David Dorantes - México City

I was born in México City in 1964 in a place called Colonia Agrícola Oriental. It's called Agrícola Oriental because at that time it was populated from people from all over México, it was farmers that came to look for a better life in the city. My grandfather was a farmer, and he bought a lot of land and they worked in what was called milpas, a place to grow corn and fruits and vegetables. It was fields of people growing lettuces and cabbages and beets and corn and sugarcane, my sister and I used to walk home from school through those fields. Finally people started just selling, selling and selling and little by little, people started building houses that weren't even, well there's never standards in México. That's something that doesn't exist. I call it unplanned urban development. By the time I was, I'm gonna say, ten years old, twelve years old, it was just houses and houses and houses and streets and streets. Nothing but houses. We were absorbed by México City.

My grandfather gave each one of his sons and daughters a piece of land before he died. Obviously before he died, right? But none of them were farmers anymore. And everybody did whatever they wanted with the land. 70% of us in all the families were relatives. My father kept the land. It wasn't that big, but he built a house out of the typical small red bricks where he brought his wife, my mother, and that's where I was born. I was the last one to be born in that house.

My grandma was my mother’s midwife, and she delivered all the kids up to me. I'm the middle one. There are five above me and five below, so a total of eleven. At that point after me, it was illegal to have babies at home. Mothers had to go to the hospital, I think it had to do with record-keeping. They told me that they picked me from a pepper tree; my mother said we had to climb up and get you, it was our version of the stork. We had two giant pepper trees, and they were always full of birds. I will always remember those sounds.

Nobody knows how much land it was because there were no records. But some of my relatives thought that it was so much land and that there was also a lot of money, but nobody knows what happened to the money. People claim that it was buried somewhere. This is a curse that grandparents did in the old days. And so instead of building a house, they ended up digging and some people went crazy. Nobody ever found anything. There was no money anywhere.

When you went to centro, which is what we call downtown, you see all the original colonial construction and you know that the reason your house is different is because we live in a different time. You don't think, oh we're poor we don't have the money to build a real house. You just assume, the Spaniards were the conquerors, they came with a lot of money, they had a lot of know-how, and they destroyed what was there. They buried everything that was Aztec and then they built their temples and their palaces and that was another era.

Our house actually was in a never-ending construction phase; it was never finished, it's still not finished, and it never will be. I have two brothers living there now and a sister with her family. The area wasn't as developed as it is now, there were not that many cars, it was quiet, you could go play soccer on the streets, you could hear your friends going out to play, and you would go out and play in the streets. Quiet except for planes flying above us because of the airport. We remember the Concorde, and we knew he was gonna break the sound barrier and we just waited for the boom.

We had one kitchen and one bedroom and a living and dining room combination. That was the extent of the house. A big unconstructed patio with trees and plants. When you enter the house, you go through the patio, and you enter the living room/dining room. If we had a gathering, the kids would take their food out to the patio so we wouldn't be interfering with the adults. I actually always felt comfortable with the arrangement, but once I started getting older, it bothered me that we were so crowded, and the house was probably not a very comfortable place to be. We didn’t have running water until I was around twelve years old. Neighbors around the block with running water allowed my parents to carry water in buckets from their house, and we would fill a big container whenever we were told.

We had bunk beds, and my mother put up blackout curtains. My parents' beds were surrounded by everybody else's beds. My mother kept getting pregnant; my oldest sister’s oldest kid is the same age as my youngest brother. So my nephew and my brother are the same age. I said to my parents once as an adult, “Why did you have eleven kids? You slept in separate beds. He's sleeping over there, and she's sleeping over here.” The church teaches you to do that so the kids don't think there is any sexual relationship. And I said, “oh, you did that for us?” And she said, “yeah.” My mother was very religious. I grew up having to do the whole rosary and prayers, kneeling on the tile floor, every night.

I remember inheriting a place on a bunk bed from somebody that was bumped out of the house, you know, an older brother or sister. And I saw that the wall was scraped up. So you learn that kids eat the plaster, and you can eat some of it, too. I remember doing that. I think it's called pellagra when kids like to eat plaster when their diet is lacking minerals, it’s instinctive. We didn't have much to eat, and how were we supposed to learn? I flunked secundaria twice. The third time I got first in class because I was an older boy and determined. But I would go to school and have no food. You could buy it at the cafeteria, which was just a tiendita with tortas and refrescos, and some of the other kids would bring their own sandwiches. But we never had anything. I learned that if I took a piece of the back page from my notebook and chewed on it, it would crunch my appetite. I would make sure nobody was watching, because the bullying was already bad, right? And then swallow a little piece of paper and then I would start to feel good.

