One summer in the late 1990s, while earning a Master’s degree in geography at the University of Arizona, I drove a friend’s truck across the border to Nogales, Sonora every week to research on children’s perceptions of globalization in one very poor colonia called “Solidarity.” I arranged to spend nights in one of the family’s homes—a concrete house on a double lot with an extra sofa in the living room.
On the afternoon of my first night there, a heavy rainstorm swept across town. The rain came down hard for over an hour spurting through the glass-less windows and rapping on the half-finished aluminum roof. The children and I and I took turns holding cups out from under the roof of the porch and pouring the collected water on the potted plants. Eventually rain turned to hail and bounced off the porch in tiny pellets. Then rivers flowed down the street. I prayed the truck wouldn’t float away.
To the west, the sun lowered and filled up half the sky with light. Within moments a full rainbow stretched over the hills. Seven-year-old Judith, the oldest daughter, flashed a toothless smile at the sky. “I want to go over there,” she said, pointing to the rainbow, “to touch it and see if it’s hard. And if it is, I can climb up it.”
Judith didn’t know any tales about pots of gold at the end of a rainbow’s arc. When I told her, she leapt around the house for the rest of the afternoon, plotting her journey to the treasure. “And when I get it,” she said. “I’ll bring it back for my dad.”
I scribbled her words in my notebook—this was just the kind of conversational gem I wanted: childhood hope and dreaming.
At night, I slept on a lopsided couch in the living room. A breeze blew through the window, but still, I sweated inside my sleeping bag. Tinny music came from the house next door. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ear all night. I woke up every hour to make sure the truck hadn’t rolled down the hill. When the roosters crowed at dawn, I was grateful the night was over.
The next day, I crossed back into Arizona for a few hours. The excuse I created for myself was to make a phone call. But I was hot and cranky. I flopped down on a fluffy couch in the empty lobby of the Americana Motel. The cold air inside dried my skin. I pressed my bare feet into the marble floor, then called home and listened to my boyfriend’s voice, which sounded hollow and far away inside the new house we had just rented–the house with its thick white walls, evaporative cooling, wood floors, high ceilings. It was an easy one-hour drive north from where I stood. I told him I’d be home in three days. I hung up and went to the bathroom and washed my hands with hot water soap because I could. This privilege wasn’t lost on me.
That evening, after my work at the school was done, I sat in the kitchen with Rosario.
She told me how grateful she was to have this home, a far cry from the one she grew up in, in Sinaloa. “It wasn’t very sturdy. Once, a cyclone came and carried it away. We all ran outside and the whole family squeezed into the truck.”
As we talked together, she set a bowl of flour and a tub of lard on to the counter. She added lard to the flour, and mixed it with her hands, asking me to pour in a little water from time to time, along with pinches of salt.
“Flour tortillas?” I asked. She nodded.
She showed me how to take a small amount of masa and form it into a small ball. When we had a dozen or more of them, she took one between her hands and flattened it, passing it back and forth in a graceful clapping dance. I followed her moves.
Hers came out round and perfect. Mine were misshaped, crooked, uneven. She smiled and put them in the cast iron skillet anyway.
Later, her husband Ricardo laughed when I carried the tortillas to the table. “Huaraches,” he said, a reference to the durable leather sandals with soles made from recycled tires. I laughed.
“They always look like huaraches at first,” he said. He ate happily, as did I.
That night, Rosario insisted that I sleep in the bedroom with everyone else. I could have the top bunk to myself, she said, and the screen door would keep the mosquitoes away.
So I did.
