Wake Up, Wake Up

Wake up, wake up, you have to get up and have some coffee, your uncle Mario will be here in a few minutes to pick you up, I don't want you leaving on an empty stomach. I bought a rotisserie chicken and boiled some eggs, you can eat them later on and give some of it to your uncle.

Have a nice and safe trip and say hello to your parents from me when you get there. It's going to be a long trip so if you can buy a comic book or two and then look around, you may be able to swap them on the bus. According to the schedule it's going to take exactly 36 hour for you guys to get there.

That conversation, mostly a one sided conversation was had by me and my aunt in Mexico City back in 1975. My dad came to the US in 1970, my mom came to visit him and went back to Mexico a month later. The second time my mom came to visit him he was ill and skinny so my mom made one of many executive decisions she has made through out her life and decided to stay here.

A year later they went to visit us (there were five of us)and brought back my older sister, whom at the time must have been around 18 years old. After a year they went back to visit the four of us and when they came back they brought my three sisters.

Finally in 1975 they told my uncle, since all of us are here why don't you bring Jose for us and stay here a while to see if you can raise some money? He accepted the offer and the rest is history. My uncle did go back in less than a year because he missed his family, me I started the long road ahead of me to try and adapt to this new country where I couldn't understand anything.

My first neighborhood was predominantly black, just a few of us Mexicans were around then, not understanding and being jumped were two things that I had for a while in my neighborhood, eventually the Mexican population took over the area, it was nice to have some allies and to be able to understand them.

The downfall of that was that for the longest time we didn't need to speak English, since in Los Ageles, Spanish is used everywhere.

This will be the first time since I left my old "barrio" in Mexico City that I am going back. I don't know what to expect but I'm sure that it will be exciting.

See ya all on the rebound.