Suddenly I felt the burden of the hours, the days, the weeks, the months of work. I saw that everything we owned was packed in cardboard boxes.
When I opened the door to our shack I stopped. The dust that seeped in from outside made him cough repeatedly. He threw back his head and closed his eyes. Roberto, my older brother, was also silent. He watched the road intently with his two hands on the steering wheel. On the way home, Papa did not say a word. These were the words that I waited for anxiously twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week, week after week, and to think that I would never hear them again saddened me.
“It’s time,” he yelled in his broken Spanish. When the sun set behind the mountains, Ito signaled to us that it was time to return home. This Sunday would be the last time I would ever see him. This is how I learned that he was from Jalisco, my homeland. Sometimes we would talk during our half hour lunch. On Sunday only one worker- the best- came to work. Every day the number of day laborers diminished. The strawberry harvest had ended, and the workers, most of whom were day laborers, did not gather as many boxes of strawberries as they had gathered in June and July. Ito, the contractor, had long stopped smiling. The frustrations range from those specific to poverty and migrancy, including the inability to follow up on promises made by a good teacher because the family moves on the day the offer of trumpet lessons has been proffered, through the universal experience of an older brother saddled with an ignorant younger sibling who insensitively feeds his prized penny collection into the grocery store's gumball machine.It was the end of August. This collection of autobiographical short stories was written years later, when Jimenez had become an established professor at Santa Clara University (CA), but they give immediate access to the feelings of the growing boy. Each story is simple, direct, and redolent with the smells of the earth, the sounds of the ever-changing home with its growing number of siblings, and the amazing experiences each new schoolroom offers. Francisco Jimenez was born in Mexico, entered California illegally as a very young child, and spent his boyhood alternating between migrant farm work and the classroom.
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