I was working in farmer Moore’s fields when the Matadors were offered a job performing at one of the new, ambitiously luxurious hotels in the budding resort area in South Padre Island, on the “Gulf-of-Dreams” coast about fifty miles east of Weslaco. The hotel was called the “Sea Island,” and for years it was the most glamorous in the area, until it was absorbed by one of the big transnationals. Thanks to our agent Bob Dixon’s hustle, the Matadors were offered work on Friday and Saturday, two performances each evening, for a total salary of one hundred dollars—a stupendous sum to us, which we split evenly (with a token amount, ten dollars, going to Dixon). By this time the Matadors had acquired a regional reputation, and our musical selection was diverse and professional enough to impress the management at the Sea Island. They brought us in for an audition, liked the flair of our performance, and hired us to entertain in the hotel’s Outrigger Club.

The contrast between the Outrigger Club and the streets of Weslaco was striking. To begin with, besides the Matadors, the only Mexicans at the resort were the cooks and housemaids. Then there was the restrained luxury and genteel, bourgeois manner of the sun-bronzed Anglos who patronized the Outrigger, which seemed light years removed from the carnivalesque bustle of the barrio. The vacationers would have considered exotic and perhaps bizarre the raw cries of barrio tamal and menudo vendors, the vulgar palomillas (adolescent cliques), and the cacophonous conjunto music blaring out of open windows. The yawning divide between the two social extremes was punctuated by the discrepancy between my life as entertainer in the hightoned Sea Island and as irrigator in the mucky fields of farmer Moore. (Despite my new job as entertainer, my father insisted I fulfill my obligations to our patrón.) The surreal transformation I experienced switching from one occupation to the other stunned me every time I stepped on the stage of the Outrigger, and I constantly dreaded fainting while performing—so inadequate did I feel to the task of entertaining such a dazzling group of socialites.

But the same juvenile self-doubt that led me to feel like an artistic imposter also spurred a sense of bravado—as it did to my partners—and the rough luster of the brash young Matadors seems to have carried the day for us. The Anglo vacationers took us to heart.