If you raise a Mexican flag in America
A memoir on gentrification, racism and identity
Dedicated to Olga Contreras
KANSAS CITY, Missouri
On clear days when soft gusts gathered strength, I’d see a Mexican flag on the roof of Los Alamos Market & Cocina billow, collecting bright sunlight into its satin colors of white, green and red.
A Mexican man owned the red brick Summit Street convenience store and restaurant in west Kansas City, Missouri, a mostly Mexican neighborhood where I lived just outside downtown, south and west of the concrete gorge of interstate highways that enwraps the city.
The owner was a naturalized citizen of the United States. He played mariachi music and, intermittently, the American national anthem. He learned the anthem attending Kansas City schools and participating in the Boy Scouts. His store was more expensive than a supermarket, but it was across the street from my apartment on the second floor of a two-story brownstone and therefore expedient. Over the years at the checkout counter, we shot the shit about the weather, politics and sometimes about ourselves, our conversations lasting as long as it took to ring up my purchases. In that way, in bits and pieces, we became acquainted and got to know and learn about one another.
In my years on Summit in the early 2000s, Los Alamos opened at 6 a.m. The owner worked until 10 p.m. six days a week. Sometimes he worked a part-time janitorial job when business was slow. His wife and mother helped. A Mexican friend who held three part-time jobs maintained the kitchen.
Most mornings, I’d buy a cup of black coffee at Los Alamos before walking to work at The Kansas City Star where I was a reporter. His store smelled of steaming pinto beans and melting cheese and the warm aroma of corn tortillas. Bread and canned goods filled warped metal shelves beside other equally overloaded and misshapen shelves bearing cleaning supplies. Two refrigerators filled with soft drinks, fruit juice and milk hummed as loud as radiators. The owner was a good 20 years younger than me, short and stocky with dark hair. I put him in his mid 30s. In the morning, he had an intense look on his face that said, I just opened and I’ve not had time to drink my own coffee. But within minutes, he broke easily into laughter when his Spanish-speaking customers gave him a hard time while they waited for coffee to brew.
Dónde está nuestro café? Usted trabaja tan lento como un hombre muerto!
Los Alamos stood at the top of Summit at the intersection with 16th Street. One- and two-story wood and brick homes built in the 1940s stretched down either side of Summit. On one end, the street intersected with Southwest Boulevard. On the other, the street dead-ended above Interstate 70. Feral dogs slept in packs on hills not far above the traffic. In the morning just before dawn, they would trot down the center of Summit, the homes on either side of them still dark with sleep. Those mornings that I woke up before my alarm clock rang, I would watch the dogs run, seeking cover from the approaching day as street lights blinked off and a few car engines coughed into life, and the sky began to gradually brighten like someone calling to me from a great distance.
Three years passed before I learned the name of the owner of Los Alamos. I never asked and he never offered. I wanted his coffee; he wanted my business. Despite our small talk, we sought nothing more from one another. I called him Viejo — the Spanish word for old — because one day he complained he needed glasses. “Tu está viejo,” I told him. He had not expected me to speak Spanish and my imperfect grammar amused him. I didn’t tell him I knew very little Spanish. From that day forward, however, he was Viejo.
Then one fall morning, as I stood in a line near the counter with Mexican day laborers holding steaming Styrofoam cups of black coffee, I noticed a collection jar by the cash register. The men in line put in what change they had.
“What is this?” I asked.
Viejo told me he was raising money for a man found dead in a room below a house not far from here on Summit near Southwest Boulevard. He was about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 130 pounds, according to a brief news report in the Star. When police found him, the body had decomposed so much they had trouble identifying him. He had been dead at least seven days, maybe as many as 12. Police had ruled out homicide. The man who owned the house thought the dead man’s name was Enrique Gomez, but he was not sure. Viejo thought the name sounded familiar. He had a vague idea of a man he thought was Enrique. He hoped people would donate to have him properly buried or sent to his family in Mexico.
“Do you recognize the name?” Viejo asked me.
“Enrique?” I shook my head. “No.”
