Yvette Benavides

Sometimes it feels like the U.S.-Mexico border is a place without a voice. Opinions about this space are sometimes borne of fear and misinformation. The real story of the Texas-Mexico border, more specifically, is often misunderstood. People think it’s a monolith and that every city and town is like every other one along a 2000-mile stretch of border. That’s not true. Each place has its own ineffable allure, its own character and vibe. The Texas border has a population of three million residents. That’s a lot of people living life and bearing witness to what goes on right there. I believe that telling more stories from and about the border, in fiction and nonfiction, in English and Spanish, offers a formidable challenge to the sometimes-skewed versions of the story of the border that persist.

As a freelance journalist who is also bilingual, interpreter gigs are some of my favorite assignments. I go out into the field, accompanying reporters covering important stories about the border and immigration and helping them communicate with people whose stories might not otherwise be shared, published, and brought into the light.

As a professor of literature, I also consider the critical work of literary translators. Through literary translations we can receive the literatures written in the languages that might be closed to us because we don’t understand them or we don’t speak them. We’ve never been to the places where the languages are spoken. Through translation we can begin to understand the stories–the people who tell them and the places they come from. The translated works become part of our place, right here in America. They become part of the language we speak. Yes, translation offers dimension to the ways we think–and that influences our language and communication, too. We can start to know and experience the same things others know and experience across the world, right here in America, because of literary translation.

I’d always been a good student in my hometown of Laredo on the border, but attending university in Austin, I learned right away that being an English major meant hiding a part of myself for part of the day.

In my first semester, I ended up in a linguistics class quite by accident.  I remember so clearly how the professor first discussed the concept of code-switching and called on me and asked if I was familiar with the concept. Yes. I switched from English to Spanish and back again in a single sentence all the time in conversations with my parents and siblings. I didn’t know this kind of communication that has always been a fact of my life had a name or that it was written about in the pages of my textbooks.

That was the first time in this early part of my college career that I felt like I had something to offer, like both of my languages mattered.

It wasn’t that long ago that young people were punished in school for speaking Spanish.

More recently, I’ve watched viral videos of people at coffee shops and other public spaces being harassed for speaking Spanish.

I’ll never shy away from speaking Spanish.

I love the English language, too.

There is no facet of my bilingual language story that can be silenced.

Superpower? That’s not some haughty assertion. It seems to me instead an appropriate way to describe my bilingualism because it is something I can never change or resist. And I work very hard to use it for good.

In his seminal semi-autobiographical novel, y no se lo trago la tierra, author Tomás Rivera offers a tale about the lives of a community of migrant farmworkers from Crystal City, Texas. The title of the work has been translated as and the Earth Did Not Devour Him.

The protagonist, Marcos, is a young boy in a small Texas town. His brother Julián went missing in action while serving in the Korean War.  His family has only one single photo of him–youthful and solemn in his military uniform.

Marcos does well in school, but soon he and his family must leave their home to travel north to Minnesota to follow the crops. Marcos must find his own way to enroll in school there because his father and mother don’t speak much English and his mother suffers from nerves or a kind of anxiety.

Marcos is bullied in the school for being “Mexican.” He watches his overworked father collapse in the fields. Then his little sister succumbs to exhaustion.

Marcos’ mother is consumed with the idea of Julián and spends their few pennies buying candles for her makeshift altar where she keeps the photo of Julián and spends hours each evening praying for his return.

Marcos suffers a dark night of the soul. He wants to summon the devil because this will mean that there is a God–perhaps a God that will care for the plight of his family and other migrants who seem to have been born to work and suffer and never quite have a true home.

Worse still, with no spoilers, I’ll share that through a series of terrible circumstances, the photo of Julián–the only one that existed–is damaged and lost.

Marcos is wise beyond his years. He is observant and watchful. Everyone agrees that he is very smart and capable.

A traveling troubadour tells him to write down his stories so that “others will remember.” These are words that Marcos takes to heart. He comes to realize that Julián–and everyone he loves–can be immortalized through words. Through stories.

