been a merry-go-round of everybody taking turns raping the country: the pope, the Spanish, then the French and the Americans. The Spanish couldn’t beat the Aztec warriors with their muskets, so they spread germs to kill them off. I could never swallow that one. The history I was taught was definitely from a Mexican perspective, so I was curious about this country up north that was founded by Europeans who took it away from American Indians and then from us Mexicans. To us, Davy Crockett got killed for being in a place he shouldn’t have been to begin with. The next thing you know, Mexico lost all its territory, from west Texas all the way up to Oregon. All that originally belonged to Mexico. From our perspective, we never crossed the border. The border crossed us.

Our awareness of America was through its culture. My mom wanted to get away from her hometown because she saw a world of elegance and sophistication in the movies of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. I learned about America from Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry. And
Howdy Doody
. I would learn a lot more later through the music, but first it was through the movies. In Autlán there wasn’t a proper theater, so the people used to wait until nighttime and hang a big sheet across the middle of a street and project the movies on it, like a drive-in without the cars.

I’ve always been conflicted about America. I would come to love America and especially American music, but I don’t like the way America justifies taking what didn’t belong to it. On the one hand, I have a lot of gratitude. On the other hand, it can piss me off when it puffs up its chest and has to say, “We’re number one in the world,
and you’re not!” I’ve traveled the world and seen many other places. In many ways, America’s not even in the top five.

I was not a great student. I didn’t enjoy the classes. I got bored very quickly and had trouble sitting still. As a child I never wanted to sit and learn things that didn’t mean anything to me. At recess time, I was allowed to go home for lunch. It was a long walk, and I liked doing that, though one time I remember going back home to find that my mom had prepared some chicken soup, even though it was hot outside. I said, “I don’t want to eat soup.” Of course, like any mom, she said, “Eat it; you’re going to need it.”

When she turned her back, I grabbed a whole wad of red chili powder that was on the table and dumped it in the soup. “Mom, I made a mistake. I wanted a little bit of chili, but the whole thing went in there!” She saw right through that. “Eat all of it.”

“But Mom…” So I ate it. Man, I got back to school fast after that!

I was young and could be foolish, but I was always learning, especially out in the world. In Autlán, I was old enough to understand that my father was a musician, that he made a living playing the violin and singing. My dad played music that was about functions. It was music to celebrate by—we need some happy music, music to raise our glasses to. Can’t have a party without some polkas to dance to. Music to help someone serenade his girl, to get her back after he messed up. Music to feel sorry for yourself—cry-in-your-beer music. I could never stand that last kind of music—there’s way too much of that in Mexico. I love real emotion and feeling—I guess you call it pathos—in music. I mean, I love the blues! But I don’t like it when the music is about whining or feeling sorry for yourself.

I got to know the kind of music Dad liked—Mexican popular music of the 1930s and ’40s was his bag. Love songs that everyone would hear in the movies, and the ballads of Pedro Vargas, a Cuban singer who was really big in Mexico—“Solamente una Vez,” “Piel Canela.” He’d play those melodies with such conviction, slow them down, either by himself at home or with a band in front of an audience. It didn’t matter. But he knew a wide repertoire of Mexican
music—he had to. Mexican music is basically European music: German polkas—oompah, oompah—and French waltzes.

By the late 1940s, around the time I was born,
corridos
—history songs and all that macho cowboy stuff, including mariachi music—started to push away all the other music. My dad had no problem with that. He would play the mariachi standards that everyone knew. He would get dressed up in those costumes and the wide-brimmed hats. That’s what people wanted to hear; that’s the music that got you paid to play. It’s like so many fathers and sons—he had his music, and I had to have mine.

But that came later. In Autlán I was too young to really appreciate what my dad’s being a musician meant for us. Later on I found out that he was supporting not only our family but also his mother and a few of my aunts—his sisters—with his music. His father, Antonino, was also a musician, as was Antonino’s father before him. They called them
músicos municipal
—municipal musicians—and they played in parades, at civil functions, and were paid by the local government. Antonino played brass instruments. But he developed a drinking problem and could no longer function. Then he dropped out of the picture. I never met him—the only thing I ever saw of my dad’s father is in a painting. There he looked like a real,
real
Mexican Indian: he had a large nose, his hair is all messed up, and he was standing with a band and playing a
córneo,
a small French horn. That’s the look of Mexico for me, the real Mexico.