Viejo was sure I’d seen him. If Enrique was the man he was thinking, he came into Los Alamos all the time. He was short and skinny with black hair starting to turn gray. He liked to joke. He was always polite. He let people go in front of him. Every time Viejo saw him on the street he said hello.
I thought again for a moment but no one came to mind. Curious, I walked down Summit to the house where Viejo said police found the body. They had been notified by several Spanish-speaking day laborers who also stayed there that someone had died. I knocked on the door and a short, elderly man looked at me, his face so heavily lined that he could have been sculpted from wood. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his red denim shirt. I told him I him I wanted to know about Enrique and introduced myself. I told him I was a regular at Los Alamos.
The old man shook my hand and introduced himself: Fausto Meixueiro. He said he had a reputation in the neighborhood for helping migrant workers. He had come to Kansas City from Mexico more than 60 years before as a migrant worker himself. He was 88. He told me he let homeless Mexicans stay in empty rooms below his house without charge. He looked in on them off and on, but not often. There was nothing in the room worth stealing. He was away when the police discovered the body.
Fausto also thought the dead man was Enrique Gomez, but he would not swear to it. He probably knew his name at one point, but he never used it and therefore forgot it. He had always called him Caruso because he liked to sing. Caruso lived with Fausto off and on for about about five years. He saved money he earned working on construction sites and restaurants by depositing it in a savings account Fausto set up for him. Fausto thought he was working at El Taquito, a tortilla factory in Kansas City, Kansas, when he died. One year, Caruso saved $6,000. He traveled on a train to Mexico through El Paso with all of his money and returned three months later broke.
Fausto patted a worn blue chair, the stuffing blooming out of it like cotton. Enrique used to sit some evenings in the chair and sing. I looked at the chair and then around the room. Faded black and white photographs of Fausto’s family cluttered two round tables. Fausto said he had divorced some years ago, and his eight grandchildren were grown. Stacks of newspapers and magazines filled every space not occupied by furniture. Mildew jungled the walls and dust hung suspended in the stationary air. A man scuba-dived through clear ocean water on a flat-screen TV.
“I suppose when I die this house will be torn down,” Fausto said. “Do you think the memories here will die or remain like ghosts?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Fausto sat in the chair and sank into it looking small and shrunken. Sometimes he didn’t see Enrique for a long time. One night he left for Chicago for two months. The last time Fausto saw him, Enrique was walking on Southwest Boulevard. He used to bring Fausto tortillas.
We walked outside and down some broken concrete steps to the dank room where the dead man was found. I pulled aside an orange curtain, breathed the stale air. A sleeping bag lay crumpled on a damp rug and wrapped around a refrigerator. Two desks and a small oven stood nearby. Cereal boxes littered the ground.
“I never lived like this,” Fausto said.
He gave me a telephone bill and underlined two numbers in Monterrey, Mexico, the dead man called regularly. I dialed both numbers, listened to the phone ring endlessly across miles. No answer.
“He was a nice man. he would sing, but I didn’t know him well,” Fausto said. “I miss him. Will you stay and talk?”
“No,” I told him. “I need to leave.”
He showed me to the door and watched me walk to the sidewalk. I listened to the door close behind me. Reaching into my pocket for my cell phone, I called El Taquito. The receptionist passed me on to the owner, Mike Casey. He had heard about the dead man from police investigators and concluded he had worked at El Taquito off and on since 1989.
“I’ve known him for years and years, but nobody knows a whole lot about him,” Casey said. “Yes, his name was Enrique Gomez. He was one of those guys who lived on the street and traveled back and forth to Mexico.”
Casey thought Enrique had been in his 60s and not his 50s as the police said. Enrique worked as a janitor at El Taquito and also cut the grass. He hadn’t worked there in more than a year. Everybody liked him. Casey didn’t know if anybody knew how to reach his family. Enrique had told Casey his wife had died and he had two adult children. Casey could not say much more about him. He didn’t know him well.
