What you're going to hear is a scene of one
of the lettuce workers in Watsonville, California,
named Vicente.
I don't know everything about him yet,
but I know that he knew Fermin Tovera,
and it's likely that he lived in the same bunkhouse
as Fermin Tovera.
These men were excellent dancers.
I grew up as a B-boy myself, and that was part of the thing,
I think, that called me.
I started to talk to them, and they started to talk to me.
And this is a record of some of the things
that they've reported to me.
Vicente here is in the bunkhouse,
and he's making a kite.
And in the process of making the kite,
he's remembering the first kite that he ever
made, which was back in the Philippines
during the American occupation of the islands.
There's a whole history that's involved there
that I can't get into now.
It's part of a collage of texts that happens here.
But I'm happy to answer questions afterwards.
And there's tons of stuff online for you to learn about it.
And I'm just going to go as long as I can, probably
for the next 10 minutes, tops.
And then I'll just stop wherever I stop.
He's called Centi as a nickname for Vicente.
And the other character is Tomás,
who was the older Filipino in the Philippines who taught him
how to make kites.
"But Centi, because he has been in California for more than a
week, more than a year, more than
he can remember without counting how many farms he's worked
and the growers who own them, the land--
I mean, own the land, the land of the house,
the land of the fields, the land that
marks where their land begins and ends, if it ends.
Do they not own the land, even in the middle
of the night, when no one is standing inside of it,
on top of it, buried beneath it?
If a bullet passes through the field, who owns the bullet?
No one will say.
Do the growers not own time itself?
Do they not own every day of planting
and every day of harvesting?
Who owns a man's hands, his back, his feet?
And what of all their scrapes and aches?
Where does a man begin and end-- his fingertips?
His ruddy toes?
Parched tongue?
Or can a man make himself nothing?
He can be a mind flying now over the valley and dunes
at the edge of the continent, soaring over
the foaming crests.
Can a man who no longer thinks about how to grip
the handle or the angle of a knife's edge
own himself if he gives up his body and keeps his dream?
If he can, if he does, how much is his body worth?
Who will buy him?
What will he get in return?
When, if at all, does he become a part of the land?
Or is he simply converted into the coffers
that the land fills up when a man learns
to work quick, but not too quick, when he stands straight,
finally, slowly, painfully, at the end of a day,
can he give himself back to himself?
Does his mind come back?
Can he call it, sing for its return, summon it?
Can he reel in the long, thin, tenuous line,
or has he lost it now?
If he gets it back, can he ask the kite
what it says to the sky, what it sings to the sea?
Vicente is undoing one of the bottom corners,
a special stitch for the tail.
He tells me Tomás, when he was an adolescent,
used to follow the Americans around,
not long after the soldiers arrived in the northern regions
of the island, and began to patrol the larger towns.
At first, the Americans would shoo Tomás away.
But the boy was curious and kept circling just
to watch the strange, sweaty men who,
when he got close enough to them, smelled like goats.
One day-- Centi says 'one day' in English--
the Americans asked Tomás where they might fish and go
for a swim.
So Tomás led them to a deep, clear pond.
The soldiers stripped down and jumped into the water,
trying to catch, bare-handed, the catfish
flapping in the mud.
As days went by, the soldiers asked Tomás to run errands
for them.
The boy bartered his services for trinkets,
brass buttons, an empty matchbox,
and, once, a full can of hardtack.
He didn't even seem to mind when one of the soldiers
pinched or slapped him just for laughs.
And it didn't take long for the boy to learn some English.
Sometimes, he even translated the soldiers' orders
to the Filipinos.
One night, the Americans confiscated two large burnai
of arak, which is a kind of alcohol, from Tito Carlos.
The soldiers got drunk out of their minds.
They built a huge fire and stomped around it, shirtless,
screeching like warring chickens.
One of the skinny soldiers left the carousing fellows
to dump a load.
The rest joined in on a song.
'Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos, cross-eyed kackiak ladrones.
Underneath our starry flag, civilize them with a Krag,
and return us to our beloved homes.'
Their arms were flung wide open, drool spilling
from their mouths.
Tomás turned to run away, but he saw the skinny soldier was
behind him with a sloshing bucket.
