American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [97]
I had no power among rich Americans. I could fool them, however. Trip them up. Dodge their game. I would lie for it, cheat for it, dance fast if I had to. I would get the girl with the bulgy eyes.
Although I fooled my way into a desk next to Margarita Martinez, I didn’t turn out to be a particularly good friend to her. We played together when we could, but she was far too interested in dolls for my taste. Her house was down the avenida and around the corner from ours, much grander, with a host of servants trailing her down the street. She hadn’t been able to get into the fancy Catholic girls’ schools for some reason, and her father—a restaurant owner—had done what he could. He wangled her way into the Americans’ school. She was timid, something of a priss on the playground, and I enjoyed lording over her far more than I should have. I made her do things my way.
I cannot say what was in my brother’s or sister’s heart, but an appetite definitely stirred in mine. I found myself looking around, assessing what kind of power was available to me. There did appear to be some: With Peruvian children at Roosevelt, I bragged I was really a gringa. With gringos, I crossed my eyes and retreated into Spanish. With sissies like Margarita, I played queen. I did what I could.
But there was something else, far more potent. As I settled into that Lima house, with its front door smack on the street, I began to decode a system I had never even suspected in the haciendas, for all that the hierarchy was obvious. I began to see that not only did the rich gringos wield a good share of the power in the city—this was all too apparent in their houses, their cars, their clothes, their toys—I could also see it was the fairer Peruvians, the ones with less visible Indian blood, who ruled Peru. The more Spanish blood in your veins, the more power you had. Maybe I had an advantage here; maybe I could reap the benefit. Nobody was posting signs about it or sending the less fortunate to the other side of the tracks, but the evidence was everywhere: The Indians were the servants, beasts of burden, construction workers, street hawkers, beggars. The mestizos—people of mixed race—were the shopkeepers, office workers, scrappy entrepreneurs. From time to time I would see a Chinese or Japanese woman behind a counter, or a tall black man in a uniform guarding the doors of a fancy hotel; the variations were relatively few. But the highest caste of all—the landowners, intelligentsia, the moneyed classes—were almost always los blancos, the whites. Clearly, my grandparents weren’t rich. But, even though my grandfather had hightailed it upstairs and forfeited his career, the two had a respectable position in Peruvian society. They had inherited a hacienda in the mountains when Tía Carmen had died. They had a comfortable house in an attractive neighborhood of Miraflores. We also had something we could never lose: We were gente decente. From the good families. As my grandmother was fond of saying, somos puros Hispanos—we were Spaniards to the core.
I had had some exposure to the power of skin: I had been of a questionable race in my mother’s country. For all our material slippage, I remained a member of the upper class in my father’s country. I did not use this information immediately, but