“A Chicano Revenge Story” by Tomás Baiza
personal essay
“Crackdown” by Douglas G. Campbell
I invited you to my favorite Mexican restaurant because I
really
don’t
like
you.
And your treatment of people less powerful than you has made me wonder, for the first time in my life, which side I want to be on.
There is nothing self-consciously “Mexican” about this place except that it is exactly the kind of establishment you might find in any small Mexican town that serves perfect tacos al pastor with strawberry Peñafiel or ruby-red agua de jamaica. A place that in Mexico would simply be a restaurant, but here is a Mexican restaurant.
I invited you to this place because I’m counting that its unselfconscious Mexicanness will not only be unfamiliar to you, but that it will scare you.
And more than anything—more than my desire to enjoy a great lunch—I want you to be scared.
It’s a perverse thing to want to terrify the person to whom I owe so much.
Who taught me the basics of primary and secondary historical research.
Who helped me publish my first undergraduate research paper.
Who promised to write me grad school recommendations and then, quietly, didn’t.
Whose class I still have to pass in order to graduate (so this little escapade could blow up in my face, big-time).
Whose female students have learned to avoid office hours and whisper warnings about you to other female students—whispers that took far too long for me to understand.
• • •
After class a few weeks ago, you said to me, “Now that I live on the West Coast with all these Mexicans, I really need to pick up some Spanish.” You said it breezily, as if picking up some Spanish were just some parlor trick, and those of us graced by your New York-accented tourist phrases nothing more than your breathless, thankful audience.
I had no idea whether you included me with all these Mexicans, or if I was exempt because I was acculturated, light-skinned, and beholden to you as one of your students. You only knew me from our interactions as mentor and mentee, and from the lunches to which you’d begun to invite me.
Our most recent outing was to the Sichuan café across the street from your office. I had the audacity to order in Chinese because I’m in second-year Mandarin and desperate to see if I could get my tones right. The older woman behind the register laughed and patted me on the shoulder. With kindness in her eyes, she teased me that although my grammar was passable, my tones made me sound like a kindergartener. She and I shared a laugh, but you were uncharacteristically quiet. You were not the center of attention.
After that lunch, you became sullen and suspicious.
• • •
The restaurant I’m taking you to today is called Las Brasas. The Embers.
The owners are from Guadalajara and the kitchen and dining room take up the bottom floor of a big barrio-pink house on E. Julian St. It’s not that far from campus, but just far enough that I’m positive you don’t even know this neighborhood exists. No, your commute from leafy Los Gatos brings you in on 280, south of the university. There’s no easy highway access to this part of my hometown, no simple way in or out. You gotta want to come here.
I know this place—shit, I know this whole pinche corner of the city—because of my pizza delivery job. It’s how I can afford tuition. I even delivered to you once, in your office, when you thought it would be fun to see me carrying that red delivery bag up the stairs.
• • •
Even though I’m from the east side of the Valley, pizza delivery has made this neighborhood mine. Yeah, it’s menial and dangerous, and on my worst nights, when the tips aren’t raining down and my boss is being an asshole, it makes me wonder whether there are better ways to pay for college. But I learned very quickly that what pizza delivery lacked in prestige and security it more than made up for in meaningful contact with sincere humans.
It was just a couple blocks from Las Brasas where I sat with two guys on my first night on the job. A middle-aged Black man and his elderly father who was dying of cancer. They were watching TV and craved pizza and, I think, a brief respite from the long, sad wait. We talked quietly until I said that I had to leave because I had other deliveries.
As the door to their apartment closed behind me, I knew that pizza delivery, coupled with this neighborhood, would change my life.
Down the street from Las Brasas was where three muggers chased me into an old multi-unit Victorian house in the middle of the night. I probably would have died right there in the pitch-black foyer if a door hadn’t suddenly opened in the darkness. I blasted through that door and locked it behind me, still holding the pizza box. My violent entry had sent the scraggly tweaker white guy sprawling across the room. He pointed at me and screamed, “My pizza! My pizza! Dude, that’s my fucking pizza!” Relieved that I wasn’t the cops or a rival dealer come to kill him, he gave me a huge tip, led me through the maze of his two-room meth lab, and let me escape through the back door as my would-be assailants lingered on the front steps of the decrepit flophouse.
