I never should have gone to Salpointe. My parents could not afford it. They thought Tucson High was a perfectly good school. After all, my five older brothers and sisters all went there and they did just fine. We were a proud THS Badger family, but I insisted that Salpointe was where I wanted to go. I argued that it was a better school and because I wanted to go to college eventually, I would get a better education there. Nobody knew the real reason why I insisted on Salpointe. In all honesty, I was in love (obsessed) with a boy from junior high who was going there, and I wanted to follow him. Nothing would stand in my way.

I promised my parents I would work my way through school and pay most of the tuition myself, and also noted that my santito cousins, the Mendozas and Basurtos were going there too. My mom and dad reluctantly said okay, but they had no idea what the tuition was going to be. Otherwise, they would have definitely said no. We barely made the tuition payments, and were given a break more often than not. I was a charity case, I suppose. Maybe the administration let me stay on because I did well academically. I really don’t know.

My home life at this time continued to be quite a challenge. My mom was sick a lot and in and out of the hospital for months at a time. Around the same time, my sister Irene got a divorce, and my sister Becky moved to New Jersey. Partying was a big thing in the seventies and most of the kids, in my neighborhood, anyway, were getting high or drinking and doing other drugs. While I was in school, I stayed away from all of that, thank goodness, but every now and then I’d hook up with some of my travieso cousins or friends and we’d smoke or drink, especially during the summer months. I have to say, compared to some of the kids I knew, I was a saint!

One day a traveling salesman came to our house selling books. Without my parents’ permission, I agreed to purchase this all-in-one encyclopedia, as it was a great deal, or so I thought. I didn’t have to pay for it immediately, but there was a catch– I would also have to buy a Spanish-English dictionary that came as part of the package, but it hadn’t been published quite yet. When it did get published, the guy came to our house a second time to deliver the dictionary and to collect the money I owed. My father was home at the time, and I told him what I had done, and asked him to pay for the books. He got very angry at both me and the salesman. He chased the poor guy away and slammed the front door and then he yelled at me and told me to never do something like that again. I guess the salesman was too scared to come back, as my dad was not one to be messed with, and as a result I kept the encyclopedia without paying for it. I was very hurt at my dad, but realized later that I should have first asked for permission to buy the books. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and things like this were considered frivolous.

FRESHMAN YEAR: 1973-1974, FALL SEMESTER

The boy I had the crush on ended up “unfriending” me shortly after school started in the Fall of 1973. Just my luck. He also switched schools and ended up at Rincon or Catalina. I don’t even know. So there I was, with only my santito cousins to hang out with. It took a while to get to know people and make new friends. I had to give up playing the cello too, because the school did not have an orchestra program. I didn’t want to give up music, however, so I took up the saxophone and joined the band. That’s where I made my first friends.

Our band teacher was cool. We played some great stuff, including the Beatles’ song O-Bla-Di-O-Bla-Da and the one that follows, Kodachrome by Paul Simon. We had a lot of fun.

Living near the railroad tracks was hazardous. Chemical waste was dumped into the ground and the water in the area was badly contaminated. The railroad companies eventually cleaned up the toxic waste, but for many in the area who got sick, it was too late. Jerry Mendoza lived right next to the tracks. He was good friends with my brother Fred and the other guys in the neighborhood. He died of leukemia at the age of 16. When I was little, he gave me a Nancy Sinatra album that had the song, “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. He was a rocker, and didn’t care for Nancy Sinatra. The album must’ve belonged to his mom or something. I just loved the album. It also included the songs “In My Room” and “As Tears go By”.

Soylent Green was released on April 19, 1973. This is how I spent Thanksgiving.

I saw these two movies on November 22, Thanksgiving night in 1973. I was very depressed, and also had a crush on a kid named Bill who lived near Salpointe. Shortly before dinnertime, I slipped out of the house and took the bus to Glenn and Campbell. I wandered up and down Bill’s street for a while and then went to the Catalina Movie Theater on Campbell and Grant, where I saw these two movies. They were both way too weird for me. I don’t remember how I made it home. The bus must’ve still been running late into the night. The only person that noticed I wasn’t home for dinner was my sister-in-law Lillian. She seemed genuinely concerned that I was gone, but nobody else thought much of it, sadly enough.