I made my way to Southwest Boulevard and asked several Spanish-speaking men on the corner who spoke some English if they knew anyone named Enrique. They shook their heads.
Later that day, I stopped at Los Alamos and told Viejo what little I had learned.
“These guys come from Mexico to work,” he said. “We don’t know where they’re from, where they go, where they live. We don’t know nothing about them. They die. It’s sad.”
I nodded, feeling more than a little self conscious that here we were talking about a guy we knew but really didn’t and in all this time I had never asked Viejo’s name. So, I asked him to spell it for me. I wanted to put it on my cell phone’s contact list, I said. I spoke with the false assurance of someone who knew his name but just wanted to be sure to spell it correctly.
A. . .u..g. . .u . . .s. . .t. . .i . . .n. J. . .u. . .a. . .r. . .e. . .z.
“Augustin Juarez,” I said slowly.
“And yours?”
“Malcolm Garcia.”
I waited for him to say, “Garcia? You don’t look like a Garcia,” as so many other people had done when I’ve introduced myself. Augustin, however, didn’t ask.
I called the coroner, identified myself as a reporter with the Star, and asked about Enrique. He died, the coroner told me, of a heart attack. A not so untypical death, he said, for someone so poor.
I hung up the phone and wondered if I had seen Enrique in Augustin’s store. I might have said, “Hola,” and he might have responded as the other Mexicans do when I greet them, shy and bemused at this outreach from someone not part of their community. I’ll never know and now Enrique was gone.
About a year after Enrique died, the gentrification that had been creeping into the neighborhood since the mid-1990s kicked into high gear. Changing demographics was nothing new to Summit Street. In the 1880s, it had been known as “Irish Hill.” In subsequent decades, houses belonged to Swedes, Germans and Danes, among others. Most worked for the railroads. Mexicans started settling there in large numbers in the 1920s when the census tract covering Summit contained 8,097 residents.
By 1970 the population had plunged to 2,625. Homes were routinely bulldozed, and the city government no longer considered it viable for residential use. It even encouraged different zoning. At the start of the 1990s, the population had sunk to 1,056, and the percentage of college graduates ranked 396 out of 445 metro census tracts.
By the time I had moved there in January 2001, all that had changed. Developers bought many of the run-down houses on Summit that dated back to the turn of the last century.
The neighborhood eatery, the Bluebird Cafe, on the corner of 17th and Summit streets, provided them a gathering place. They liked what they saw in the 15-block district, the camaraderie at the cafe, the new promise of rehabbing houses with historic “peaked” gable roofs dating back to the 1870s and increasing property values. Mexican families, however, descended from relatives who had settled here in the 1920s, felt the housing speculation had gotten out of hand. They considered the West Side their ethnic stronghold, and couldn’t afford the prices — as much as $100,000 in some cases — these rehabbed homes demanded.
“I think there’s a little clique up there that wants to turn it into Yuppieville, and it’s very dangerous,” remarked one Hispanic activist, Alfredo Parra, a hair stylist, in an interview with one of my colleagues at the Star. “What I see of the West Side is a Chicano community, and I really want us to keep our identity.”
Newcomers considered such concerns nonsensical.
“You have a part of the Mexican population who don’t like being integrated,” said Kathy Kirby in the same Star story. She had spearheaded beautification projects in the neighborhood by promoting community gardens. “They won’t recognize this has been Northern European in the past, and they don’t value an integrated setting.”
At the time, I did not appreciate the concerns of Mexican families, either. When I moved to Summit, the neighborhood looked to me like a rundown relic from another era. One-story wood and brick houses built in the 1940s, curled peels of paint falling off them like so much lost hair, stood aslant on ruined foundations dipping before strong winds. Porches that perhaps provided romantic interludes for young couples at one time, buckled and sagged and held no furniture or any other suggestion of life but instead jutted out beneath cracked windows, misshapen and wearied from decades of rain and snow, heat and cold, dimly illuminated by the faint glow of lamps inside.