The American's eyes widened, and he was smiling gleefully
with his mouth open as he flung the shit water on the boy.
Tomás flew into the hills.
The titas said maybe he was ashamed to come back
to the village.
Centi says the boy spent his days and nights
catching frogs and fishing alone and hanging out
in a clearing on a slope overlooking his village.
He couldn't get the image of the Americans laughing out
of his head, the awful shit water dripping
from his eyebrows, slithering over his lips.
Tomás gathered some sticks and old coconut husks.
He tied them together.
He fashioned two arms and two legs and a neck.
He had a vine with which to do it, too.
It looked enough like a man, a soldier even,
that Tomás could throw the figure in the river to watch it
drown.
Or he could burn it, or he could hang it from a tree.
He giggled out loud at his own cleverness,
fastening the vine around the effigy's neck.
But then, seeing it, how the sticks and leaves
looked just real enough to make him shake his head.
He couldn't even bring himself to hang a poor version
of a man who did him wrong.
He could not hang it by its neck.
Not long after the Americans arrived,
Tomás had seen a real man swinging from a tree
at a distance, a Filipino, an acquaintance of his father's.
He remembered the American soldiers standing
around the body, leaning on their guns.
Tomás looked at the magnificent trunk in front of him
and remembered the bani tree from which the Americans hanged
his father's friend.
He looked at his makeshift doll and thought of the swinging man
and how his father neither cried nor laughed,
not once, after the hanging.
Tomás dropped the vine, which was when he heard someone call
his own name--
Tomás, an American voice.
The skinny soldier who threw the shit water into the boy's face
and eyes stepped into the clearing.
Tomás remembered this man as the one who laughed so hard,
he gripped his own belly and opened his mouth like
a drowning man.
Even small choking sounds came out,
the soldier shaking and shaking with drunk and soundless
laughter.
The American drove the butt of his rifle into the boy's ribs.
Tomás dropped, his chin catching the soldier's boot flying up,
and everything went black.
When Tomás woke, a wicked agony roped through his back
as if the wing bones had been torn out of his body.
The pain ran up and around his neck to his temples
and out the top of his head.
It was Centi's father who found Tomás hanging from the tree,
which stood in the small clearing,
the clearing where the boy had made the scraggly doll,
its limp arms and legs, its awful head,
where the boy dropped the vine, where stood the tree from which
the boy did not make real his dream of killing,
the clearing where the soldier left the boy hanging
by the neck.
Tomás healed well enough to walk,
but his back and head stooped now,
as if to avoid some low doorway or invisible branch,
or as if he were about to cut something loose from
the ground.
Tomás looked no one in the eye.
He mostly moaned and cried and sang his nonsense
into his hands.
On good days, he made brooms the titas could sell in the market.
A steady breeze came through the road
where he was making those brooms.
And when he picked up some of the ones that had blown over,
he noticed how the broom's fine palm
midribs, stripped of their leaves, bent in the wind.
That was when he remembered the pleasure of making
[SPEAKING FILIPINO],, the gentle curve of the slender stick
crossed by another, the unruly tangle of the twine.
That was the day he made his first kite,
the first kite since the Americans came for land,
came for war.
Tomás walked out into the road carrying this simple marvel,
so light, as if air itself were lent the shape and the color
of sand, the gentle breeze bobbing Tomás' invention as he
held it gently by the tethers to bear it into the fallow peanut
field.
And the fascinated children followed him in small leaps.
Tomás placed the kite on the ground at the edge of the field
because he couldn't run fast enough to get any lift.
A younger boy of the barrio came close to Tomás and put his hand
out.
Tomás handed him the reel, and the boy named Vicente ran.
When the young Centi took the kite from the man's hands
and ran through the field, the kite
flew so high above the balete trees and the salingbobog
trees and the bani, for a moment,
the whole village was looking up.
[SPEAKING FILIPINO]
The villagers could have been looking through the kite
like a window into the sky.
They could have been looking through all the rain gathering
in the heavens, into all the burnished coins of the stars,
into the whole black night throbbing
with the songs of every ghost, one moment of wonder like that
shared by a whole village, all its children and elders
and workers and murderers.