“Bro, I really hope you make it back to your car,” the tweaker said to me as I descended the rear stairs. I sprinted across the back yard and hopped the fence, thankful that this man was probably the kindest meth cook a pizza delivery driver could ever meet.
And a few blocks further west, in Japantown, I recently found my entire shoe in the gaping jaws of a pitbull that had bolted past its owner to maul me on the porch. I managed to save my foot by shoving the dog’s face into the jagged bottom of a chain link fence until it squealed and fled back into the house. The beast’s shirtless owner and his entire crew flooded into the front yard and threatened to beat my ass for disrespecting their pet. High on adrenaline and fear, I squared up and told them that animal control would be there by dawn to cut their fucking dog’s balls off. Things calmed down when they gave me a $50 tip in exchange for a promise to not snitch to la chota.
I know this side of town. I know its attics, basements, churches, drug dens, preachers, prostitutes, cops, addicts, emergency rooms, assisted living facilities, midnight handball courts, combination laundromat-panadería-tax-preparation businesses, Thursday-night strip poker games, Friday-night orgies, and hourly hoteles de paso.
And I know that, nestled in the middle of this beautiful, scruffy mess, is Las Brasas.
• • •
“Wow,” you say from the passenger side of my rusty pick-up truck. The cloth upholstery reeks of stale pepperoni from my deliveries, and there’s a grease stain on the armrest the size of a half-dollar. “I’ve never been to this neighborhood.”
I want so bad to answer, “Why would you?” but I restrain myself. An expectant grin spreads across my face despite every attempt to lock it down. Your eyes dart back and forth.
“I’m guessing that this place you’re taking me to is pretty authentic?”
Fuck, of course you’d use that word.
“Lo más auténtico,” I answer, keenly aware that you have never, ever heard me utter a word in Spanish. This is the only Spanish that I will ever speak to you. In your office, you’ll regale me with the German that you know so well, and we’ll debate the subtleties of this Latin word or another in some medieval manuscript I’m transcribing for you, but I’m insecure about my Spanish. Speaking it, for me, is intensely personal. I have to trust you if I’m gonna bust it out.
And I’ve known for a while now that you are totally not that guy.
We luck out and find a spot right in front of the restaurant. You survey the house and seem taken aback by its gaudy, gratuitous pinkness.
“Reminds me of Barcelona,” you mumble, “or Cinque Terre.”
“Or Mexico,” I say as we cross the restaurant’s patio. The concrete is cracked and shaded by garish metal umbrellas. Under one of those aluminum palapas is seated a trio of cowboys who look up from their paper plates to inspect us as we pass. They could be from Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, or Durango. For all I know, one of them is a closeted Salvadoreño cosplaying as a northern Mexican, but they’re all flashing the proper vaquero uniform: boots, jeans, big-ass shiny belt buckles, black mustaches, and perfect felt hats.
To ignore the cowboys would be to expose myself as a total outsider, so I give them a subtle, respectful nod. Not an up-nod—because I’m not one of them and that would be too street—but a slight downward flick of the chin that lets them know that I see them and acknowledge that they were here first. The tallest of the cowboys nods back with the subtlest of squints that hints at a smile and I follow you inside the restaurant to the order counter.
• • •
It’s the smells that got me the first time I came here.
I was in between deliveries and in a hurry for something to go. The girl behind the counter was surprised that I ordered in Spanish and flirted with me as she handed over my food. I sped away to my next stop, the truck cab filled with the aroma of chicken flautas and guacamole—which I promptly spilled all over my lap. It was all good, though. I pulled over to clean up and was surprised at how buoyant my mood was despite the mess. My pocho college ass had just been hit on by a card-carrying Mexican girl. I was way up on tips that night. And I felt proud that I’d probably be able to cover tuition this semester.
I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to actually do with my life, but in the extreme short-term, things were good.
Along the way, I’d managed to impress you, the brash young history professor who was a shoe-in for tenure and openly auditioning acolytes. I had no idea, yet, that collecting mentees was one of the ways that members of the academy build professional capital. I didn’t yet realize that being associated with you—and the things for which you were slowly becoming infamous—could hurt me.