It did not take me long to see why Mexican families were so worried. Shortly after I moved into my apartment, developers built two condominiums on empty lots that had once held houses on the north end of the street. I was not living there when the homes still stood. I was told by Augustin that they had resembled other houses along the street and were in no better condition. Fires had destroyed them and the families that had owned them left. Heaps of stone and crumbling brick lay on the lots buried by grass.
The developers promised the mostly Mexican families who attended community meetings about the condos that the condos would match in design the style of the existing houses and would be just slightly taller. They lied. The condominiums towered above the old homes, each square section a hulking, gray Rubik’s cube of modern architecture, one on top of the other slightly askew to achieve an affect, I presume, that I did not understand but that a Star colleague dubbed as “condo cubism.” The condos rose four stories and resembled no other buildings on Summit.
The deceit of the developers angered me. I don’t like liars, but I did not feel as violated as those Mexican families who had lived on Summit for generations. I was not raised as a Latino, Chicano, Hispanic. I had no visceral sense of what those designations meant other than embarrassment when I was asked why I didn’t speak Spanish. I had no sense of belonging to a particular ethnic community. I had moved into my apartment only months earlier. I presumed that if anyone gave me any thought at all, I was seen as the newcomer I was, part of a wave of newcomers each of whom had their own plans for Summit Street but who individually and collectively had no connection to the Spanish-speaking community that had come before them.
With the condos came the enforcement of long-ignored code violations. The Star reported that one man whom I knew from Los Alamos, Adolfo Celedon, had sold his house after a code enforcement officer cited him for several violations: an overgrown backyard and a leaking roof, which heavily damaged the inside of his house. Living on a fixed income and financially strapped, Adolfo told the Star he had decided give up his house and rent a room at the Roslin, a nearby hotel that served indigent people. He was 65 and had lived in the neighborhood for 50 years. He had abandoned his two-story brick home for a room with a dresser, an end table, a compact refrigerator and a toaster oven. A mini TV filled the one chair beside the big metal bed that dominated the room. Adolfo shared a bathroom down the hall. No shower. A tub only, and a toilet and a sink, and a mirror held together by duct tape. At night, a 40-watt bulb illuminated his room.
Occasionally, I’d see him park his pickup in front of what had been his home, chatting up old friends. Then, like Enrique, he vanished. Mexican customers at Los Alamos would ask Augustin about him but Augustin would shake his head and shrug. After a while, they stopped asking.
The people spending money to fix up the houses liked the neighborhood’s economic diversity, Kathy Marchant told the Star. She moved into the neighborhood in 1982 and opened the Bluebird Cafe in 1994. “It’s a diverse group of people trying to build something,” Marchant said. “It’s the healthiest urban environment I’ve ever lived in. This should be a model for urban redevelopment.”
She dismissed the word “gentrification” to describe what’s happening on the West Side. “That implies, ‘We don’t care about your life,’” Marchant told the Star. “Rich guys moving in on the poor guys. And I don’t perceive that happening here.”
One night, I asked Augustin what he thought of all the changes on Summit. He told me he tried not to think too much about it. He had lost some old customers like Adolfo but he had picked up a few newcomers like myself. As long as business was good, he would be OK, he said. He worried about property values increasing to a point he could no longer afford his house. He would adapt, work harder. He had a wife and two children to support. He felt badly about Adolfo and others like him, but he had to worry about himself first.
As nonchalant as he sounded that night, the gentrification of Summit Street had bothered Augustin more than he had let on. In 2004, a year after the condos went up, he raised a Mexican flag on the rooftop of Los Alamos to commemorate Mexico’s independence from Spain on Sept. 16, 1810. He told me he was born in Mexico on Sept. 17. One day earlier and you would have been an independence day baby, his father told him. His father served in the Mexican military. He always awoke at 6 a.m. and played the Mexican national anthem. Augustin liked it. Every morning, Augustin put up the Mexican flag with his father above their Monterrey home.
One of his aunts had moved to Kansas City while he was still a boy and would travel back and forth to Mexico to visit family. Every time she stopped to see his parents, Augustin made her coffee. He was her favorite nephew. She wanted to bring him to Kansas City. His father said, “If Augustin goes, we all go.”