My father never talked about those things—not then, not really ever. He was one of ten children, and they grew up in El Grullo, a small town halfway between Autlán and Cuautla, where he was born. We only visited a few times, when my mom wanted to appease my dad. I remember my grandma frightened me—her silhouetted shadow on the wall, cast by the candlelight, scared the hell out of me. She was sweet as pie with my dad, but with us and my mom she was a little guarded.

That’s where we met our cousins—my aunt’s kids. My siblings and I may have been from a small town, but we were city kids compared
to them. They were country, country, country—which meant that we got a real education. They would say, “Come here; see that chicken? Look in her eyes.”

“Why? What’s wrong with her eyes?”

“She’s going to lay an egg!”

“What?”

I didn’t even know chickens laid eggs. Sure enough, the chicken’s eyes got wide, it started clucking, and all of a sudden—
pop!
Out came this steaming egg. I was like,
“Wow!”
Not until we visited my grandparents did I experience that or the sound and smell of cow’s milk when it hits the bucket. There’s nothing like it.

It came to a point one afternoon when nature was taking its course and I had to go to the bathroom. I was used to toilets or an outhouse, but I didn’t see any around. So I asked my cousins. “See those bushes?” they said. “Do it right there.”

“No—outside? Really?”

“Yeah, right there beside those bushes. Where else?”

“And how do you clean yourself?”

“Leaves, of course.”

I was like, “Uh… okay.”

So I was over there doing my business. The next thing I knew I felt this wet, hairy thing touching my booty. I turned around and got the fright of my life—it was a pig’s snout, and he was snorting and trying to eat my stuff! I was like,
“Aaaah!!”
I ran out of there with my pants still around my knees, trying to get away from that hungry pig, and all my cousins and brothers and sisters were laughing so hard they were falling over. They didn’t warn me to be careful of the pigs and do your business fast, because that’s what pigs love to eat. It was enough to make me stop eating bacon.

When I was seven years old, our family was as big as it was going to get, and things began to get really tough. We were seven kids—from thirteen-year-old Tony down to baby Maria, plus Chepa and a small dog that looked like a white mop and had no name. Some guy had asked my mom to hold it for him and never returned
to get it back. My dad was working harder than ever, trying to keep money coming in for food, and he started to leave for longer periods. I missed him all the time; everyone did. When he would come back home, we all wanted to be with him, especially my mother. But they would fight—about money and about women.

Through the eyes of a child, I saw only the fighting. They would yell at each other, and I hated that, because I loved my dad and my mom. I didn’t understand the reasons behind the behavior, and I didn’t know words like
discipline
and
self-control
. Hearing them fight when I was a child was like looking at a book with words and pictures, and you get a general idea from the pictures but you can’t read what’s written to get the full meaning.

All I knew is that they would go at it, and then my dad would leave and come back at four in the morning with a bunch of musicians, and he’d serenade my mom from the street outside. You could hear them coming, and all of us would wake up. My dad would stand right in front of our window and play the violin and start singing “Vereda Tropical.” It was their make-up anthem. Like B. B. King, my dad never sang and played at the same time, ever. He’d sing the lines—“Why did she leave? You let her go, tropical path / Make her return to me”—and then to bring it home he’d embellish the melody with the violin.

We’d watch my mom, and if she went to the window and opened the curtains, we said to ourselves, “They’re going to be all right, thank God.” It was beautiful, and we kids felt relieved. “Okay, they’re going to keep it together.” That happened a number of times.

Some of their loyalty to each other I think came from experience, from learning to get past the rough stuff. When they were first married my mother couldn’t cook at all. She’d been raised on a ranch with servants and cooks. When she first tried to bring him food, my dad was rough. “I work really hard. Don’t waste any more money, and don’t ever bring me this crap again. Go next door and ask the neighbor to teach you how to cook. Go ask somebody.”

My mom did that. “I swallowed my pride,” she told me. The
neighbors said, “Don’t worry, Josefina, we’ll teach you. You put grease in here and then a little piece of tortilla, and when it turns a certain color, then you can put the chicken in.” My mom eventually became one of the greatest cooks ever.