Abuelo’s truck

“Abuelo's Truck” by Lupita Romero

“Babe, what time are your parents coming?” Julian says to me while leaning over my shoulder from the side of the bed, his dark wavy hair falling over his big brown eyes. 

He’s been up for two and a half hours already, fed our two cats and a dog, made us coffee, and a to do list for the day. He lays down next to me and waits for me to wake up. 

“Too early.” I say half asleep, scrunching my face to the light. “I need to text my dad.” 

They are coming at 10am, as in, five minutes away. I brush my teeth and we head down, get in the car and say our hellos. 

“Hola Juan. Hola Yka” says Julian as he gets in the car. 

My mom is sitting in the front seat wearing a shirt to large for her petite body. She is wearing jeans and her neon green OSHA training t-shirt and it looks extra striking against her peachy pale skin and pink lips. 

“Hola!” she says softly as her ponytail swings in our direction. Her matching brown eyes look tired but awake as she smiles at us. 

She’s been teaching occupational safety classes every Sunday morning since she joined a worker’s rights organization a couple years back. She’s happy to do it but she’s tired and hungry. My brother is working as usual and can’t make it but I get a whiff of the faint smell of mota from the night before. 

We drive to Pete’s Diner, our usual spot on Queens Blvd and settle down. We meet for brunch every so often but today there was a specific purpose. I finally got my dad’s car registration documents translated and certified. His red pick up truck is almost ready. Repainted and refurbished and only needs a registration and license plate. 

As a twist of faith and irony however, even his car managed to be illegal in this country and it wasn’t going to be easy to drive it. 

Getting to the point, I take out a manila folder and slide it over the table. Julian, glancing over to the documents asks, “so why did you need these documents?” 

Despite moving out, I was still operating as the family’s translator, advocate and secretary. I was able to translate documents at record speed pero la migra wanted an “official certified” translation. Between work assignments, I made calls to translators, remembering how much my dad had hustled to get the car to the US and how much there was to do still. He had already heard me complain about needing to get this done for weeks but hadn’t gotten the full saga.

We get our coffee and breakfast and promptly get into it. 

“It was el truck de mi abuelo” dad starts as he takes a big bite of his steak and eggs. “It was a 1980’s Ford pickup truck.” All angular and vintage looking; a stick shift truck that few even know how to drive today. “He was always working, taught me construction and farming. We used to pick up materials in the truck, he taught me how to drive in it. I used to help him plant the maiz which he ate and sold. He had nine kids and sent them all to college.” He adds with pride.

His abuelo was a thin man, with bronzed leathery skin and black straight hair. He shone with years of sun on his skin and he died, after a whole life toiling the land like his abuelos had; from old age and tiredness.

…………………

My parents grew up in the two towns surrounding Teotihuacan, one of the most famous pyramid sites in Mexico.  It is known as one of the first and biggest multi-ethnic cities in Turtle Island, aka colonized America (the continent, not the US), a mecca for many peoples.

Both sides of the family got their land after the Mexican Revolution when indigenous people fought so valiantly against the country’s ruling class for the land that even when the less radical mestizos won the revolution, there was a massive reparticion de tierra for indigenous farmers. 

It’s one of the remains of our erased indigeneity, one we are still trying to trace back and honor. That and the fact that my family is full of campesinos and artezanos. They work the nopal, la obsidiana y el maguey as indigenous people have always done. They sell traditional food like tlacoyos y sopes made of maiz and topped with salsas of all colors along the Avenida de los Muertos that leads tourists to the pyramids.

The first nine years of my life before New York, I woke up at sunrise on weekends to grind the corn, pack our nopales y comales and ride on the back of the pickup trucks that took us to our stands. My primos, Carlos and I took orders from the gringos because they tipped kids better but we always got away to run up the pyramids at sundown, a birthright of sorts, and ended up dusty and packed like sardines asleep on the truck until we got home. 

…………………

Dad orders a second cup of coffee and continues, “when abuelo died, his truck was given a mi hermana Rosa, who then sold it to a fulanito who then sold it back to an uncle of mine, who I bought it from.” 