While I liked the majority of my classes this semester, I didn’t really care for my English class, as it was team taught, and each teacher brought a different approach to their work. It didn’t provide for a lot of continuity, which I favored. However, I do remember one teacher in particular who had an impact on me early on. Her name was Sister Rachel, and one day in English class she played the song “What Did You Learn In School Today?” by a folksinger named Tom Paxton. She was “shocked” that none of us had heard of him before! The song was an eye opener, and I later sought it out. Tom Paxton was a folkie who was part of the Sixties generation of singer songwriters who became popular for their political lyrics and memorable tunes like Ramblin’ Boy and Early Mornin Rain. Another thing I remember clearly is that Sister Rachel and other nuns were involved heavily in the farm worker movement at the time, and I remember bringing my mom’s black velvet painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe to class so that Sister Rachel could use it in a protest march that was being held somewhere in the community. It made me very proud to have my mom’s painting included in the march. I didn’t know it at the time, but Sister Rachel was good friends with my other teachers Ron and Jane Cruz. I had a feeling she didn’t like me much for some reason, and I came away thinking she was a very moody nun. Oh well. I did appreciate that she turned me on to Tom Paxton!

I didn’t care much for my religion class either, but the teachers, Father Frank and Father Roderic in particular, did get us to start thinking about deeper stuff like “values” and “morality”. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was still lost. I continued to struggle with my budding sexuality, and began to question who I was. I’d never thought much about it in the past. I was busy trying to “fit in” and not get beat up.

All in all, I managed to survive my first semester at Salpointe without too much difficulty. I liked my teachers. Most of them were supportive, but I do remember being told by a “counselor” early on that I shouldn’t get my hopes up about going on to college. I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d always wanted to continue my education and go to college, but this jerk must have assumed that because I was Mexican American, that I wasn’t college material. This made me more determined than ever to succeed. Bigotry and hatred towards Mexican Americans, while not always expressed so openly, did exist at Salpointe. I would encounter it at the oddest moments, and it would really shock me and throw me off kilter for a while, but I can be rather stubborn, and I’ve always known I was gifted academically, so I didn’t give up and I persevered in spite of the obstacles and bigoted people I encountered along the way.

The following is from the September 18, 2015 issue of the magazine, Psychology Today.

“In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it. The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with “sexual orientation disturbance” for people “in conflict with” their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.“

I wrote the following poem around this time. I was fourteen years old.

FRESHMAN YEAR, 1973-1974: SPRING SEMESTER

I started working the Spring semester of my freshman year. I got a job in the snack bar during Bingo nights and worked with my two aunts and my santito cousins selling soft drinks, pop corn, tacos, tostadas, and sandwiches. I had to get a health card in order to serve food.

Spring 1974–this is the semester that changed my life. Growing up, I knew my family was of Mexican and Spanish descent, but we never really discussed our family history in much detail, although my dad was very proud of his Spanish roots. His father was Asturiano, and came to North America from Spain at the turn of the century. His mother was from Zacatecas, Mexico, but also of Spanish descent. My mother’s family, on the other hand was mostly Indio Mexicano and part Spanish. I knew very little about her father’s or mother’s families. Once my grandparents families made it up north, their ties to Mexico weakened with each succeeding generation. As a little boy, I was very light-skinned, a guerito, as they say. I could easily pass for being “white”, especially in my younger years. My brother Fred on the other hand, had darker skin, and people quickly identified him as “Mexican”. This dichotomy played itself out in my whole family. Three of us were light-skinned and three of us were darker in complexion. I never really felt like part of the family. My brothers and sisters were all incredibly good looking, and I felt anything but that. I was fat and cross-eyed, a clumsy, goofy kid with very low self esteem. It didn’t help that my older sister Becky would tease me and tell me I was dropped off on the doorstep and adopted. She was kidding, of course, but I was just a child and I believed her at one point. It messed me up.

Before the second semester started, Salpointe had what was called “Interim Week”. During this time, all the students were able to take mini-courses on any number of topics. I can’t remember the name of the mini-course, but I signed up for one with a teacher named Ron Cruz. The course was a mix of politics and history, and Ron ended up taking us on field trips to a variety of places downtown, including Barrio Viejo and the Pima County Courthouse. It was an eye opening experience, because Ron was teaching us local history, our history. I’d never been exposed to it before, and I was completely hooked. It turns out Ron was going to teach an entire class on the topic soon and he invited me to sign up for it, even though most of the other students enrolled in it were sophomores.