Augustin’s aunt hectored the family so much that one day his father said, “OK, enough. We’ll visit on a vacation.”
Augustin had just turned 7. His family intended to stay just three months. When it was time to return to Mexico, they decided to remain a little longer. And a little longer. And a little longer.
Years later, Augustin could look south down Summit and see the small wood house with a square backyard where he was raised when his family moved to Kansas City. He and his wife and his two U.S.-born children live there. Like his father before him, he plays the Mexican national anthem and raises the Mexican flag over his house. He reminds his children where he and their mother came from. Mexico. Never forget, he tells them. Never forget. You are Americans, but do not be embarrassed to be Mexicans, too.
Every September he had thought about raising the Mexican flag over Los Alamos. Then Enrique died. Then the condominiums were built. Then Adolfo moved. Augustin decided to put up the flag to remind the newcomers of the Mexicans who lived there, men who no one remembered and the newcomers had never known but who had worked hard and contributed to defining Summit Street as a Mexican immigrant community.
Days after the flag began flying above the store, a man came in and accused Augustin of disloyalty to America. A vendor also telephoned to warn Augustin that he had heard a caller on local talk radio threatening to remove the flag by force if necessary.
“It’s bad enough we have illegals,” the caller said. “It’s worse when they show their flag like they’re proud of it.”
“What is the problem?” Augustin asked me. He lived in Kansas City legally. He loved the United States, but he also loved the country of his birth. He had asked the city if he could put the flag on the roof. The man he spoke to told him he did not need a permit. So, why the threats?
He waited for me to answer, but I had nothing to say. I remembered a grade school gym teacher I had. She told me the American pronunciation of my last name, Garcia, was “Garsha.” Since I lived in the United States, she continued, that was how she expected me to say it. At roll call, she would shout, “Malcolm Garsha,” and I would dutifully raise my hand. I was a child, no more than 6, and assumed, wrongly, she knew what she was talking about.
My poor Spanish and my white skin did not reflect the stereotype many people had of a Latin person. Few thought of me as being anything other than white. An Anglo. To them my last name was an anomaly, if they considered it at all, trumped by my skin color, and when I spoke I had no Spanish accent. Thus concealed, I had been spared the trauma of directly experiencing bigotry and prejudice.
Years before I moved to Kansas City, my uncle, an actor in New York City, told me that the Spanish equivalent for the American expression, “like” was “este.” For instance, a teenager might say in English, “My teacher is, like, so insane.” In Spanish that same teenager would say, “Mi profesor es, este, muy loco.”
This simple lesson helped connect me to a Spanish word I’ve not forgotten more than 30 years after I learned it. It was a simple word and one I could easily grasp. “Este,” which also means “this,” became a kind of code, the one word I understood when I overheard people speaking Spanish. It brought me closer to a language that under different circumstances might very well have been my native tongue. Now when I overhear couples speaking Spanish, I’ll catch one them saying, “este” and I’ll think “like” and I’ll recall sitting with my uncle in his 57th Street apartment. He would listen to tape recordings of interviews he had given arts reporters and critique his speech. He noticed when he mumbled, spoke in a monotone, and when his comments lacked precision. He encouraged me to pause between words when I didn’t know how to continue a thought rather than stumble around as he sometimes overheard himself do with like, uh and er. My mother had always hounded my brothers and me to speak well, but it never sunk in until I listened to my uncle’s tapes. Her voice sounded very much like my uncle’s, deep and clear. She struck every vowel of each word that rolled off her tongue. My uncle enjoyed imitating her.
“Ohhhh, Joe,” he’d say, dropping his voice and dragging out each syllable as if it were taffy.
My maternal grandmother died when my mother was very young. For the remainder of her childhood, my mother was raised in Puerto Rico by her father and a Barbados-born nanny, Amy Clairmonte, who learned English as a girl from British families in Bridgetown. When she spoke English, my mother’s voice carried strains of the British Empire and the rhythms of the Caribbean as conveyed to her by Amy’s accent.