He wanted to bring it here, remodel it bright red and maybe deck it out like the lowriders that cholos drive in Los Angeles. Because of his stature he wore oversized t-shirts and shorts that landed below his knees, as well as a black curly ponytail and a scruffy bigote like the little cholos they sold at the candy dispensers in supermarkets. Now he would have the car to match. 

An uncle in Mexico found a company called CarroMex. They could get it to New York in about two weeks for two grand. Instead, it took them four months and a bribe.

When we first closed the deal, dad counted the days and talked about all of the things he would update on the truck to anyone who would listen. He was happier than we had seen him in a long time. We had a hard couple of years. My brother was almost deported and my mom was unfairly fired from the factory she was overworked in for more than a decade, because that’s what mexicans are good for.

Dad worked through it all because he wasn’t good at the feelings but also because those hits came with costs, something he could take care of. Now, however, he was working towards something for himself, he would bring his abuelo’s beaten up car back to glory from bare bones and drive it en los Estados Unidos. 

Always diligent and anxious, he called them exactly on the day it was supposed to arrive but there was no car. For weeks the driver texted him excuse after excuse for it not having arrived. 

“After two months, he was irritable and started to get sick, stomach aches and body pain. He couldn’t sleep, se pone trompudo,” mom reports to us, “he pouts around upset; lips and eyebrows scrunched up, making his hairs stick out.” 

I continued, “No one wanted to tell him that maybe the car was gone, stolen and we couldn’t do much from New York.” 

He had suggested that Carlos and I go down to the border where it was supposed to be passing through to get it. He had an expired license he got in Maryland, one of few states that issued licenses to undocumented immigrants but after a couple of months the local government realized people were coming from all over the country to get them and set more stringent requirements and refused renewals to many. 

He still drove around the city with it but avoided main avenues where police stationed their cars, and really, stopped any brown guy they thought was “illegal”. They cross-referenced names in a database they share with la migra and they alerted ICE if they were undocumented.  He would not drive across main avenues much less across states. 

At some point he suggested over dinner, that Carlos and I drive down to the border to intercept the van where he thought it would cross at. We both had DACA, a conditional work permit they gave us good and young immigrants, aka able to work and make the US money, and we could get legal licenses.  But however “safe” we were, we were not trying to go to the border. 

I was furious that he had been scammed but I understood his pain. He had come to the US in 1998 and in spite of his plans to return, time got away. He wasn’t able to go back in time to say goodbye to his ama when she passed or when his abuelo died, either. 

This truck was a tangible part of the life he left behind and bringing a truck over is easier than bringing family across the border, I guess.

Our hearts ached with him; the way they ache every time we think back to things left behind. Like a fingertip tracing a wound that won’t close, that refuses to heal. It stings and it burns with festering bitter impotence. Like tracing the borderline between this and that country on a map, unable to erase it. We embalmed the marks of those losses with silence. The silence that comes when there is no justice or dignity you can speak to soften the blow. 

“I almost gave up” dad continued “but after four months I called the guy and offered him twice the original price in cold cash, half of it upfront through Western Union and the rest when I got the truck. That night, four months after we hired them, it finally pulled into my coworker’s garage in Astoria, Queens.” 

Mom and Carlos FaceTimed me that night and I laid in bed with Julian as we all watched him sitting, inspecting and caressing his car. We were so happy; you’d think we were welcoming family.

 “Apparently, CarroMex didn’t fill out the proper border documents and brought it in without inspection. Lo hicieron chueco, like everything in Mexico, corrupted,” my mom adds as she rolls her eyes and sips her coffee, reminding us that the story is not over. “They probably used it to bring drugs or something. And now we have to do all this to sort it out!” 

“Now the car is almost ready but technically it’s not registered with the government so we need a form from border patrol, the one you fill out at the checkpoint when you bring cars in, to get a registration and be able to drive in the US. We can get it at the international airport.” 

Julian glances over at me with his eyebrows raised. He’s from Colombia but as many Latinx, he knows about such corruption. 

Dad jumps in, “I already talked to an office en la Roosie (short for Rooselvelt Avenue, Queens) who can do it so I don’t have to go to the airport but they needed these translations”—trying to reassure us even though he said it like he was convincing himself too, that he would be safe.

He knew how to get around, it’s a skill you have to learn in el norte. I learned quickly from him that in America everything is about money, you can pay anyone to do anything and anyone will pay you if you know how to do something well. 

