Barrio Boy

“The utensils and the furniture were matched to the cottage, as if everything had been made at the same time by the same people out of the same materials of the earth.” 

Jalco is a town of predictable regularity. The houses are nearly identical, the days are the same, and even the items they use all seem to be made out of the same materials. In this quote, Galarza uses the word “same” three times to emphasize how regular life in Jalco was. By establishing how predictable life in Jalco was, Galarza establishes a foundation that makes the migrations and changes of the following chapters more dramatic.

“Books were rare. My mother had one, which she kept in the cedar box. It had a faded polychrome drawing on the cover with the title La Cocinera Poblana, a cookbook which had belonged to Grandmother Isabel. We did not need it for cooking the simple, never-changing meals of the family. It was the first book from which Doña Henriqueta ever read to me. The idea of making printed words sound like the things you already knew about first came through to me from her reading of the recipes. I thought it remarkable that you could find oregano in a book as well as in the herb pot back of our house. I learned to pick out words like sal and frijoles, chile piquín and panocha—things we ate. From hearing my mother repeat the title so often when she read to us, and from staring at the cover drawing, I guessed that the beautiful girl in the colorful costume was the Cocinera Poblana. The words above her picture were obviously her name. I memorized them and touched them. I could read.”

While the memoir only goes until Ernesto is in high school, Galarza went on to become a respected academic and professor. His interest in books and learning is expressed throughout the memoir. In this scene, Ernesto recalls his mother teaching him how to read from a cookbook. His family values education and encourages him to study despite the upheaval in their lives.

“We moved to Jalco—my mother, my uncle Gustavo, my uncle José, and I—several weeks before I was born. They walked, with a few clothes and some food, from Miramar, about twenty miles away down the mountain. Under the circumstances, the journey was no problem for me.”

Despite the serious subject matter—the revolution, the breakup of his extended family unit, economic struggles—Galarza’s tone is often humorous. In this quote, he describes his mother and uncles moving to Jalco while making a joke that the journey was easy for him because he was in his mother’s stomach.