For my first day of school, Mama had packed some tacos in a brand new metal lunch box Papa had bought for me, with a picture of Hopalong Cassidy and his horse stamped on the lid. In those days, anything wedged or wrapped in a tortilla was called a taco, and these were made of refried beans and potatoes mixed into a hash, which Mama had rolled into a home-made flour tortilla—what in later years came to be known as a burrito. During mid-morning recess, I had met and befriended a couple of children, and when it came time to eat I joined them and two or three more in a little circle, where we all set about opening our lunch boxes and unwrapping our noon meals.
When the other children saw what I had brought for lunch, they all burst into simultaneous laughter. “Lookie, lookie,” one of them jeered in his Mexicanized accent, “he’s eating tortillas!” By this time I had learned a little English by listening to my older brothers and playing with a poor gringo neighbor’s kid—what we called a garra—and when the other classmates joined in the taunting, I quickly found myself in a state of crushing embarrassment. I was unable to understand why my new friends were so disdainful of my food! But I knew what ridicule was in any language, and, feeling ashamed and near tears, I finally put my tortillas back in the pail and ran for comfort to my brother Plon, who was eating his tacos on the other side of the building. He was sharing the noon repast with a student from our neighborhood. Too upset to eat, I did not have lunch that day, and I felt miserable for the rest of the afternoon, the pangs of hunger gnawing at me while I tried to explain to myself what had happened during the noon hour.
“Francisco,” I heard my mother say to Papa when he got home. “Memito was completely humiliated at school today. The other children all had white-bread sandwiches except him, and they taunted him because he brought tacos to school. Can you believe that? And they’re all Mexican kids. Anyway, he’s very upset, and he says he’s not going to eat in school unless he takes sandwiches to eat. You know how sensitive he is. You must drive into Odem and get him the things he wants.”
The next day at noon, I proudly pulled out my white-bread-and-bologna sandwich, complete with lettuce-and-mayonnaise trimmings. No one laughed or jeered this time. I was now one of them. But I had learned a lesson in this little encounter between American and Mexican culinary habits. For the first time in my young life, I had a vague notion of the difference between things American and the exclusively Mexican world I had known until yesterday. And, as I had quickly learned, in the social space defined by the school, anything Mexican was subject to shame and contempt. The irony lay in the facts of the lesson: it had been taught to me not by the americanos, but by Mexicans like me—tortilla-nourished children whose lives, too, were being reshaped by simple but powerfully symbolic things like the difference between a taco and a sandwich.