I would return to Las Brasas as often as I could on delivery nights—not for the girl at the counter, but because it had started to feel like home. Some evenings it was quiet, with families enjoying a rare meal out. Other nights, though, you could feel the edge. Junkies, gang members, ER nurses, the occasional cop—all of them part of a complex social ecosystem bound together by the food. Like how predators and prey rely on the same coral reef.
• • •
“I wasn’t able to get through last night’s reading,” Emily said. Her eyes sagged a little and she shook her head slowly. “My girls wouldn’t stay asleep, so we ended up watching TV until they passed out.”
I only ever get to chat with Emily in the minutes before lecture starts. She’s white with shoulder-length brown hair, maybe in her early thirties, and I have no idea how she’s able to manage her classes. I can barely hold shit together with my 30-hour-per-week pizza job.
She has two kids.
“It wasn’t too bad,” I said, trying to be comforting. “The Tristan and Isolde story was short. The part about the love potion was pretty corny, though.”
“Dude, I’m a divorced mom. I don’t believe in crap like love potions,” she deadpanned.
More than once, I’ve thought that if I wasn’t so intimated by her—and if things were totally different, if I were older or she were younger—I could like Emily more, or differently, than I currently do. I realized as we talked that it was nice to know a woman and not worry that anything more might or might not happen. I liked that we could just bullshit and it didn’t have to be any more than that.
Emily jammed her knuckles into her temples and sighed. “And tonight I’ll be at Dr. M’s house, so I’m not sure how much reading I’ll get done.”
I cocked my head at her and frowned. “At Dr. M’s house?” Oh fuck, are Emily and my professor dating?
“Yeah, I clean his house twice a week,” she said. “It’s a long drive out to Los Gatos, but he pays decent and he’s fairly clean, so it’s worth it. Sometimes I wonder if he leaves dishes in the sink just to give me something to do.”
I nodded and fumbled with the notebook. “Oh,” I managed to get out. “I—I didn’t know.” Who needs someone else to clean up their house?
“I just have to make sure that I’m in and out real quick,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “If I’m there too long, the vibe can get a little, I don’t know…heavy, you know? Dr. M’ll get all quiet and start standing a little too close and I’m like ‘Okay, everything’s looking good for now, see you in class!’”
The door to the classroom swung open and you entered like a windstorm, the wings of your suit jacket flared out at the waist and leather satchel swinging on your shoulder. Emily and I opened our notebooks and faced the front of the class, prepared for the next lecture on the cult of courtly love in medieval European literature.
My classmate cleans my professor’s house, I thought.
Like she’s his maid.
• • •
The Las Brasas menu board is a glorious display of low-tech Mexican practicality: a black wood-framed chalkboard hanging from the ceiling behind the register. The options are spelled out in swirly old-school Mexican script. Huevos dishes are announced in orange chalk; the Platos in yellow; and green for the Antojitos and Bebidas. Next to the register are two comically large glass pitchers. They’re not labeled, but I know that the milky white one is horchata, and the other, a deep, crystalline red, is Las Brasas’s famed agua de jamaica.
The young woman behind the register recognizes me with a raised eyebrow, as if she’s thinking, You don’t usually come here during the daytime, and never with some random gabacho.
Despite her confusion, she smiles and says, “¿En qué puedo servirles?”
The mix of shit-kicker conjunto music, combined with the aroma of meat sizzling on the grill, threatens to overwhelm the senses. I’m used to it, but you most certainly are not. You blink at the menu and open your mouth to order, but nothing comes out. That deep, confident professor voice is, for once, silent.
I say to the cashier in Spanish, “This is his first time here. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
She covers her mouth to laugh and says in English to my mute professor, “Would you like a burrito?”
“Um…I’m—I don’t know,” you say, struggling mightily to look as though you’re in control, as if you’re not in a totally new and unfamiliar environment. You lean closer to the menu board. “What are, uh, what are…say-sos?”
The counter woman and I lock eyes. Sesos.
“Beef brains,” I say. “You can get them in tacos or burritos or quesadillas. Whatever you want.”
My own brain explodes with warped possibilities. Mad cow disease has been all over the news lately. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It comes from cow nervous tissue infected with twisted prions—basically proteins that have said fuck this shit and bent themselves into rogue, insanity-inducing neurological chaos agents that’ll kill you within a year, but not before your quality of life has been nuked into oblivion. Social isolation, confusion, paranoia, involuntary muscle spasms, incontinence, blindness, memory loss, depression. Symptoms so bad that the inevitable death is a mercy. All because of a few awkwardly folded proteins.
