American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [11]
A year passed. The war in the Pacific intensified, changing the very face of America. The heavy deployment of young Americans had not only depleted the gringo schools, it was shrinking the gringo workforce. Whatever jobs women were unable to fill were now being offered to foreigners. Peru itself was little fazed by the war, except for Japanese Peruvians, who were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps in the United States—among them a family named Fujimori, whose ranks forty years later would produce a president of Peru.
In Lima, my father continued to come and go from the Peruvian interior, paying visits to his coffee-colored lover, appalling the family. Abuelita expressed disapproval. La mujer no es gente decente! She’s not the right kind!
Here is the point, I often thought as a child, when the gears might never have shifted, that I might never have existed, that my father might have taken another path. But four little cogs changed everything: The first was my grandmother’s censure of his woman. The second, the growing ennui of her charms. The third, a renewed offer of the scholarship. The fourth, a conversation at the Department of Public Works: His bosses promised to continue to pay his salary while he studied in the United States on the assumption that he would return to work at the same department. MIT? one of his compadres said. Caramba! That’s the best science the gringos have!
MY FATHER LOVES to tell the story of coming to America and will tell it to anyone who will hear it, in an urgent present tense. He narrates it now so that I can write this book. It begins this way: In early June of 1943, just as General Patton is planning his leap from the African shore, Jorge Arana flies to Panama City. But he finds himself wandering that capital, wondering whether he’ll ever get out. The planes are full. Panama is crawling with soldiers, and all flights to and from the isthmus are preempted for military use.
He spends days looking over the airstrip, lining up, waiting for announcements, loosening his collar against the furnace of the sun. At dusk, he is told to pray for luck, come back on the following day. Nights are tolerable, in town with other Latinos, young men lured north by the promise of bigger careers. They go down to the sailor dives, perch on stools, sway to mambos, eye women over tankards of rum.
Seven days pass and civilian travel remains paralyzed. The dollars he’s hoarded thin to a precious few. MIT has sent only what is necessary to get him to Boston, and each day in that way station is a drain on his future.
One morning, as he sits in the roiling airport—a suitcase at his side and his parents’ photographs in his pocket—an airport official emerges to bark at the crowd. The day’s plane to Miami is light, he says. We’re one hundred ten pounds short of mail. Anybody weigh fifty kilos or less?
My father steps forward: a stringy man, a tight bundle of energy. They can see that he isn’t much heavier than a sack of mail. They weigh him, rush him through the gates, strap him in. He comes to America as a letter might: with no more than a destination and a sliver of hope. There, beside the green of young soldiers and the dust of old burlap, he feels his fortunes rise.
The Miami he flies into is jittery, quick with street life and cash. War is everywhere evident—in the uniforms, the mongering slogans on walls. He stays for two nights, dodges his way through the mayhem, tries to get on a train. There are other Hispanics headed for universities. Much of South America