The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

back into the ring. He went running into the middle again and stopped and just stood there, still saying, “Okay—who’s got the guts to come and deal with me?” One bullfighter stepped up with his red cape, but this was no idiot bull—he wasn’t going for the color. He was going for the guy. The bullfighter got too close, and one of the bull’s horns got him right in the side. They had to distract the bull so they could rescue the man. The guy lived. I don’t know what happened to the poor bull.
    I remember when I started going to Autlán’s public primary school, the Escuela Central. There were paintings of all the Mexican heroes on the walls—Padre Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez,Emiliano Zapata—and we began to learn about them. I liked the stories about Juarez best because he was the only Mexican president who had worked in the fields as a peasant and was a “real Mexican”—that is, part Indian, like my dad. My favorite teachers were the best storytellers: they would read from a book and make it all come alive—the Romans and Julius Caesar, Hernán Cortés and Montezuma, the conquistadors and the whole conquest of Mexico.
    Mexican history is a hard subject to talk about now, because as I grew up I quickly learned that it’s pretty much been a merry-go-round of everybody taking turns raping the country: the pope, the Spanish, then the French and the Americans. The Spanish couldn’t beat the Aztec warriors with their muskets, so they spread germs to kill them off. I could never swallow that one. The history I was taught was definitely from a Mexican perspective, so I was curious about this country up north that was founded by Europeans who took it away from American Indians and then from us Mexicans. To us, Davy Crockett got killed for being in a place he shouldn’t have been to begin with. The next thing you know, Mexico lost all its territory, from west Texas all the way up to Oregon. All that originally belonged to Mexico. From our perspective, we never crossed the border. The border crossed us.
    Our awareness of America was through its culture. My mom wanted to get away from her hometown because she saw a world of elegance and sophistication in the movies of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. I learned about America from Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry. And
Howdy Doody
. I would learn a lot more later through the music, but first it was through the movies. In Autlán there wasn’t a proper theater, so the people used to wait until nighttime and hang a big sheet across the middle of a street and project the movies on it, like a drive-in without the cars.
    I’ve always been conflicted about America. I would come to love America and especially American music, but I don’t like the way America justifies taking what didn’t belong to it. On the one hand, I have a lot of gratitude. On the other hand, it can piss me off when it puffs up its chest and has to say, “We’re number one in the world,and you’re not!” I’ve traveled the world and seen many other places. In many ways, America’s not even in the top five.
    I was not a great student. I didn’t enjoy the classes. I got bored very quickly and had trouble sitting still. As a child I never wanted to sit and learn things that didn’t mean anything to me. At recess time, I was allowed to go home for lunch. It was a long walk, and I liked doing that, though one time I remember going back home to find that my mom had prepared some chicken soup, even though it was hot outside. I said, “I don’t want to eat soup.” Of course, like any mom, she said, “Eat it; you’re going to need it.”
    When she turned her back, I grabbed a whole wad of red chili powder that was on the table and dumped it in the soup. “Mom, I made a mistake. I wanted a little bit of chili, but the whole thing went in there!” She saw right through that. “Eat all of it.”
    “But Mom…” So I ate it. Man, I got back to school fast after that!
    I was young and