In my retirement years I like to listen to music of the 70s when I attended graduate school at the University of Kansas. One morning in early July one song by James Taylor instantly evoked memories of growing up in El Paso. It was the song, Mexico, from Taylor’s album, Gorilla, whichI particularly liked, because it reminded me of that summer I spent in Mexico between my junior and senior years of high school. The lyrics are whimsical and joyful, with a catchy Mexican beat.

Oh, down in Mexico
I never really been so I don’t really know
Oh, Mexico
I guess I’ll have to go
Oh, Mexico

In the summer of ’62 I applied for a summer program to build friendships between El Paso and the small village of Río Florido. It was called “Crossroads of America”, under the auspices of the two town councils and was supported by Sargent Shriver of the Peace Corps, established during President Kennedy’s presidency. I was accepted and agreed to spend two months in Río Florido, about 400 miles south of El Paso in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. 

That summer I learned to work with a group of high school students from El Paso, building desks for the village grade school and teaching English to first graders. There were about 16 of us, an equal mix of Anglo and Chicano teenagers. Most of my friends in El Paso were Mexican, and I seldom interacted with whites, except in the classroom and in sports. I became more sociable in high school because of that experience in Mexico. 

The bus trip from El Paso to Río Florido was long and tiring, but the organizers of the program tried to make it interesting by laying over in Parral for the night, the largest city near the village. When we got off the bus in the early evening, we were told to wash up and prepare for a dance sponsored by one of the local prep schools for girls.

I never dated in high school, never attended any school dances or proms, and rarely spoke to any girls in school. But that night the Mexican high school girls were friendly, and I had my first dance with a girl as a teenager. Chubby Checker’s Twist was number one on the charts that summer of ’62, and one of the girls persuaded me to do the twist with her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two of our El Paso chaperones laughing and pointing at me. Somehow, I got through the evening and said goodbye to the Mexican girl who was so nice to me.

Late that night we got on the bus and an hour later we were in Río Florido. I was ready to have new experiences in the country that my grandparents and mother escaped to start their new lives in America.

“Danny, you’re at the top level with William”, one of the chaperones for the trip yelled out.

There were two individual beds for William and me, two steps above the rest of the guys, whose beds were aligned in two rows of seven beds below us. The outhouse and shower were behind our small building, which was actually a small parish hall next to the church. Our meals were prepared by some of the village women, which were quite hearty and different, unlike the Tex-Mex food served in many El Paso restaurants. 

It was an eclectic group of guys involved in this Crossroads’ program. Two of the guys were Mormons, who chose this summer program to fulfill one of the Mormon church’s tenets to help the poor and needy. One of the chaperones was the father of one of the boys, and I learned more about the Mormon church from the three of them.

I thought I was shy around strangers, but William was even shyer than me. During our free time in the late afternoon when it was too hot to be outside working, we’d go back to our sleeping quarters to rest, read, or just talk. William took out his copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and read it each afternoon. I mostly read novels like the Count of Monte Cristo; I asked him many questions about Germany and WWII. He was very modest about his knowledge of history and politics.

One early morning as all of us were getting dressed for the day, there was a shout from William:

“There is something in my shorts!”, he screamed.

“What does it feel like? Is it a bug or spider?”, someone yelled out.

We had been warned by the chaperones to check our clothes and shoes before we put them on because scorpions and other insects were always lurking around. He immediately took off his shorts and threw them to the floor. A baby scorpion crawled out of the shorts. We all laughed that it wasn’t a big scorpion, but he had turned quite red by that time, standing stark naked in front of us.

That episode with William reminded me of my life as a small boy in El Paso. Several of the rental houses our family lived in had a variety of bugs and insects that sometimes got into our homes. Our first rental home was elevated on stilts with no cement foundation. We didn’t have a backyard; instead an alley jutted against the back windows of the living room and my sisters’ bedroom. Because I didn’t have a bedroom of my own, I often stayed over at Nana Cuca’s house with Tía Babe and her son, Louie.

There were a few gaps between the wooden slats of the flooring, where I could see below (especially near the toilet in the bathroom) the dirt floor of the basement, where roaches, spiders, black vinegarroons, and other nasty insects scampered about. I was not allowed to go into the basement, which could only be entered through a locked rickety half-door on the exterior side of the house. Near the door was a gradual slope from the alley which was lined with many rocks to prevent erosion when it rained. I’d found special-colored rocks and secretly hid coins under the rocks that my two sisters couldn’t find.

My summer experience in Rio Florido revealed the contrast between the homes of the haves and have-nots in this poor village. I met some of the older Mexican boys who lived in haciendas in the more affluent part of Río Florido. Because there was no high school there, they went away to prep schools and came back home for the summer months. We had long conversations about the US, and I asked them a lot about Mexico and its customs and politics. Unlike the other El Paso Mexican students who spoke fluently in Spanish, my Spanish was terrible. But this summer experience gave me more practice in learning conversational Spanish. They didn’t laugh at my accent and awkward phrasing of words, which I really appreciated.

Why memories of my life as a young Mexican boy came to me while I was participating in this program I can’t explain. Was it because of my attempt to rectify the shame I had of my Mexican heritage? My earliest memories brought out my conflicted thoughts about growing up as a poor Mexican boy who desperately wanted to be white. When I started grade school in the early 1950s, I was a shy Mexican boy who wanted to impress his white teachers and classmates.