And you can’t cook that shit out, I think, gazing breathlessly into the blood-red depths of the agua de jamaica. My mind sparks with images of you wandering into class disheveled, disoriented, no clue who or what you are, your brain turned into Swiss cheese by the tacos de sesos that you ate right in front of me at Las Brasas!
Goddamn. I’m a Chicano monster.
• • •
The cowboys are still seated beneath their aluminum palapa when we return to the patio, holding our trays. They glance at one another, narrow-eyed, between pulls on their Coronas and then watch us from beneath the wide brims of their hats. I nod back at them, both annoyed and reluctantly relieved that you played it safe and opted for a bean burrito and not the cow brain torta. My chicken flautas, smothered in guacamole and cotija, are still steaming when we take our seats at the wobbly table closest to the street.
You survey the patio, your eyes settling momentarily on the cowboys.
“How do you know this neighborhood?” you ask, almost whispering. “Do you live around here?”
My teeth crunch through the deep-fried corn tortilla. “Nuh-uh,” I say, sucking in air against the molten chicken. “I found this place delivering pizzas.”
You nod slowly and pry your eyes from the cowboys, who are not even trying to hide that they’re all but leering at you. These men are the farthest thing from street thugs, but I have zero doubt that they’re tough as nails. I can’t imagine that they get many opportunities to blatantly challenge a well-dressed Anglo guy who is painfully out of his element. Watching you squirm beneath their gaze, I consider my own role in this little farce—how I essentially lured you to a place where you would not be able to use your credentials or institutional status to insulate you from the unknown.
I almost admire your pluck as you try to ignore the cowboys’ acid gaze and tuck politely into your burrito with your plastic knife and fork.
The young woman who took our order blinked at you when you asked for “silverware.”
“Dice que quiere cuchillo y tenedor,” I said to her, partly just to break the awkward silence. He said he wants a knife and fork.
“Pero el señor pidió un burrito. No se come con…” she started to answer and then shrugged, confused. But the gentleman ordered a burrito. You don’t eat those with…
I shrugged back. “¿Qué te puedo decir? El jaitón quiere lo que quiere.” What can I say? The snob wants what he wants.
• • •
Dr. Giangrande looked up from her desk and lowered her bifocals for effect. “Wait a minute,” she said, her dark eyes boring into me. “Are you telling me that Dr. M—Dr. M from the History department—is your major advisor?”
Written on the chalkboard behind her were the present indicative active forms of the second-conjugation Latin verb moneo, monēre.
moneō; monēs; monet; monēmus; monētis; monent
I warn; you (singular) warn; he/she/it warns; we warn; you (plural) warn; they warn
“Yes,” I told her, gathering from her tone that there was something wrong. “He also hired me to transcribe his lectures and publications into digital format.”
“Huh,” she said reluctantly. “That actually is good training.”
Dr. Giangrande shoved her notes into her oversized bag and tilted her head toward the classroom door. Nonverbal professor-talk for walk with me. I followed her down the hallway crowded with students rushing to their classes and onto the front steps of the Humanities building. She paused and raised her face to the spring sun.
“So, Baiza, what are you learning from our esteemed Dr. M?”
I liked that she called me by my last name, like she was one of my high school coaches.
“He’s helping me with secondary research,” I said, unsure why I’d begun to feel defensive. “I think he was impressed by some of the Latin sources I used in my first term paper, the ones you’ve had us read in your class.” I felt Dr. Giangrande’s eyes on me more than ever. “I’m guessing that I might be the only one in his class who’s doing that sort of thing.”
Dr. Giangrande arched a graying eyebrow. “Does he know that you learned Latin from me?”
There it was. I knew I’d have to be honest with this woman who, in her own way, was doing at least as much for me as Dr. M. Only, where accepting support from Dr. M was beginning to make me feel complicit, somehow, working with Dr. Giangrande left me feeling thankful.
“Yeah,” I said. “I wrote an essay about the medieval story of Yvain. He got intrigued when I linked the character Laudine’s name with laudō, laudāre.”