Even a pale American soldier made
a poor salute, hand to brow, to watch the kite float
and jerk and rise.
And if anyone cared to follow the kite,
they would have been led to a field of children
jumping up and down, gazing over the trees.
They would have seen a stooped man
with his fingers over his mouth swaying on his haunches
as if the wind moved him, too, but could not knock him over.
And the younger boy, Vicente, who
ran through the gnarly furrows so the kite could fly,
stood now with a string dangling from his wrist
and the long curve of the twine guiding the eye up
and up and up.
And you already know that a liar can lie to a liar,
and a thief can steal from a thief,
and an assassin can cut an assassin down, and each of them
can still sing.
The kite maker is tired of his story.
He is going to sleep.
He is turning onto his belly and shutting his eyes.
He may very well dream of kites tonight.
He may dream of them not in the sky
but thousands floating on the Bay of Monterey,
the cold American waters.
Vicente may very well dream of the man
with a crooked walk who sobbed into his hands, whom
the aunties pitied and gossiped about.
Vicente may dream of the sky and blackbirds
with orange collars zipping through the field
of his first kite.
It's OK.
He knows dreaming is another making.
He knows he has already invented the image of an ocean
and invented the sloppy calendar he
kept in his head of all the days it took to cross that ocean.
He has already invented the horse-like grunts
of the white men who checked his palms and knuckles
and counted all his fingers and the white men in charge
of the boat bearing him and other men from his province.
But Centi did not invent the memory
of the kite of his childhood.
I'm coming to understand he may have even invented me.
Here is a lie.
The kite maker and his companions
get up under an orange-blue dawn.
They work hard and sleep well.
When they wake, they sometimes smell the sea.
They open their eyes and lift their chins
as if there were an escape route above them,
a way to float up and out of the dream that comes back
time to time and fills the valley from the Pajaro Dunes
to Morgan Hill for weeks on end, the weird underwater visions
of roosters thrashing in the ocean
deep enough that they can't make their way to air
but not so deep that they aren't cast in stormy hues
bearing down from the sky.
Their beaks agape, they can't breathe but can't
seem to die, either, the birds' blades still shining,
tied to their ankles.
They kick their feet, clawing in circles,
scratching at saltwater, turning in the swirls
of gray-blue undercurrent, the gorgeous rust
and green of their wings at beatific angles.
And the dreamers, these men, they always wake
before they find out if the cocks drown or grow
fins or gills or get swooped up by nets
and dropped back into a yard, someplace
they make more sense, a place like a valley in summer,
like these fields.
Sometimes I can see them so clearly from here, like now.
Sometimes I get close enough to them I can ask them questions.
He doesn't look my way.
He doesn't take his eyes off the hills or the road behind it
or the sea behind the road behind the hill,
for that matter.
He goes on to answer a question I haven't even begun to ask.
He tells me there was a time when he first arrived he
had to be careful, deliberate.
He had to look real hard at the lettuce,
comparing the first one he cut to the next,
making sure he got the whole head.
Another mano says it doesn't take more than a
week to stop thinking about what you're doing.
Your body just carries on without you,
and your mind heads out on its own.
Another man says he remembers the faces he left behind.
He says he names them quietly with every hack of the knife
so it becomes a kind of silent song.
Even his enemies, he'll sing their names, too.
And another mano dreams how happy his sister and father
will be to see him again, how he'll
build his family a big house in the barrio
and buy so many fat pigs and goats and cows,
he'll feed all the children.
You caught me lying again.
The men, when they are in the fields, are thinking of sleep,
or they're thinking of an uncle who mocked them the day
before they left the village.
No, they are thinking of slitting the foreman's neck.
They are thinking of hanging themselves from a tree.
They are thinking of swimming in the ocean,
tasting the water's salt, which is
different from the spicy, muddy salt of their own heads
and armpits.
They are thinking of swimming all the way back home.
They are thinking no one will remember their names.
They are thinking of changing their names, anyway.
Edison is a good name.
They are thinking of going back to another province
and finding a wife who will call them Edison, a famous name,
as if a name could change a face.
The name of the kite maker is Vicente.
No one weeps anymore.
That is my last lie."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]