Becoming Dr. Q. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

To this day, the mere mention of the word “hunger” summons that scene to my mind.

      That was dinner—flour tortillas with homemade salsa. Gone were the days of eating meat once a week. Gone were the nights of imagining that my father was out somewhere picking up bread or something hearty for our breakfast. Gone were Christmas mornings waking to the smell of my mother’s tamales. Now, as I lay on the roof, instead of looking up at the sky and dreaming of traveling beyond the stars, I dreamt of more practical desires—a piece of pan dulce and a time when we would have beans and potatoes at our table again.

      Every now and then, I dreamt of things that I’d like to do or own for myself that weren’t food or family related—like the time I became very focused on owning a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. Back then, they were the essence of living la vida loca!

      Strangely, it was in this darker period that the nightmares that had plagued me for most of childhood suddenly ceased. Now actual threats to our security occupied my waking thoughts. But instead of feeling helpless, as I sat up on the roof late into the night, I was emboldened by thinking of ways to help. Surely real problems could be met with real solutions.

      I was also convinced, as I told Mamá, that the many hours spent in church, as an altar boy and in confession, could be better spent working to help the family. Besides, sitting in church was boring and my attention span was not my strong suit. My mother thought for a moment and then pronounced her decision. “Alfredo, if you continue as you are until your First Communion, after that, it will be up to you to choose whether or not to attend church anymore.”

      She had only two conditions: first, I must remain observant and good during Easter week every year; and second, before taking First Communion, I would have to go on my knees from outside of the church into the sanctuary, confessing my sins as I crawled all the way to the altar.

      Now I had a tough decision to make. Easter was actually a dark, somber holiday in my estimation. The rituals were strange to me, unlike those of my favorite celebration, Día de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead—when we ate candy, danced, and dressed up in skeleton costumes and skull masks, giving death its respect but mocking its finality. Still, if these gestures meant that much to my mother and I only had to go to church one day a year, this wasn’t a bad deal. The real challenge would be coming clean, in public, about my many misdeeds.

      And yet, at ten years old, that’s just what I did. On that long crawl, as I shuffled on my knees up the steps and down the aisle on the cold, hard, marble floor, I asked to be forgiven not just for the past but for future wrongdoing as well. These sins of mine were not generic or abstract; they weren’t extreme, but they weren’t inconsequential. They included the little pyrotechnic experiments I had conducted in the fields with my investigative team in tow, as we created geysers of flame high in the air. As I had admitted to our priest in previous confession, I also had a habit of not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when interrogated by my elders. Though I didn’t lie outright, I had found a way of avoiding the truth by saying nothing—like the time when I was seven or eight years old and my father questioned me about a particular boast that I had made to the older boys out in the schoolyard.

      Rather than asking me if it was true that I had bragged that I was so fast I could run around and pull up girls’ dresses without their realizing it, my father asked, “Are you behaving yourself at school?”

      I was outraged. “Of course!” This was true when discussing my behavior in the classroom, where I was an angel. Out in the yard, a little devil got the better of me.

      “Tell me the truth, Alfredo, were you trying to look up girls’ dresses?”

      “What?” I put on a disgusted, shocked look. Very convincing, I thought. “Who said I did that?”

      “Never mind. I’m asking if you did or didn’t. Well?”

      “And I’m saying that is a terrible accusation, and whoever made it must not have known what they were talking about!”

      We could go on like this for hours. As long as I wasn’t caught in the act, I figured, I couldn’t be convicted. But I knew deep down that my action counted as a sin by omission and confessed to the priest soon afterward. The priest seemed more upset that I had looked up girls’ dresses than that I had lied. Clearly, I wasn’t living up to the moral standards of the church or showing the kind of character that honored my family and my parents’ values.

      While crawling on my knees from outside the church, I expressed true remorse again for that episode. And there was more. Besides having a sharp tongue and sometimes lashing out with sarcastic comebacks, I had been known to tell a dirty joke or two. Or three.

      For these sins and more, I asked forgiveness all the way to the altar. Even though I had no reason to feel responsible for the loss of the gas station, just in case, I begged for forgiveness if anything that I had done or not done had contributed to our misfortune. More important, I also asked to be given the responsibility and the strength to help relieve the problems, along with the understanding to make sense of what was happening to us.

      Thus ended my relationship with organized religion. From then on, though I attended church occasionally, I communed with God wherever and whenever I chose: at night under the stars or on my walk to and from school or to various jobs. There were times when my one-on-ones with God led to some heated questioning: why was there so much suffering, how could a merciful Supreme Being allow poverty, illness, injustice, and misfortune to exist, and what had my innocent baby sister Maricela done to be taken from the world? The explanations were rather hazy, although my faith that I would one day come to understand these mysteries was not.

      In the meantime, my source of inspiration in coping with our earthly difficulties was my mother. Unafraid, without complaint, Mamá made up her mind that she was going to hold her family together, in spite of the already strained relationship between my parents and even with our ongoing challenges that had no easy remedy.

      Already resourceful, Flavia now expanded her activities. In addition to buying and finding used goods to refurbish and sell, she soon set up a little secondhand shop in a market area outside Palaco. Forty miles south of the border fence that ran between Mexicali on the Mexican side and Calexico on the U.S. side, her shop attracted both local customers and tourists who wanted to venture into the country but not too far. When Mamá had raised a bit of capital, she bought an old sewing machine with a foot pedal and began doing piecework at home at night for a costume company—sewing, of all things, sexy outfits for hookers at the local brothel!

      Word of this particular work spread in the neighborhood, and I was not amused when the taunts started. Too bad for the kid who sneered at me one day, “What’s it like to be the son of a woman who makes clothes for prostitutes?”

      Putting my sharp tongue to use, I responded, “What’s it like to be the son of the woman she’s making the clothes for?”

      After getting my butt kicked badly for that remark, I resolved to fight less and to find a better way to harness my outgoing personality. With help from my Uncle Abel, one of my mother’s brothers—and money from trading in all the marbles I’d been amassing for years—I went into the hot dog business. Who could resist a child with a big voice, standing up on a stool and hawking hot dogs? No one, I thought! Unfortunately, few could afford my wares. I then started selling roasted corn, but as the national economy worsened, I didn’t fare any better.

      Desperation set in. Just when things became really bleak, my mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Jose, began to make periodic deliveries from the United States, where he worked and lived part-time—bringing food staples and sometimes money that meant we could eat for the next few months. The sight of his pickup truck heading our way and kicking up dust on the road—loaded with burlap bags of beans, rice, and potatoes—was like witnessing the arrival of the cavalry in old Western movies. Just in the nick of time!

      I didn’t know the extent of Uncle Jose’s generosity at the time—he had few resources himself—but I did know that he cared enough to help. Interestingly, no one ever told Uncle Jose how bad things had gotten for us. Somehow he figured it out.

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