Becoming Dr. Q. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

the excursion was over—symbolizing hope for my future and firing me up with the spirit of navigation that applied as much to the sea as it did to outer space.

      One of our more memorable trips took place in 1977, when Mexico’s economic downturn was starting to send tremors across the country before becoming a full-blown earthquake and forcing the catastrophic devaluation of the peso. On this trip, as soon as Papá parked the truck, he sent me and Gabriel off to play for many hours on our own. On a weekend day like this, we were usually at work at the gas station, so this truly was a holiday. We spent most of the morning building an elaborate sandcastle—a fortress fit for a king—until it was time to comb the beach for the small shiny rocks and shells that we determined were gold and pearls.

      Then it was time for our feast! My father had exchanged goods for so much fresh fish that he had enough to cook us dinner before we made the journey back home. He cut the fish open, cleaned them of bones before stuffing them with vegetables and spices, and then baked them in tin foil over a fire that he made on the beach. The smell of the baked fish when my father first peeled back the foil was so intoxicatingly fragrant that I could almost taste it with my nose. The lens of memory captured it all: the red embers of the wood heating the package of tin foil, the seductive peeling back of the foil, and the vapor rising from the fish, just caught by local fishermen, waiting to be eaten. A feast to be remembered, savored again and again, and always appreciated.

      Upon our return from the Sea of Cortez, even as leaner times began to seriously encroach on our lives, I refused to be robbed of childhood and constantly sought creative ways to hold on to the magic of life. The prime opportunity to challenge darker days occurred whenever it rained and a lake would form outside and then flood the lower part of our house, where everything was already made of mud. To my mother, this was a housekeeping nightmare: a messy, salty, sticky, disgusting ordeal that would take weeks to clean up after the rains were over and we were no longer wading through water up to our knees. But to me, it was our very own Sea of Cortez—inside our house! By a wonderful stroke of luck, my father had purchased a wreck of an old fishing boat, basically a wooden board with sides that he insisted on keeping in the yard. Obviously, it was a pirate ship begging to be put to use!

      You should have seen the surprised faces of the adults when I created a contest to determine who could command the old boat in the waters filling up the lower part of the front yard. Of course, I didn’t wait for the sea to form. The minute the rain began to fall, it was rock ’n’ roll time! Gabriel and I would rally our younger cousins, I’d assign roles, and then we’d let the games begin.

      No matter how hungry, wet, or sticky with mud we might have been, we didn’t care. We were having fun, and it didn’t cost a peso. We could create the magic with the superpower of our beautiful brains! How much did I learn from my trips to the Sea of Cortez and from my other research in the laboratory of childhood about how to use mental resources to withstand the tests to come? Everything.

      TWO Faraway

      Misfortune seeped into my family’s existence very slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. Then, toward the end of 1977, when I was nine years old and in the fifth grade, tough times seemed to descend on our household all at once, like a drastic shift in the weather. Even through the foggy lens of memory, I can recall the moment when I understood that we had left behind the simpler, more secure days and were treading upon shaky ground.

      The moment of realization arrived when I found my father behind our house, alone, crying desperately. Something was very wrong. My first reaction was to ask Papá why he was crying. But I was too shocked to ask. Here was my father—the strong, stubborn head of our family, highly intelligent though not educated, hardworking, honest, and kindhearted, the colorful, passionate, larger-than-life man who was my hero—crying his eyes out.

      For some time, there had been clues that business at the gas station was going poorly, but not until I found him crying did I understand the magnitude of the crisis. Without being told exactly, I figured out that the worst-case scenario for our family—losing the gas station, our primary livelihood and means of putting food on the table—had occurred. The station was our family’s identity—not just where I’d worked since the age of five but a place of business that gave us stature in the community. Even at nine years old, I understood why this loss was such a blow to my father’s sense of self, not the least because his father, Tata Juan, had chosen him to be his partner and then given him this endowment that was to have secured our future well-being.

      In the year that followed, I came to better understand the circumstances that had led to this predicament. One factor was the financial downturn in Mexico, which would continue for several years and become a widespread economic depression. Before, we had steadily worked our way up and into the lower middle class. But without the gas station, we tumbled so far from that rung that we had to struggle to obtain the bare necessities—including the money needed to feed a growing family.

      This descent was a shock to our system, as it was for much of the country, which had been enjoying relative prosperity and improvement since the 1930s, when American companies and other foreign investors had come in to develop rural areas and outposts like Palaco. The influx of outside investment created jobs and helped lift many families out of poverty. But in many cases when the companies left (or were forced to do so when the laws in Mexico changed to limit foreign-owned business), so did jobs and family security. The middle class sank to lower levels, and the poor became the really poor.

      The other factor that contributed to the loss of the gas station only came to light after my father had to sell it for next to no profit. To do so, he had to first turn it over to his brother, my uncle Jesus, in whose name the government had originally issued the PEMEX (Petroleos Mexicanos) permit and who had wisely renewed it over the years—to his credit, since few such permits were available anymore. When Uncle Jesus tried to turn the gas station over to new management, a survey of the property revealed a startling fact. All those years, unbeknownst to Papá, there had been holes in the gas tanks and they had been steadily leaking their contents into the ground. So much gas from the underground tanks had seeped out that everyone’s first reaction was to thank God that no stray lit match or mechanical explosion had ignited an inferno that would surely have swallowed all of us up. During all the years in which we had lived in the apartment at the back of the gas station, we had been unaware that such a horrific event—of a type that was all too common in our area—could have occurred and ended our lives.

      Why had it taken so long to realize we were paying more for the gasoline than we were selling at the pumps? It should have been more obvious that the profits were literally leaking away into the earth under our feet.

      Papá may have had distractions that kept him from noticing our sinking bottom line. And he was young and inexperienced, never having had the chance to explore the world before settling down, instead going from marriage at the age of twenty to becoming the father of six children within ten years. My father might have been fighting depression, which became more evident as our financial status worsened and as alcohol became a more frequent means of escape, a way to self-medicate.

      Looking back, as I try to understand what my father went through, I truly believe that he was destined for great things, as my grandfather had foreseen. But Papá wasn’t on steady ground when sudden misfortune capsized him, so finding his way to terra firma became that much harder. Losing the gas station also represented a decline in our standing in the Quiñones family and in the community—even though my aunts and uncles, as well as my paternal grandparents, maintained a policy of denial about how much trouble we were in. Still, despite our attempts to keep up appearances, they must have known of our struggles.

      But within our household, the reality couldn’t be ignored. It is hard to be in denial when your stomach is empty. One scene is burned into my memory: my mother standing over the stove making tortillas, just flour and water and a touch of oil in the pan to feed us children—me at ten years old, Gabriel at almost nine, seven-year-old Rosa, Jorge at about four years old, and baby Jaqueline not yet six months, then asleep for her nap. There we sat at the table, hands folded, waiting quietly to split the tortillas as they came from the pan. Decades later, I can still conjure the smell that told us how delicious every morsel was going to taste. Remembering that near silence