Civil War to Harley Davidsons
Jaime Garcia’s journey from Guatemala to Inglewood
The roar of a 1970’s Harley Davidson tears through the quiet Inglewood neighborhood. The rider pulls into the driveway of an aged, yellow, house-turned-apartment complex and slows to a stop next to a small well-kept garden. He steps off the bike wearing a half helmet, an oversized dress shirt, khaki pants, and perfectly shined cowboy boots. His white beard reaches his chest and his long, stringy hair is tied into a ponytail. Jaime Garcia, 73, revs the throttle on Harley one more time in response to the dirty looks from neighborhs that accompanied his loud entrance and then cuts the engine.
Garcia gets off the bike and carefully checks every one of his plants while mumbling about the neighbor kids always getting various objects tangled into the branches of his garden. If not for the motorcycle helmet, he would look like a well-mannered gardener. The garden is no bigger than an average living room, but it is filled with leafy plants and bushes. There’s a narrow, stone path that stretches halfway into the garden and then abruptly ends. Casually strolling through the garden, Garcia he picks off some leaves from a mint bush for his tea and brings them up to this nose to smell.
Inside his garage is a sort of man cave/work-out room featuring both an aquarium tank and cages in opposite corners, one holding a turtle and the other a parrot. In another corner is a small pen with a sleeping Chihuahua that somehow looks older than Garcia. In the middle are three ancient workout machines in varying states of deterioration. Floral patterned couches with mismatched pillows line the wall opposite a TV. A low-hanging mirror hangs above the couches. Garcia heats up a bowl of rice and makes some remarks about the neighbors to his parrot, which gleefully repeats back, “fucking putos!”
Despite the apparent pleasure taken in revving his Harley enough to mildly disturb the peace, Garcia is a rather quiet man, who only occasionally raises his voice — mostly to silence the parrot or call out for his son. Despite years of hard work and hard riding, Garcia is surprisingly spry even with the four steel bolts in his leg from a motorcycle accident, not to mention a body that logged 60-hour work weeks. When times were particularly tight, Garcia sold his blood.
“I wasn’t losing another one.”
Garcia grew up in Guatemala in a neighborhood riddled with gang violence and drug addiction. The plain, cement house he lived in, built by his family generations ago, had a metal roof that would amplify the sound of raindrops into a chorus of tiny, tin voices with which Garcia would develop a love-hate relationship. Before the age of 30, he would marry and have eight kids during some of the most tumultuous times for both him and the country. “I buried four of my children because I couldn’t feed them, two of them never even made it past the first year,” he says. Garcia pauses to track a passenger plane flying overhead. “I always wanted to be a pilot,” he says, “I thought it was crazy how they flew.” He returns to his departed children. “Their graves were so small.”
Of his four surviving children, three eventually made it to the United States. One son remains in prison in Guatemala. Another would be kidnapped by guerilla fighters during the country’s long civil war — a common horror for many of the youth and their parents in Guatemala during this time. At the time, Garcia had worked for 20 years at a prestigious government bank, making deliveries and couriering messages. Through his job, he had built up connections with high-ranking members of the bank and he was able to convince them to talk with people who had influence over the guerilla fighters. They eventually let Garcia’s son, Danny, go. “I wasn’t losing another one,” says Garcia.
Danny now lives and cares for his father and his mother. He originally moved in with Garcia to protect his mother when Garcia had a bad bout of alcoholism. Though his son still harbors some resentment toward his father over this episode, Garcia is reluctant to speak about his problems with alcohol. “It was a problem that a lot of my family and people I knew dealt with, especially during the war,” she says. “I’m not proud it happened to me too.”
Garcia followed his sons to the U.S. in the late 90s. At first, he was reluctant. “I couldn’t stop working because I still had Donna Chuse [his wife] to take care of, and then I just felt too old to make the cross.” His sons, though, had legal-status and Garcia found the crossing went relatively easy for him. “They [sons] had papers and me and Chuse were getting old,” he says. “So I don’t think the Americans were too concerned with having some senile wetbacks taking their jobs.”
Garcia quit drinking when his son Danny moved in with him, both to alleviate the household stress and so he could better cope with the long hours, hard work and exploitation that comes with having “illegal” status in the U.S. It paid off. Eventually, Garcia got his citizenship and a job at the local swap meet as a security guard. He worked there until he retired.
In America, Jaime would fall in love with motorcycles and ride them for years, never getting a license until he was pulled over for speeding and ticketed. “After that I figured I’d stick to being driven around, but I still take the Harley out from time to time when I think the neighbors had too rowdy a night.” He chuckles and the chuckles become a dry cough. “That never goes away,” he says.
Garcia says he holds no resentment towards the U.S. for its involvement in the civil war and that he voted for Donald Trump during the presidential election. “I think he’s a blunt gringo and I like that, even if he is a little orange.”