At family gatherings, after my brothers and I were grown, my mother would often recall the time my oldest brother came home from the fourth grade and said he lost his “kep.”
“Kep? What’s a kep?” my mother said.
Finally, it dawned on her that he had lost his cap. Somewhere along the line he had begun speaking like some of his friends. My mother did her best to resist the corrupting influences around us. She corrected our speech endlessly.
“Gonna? What’s ‘gonna?’ It’s ‘going to.’ Now sit up straight.”
“Haveta? What’s ‘haveta?’ It’s ‘have to.’ Don’t slouch.”
“Gotta? What’s ‘gotta?” It’s ‘got to.’ Tuck in your shirt.”
My mother spoke Spanish fluently but never spoke it to my brothers and me. She never explained why. Consequently, my brothers and I studied Spanish in high school to fulfill a two-year foreign language course requirement. The teachers expected us to memorize various grammatical forms and from that deduce meaning. “Conjugate these words in every verb tense including preterite, imperfect, future, conditional and subjunctive,” my teacher would instruct us as he wrote tener, saber and venir on the black board. I did not understand English grammar, let alone the grammar of a language I did not speak. I barely passed with a D.
As I struggled with Spanish, I felt an increasing anger at my mother for not speaking Spanish in the house. Had she only spoken to me in Spanish, I thought, I would not have to undergo this torture.
However, she had married a man who spoke no more Spanish than I did. My father was born in St. Louis of Cuban parents. After college, he served in the Navy during World War II and met my mother in Puerto Rico.
When I was growing up in Chicago, I remember him telling my brothers and me that he had spoken Spanish before he learned English. But at some point in his childhood, he stopped speaking Spanish. The few times I heard him speak the language I could hear how he struggled searching for the right words. He had obviously forgotten much of the language if he ever knew it as well as he liked to think he had.
My father could be a difficult, impatient man, easy to anger. Looking back, I realize he never would have allowed my mother to speak to my brothers and me in a language he no longer understood. I grew up frustrated by a language that I felt I should have known but instead remained annoyingly out of reach.
I never had the opportunity to see my uncle in a play, but after I graduated from college and lived in Minneapolis for a short time, I walked into a used record store and by chance discovered a recording of my uncle in the play Cyrano de Bergerac. When I listened to it, I noticed that, unlike his interviews, each word he spoke had a special cadence. His voice was enriched by the subtleties of proper enunciation and flowed with symphonic power, especially when he spoke the love-lorn monologues of Cyrano to Roxanne in the final act of the play.
My uncle’s theatrical voice and my earlier memories of his analysis of his speech inspired me. I liked the sound of his deep, resonant voice. He sounded very adult and experienced with the world in ways I was not. But I wanted to feel I was. I resolved to improve my own slip-shod speaking habits to sound more like him. I learned to pause, collect my thoughts and continue speaking without uttering “like, uh.” I considered what I would say and how I would say it. I felt an assurance I hadn’t experienced before when I was at a loss for words. Words became chess pieces. Every move counted and deserved to be thought out. I sought meaning and accuracy and clarity. Then I made my decision and enunciated the chosen words with careful deliberation. I thought about what I said. I mulled over ideas instead of just spouting off, and in turn I began to think more seriously of how I wanted people to think of me and what I wanted to do with my life.
Like my uncle, my Mexican-born cousin, Miguel, spoke four languages flawlessly. German, French, Spanish and English. He was raised in Mexico City, educated in the states and had traveled the world. He was a good 12 years older than me and quiet. He spoke in staccato bursts with long pauses between words. He was something of a dilettante and hung out with artists, actors and writers because he liked the banter, the ideas that flowed with each bottle of wine. He painted portraits and landscapes and was an amateur photographer but did not pursue painting and photography seriously. He dabbled. The act of doing mattered to him more than outcome, self-promotion and success.