“The very first verb I taught you,” Dr. Giangrande said. “Nice touch.”
The gentle pride in her expression felt warm and sincere. Not like Dr. M, whose praise always seemed contingent on something else left unsaid.
“What was his reaction when you told him that you studied with me?”
I stared at my shoes, preparing myself.
“Go on,” she said, tilting her head. “Mihi crēdere potes.” You can trust me.
I took a deep breath. Here goes.
“He said, ‘In this business, you’ll have to tolerate some difficult women, but the perks are worth the struggle.’”
Dr. Giangrande’s eyes flared behind her glasses. “Did he confide in you exactly what those so-called ‘perks’ are?”
“Not really,” I said.
“But despite your occasionally dissociative demeanor, you can be extremely observant.” Her expression softened, bordering on sympathy. “What have you observed, Baiza? And please do consider the various implications of the Latin ob-servō before answering.”
How he wouldn’t give me a final grade on my mid-term paper until I’d finished transcribing his lecture series on itinerant medieval German kingship.
The veiled, retreating look in Emily’s eyes every time he enters the classroom.
The way he insists that the brunette who sits at the front of our class—the one who wears cut-off shorts and spaghetti strap tops on sunny days—come to his office hours because he would love to help her do better on her next paper.
“I’ve…observed things that are starting to make me uncomfortable. Things that don’t seem right.”
Dr. Giangrande nodded curtly, as if she’d made up her mind about something. “Instincts, Baiza. From a wonderfully visceral and essential Latin word. Your senses are inflamed or aroused around that man because his very nature alerts you to danger.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew these things, how she could so accurately describe the way I felt around this scholar who had invested so much time and effort in me, but whose way of moving through the world felt coldly transactional and self-serving. I realized—how could it be for the first time?—that Dr. Giangrande was my only female professor. The only woman in her department, I suspect. What must that be like for her? How many times a month, a day, a week were her instincts triggered in such an environment?
My mind spun with questions until Dr. Giangrande’s darkly intense stare brought me back.
“I don’t make it my business to gossip with students about colleagues, Baiza, but I’ll make an exception for you. That man’s mentorship is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. High rewards for him—and high risks for you and others.” Before turning to leave, Dr. Giangrande placed a hand on my shoulder and added, “Be careful around him. Keep a low profile, and don’t do anything rash.”
• • •
The cowboys are elbowing one another and sneering in our direction. You are literally sweating over your burrito and not just because of the habanero salsa that you stupidly put on it, and I’m wondering whether you’re scared enough to actually shit yourself right here in front of me. I watch you out of the corner of my eye and you seem…smaller, like you’re actually shrinking in your chair.
Throughout all of this, I’m asking myself if Dr. Giangrande would consider this situation that I’ve concocted rash.
Your hand trembles as you raise your fork to lips stretched thin from fear.
Yup. This is all feeling pretty goddamn rash to me.
Guilt unfurls in my gut, opening up like a black flower, its venomous petals dripping foulness and desolation. What the fuck have I done? I’ve lured this man into a trap under the guise of thanking him for his mentorship. I deliberately brought him to a place that I hoped would cause discomfort, but beyond my wildest hopes, he’s now being mean-mugged by “authentic” hat-wearing, belt-buckle-flashing, boot-stomping Mexican norteños who are absolutely loving making this snowflake gabacho soil his chonies.
And I’ve used Mexicans to do it.
I lean back in my unforgiving metal seat and take a deep, deep breath.
I’ve weaponized us—the Other—to get back at this brilliant, hapless turd for belittling us. For belittling me.
A dicho—a saying—that I once heard my grandmother pronounce in her kitchen comes back to me:
Ojo por ojo y acabamos todos ciegos. An eye for an eye and we’ll all end up blind.
You’re hunched defensively over your plate and I am this close to standing you up and getting us the fuck out of here when I hear it—the warm, burbling purr of dual flat-tipped exhaust pipes. As if summoned by demons catering to my vengeful pettiness, a slammed Impala lowrider slides past the restaurant, mere feet from the patio. The ranfla’s spoke wheels glitter in the midday sun, and its gray rainbow-sparkle paint reminds me of a manta ray sleepily patrolling the shallows. Glaring our direction through red-lensed ’64-style shades is a dark-skinned vato with tattoos that climb his neck, his thick forearm hanging out the open passenger window. Past him, the driver gooses the gas and cranks the chrome chain steering wheel to send the car leaning around the corner, the flat exhaust tips issuing a menacing—and beautiful—warning to anyone who would dare step off the sidewalk.