Those early phases of my life have haunted me for years: my attempt to become “Americanized” led me to be ashamed of my background and to not stand up for my Mexican identity. I incorrectly believed that competing successfully as a “non-Mexican” at educational and professional levels was more significant than accepting one’s own cultural background. I thought that this acquisition of “whiteness” allowed me to leave my Mexican heritage behind me. It was only later in high school that I realized I was so wrong, and it is that part of my life that I am truly ashamed of. A person of color should never corrupt one’s own identity to make it in white America.

My new Mexican friends in Río Florido opened my eyes to the beauty and wonder of Mexico.

“Quieres un poco de sandía?”, Juan asked me. 

One lazy, hot afternoon I went out with a group of his friends to a wooded area near his parents’ hacienda. We sat in the shade and ate delicious ice-cold watermelon, lying in the cool grass and looking up at the sky with its many clouds. We tried to guess what animals were represented by the cloud formations.

Afterwards, I was invited to Juan’s home and met his family. The hacienda was picture-perfect, as one who had only read about large adobe haciendas in magazines but never saw one in person. One entered the home through a large, magnificent door which opened up to a quiet garden, with flowers, shrubs and large trees which provided shade and coolness during the summer months. A covered veranda around the hacienda led to the many rooms of the home. I was taken to a large open kitchen where I met his parents and grandmother. It smelled delicious in the room. We had warm tortillas with beans and vegetables for a light snack.

Juan’s abuela asked me about my parents and where they came from. The little I knew I told her about my abuela and mother emigrating from Chihuahua and settling in El Paso, across the border from Juárez. I was ashamed that I didn’t know more about my family history. Much of my knowledge came from Nana Cuca and not from my parents. There was a reluctance on the part of my parents to talk about their early years growing up in Texas.  

I learned bits and pieces over the years about my father who was born in Valentine, Texas. His parents had also emigrated from Mexico. He quit school after the sixth grade to work with his father who was a cowboy on a ranch near Marfa. We were never told how our parents met; we learned later that they were married by a justice of the peace in a small town in New Mexico. A few months later they were formerly married in a Catholic church in El Paso.

The thing is that I wanted to remain in Mexico to learn more about its beauty and people, but the Crossroads program ended in early August, and we returned to El Paso. For most of the guys we began our last year of high school. That dance with a friendly Mexican girl gave me the courage to be more sociable and friendly in my senior year. I became more confident in myself and participated in more school activities. I joined the chess and science clubs, and because of my grades, I was elected into the Senior National Honor Society.

But more significantly I was elected president of the school’s chapter of the Spanish National Honor Society. I became more sociable and learned to speak more comfortably in front of people by leading the chapter’s meetings and worked with my Spanish teacher on its monthly agendas. Some of our meetings were held in the more affluent homes of the Anglo students. While growing up, my family lived in five rental homes, none like the ones I saw during my presidency of the chapter. I was so glad that I was never asked to host one of those meetings at our house.

I also remembered the several times I turned down dates with girls who asked me out for school dances or the ROTC prom in my sophomore and junior years. I promptly said no without any explanation. I was ashamed that I didn’t have a car to go out on dates with girls; I never learned to drive until I was in my last year of college. I used an old bicycle for my paper route, and I didn’t want any of my classmates see me ride the bike to school. 

But one day because of my new experiences in Mexico, I surprised myself and agreed to go out on a date (or sort of a date) to play tennis with a girl from my government class. She was a very attractive Chicana, who asked me to play a set of tennis at a court near her house. I was able to walk to the court without taking my dilapidated bike. 

She was a much better player than me. In my t-shirt, jeans, and old tennis shoes, I looked like a jerk, compared to her cute tennis outfit of a white blouse and skirt. I lost badly because I was looking more at her slender, lovely legs than the tennis ball. Like baseball, always keep your eyes on the ball. I think she liked me, but I never went out with her again. Funny, these are things that might have changed my high school experiences if I had been more assertive in asking her out later on a date. I will never know. But that experience gave me the incentive to date in my last years of college and then later when I was in graduate school.

Life for me in El Paso as a young boy in the 50s and early 60s was enjoyable. I had many good times with Babe, Louie, and Nana Cuca at their home on Piedras Street. Memories of the years before I started high school and my actual years of high school from 1959 to 1963 were devoid of the acrimony and strife that I’d experience when I started pharmacy school at the University of Texas at Austin.  

By the time I graduated with a degree pharmacy in 1968, the US was in turmoil over civil rights for Blacks and people of color and the war in Vietnam. There were political and social disputes between the baby boomers and their parents. It was truly an extreme generational clash of ideas and independence.

But this story is about those fonder memories of my early life in El Paso and the feelings and love I have for Mexico. I wanted to remain in Mexico to learn more of its culture and people, and, more importantly, about my own heritage and identity.

Oh, Mexico
It sounds so simple, I just got to go
The sun’s so hot I forgot to go home
Guess I’ll have to go now.

– Daniel Acosta

Author’s Note: The lyrics are from James Taylor’s song “Mexico,” which was first recorded in 1970.