When he talked other than in Spanish, people who didn’t know him thought he was a native speaker. Sometimes when he became excited and could not talk fast enough to keep up with his thoughts, he would leap from English to Spanish to French to English and back to Spanish again.
“All these languages,” he’d say, cutting himself off. “It gets confusing.”
Then he would begin again in English and I would listen to him speak and the Spanish words he had just spoken, the sound of them so familiar from memories I had of my mother speaking Spanish on the phone to her family in Puerto Rico, and yet so incomprehensible, quickly faded from my mind. I responded to him in the way my mother and uncle had influenced me, speaking English with an enunciated diction I had learned by listening to them and that now had become characteristic of my speech as much as it had my mother and uncle, filling in some undefined way the spaces left empty from my inability to speak Spanish.
But not completely. By the time I took an apartment on Kansas City’s West Side, I was in my early 40s and had lived without Spanish for all of my life. My desire to learn the language had devolved into a faint kind of yearning for something I wanted but knew I would not achieve because I did not want it that much. My interest had waned. The frustrations I had felt in my high school Spanish classes were well behind me. I had settled into the daily routines of a working, white, middle class guy approaching middle age, the life my parents had embraced for themselves and wanted for my brothers and me and that had now become a part of my DNA much more so than my Latin heritage.
Augustin never asked me why I didn’t speak Spanish. I’m not sure it mattered to him. Even had he asked, my answer might have addressed his curiosity, a snippet in a our daily small talk, but little else. I was not him. Our mutual Latin heritage did not bond us. I had not faced the challenges he had faced. Nothing about my life would have suggested how he should confront the hatred he now faced over the Mexican flag. I was a Garcia, but I had never been subjected to anything like what he was experiencing, and I think he knew that. I listened to him question aloud the rage directed at him and which he did not understand. He told me he had considered taking down the flag, but he decided, no, he would let it stand a while a longer. He refused to be intimidated. He asked customers and friends who lived nearby to alert him if they saw anyone trying to remove it. He was not trying to do anything against the United States. It was just a flag.
I listened to him vent. I said nothing. I was old enough by then to know better than to say, “I understand.”
To my knowledge, no one attempted to remove the flag, although the threats against Augustin continued for several more weeks, and burglars broke into Los Alamos twice in the same period. Through it all, the flag remained aloft every day, including the morning a year later when I met a woman and moved to Kansas to live with her.
From time to time as I adjusted to my new life, I considered driving through Summit Street, but I never did. I did not want to see the how the changes I had witnessed had finally consumed the neighborhood. I did not want to see if Augustin still owned Los Alamos or if he, too, had fallen victim to gentrification. I did not want to be seen by Mexican families, if any remained, and wonder if they assumed I was part of the wave taking over the West Side, people like me with a past that had no relevance to their lives, people like me who had been raised to achieve goals suitable for what they saw as their position in life, and to possess property fitting for those goals without care or awareness of what had come before them on the streets where they lived, in the homes they owned. If I was to go to Summit and be noticed at all, I wanted to be seen as the person I had once been, a regular in line with migrant workers at Los Alamos, different from them but at that hour no different, wanting only what they, too, wanted: strong coffee.
I hoped some remnant of the Summit Street I had known remained, but I knew instinctively the opposite to be true. I did not want to see what it had become and how people like me — spearheading a contemporary version of manifest destiny — had brought those changes.
On a windless night, the day before I packed up my Summit Street apartment for Kansas, I stopped by Los Alamos to say goodbye to Augustin. Mexican day laborers lingered outside talking, killing time, before they made their way home, men whom I recognized from the neighborhood and who I had greeted with, “Hola,” countless of times but whose names I did not know.
They would get up at four the next morning and a few minutes before six meander nameless as shadows past what had been Adolfo’s house, renovated now by its new owner, past Fausto’s house where Enrique had sat in a blue chair and shared his tortillas, toward Los Alamos and coffee, the flag hanging limp in the dark like something exhausted, drooping against the bare wood pole in subdued deflation, not a breath of wind to disturb it or the laborers lingering beneath it, unnoticed and unwanted.