The class was called “Cultural Awareness” but it was really an introduction to Chicano Studies. It opened my eyes to who I was. I was finally able to understand the significance of my family background and began to learn about our social structure and my family’s place in it. I embraced the word CHICANO because Ron defined it as a person who was proud of both his indigenous and Spanish roots and someone who had a sense of “critical consciousness” about the historical and political realities of American society and who worked to make the world a better place. That’s exactly who I wanted to be and do too.

To elaborate, this brief description from Wikipedia describes well just what I was experiencing. “Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in post-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one’s life that are illuminated by that understanding.^[1]

In subsequent years, I would continue my education in Chicano history and other topics such as the study of social movements and non-violence. I am forever grateful to my teachers Ron and Jane for helping to guide me in this direction.

In this class, I was exposed to music, poetry, history, politics, film and literature. Ron would play us Mexican corridos, and on his classroom walls were portraits of accomplished Mexican Americans, people like senators, congressmen, educators and labor leaders. He would also show a variety of films in class, which I really enjoyed. He helped us all realize that we had a deep, rich history, one to be proud of. Wow. I felt like I had finally found myself, at least partially. There certainly was a lot more to discover and explore, but this was the start of a long adventure of self discovery and self acceptance!

I wasn’t always aware of it, but my feet have always been immersed in both Mexican culture (especially at home, listening to my parents and relatives speak to each other in Spanish, listening to norteno music on the radio in the kitchen , watching El Teatro Mexicano on TV every week, going to Catholic mass every Sunday, and eating Mexican food all the time), and American culture ( via television, popular music, literature, and film).

SUMMER, 1974

During the summer of ’74, I tried my hand at washing dishes at Howard Johnson’s during the graveyard shift. I lasted only a month, and earned just over $350. It was the first time I’d ever contributed to the federal tax system, however. From this point on, I’d continue working and paying income tax every year, either at the snack bar or at other places.

SOPHOMORE YEAR, 1974-1975: FALL SEMESTER

As I entered my second year of high school, I was still struggling with the fact that I was attracted to boys. I continued to hide how I felt, although I did have a couple of sexual encounters with one of my travieso cousins around this time. What started out as horseplay developed into something else altogether. The details aren’t important. I’ll just say I enjoyed it immensely, but knew I couldn’t tell a soul about it, nor could I allow it to continue. What felt so right was wrong, at least that’s how everyone around me, including me, thought about it.

This was also the year I became great friends with Ron and Jane Cruz, Richard Elias and Sylvia Boyed. Richard and I had met in Mr. Cruz’s Cultural Awareness class the previous semester, and we both ended up playing the tenor saxophone in the marching band together in the Fall of ’74. We were also on the newspaper staff together. The following semester, we led a petition drive to get scab lettuce out of the high school cafeteria. Most of the student body signed the petition, but the administration let us down and we were informed that the lettuce machines didn’t work with romaine or other kinds of lettuce. They only worked with iceberg lettuce, so our effort went down the drain. It was fun, nevertheless. We had drive and were passionate about a cause, and we succeeded in getting the vast majority of students on our side.

As I just noted, I started to spend a lot of time in and out of school with Richard my sophomore year, and we would remain very close throughout the rest of our time at Salpointe. I would, for example, go to his house after school and play basketball with him or watch Hogan’s Heroes and The Munsters on TV with him. I even stayed at his house and had dinner with his whole family multiple times. Richard’s parents were very kind and generous to me at a period in my life when I needed such generosity. My mom was hospitalized at this point, and there was no such thing as “family dinner time” at my house. I always marveled at how the Elias family would eat together every day, and how Mr. Elias would engage his kids in conversation at the dinner table. Richard had an older sister named Ana, and an older brother named Albert, both of whom I became good friends with as well.

If there was one album that I cherished in my teen years, it was Carole King’s Tapestry. I especially loved the tunes, So Far Away and You’ve Got a Friend. I thought of my sister Becky when I heard the first of the two, and of Richard when I heard the second. Becky and Richard became the two most important people in the world to me, and while one was close in proximity, both were very far away. Unreachable. I’d dare not share how I felt about Richard, yet somehow I think everyone must’ve known that I was completely smitten and totally in love–a real mess, yes indeed. Becky was the only person in the world at the time that I felt understood how hard things were for me growing up. She was there when I needed her, but had moved very far away, and it would be years before I’d see her again.

The film, “The Longest Yard”, premiered on August 21, 1974. It was so funny!