The cowboys pull faces and grumble at this new development, clearly unimpressed by the arrival of this entirely different kind of “Mexican.” It would be impossible to know without point-blank asking them, but I’d bet an entire month of delivery tips that to these cowboys, the words cholo, Chicano, and lowrider are all uncomfortable reminders that Mexicans in this country have evolved into new things that might reflect poorly on nuestra madre patria.
Your eyes are wide and give off an actual deer-in-the-headlights vibe. “I’ve never been to this neighborhood,” you say.
“Yeah, you said that when we got here.”
The revs of the Impala’s small-block V8 reach us from a street away. They’re circling the block and on their way back. The second time they cruise past, the passenger locks onto me and gives a slight up-nod. I nod back, not too quickly or eagerly. Just subtle enough to let him know that I see him seeing me and it’s all good.
“Do you know those gentlemen?” you ask.
Any pity or guilt that might have been threatening to make me a better person just seconds ago evaporate instantly.
“Why would you think we know each other?” I say, unable to hold back the growing bitchiness in my voice. “I already told you that I’m not from this neighborhood.” I have never spoken to you like this. I have never spoken so directly to any teacher or professor in my life.
You sit up straight, as if I’ve slapped you across the face. “But…he…” Your expression shifts from surprise to indignation. “You just exchanged salutations.”
Your cheeks are red and ¡chingao! I feel a thrill when anger flashes in your eyes. I’m not quite sure what this whole escapade is turning into, but I’m about to go full ni pedo—fuck it—on this.
“Hell yeah we did,” I answer. “That doesn’t mean we know each other, though. He acknowledged me, and I acknowledged him back. If I hadn’t, that could be bad.”
“Bad how?” You scan the patio for threats. The cowboys have moved on from us and are now bragging about how far they can flick the caps of their beer bottles. The aluminum caps plink against a garbage can, several feet from their table.
I shrug. “It would have been disrespectful. And the best way to find out how ugly it can get with dudes like that is to disrespect them for no reason.” I don’t tell you that the same goes for the shitkickers at the next table.
On cue, the Impala turns the corner and stalks past us again. This time the passenger ignores us, his head swiveling back and forth.
“What are they doing?” Your voice is shaky and you’ve abandoned your half-eaten burrito.
I resist the urge to set you at ease and tell you exactly what these men want. They’re just looking for a parking place, I could say. Because they’re two guys who want to get a decent lunch at an inexpensive, unpretentious place where they can hang out for a little bit on a concrete patio shaded by rusty metal palapas and purple bougainvilleas.
Just like us.
“Hard to tell,” I say, “but if I give you the signal, just do what I do, okay?”
These guys aren’t looking to murder anyone, and I love that you don’t know that.
“Oh!” You watch the Impala rumble around the corner again, its exhaust note fading. “I think I’m done,” you say, dropping the plastic knife and fork onto your plate.
I push my last flauta through a mound of guacamole, cram it in my mouth, and stand up quickly from the table. You jump out of your seat, sending it toppling over. The cowboys look up from their beers.
“Sale, muchachos,” I say to them with a full down nod. “Cuídense.” Alright guys, take it easy.
• • •
The cowboys grin and hold up their bottles. One of them touches the brim of his white hat and, inexplicably, a sense of pride washes over me. We’re nothing alike, me and these vaqueros, but this moment of union, of mutual acknowledgement, reminds me that I have roots.
I’m tempted to share with my professor that my long-dead grandfather was a northerner from Chihuahua, and that there are faded pictures of him in the wilderness—the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff—herding goats and wearing a massive white sombrero. In one of the pictures, he’s kneeling next to a tree stump that serves as a camp table, on which sits a carved watermelon. A broad knife, long enough to be a small machete, has been driven point-first into the stump. The watermelon next to the knife is nothing like what you see in the supermarkets now. That watermelon consists of mostly pale rind with thin strips of rich, dark fruit. My grandfather, Jesús, smiles and looks down on my toddler mother holding a slice of that pre-genetically modified watermelon and, thinking of that ancient photo, I am filled with both a sense of history and envy.
