OK, 23.
"Murilio Miguel grew up in Michoacán on a large hacienda
built around a central courtyard,
opened the huge wooden doors, and there it is, an oasis.
In the courtyard there are tall trees
and from them hang clay pots of water to cool in the breeze.
There are birds, a cacophony of songs.
Flowers so large and vibrant they have tongues.
There is a church on the ranch, long and low and white,
built in the shape of a cross.
Above the altar, Christ carries the cross, stumbling, one knee
on the ground.
When Maurilio was five, the Federales came out to the ranch
and he hid in the cellar of the chapel with the statues.
The statues were white and cold, the cellar was dark,
and he could hear the hollow sound
their boots made on the wooden floor
above his head, the fine dirt sifting down with the light.
Dora tells me I remind him of his mother
because of my light colored hair and the way I braid it,
because my maiden name was Coryell and hers Curiel.
His mother, like me, was afraid of thunder.
Dora always tells us this story when the monsoons come and it's
raining and she and the children and I
are in the living room waiting for the thunder to stop.
Maurilio, when he was a child in the hacienda,
Dora tells us, used to hide with his mother and little sister.
They would crawl under the dark table in the sala
and hide until the storm had passed.
Maurilio's father, Carlos, had been a Cristiano,
one who defended the church.
In the early 1920s when the government was looting
and burning the churches, Carlos had gone with other men
to defend a nearby town.
After the Federales left, while smoke was still
rising from the rubble, he rode up and saw a beautiful woman
standing in the ruins.
As if in a movie, he helped her up onto the back of his horse
and they galloped away and fell in love.
She was the daughter of a wealthy German merchant
and he was the son of a Spanish hacendado.
They fled to California and married,
had two children before returning to Mexico.
Late one night, Carlos was in town working in the family's
trucking firm locking up the office and someone shot him
in the back.
Maurilio four or five at the time,
remembers his German grandfather at the wide wooden doors
of the hacienda.
He has come to collect his daughter and granddaughter.
Maurilio he leaves behind.
Later, when Maurilio is 13, he will get into a gunfight
with the federale, perhaps the same one who
killed his fathers.
And his uncles will dress him as a woman,
smuggle him out of Michoacán to Mexico City where he will live
for a year with ancient nuns in a large house with servants.
There are high walls he is never allowed to see over.
Bowls of water on the table.
You squeeze lemon in and then rinse your fingers.
There is mole, camarones.
Mangoes and papayas are sweet.
The old women wear black and wrestle like angry nuns
from room to room.
It is a relief to leave even though he
has to be dressed again as a woman
and smuggled across the border, even though he is left alone
at 14 in California where he will learn English and find
work mounting dirt over stocks of asparagus
so they will stay white and tender.
Where he will drive trucks taking food
to relocation camps for the Japanese.
Where he will fall in love and have a son and leave them both.
Where he will wear his zoot suit and fight with the sailors
and end up in jail for stabbing a policeman.
Where, at the age of 24, he will reinvent himself,
move to Arizona, and work on the roofs
mopping hot tar, 125 degrees in the summer, easy.
He will learn to read and write English.
He will marry, raise nine children.
He will never look back.
The past, like Mexico, is a place to be from.
He is mexicano, pero de Los estados unidos.
His name is Mike."
OK.