SOPHOMORE YEAR, 1974-1975: SPRING SEMESTER

Joan Baez started her career in 1959, the year I was born, but she was rarely on the radio. Her only hit was “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, which I didn’t particularly like. I started listening to her my freshman year. The first records of hers, aside from the aforementioned one, that I heard were “In Concert: Part II”(1963) and “David’s Album”(1969). I borrowed them from the public library downtown. My mother bought me the album “Diamonds and Rust” in 1975, and I wrote an article about Ms. Baez for the student newspaper around the same time. This was the year she was part of Bob Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour. They both appeared together on the cover of Rolling Stone too.

The above film can be watched on youtube, but it’s broken up into six parts. Here is the first part. Subsequent parts appear on the right of the youtube page.

JUNIOR YEAR, 1975-1976: FALL SEMESTER

JUNIOR YEAR, 1975-1976: SPRING SEMESTER

Meanwhile, two adult friends of mine and Richard’s who shall remain nameless took us to see this film. What a hoot!

The second semester of my junior year ended and most of my friends graduated. Richard went on to Colorado College and my friend Sylvia moved to San Diego and attended the University of San Diego. My friends Terri and Rose also left for college. Ronnie got a job and would soon be married.

Even Ron and Jane left. Ron went on to work for Nosotros, a local social service agency, and Jane ran a bookstore before going to work for Pima County Adult Education. I knew it was going to be rough for me the next semester. My support network had disappeared, but I had no idea how truly difficult things would get. Our family had problems coming out of its ears, and I couldn’t wait to leave home. It would take another year or two before that happened, however. I held on and did my best to get through and graduate the following Spring, but things didn’t quite work out that way.

SUMMER, 1976

I’m not exactly sure when, but around this time I went with Richard and his mom to Nogales. I bought some greeting cards, post cards and other stuff while there. I still have these little treasures after all these years.

FALL, 1976

It was the start of my senior year, and I felt so terribly lonely. Things at home were worse than ever. My mom was very, very ill and life in our house was nearly unbearable. On top of that, I was working half time at Fry’s and had a full load of classes, including a couple where I ended up with a bunch of freshmen, because I messed up the sequencing of my classes a few years earlier. I took physics my sophomore year, when I should’ve taken biology, for example. I also had two advanced math classes, which were a real challenge. I was also supposed to fill the role of editor of the Crusader, something I knew was beyond my capabilities. I was under so much pressure, it nearly turned me into a basket case.

My friends were all away at college at this time, struggling with their own issues, but we managed to keep in touch regularly. Some did better than others at adjusting to college life away from home. Richard wrote a few letters, and I could sense that things weren’t very easy for him. Sylvia, Terri and Rose also corresponded with me regularly at this time. I still have all their letters. My sister Becky also wrote to me a lot, something she started doing back in ’73, after she moved to New Jersey. Her letters and cards were always encouraging. She knew that I was struggling, but would always try her best to cheer me up. Her favorite little saying to me was “cheer up, buttercup”. Ha ha ha. Oh, if only it were that easy!

The previous year, a good friend of mine named Marlena had left Salpointe early, at the end of the first semester of her senior year. She took the GED exam and went straight to the University of Arizona. I remembered that she had done this, and realized that was what I needed to do too, to preserve my sanity. So I decided to follow suit and announced to everyone that I was going to quit high school. My parents were horrified, as were my teachers and the school administrators. I was betraying everyone by doing this. I was losing out on getting in to a good school upon graduation. It was wrong, and I would regret it, they told me, but I knew it was the only solution. I was ready to crack. I had to get out, so I didn’t waste any time. I left Salpointe in late September and found out when and where I could take the GED. I took it in October, and then I set about getting myself enrolled at the University of Arizona, and completed all the paperwork by November. I did this all on my own, and my plan worked. By January, I started classes as a freshman at the University of Arizona, and I continued to work at Fry’s. A whole new chapter in my life was about to begin.

Here’s one of my favorites songs from the soundtrack:

1976 marked a turning point in my life. It was the year I declared my independence and started making my own life decisions. It was also the year I started working a regular job. My earnings for the year totaled $1,832. From that point on, they would steadily increase and I would continue working for 9 more years at Fry’s, supporting myself through college. Even though I was young, adulthood had arrived. Freedom from my demons would also eventually become a reality too, but it would take another year or more before I came to terms with the truth, and many more before I fully accepted myself.

To be continued. Stay tuned for Part 4: The Undergraduate Years, 1977-1982…