There was a guy that used to sell blood sausages. And he would come to our house, and whenever somebody knocked on the door, we hoped that it was that guy because he always gave a piece of blood sausage to all the kids who were around as a sample. Then my mother would buy it and cook it with salsa verde, but just getting something to eat was very good for me.

And the guy who sells Italian ice cream, we called him Nieve (the Spanish word for an Italian ice or sorbet). He had a little bell. You could hear everybody yelling and screaming, the mothers calling their kids out of my house, my cousins, my mother calling us if I was in another house, because Nieve was on our street.

My father was not a handy person, he never fixed anything. Maybe that's why I'm so obsessed with having everything working. We had bare light bulbs, no lampshades. We didn't have switches. The wires were sticking out of the wall. That made us very smart, because if you grabbed those, you're going to get a big jolt, right? We all did it just to see what it felt like. The wires had a little plastic on each end and one wire had a hook. So if somebody told you to turn the light on, you grabbed one end and tried to hook it to the other without getting shocked. But once it grabs, the light goes on. It wasn't until when I was in my teens that I put switches on everything. I figured that out myself. My father never did anything like that.

During the rainy season, we had about twenty-five pots all over the house catching the water leaking from the corrugated asbestos ceiling. And when it started raining, my father would never suggest let's fix it, let's change it. It was just those sheets that sit on top of wood beams that get screwed onto the beams. In the winter, the cold air would come in gaps in the ceiling. So what we would do is get newspaper and make balls and stuff them in the holes. And I remember every year stuffing more papers because they would get wet during the rain, they would get blown in. So, my father was never one to say, you know, we should just like fill them with some plaster or something. That never happened.

He didn't have any money; he was a cab driver. He didn't want to work in a factory or something to make money. I found out later, but I never saw it, that he had another wife somewhere, another woman with other kids. And we were getting the short end of the stick.

The best part was the sound. Thunder and rain, but the water goes in and you lose power. It was more wet inside than outside. When it was hail, you felt like you were gonna die. Imagine when I was a kid, growing up in the 60s and 70s, you lose power and you won't get power until the next day. So you grew up lighting candles, we always had candles. And usually during the rainy season, we had a lot of oranges in the house, and we would get the orange skin and hold it in the flames. The oil in the orange would give this fabulous spark, and that’s how we entertained ourselves. I also used to play making shadow animals with my hands in the light of the candles.

When there was an earthquake, you went out and you stood in the door frame. It was the belief that if the house fell down, the only thing that would be standing is the door frame. So we would do that and my mother would be praying. The year I left the country was the big earthquake of 1985. That's the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I was in the subway in México City in the tunnel.

But I felt safe in my house, it was my fortress. Once you went through the threshold, you were home, literally. And nothing can get through there, even though it was a really flimsy house and anybody could get in. I just felt secure, I felt safe. You have your parents and your siblings and your dog. You feel really good going home. But once I got older, I started to not care about that. Whereas as a kid, it was definitely a sigh of relief when you entered that door. I went back when my mother was still alive. When I went back, I would have memories. You know, remember where I grew up. But it didn't look like the way it was when I was a kid. I didn't feel attached, it wasn't home anymore. At that point, I was just visiting a place. My mom, two brothers, a parrot, a dog that she had, and her hanging plants that she liked were still there. But it was just going through the motions at that point. There was no longer anything that I liked that I missed, because even the street had changed completely. My mother died of COVID during the pandemic.

I didn't see a future here in México. I had a friend that lived in California and was visiting México and got stuck because of the earthquake. I spent a lot of time with him and he told me how wonderful it was. He lived in Santa Barbara. And he told me, you don't belong here, you need to go there. He saw something in me, and I believed him. It turned out that when I went there and I tried to find him, he had given me a fake address. But he gave me the wings, right? That's all I needed.

(David became a nurse in the U.S. and worked for twenty years in that profession. He realized his lifelong dream to become an artist and now is a painter and gallery owner living in San Miguel de Allende.)