History that reminds me that I am a privileged college student whose mother worked in a tomato cannery and whose grandfather walked to the U.S. all the way from Chihuahua and built his family’s outhouse by hand when he wasn’t herding goats.
What do I have to complain about? I wonder. So what if my professor is a prick to me? How can that compare with what my ancestors had to endure? My grandfather was forced to leave his village when he was ten years old because his parents couldn’t feed him. My mother had to kick my father out when I was four and then hock his gun to feed me and my sister.
How can my punk-ass first-world problems compete with that?
And the envy, that’s harder to process right now. These cowboys’ hats and faded blue work shirts and long, aquiline norteño profiles remind me of my grandfather from the pictures, gazing down at my mother with love in his almond-shaped eyes. I have never known a man’s love. I have no concept whatsoever what it would feel like to have a father look down on me like that. My own father, a red-headed white man who, it turns out, didn’t think much of Mexicans, was a menacing presence that my mother had to forcibly remove from our lives.
My whole life, adult men have only been one of two things to me: threats or potential threats.
But for a few months, you, Dr. M., you seemed to give a shit. You paid attention to me in ways that made me think that maybe I had skills and something to contribute. I would have never considered you a “father figure”—I’m not that sentimental—but it was a new and welcome experience for me to have a man tell me that I did a good job, that I might have a future using my mind, and that I might deserve more in life.
But, with every little comment about “Hispanics” or “Latins,” and every subtle hint that, despite my promise, I’m somewhat less likely to make it than your other favorites, and every unsettling moment in which I watch you subtly belittle women and make them dependent on you, all the praise you’ve given me tastes increasingly sour. The lowrider’s growling exhaust builds for another pass, and you’ve sucked up to me as if I’ll take all the drive-by bullets that I’ve helped you believe are coming. The disgust rises in me. For just one second, I want to look over at those cowboys and tell them to tee off on you. I want to lie and tell them that you called them “wetbacks” and stand back and sneer as they stomp you into oblivion with their square-toed ranch boots. But instead, I lead us to the sidewalk just in time for the lowrider to cruise past once again. I gesture at my truck, a signal to the driver of the Impala that we’re leaving.
The car slows and the tattooed passenger yells “¡Órale, carnal, ay mero!” and—there!—another pang of unexpected pride. I have even less in common with these guys than the cowboys, but something, something I can’t express in words but that whispers to me in my heart, acknowledges a common tie, somewhere in our past.
We’re not the same, but we’re linked.
You duck into the cab of my truck and you’re buckled up before I can even get the key in the ignition. The lowrider slides in behind us as we pull away from the curb. I screw up the courage to look over at you. Your lips are pulled thin—in anger or relief, I can’t tell—and you gaze out the window, breathing deeply. I know not to talk to you right now, and I think that the only thing that could have made your comedown even sweeter was if a troop of neo-Aztec conchero dancers had waylaid us on the way to the truck, their feathered regalia quivering in the afternoon sun. I legitimately think that you would have crapped your dress slacks the moment one of them shook their macuahuitl at you.
Images of native headdresses fade and I look out my window to hide a nasty grin. I did it, I think. I scared the living shit out of you.
• • •
It’s really not that far to campus, but the neighborhoods and shops and intersections crawl past, and the quiet between us becomes so palpable that I wonder if it needs its own seatbelt. It would have never occurred to me that silence could be so oppressive.
I say to you, “What’d you think of the restaurant?” and it comes out as a croak.
You sit completely still and stare ahead, like a statue. “It was—” you say haltingly, “very—”
Don’t say “authentic.” I might actually punch you in the side of the head if you say “authentic.”
“—eclectic.”
I want to feel a sense of righteous accomplishment because there is no doubt that you deserved to be put in your place. But as I navigate the busy streets of downtown San José, my triumph is slowly tarnished by the possibility that you will never trust or feel safe around another “Mexican” again. Will the next talented Latino student who catches your eye suffer for what I put you through today? And then I wonder if what you’ve just experienced will do anything to mitigate the damage you’re sure to do to the lives of your female students. Did this cultural emasculation teach you some tiny measure of humility, or will it spark a resentment that you’ll take out on everyone else around you?