Once back in Crystal City, he climbs a tree and looks across the way, thinking he sees another person.  Uncharacteristically, Marcos calls attention to himself. He waves, he says, so that the other person will know that he is there.

Migrant workers should not be invisible. They do the fine-fingered work that no machine can possibly accomplish. They are complex human beings–each with a story. Perhaps they don’t have a platform to share their stories, their dreams and aspirations, but as Rivera’s novel shows, they are as complex and intelligent and resourceful and industrious as anyone else.

Here is a figurative wave, America. I wave to say that the migrant worker is here–with much to offer that too often goes unnoticed and unsung.

Every town or city in America has a secret history–stories that aren’t shared enough. When I want to know about a place, those are the stories I seek out.

Here’s one example of such a story about someone who might best be described as an antihero.

In 1948, civil rights attorney Gustavo “Gus” Garcia argued Delgado v. Bastrop ISD in the U.S. District Court, the outcome of which made the segregation of Mexican Americans in Texas public education illegal.

In January of 1954, Garcia successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to bring about an end to the systematic exclusion of Hispanics from jury service. While the State allowed that no person with a Spanish surname had served on a jury for 25 years, the absence was due only to coincidence.

This was the first case to be tried by Mexican American attorneys before the United States Supreme Court.  Garcia argued that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed protection, not only on the basis of race, but also class. While Mexican Americans may be considered “white,” the established pattern of discrimination against them proved they were also a “class apart.”

Garcia was so eloquent, his presentation so compelling, that the justices, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, allowed him to go 16 minutes over his allotted time—another first in the history of Supreme Court cases.

The Supreme Court voted unanimously in favor of Hernandez. The case set a vital precedent for civil rights.

Perhaps as noteworthy as Garcia’s compelling oration is that the night before the arguments, he had climbed out a hotel window to go out and get drunk.  Everyone who knew him knew of his heavy drinking. The reputation at that time did not hamper his career.

Eventually, however, it all caught up with him. He died destitute and alone on a park bench in San Antonio, Texas in 1964 at the age of 48.

Scholars who have studied Garcia’s life, speculate that he could have had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder which could account for the long spells of mania that led the man to such feats of excellence and also the low lows that brought about his problems with alcohol, his failed relationships with three wives and, of course, his untimely death.

History loves winners. When we study American history, whose stories do we get to read about? I certainly didn’t read about Gus Garcia in any history book in school. I think I would have benefited from learning about him. I would have loved to know that it isn’t perfection that can lead us to our greatest achievement. There are other mysterious elements at work in those sorts of endeavors–things that make us human, that probably allow us to feel sympathy and empathy for others.

Garcia was heroic in his ongoing fight for equal justice, to be sure.

However, he also lost major battles. He lost to a persistent lack of social equity, the stigma of mental illness, and the daunting battle against addiction.

Garcia was born in Laredo and raised in San Antonio. He was considered handsome for the green eyes and fair features unusual in the contexts of Texas-Mexico border cities. People often say, “He didn’t look Mexican,” as if that were a compliment. The well-meaning refrain about Garcia has always been akin to, “He did pretty well for a Mexican guy,” even though, by any standard, his mental might and his courtroom prowess were obviously unequaled. He demonstrated this fact again and again throughout his short life.

Perhaps Garcia, for all his accomplishments, hit a ceiling in his career that he could not transcend because of the times, the still-simmering racism and discrimination that perennially boiled over. The lack of understanding and acceptance of mental illness, particularly in underserved communities with other cultural variables to reckon with, made any consideration of mental illness impossible. It was easier just to think that he could not hold his liquor.

Some of us admire our heroes all the more for their feet of clay and the darkest chapters of their stories. If there must be monuments, let them be to those who succumbed while battling their own personal demons. Let their triumphs be the footnotes drowned out by the elegies of what could have been. Let the statues not be made of marble or anything gilded. Paper has always been good enough for lovers of words.