I am blessed. I have a wonderful family and friends
that I love and that I know they love me.
My dad goes by Raul and my mom goes by Mila.
They did a good job raising my older brother Raul,
my younger brother Oscar,
and I guess even with all my craziness, they did a good job
raising me also.
We were all born and raised in Suchitoto, Cuscatlan,
El
Salvador.
A beautiful country that is now foreign to me.
Mom an dad worked very hard and sacrifice much,
my brothers and I. I never knew that there were times that they
were financially struggling. They took good care of us.
My story begins one day in the late seventies. I woke up knowing something big had happened the night before. "They found a dead body in the river!" someone said. This was the first sign. I knew something big was about to happen. It was truly horrible. There was this body that someone found in the river that had been mutilated beyond recognition.
Well, you see, the day before, I think it must have been a Saturday, my parents took us to the capital to watch a movie. I always liked to go the capital because we saw things we didn't see in my town. Exotic fruits like grapes and apples. Big department stores like Almacenes Siman, and Metrocentro. Places to have fun like Plaza Alegre and Saburo Irao. It was all very exciting. Then, I also saw something very hard to see. I saw people, little children, and older woman, begging for money. The contrast was disturbing. It wasn't like I had ever seen anyone begging for money. Surely I had seen that in my town. The difference was that in my town, every body knows those people by name, and people were kind to them. The other difference was also that my town was so small that the social classes were not as obvious to me. We drove into town that night and we found out that don Abel, the man who sold milk and was the grand father of the girl I had crush on, was robbed and murdered in the process.
That was the beginning. It turned out that don Abel's eldest son shot one of the thieves and as they were fleeing, the rest of the thieves saw the wounded one as a burden so they killed him. It was horrible. The rest of the thieves did not want the dead man to be identified so they completely mutilated his face, leaving only the skull. They also cut of the fingertips so that the fingerprints could not be traced. Finally, they threw him in the nearby river. The body was paraded for everyone to see. Nobody knew who he was until a woman reported that her husband was missing. The way he was finally identified was because he had a mole on one of his buttocks. The thieves were identified and all of them were linked to the right wing militias.
That's my memory of when the war began. From that point on, life was not going to be normal. The war divided friends and neighbors. By the end of the decade of the seventies, the war peaked and my parents became very vocal opponents of the right wing party that was in power at the time.
One September Sunday afternoon, an army from the neighboring city came into town. They had orders to get Mila Herrera, Raul Gonzalez and their family out and kill them. My dad had already warned us that there would come a day that he would just tells us to get in the car, and we would leave town. That day was that Sunday. As luck would have it, the army had orders to get us out at five. They came into town at around noon. So, they all went to a local restaurant and started discussing the plans. At the restaurant, the waitress over heard the conversation and she rushed over to my dad to warn him. My dad immediately told us to get ready and to put in the car as much as we could, and in short while, we all got in the car and we left for San Salvador. We stayed in hiding in the capital, until we were able to leave the country and we fled to Mexico.
My parents must have been under a great deal of stress. They liquidated all the assets they had except for the house, and we were off to Mexico. My parents had plans to settle in Mexico and start a new life there. These hopes quickly disappear when we found out that in that country, it is very difficult to find jobs if you are not a Mexican citizen. As far as my brothers and I, because we left El Salvador in such a haste, we had not gotten verification from the ministry of Education certifying that we had successfully completed the all the grades we said. The Mexican schools would not take our word and wanted us to repeat a few grades.
By the middle of December, we had no money. We couldn't go back to our country and we couldn't stay in Mexico. My mom had a sister in the U.S. and she told my mom that that if we could find a way to get there, we could stay with her for a while. So, a few days before Christmas my parents saw no other way but to come to the U.S
I can only imagine through what kind of stress my parents were going. They had to swallow their pride and start a new life in a new country, with a new language, illegally and start working for wagers that were below the nation's minimum wage and being afraid that we would be deported back to El Salvador. We were unable to obtain visas because at that time, they were not giving political asylum to subversives. And that's what we were called, subversives.
I wasn't until the end of the eighties that we were all granted permanent legal residency in this country. There was a law that was passed by the U.S. congress that enabled people that had arrived and stayed here in the U.S. before a certain date, would be allowed to receive legal permanent residency. We barely qualified for this. Freedom, I never knew what that meant. The day I became legal, I felt free. We had never planned to visit the U.S. let alone, live in it. But here we are. Here I am. Enjoying freedoms I never knew I had. This is a great country for me. My parents...they can't get use to this life. The long to be back to their old life. I feel sorry for them. They gave up everything to be able to provide for us. I only hope that in my everyday life, I live to respect and make them feel proud that I am their son.