And more pertinent to my current situation: am I guaranteed to fail your class now?
We’re a block from the university parking garage, but you point to the building where your office is. “You can drop me off here,” you say. Your voice is deep and feels a little forced, like you’re struggling to reestablish that professorial aura of authority that failed you at the restaurant.
“Cool,” I say as we pull up to the curb. “Let me know when you want to do lunch again. I know a good Cuban place near Japantown where the food’s not so spicy.”
What the hell. One more twist of the obsidian blade.
The truck has barely come to a stop when you open the door and hop out. Without a word, you swing the door shut—a little harder than necessary—and stalk away. Your broad shoulders swing with a rigid energy that suggests someone is going to pay for what happened to you today. The muscles in my neck ache, and my vision is a little blurry, as if I could fall asleep right here behind the wheel. The revenge-fueled adrenaline rush I’ve been riding bleeds away now that I’m alone.
On the way to the parking garage, I think about how being a college student is a complicated, nuanced little game. I let myself feel a mixture of jealousy and respect for my classmates who know how to play that game better than me. Is it an immutable law that the rules of the game aren’t the same for everyone, and that some people are better prepared than others for the arbitrariness of academia?
College is a culture, I realize as my eyes adjust to the dark parking garage. A culture with rules that some of us have to learn by fucking up. The trick is to not fuck up so bad that the culture rejects you and moves on, denying the fact that you were ever a member. The modern, academic equivalent of damnatio memoriae.
There must be a worthwhile term paper in there somewhere.
I pull the truck into a space on the second level and find that I’m breathing hard.
Culture as a weapon. A complex weed-out mechanism that ensures that only those who’ve been vetted can benefit. The divide-and-conquer dynamic that keeps people like me wondering if they’re the only ones who are struggling to figure it all out. The tuition I’ve paid. The subtle and not-so-subtle bullshit I’ve experienced at the hands of sanctimonious, elitist jack-offs like you, Dr. M.
“I just used culture as a weapon,” I say out loud to myself in the rearview mirror.
The steering wheel actually creaks beneath my tightening grip. But before I can get spun up even more, I let myself smile at unexpected images of cowboys, lowriders, Aztec dancers, and so many other random expressions of us. And we have history on our side. We were here before this university, before admissions standards and scholarship applications and graduation requirements.
Before fucking tenure.
We—in all of our eras and evolving ways of being in the world—have survived. I might not have been bred for this college shit, but I come from a people who are still here despite everything. I have resources and traditions that I’m only beginning to understand.
Instincts was the word that Dr. Giangrande had used. It occurs to me that traditions can play a huge role in how instincts work, and that there are people like her who make this expensive, nuanced game a little less punishing.
I take a deep breath and push the truck door open with my leg. On the way to the stairwell, I look out at the campus and think that maybe, just maybe, I’m a little better equipped to navigate this pendejada than I was before lunch.
My footsteps echo in the concrete stairwell. I glance at my watch and roll my eyes, realizing that I have your class in about an hour. As I step into the sunlight, my stomach growls and I laugh.
I’m still hungry.
Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, but now finds himself in Boise, Idaho. He is the award-winning author of Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery and A Purpose to Our Savagery. Tomás's third book, Mexican Teeth: Stories and Assorted Artifacts of an Errant Chicanidad, will appear on Inlandia Books in 2026. Tomás's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize, and his novel, Delivery, has been accepted into the holdings of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Sherman Alexie has called Tomás's writing “painful, scary, hilarious, incredibly vulnerable, and powerful in equal measure.” Tomás has been stalked by wild dogs while hitchhiking in Mexico, was once escorted by security out of the Pebble Beach & Tennis Club, and had the privilege of delivering a dozen pizzas to a Klingon-themed orgy at a sci-fi convention.
Douglas G. Campbell lives in Portland, Oregon. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at George Fox University where he taught painting, printmaking, drawing, and art history courses. His poetry and artworks have been published in numerous periodicals. His artwork is represented in collections such as The Portland Art Museum, Oregon State University, Ashforth Pacific, Inc., and George Fox University. You can see Douglas’s artwork at http://www.douglascampbellart.com.