Black Dove. Ana Castillo

were demanding a new high school in their neighborhood, and afterward, Mexican Americans did likewise in theirs. There were protests. I remember taking off from my after-school job to shout “¡Viva la raza!” and raising my fist at city hall until I was hoarse, although I don’t remember what exactly we were protesting on that occasion.

      Not that we didn’t have ample cause. No, not all men had been created equal in the country, and women, despite their right to vote, most certainly were not seen as equal to men. Right after I graduated from high school, I stopped wearing a bra, and a Mexican college boy I dated told me he didn’t think a nice girl should go around like that. I always have liked my breasts, even if I found them mostly obtrusive, and I defended my new right to not be forced into constrictive body armor.

      That was my assertive self. Another part was struggling, feeling like an outsider. During those years, I would have liked to have a mother to talk with—or a father. Instead, my parents showed little interest in the young woman growing up under their roof, who spent most of her time in her room in the manner of all teenagers, who cried quietly or loudly and either way was ignored.

      I began to suffer periods of catatonia. It was clear to me that my mother was aware of this disturbing affliction because her response was to yell at me from the kitchen that if I kept it up she’d lock me up in the psychiatric hospital not far from our neighborhood. This catatonia stayed with me until my midtwenties. I don’t remember any episodes after the age of twenty-four. I didn’t know why I couldn’t talk at times. I just couldn’t and wouldn’t. When I shut down, you could come at me flailing a medieval spiked ball and my lips wouldn’t have parted.

      My two high schools had been small and, how I recall it, there were various cliques that were “in.” If you were athletic, let’s say, that was one way to be admired or at least respected. Of course, if you were very pretty, girls and teachers both liked you. I had my experiences of being both “in” at times and, at others, singled out. At fourteen, my most awkward teen year, I was lanky and felt plain. Previously an active kid, I was now clumsy at sports. By fifteen I started to make an effort to keep up with cool girls.

      As a senior I was in the Spanish club, which was mostly native Spanish speaking girls, and I don’t think I spent much time with them. Their first language was Spanish and my Spanish was so-so. Instead, I’d started a kind of underground paper about the eminent revolution. I did almost all the writing and illustrations (I think I drew the red-winged woman straddling a conga on Santana’s Abraxas album cover for my own cover.) I also did the publishing (i.e., xeroxing at my job on the sneak) and distribution (the school). The girls from the Spanish Club gave everyone a title at the end of the year. Mine was “Miss Intelligent.”

      I had an after-school clique, not necessarily girls from my school—in fact, a few much older. Our hanging out was a Latina version of Iceberg Slim pulp fiction. A digression: Yes, I had read Iceberg Slim by then. I read anything that came across my field of vision. I’d found a box of his paperbacks hidden underneath my parents’ bed. What was I doing under my parents’ bed? My mother had a habit of hiding things. It might be the packaged cupcake snacks or oranges she kept exclusively for herself to have with her week-old bread sandwiches on her thirty-minute lunch break at the factory. (She said she wasn’t hiding them from me but from my older half sibling who notoriously ate everything when he was around.) It might have been my transistor radio if she’d gotten mad and took it away because I had played it at night and kept her up.

      My nosiness paid off with the book discovery; I cut school and read them all. I never knew why my father had those books. At home I only saw him reading the daily newspaper. Now that I think of it, maybe he read them on his breaks at the factory and kept them out of sight at home because of their cover illustrations of pimps and sultry streetwalkers. These were stories told of a backstreet lifestyle that Slim had experienced firsthand, in and out of jail. He was an excellent spinner of seedy tales.

      When I graduated from high school and took a full-time job in an office downtown, I used to stop in the sundry shop off the lobby in the high-rise for cigarettes. I started smoking that summer because I was eighteen and could do what I wanted. Like Alice Cooper, I loved it, liked it, loved being eighteen. I’d spin the paperback rack for something to read on the bus ride to and from work. The books I found and still have were Zelda (about the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Other (a movie based on the novel came out around then), and The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim.

      Back to being a high school freshman: I don’t know what I’d have done if either of my parents had come home and found me sprawled on the living-room floor surrounded by all the paperbacks apparently viewed by them as hardcore porn. My mother might have threatened me again with the insane asylum. But they never came home unexpectedly from work, ever. They never missed work. They never called home to check in during the day. You were not allowed to call the factory and interrupt their machines and quotas. And when the school eventually reported to my mother (unable to reach her, the nuns actually came on a weekend morning to catch her at home) about my excessive ditching of school, neither did anything about it. It was a Sunday, Mamá’s only real rest day, and she couldn’t have been happy with the visit. I may have had a catatonic adolescent depression, but my mother didn’t like to talk to anybody on principle. My father was sleeping off a hangover.

      Mamá wasn’t very religious, so the nuns didn’t connect with her. The school was my choice, and with my after-school job I paid my own tuition anyway. As an orphan, being made to work as a domestic as a child, Mamá never attended catechism. She said she was Catholic but she couldn’t take communion. My mother was an outsider all her life. Maybe she passed this feeling of exclusion from everything on to me the way some parents inadvertently pass on OCD behaviors.

      When I wasn’t home in a state of antisocial withdrawal, I went to see some girls I knew; the quasi–Iceberg Slim, late-sixties Latina version of our crew is in my mind. They were around nineteen to twenty-one years old for the most part, but there were a few precocious younger girls. One thirteen-year-old became pregnant. She was white and when the mother let the boyfriend stay over, I couldn’t help thinking if that were me getting caught having sex, far from inviting the punk to have a sleepover, my mother would have taken me to an abortionist, then locked me up in the psychiatric hospital until I was eighteen. Only God could have helped the kid when she caught up with him. Why my folks were guarding my virginity is hard to say. There was no dowry to be had. In 1968 the pill had barely made its entrance into the world, and until we mastered birth control, sex and getting pregnant for the inexperienced were synonymous. My parents were adamant that nobody birth babies they could not afford. I was lucky my father had agreed to have me.

      Memories of those young women I fell in with when I was fourteen abound. There was stunning, slender, dark Puerto Rican Carmen, whose brother, Edgar or Edwin, closer to my age, was in the clique. No cool guy ever paid attention to me when I was fourteen, at least no positive attention. Edgar or Edwin was the epitome of cool. Sleek, silent, and meticulous in a black cashmere coat and polished shoes. One time a tall, sloppy guy who went by Shadow picked me up without warning and slung me over his shoulder, caveman style. On another evening Herc (for Hercules) led me to an abandoned building to make out. I didn’t know what else he had done, but two of my friends explained it was “dry humping.” Those girls, my age, often ridiculed me for my naïveté as well as for my use of multisyllabic words. One school friend’s brother who answered the phone when I called her one time made fun of my deep voice. His spoiled kid sister sounded like a five-year-old. In all kinds of ways, I didn’t fit in at fourteen.

      On the other hand, the older girls didn’t care one way or the other about whether I went with any boys or not. They might offer me a Seagram’s and Coke. They sat around drinking while they smoked, blowing sexy rings in the air. I didn’t care for any of that. I liked listening to 45s on a portable record player and doing the soulful strut or singing along with new hits like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” or oldies like “Angel Baby.” I did a decent “Hello Stranger,” with two of my girls as backup, having a sultry voice at fourteen and all.

      One summer evening, I dropped by Carmen’s flat. Carmen was in the middle of a fight with her boyfriend, “Moose,” a very tall, fair, good-looking Puerto Rican. He was gone when I arrived. Carmen