Soft Studs

We all become our fathers, whether we like it or not. We spend some wretched nights of the soul with some whisky and Valentin Elizalde, we go to soccer games to find answers at the bottom of a tall boy, we suck it all up and whisper to ourselves, “Fuck it.” It isn’t until we sit alone in a dark theater that we allow ourselves to cry.

As the eldest, my father sometimes calls me mijo - his son, even though he has many, he says I have surpassed his wildest dreams - that the expectations he had for me grew legs and had a life of their own. I think he has to perceive me as a son at times in order to feel like I can take on the world - so there is a perceived shell that protects me when the world encroaches and opens its lid to me. 

I’ve only ever had the courage to tell my father once: look at me. To tell him that I am a woman, that this is how I move through the world every day. That I am not this perceived masculine son. That I am composed of a feminine gushiness and sweetness he’s so scared to see in me. That I have always felt closer to the inherited trauma of the women in our family, not the men.

I call my father the man with a face of many rivulets, though he rarely cries. I’ve seen it happen twice: once when I was seven, when Child Protective Services tried to take me and my siblings away, and again late last year, when he took the stand at my brother’s bond review hearing. He meant to give a statement asking for my brother’s release, but the words never came. Instead, he broke into a deep, guttural sob --- the kind that comes when sixty-one years of grief finally find a way out.

My father tried to teach me to be an immovable force, a rock or a blade that does not bend. But within me, there is soft, fertile ground. Something always wants to erupt, to scorch. Maybe this part isn’t his. Maybe it’s my mother’s. I’d like to think this fertile ground exists in him, too. But I know it is difficult to create the perfect conditions for a garden to grow.

When my father was young, he wanted to be a professional boxer in Villa Unión, Sinaloa. He had a sharp left hook; they called him “El Alacrán,” the scorpion. Before he became the local phenom, he was his aunt’s adopted son—a baby given away by his mother, who was unprepared to raise a child. His aunt, my grandmother, was unprepared too, but she took him in. Before he threw his first punch, my father sold chicles and wiped windshields to help her make a living.

When my uncle Chon migrated to Santa Ana, my father followed at sixteen. His first job was at Markland Industries, a factory once tucked into the eastern part of Santa Ana, near the train tracks that separated Kennedy Elementary from the working-class community where we grew up. He worked there until it closed last year. Decades of labor, and in the end, he gathered the last scraps in that factory, leaving without a bonus or severance.

My father was also a breakdancer in the ‘80s—he’ll still pop if you ask him to. He rode Harleys and wore his hair in a long Pootie Tang-style ponytail. But when he met my mother, he cut his hair, and traded his leather for cowboy hats. She was from Sinaloa too, from the southern part near Nayarit from a pueblo called La Concha.

The life my father expected also grew legs of its own. He left Villa Unión for Santa Ana, rollerbladed at Knott’s Berry Farm, danced disco, worked for Kawasaki Motors and American Airlines, frequented the movie theater that is now the Frida Cinema in Downtown Santa Ana in front of the El Vaquero store. He built a big family. Led us down noble paths. Met my mother—a woman so full of life you’d wonder how she ended up with someone as stern as him. Even the cancer in her body does not quell her undeniable force. Her cells multiply, as if even disease recognizes that she is fertile ground.

 When my grandmother died during the first Trump era, my father was too afraid to leave the country to bury her. He still is, even as a permanent resident. I remember the morning she passed—he sat with his glasses on, the ones he uses to read the bills, sipping his cafecito and his caldo de camarones, staring at a photo of her on his phone in silence. It is incredibly hard to be soft when the world is not soft back. When it constantly reminds you that if you are too tender, you will be carried away—like the camarones in my father’s soup

My father’s experience is not unique; it is universal. But I hope that in this life, he and I get to experience softness in all its shades.

Sandra E. De Anda is an award-winning Santa Ana-based writer and immigrant rights advocate. She received her BA in English from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been featured in the LA Times, Voice of OC, Sin Cesar, The Ear, Makara Arts, Khabar Keslan, and the late OC Weekly, where she co-founded a weekly column titled, “Deport This” which highlighted the stories of local immigrants and refugees in resistance. 

You can follow her recently published work here: https://linktr.ee/Basurababushka  

Instagram & Twitter: @basurababushka