In 2016, I was supposed to renew my DACA, as we all do every two years to prove that we are working and don’t have any civil offenses or criminal record. It’s how the government keeps checking up on us to see if there’s a reason to deport us yet and to keep squeezing renewal fee monies. That year however, there was a big backlog because of a technical issue at USCIS, the immigration processing unit, and hundreds of renewals were stuck in processing. I had just landed a unionized job and moved out of my parents’ house but my DACA permit expired before I could be put on payroll and without my renewal, I couldn’t provide papeles.

My employer forced me on unpaid leave but secured my position until things were sorted.  For those 6 months, I was unemployed and alone and survived on odd gigs: translations, transcribing for college grad students, babysitting, house cleaning, and I kid you not, lice picking, moving furniture gigs.  I was one of the lucky ones though because on the facebook group I joined for DACA recipients to stay informed, there were hundreds of stories from other recipients losing their jobs, defaulting on loans. I was depressed as fuck and living on $5/day but I survived doing the weirdest jobs because I’m a jane of all trades.

Roosevelt Avenue was the main avenue along western Queens, where Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Brazilians, Argentinos, Uruguayos and all other Latinos dominated the businesses and filled every available space in the avenue to display their culture; food, fashion, music, barbershops, bicycle shops. Not to mention the South Asian and East Asian folks living down the main avenues. 

It was also the avenue where you could get solid paper permission to do many things. It’s always crowded on Roosie but if you get close enough to the edge of the sidewalk, men standing by will whisper, social, social in Spanish. And if you take the bait, they walk you down the street and you hand them your money under a handshake they will tell you where to go and take “la foto.” If you know who to ask for you could work on the books but “under the table.” People there were savvy, knew how to do things. They could deal with registering the car at the airport, he just needed these papers.

As he wrapped up the convo I realized that one way or another, that damn truck would be legal to exist and roam these streets before any of us could. 

…………………

“Damn, that’s a crazy ass story.” Julian responds after taking it all in. After a pause, he casually adds, “So you gonna drive us to breakfast in your truck next week?,” cracking a sly smile at the end, making us all crack up.  

It would be a while before he could drive it. We still needed to apply for a registration and then so we could finally insure it and for dad to get a license. 

“Claro que si, a donde quieran, algun dia” dad says smiling as he gets up to get the check. 

New York had just passed a bill to give licenses to undocumented immigrants. New Jersey quickly followed suit. Despite last minute threats to veto it, he had given in to pressure or boredom and signed it off. It was to be implemented in just a couple of months. While immigration reforms that could protect people from deportation and allow them to eventually get citizenship had failed again and again, many immigrants refocused their fights towards protections that could reduce deportations. 

Obama’s administration, the one that had banked on the latino vote, promising us immigration reform had said deportations were focused on criminals but didn’t tell people that most civil offenses that are not criminal for citizens, are considered felonies when immigrants did them. This meant that the president could say that they were only deporting criminals but deportations were a result of traffic stops, driving without licenses that the government would not give to undocumented people or civil offenses like staying at the park after sunset, or evading fares on public transportation. People figured, getting the right to drive would protect all of those driving without papers. After years of organizing and protesting, some major cities and states started to pass licenses for all.

I had already made him an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In that moment, I imagined my dad driving down Junction Blvd, valid license in wallet, virgencita de Guadalupe on the headboard, with abuelo glowing by his side on the passenger seat; listening to Juan gabriel, driving to Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the winter for some barbacoa and to Rockaway Beach in the summer, pointing to all of the houses he had built for the rich gringos and Jews. 

As he walks back to the table to start packing up, he says “that truck might just be the one that drives us back home si nos deportan, you know?”, with a measured and resigned smirk. I smile back at his dry humor scuff as it sits on my throat. 

As he drives me back home, my imagination flickers to all of us sitting in that truck, Juan Gabriel on the radio, deportation orders in hand, maletas in the back going back home. 

“Nos han quitado tanto que nos han quitado hasta el miedo.” – Mexican Proverb

Lupita Romero an undocumented Xicana of indigenous roots who resides in Queens, New York. She is a writer and self-taught mixed media artist. She works as a legal advocate for low income New Yorkers and is a proud union member with the Legal Services Staff Association.