Victor Villaseñor - Burro genius (2004)

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E as you, but he couldn't see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn't have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!

Victor Villaseñor
All I knew was that I'd flunked the third grade twice because I couldn't learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York.

Victor Villaseñor
Look, said Jake, last night, after you went to bed, we told your dad how we'd come across you running away from home. You did? I said. Yes, we did. It was the honest thing to do, son. And you should've seen the hurt look on your dad's face, because, you see, Mexican kids don't run away from home. White kids, gringo kids, like me and Luke, we're the ones who run from home, but Mexicans, they ain't never do that.

Victor Villaseñor
The Indians, were like the weeds. That roses you had to water and give fertilizer or they'd die. But weeds, indigenous plants, you gave them nada-nothing; hell, you even poisoned them and put concrete over them, and those weeds would still break the concrete, reaching for the sunlight of God. That's the power of our people, my father would tell me, we're the weeds, LAS YERBAS DE TODO EL MUNDO!

Victor Villaseñor
I began to realize that my parents were going to build the biggest damn house in the whole town! I was shocked! Are we rich? I asked my brother. Yes, he said. We are? Then why do I always wear dirty, old work clothes? I asked. Because we're ranchers, said my brother. We're not city people. Oh, I said, then it's okay for us to be dirty? We aren't dirty, he said, laughing. To be dirty means you never wash. We wash our clothes and take baths all the time. It's just that people that live on a ranch get dirt on themselves. My eyes went big. I'd never thought of this. My brother was really smart.

Victor Villaseñor
You just remember, mijito, whenever your wife comes screaming at you that she's going to kill you because you forgot her birthday, that what she's really saying is 'I love you, I depend on you for my life and love, and so this is why I hate you and want to kill you!' It's always with our wife, our best friends, and our relatives that we end up having most of our troubles in life, mijito.

Victor Villaseñor
No, I wasn't very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.

Victor Villaseñor
Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in thinking and figuring out things, and he'd been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he'd been flunked before. This didn't make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.

Victor Villaseñor
I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED! I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE— I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn't going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I'd go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.

Victor Villaseñor
I laughed. I could see her point completely, because in Spanish you'd never say, I think I love you, especially after four years. That would be an insult. You'd say, I feel love for you so deeply that when I just think of you, I start to tremble and feel my heart flutter. Why? Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head.

Victor Villaseñor
It was still very hard for me to sometimes know where my Catholic–Christian upbringing stopped and my grandmother's Indian teachings began. For me it was all like one big river running together with all these different waters.

Victor Villaseñor
So, keep your powder dry and dig in for a long, fruitful life of being a writer, that storyteller around the campfire of your people and your generation. Your trade is as old as time, and your main job is to uplift the human heart so that then we can go on with dignity and fair play. That's it

Victor Villaseñor
Later, I heard my brother ask our father why he'd been so generous. A man can never be too generous, said our dad, when he's generous to a good, hardworking honest hombre, because that man will then break his back to do all he can for you. But…you be generous to a relative or a lazy, no-good worker, and they then think you're a fool, lose respect for you, and start thinking you owe them something.

Victor Villaseñor
Seeing my mother's red shoes disappear, I almost leaped up screaming again, but then, the boy next to me said, Calmate, in Spanish, we're going to be okay, mano. I turned and looked at this boy. My God, his Spanish sounded so soft and comforting, and he was the most darkly handsome boy that I'd ever seen. His eyes were as large and beautiful as a goat's eyes. Looking at him, I stopped crying.

Victor Villaseñor
Then I saw it. Oh, my Lord God, Ramón, he was like our very own Jesus Christ. I could now see this so clearly as he walked across the school ground. He had a glowing light all about him, because he, just like Jesus, was willing to carry the cross of crucifixion for all the rest of us lesser kids.

Victor Villaseñor
Dog, cats, horses, all animals could do this at will much easier than us humans, Rosa and her husband Emilio, had explained to me, because animals were much closer to God than we humans were.

Victor Villaseñor
I still wanted to tell our teacher about how the Indian people who'd worked on the ranch for us had explained to me that Shep, who'd always loved my brother more than life itself, had disappeared, because he'd run off to the highest hilltop to intercept my brother's soul so he could lead my brother's soul back to heaven.

Victor Villaseñor
Then I was almost thirty years old when I wrote Macho!, and finally got published after 265 rejections. Immediately, I returned to this book you're reading, thinking I could now pull it off, but I was wrong.

Victor Villaseñor
I liked him. He seemed a lot more animal to me than human, which was good, of course, because my grandmother, Doña Guadalupe, had always explained to me that all humans were born with an animal-spirit to help guide them through life, and so the humans who realized this would always seem more animal than human, and this was wonderful. It kept us closer to God.

Victor Villaseñor
No, my dad had well explained to me that a real man didn't get offended if other men ridiculed him for staying close to the women of his familia. That a real hombre was proud of being close and loving with the women of his life.

Victor Villaseñor
Mexican kids were now speaking quite a bit of English. Even Ramón. But he was a changed kid. There was a darkness in his eyes like a horse that had just been beaten one too many times.

Victor Villaseñor
It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I'd have to go back to school again. NO WAY, JOSÉ! I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to break us, not amanzar us.

Victor Villaseñor
His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.

Victor Villaseñor
Papa always explained to me that there is no such thing as a kids' game. That there are only games with which kids are learning the facts of life, but it's the parents that are so tapados—so blind and constipated that they can't see what these games are really all about.

Victor Villaseñor
No, teaching could be done as fast as a lightning bolt. He'd cut across the valleys of my deepest doubts, giving light to the darkest crevices of my beaten-down, inhibited mind, accessing a natural storytelling ability within me that was utterly profound!

Victor Villaseñor
My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I'd ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn't get it at first.

Victor Villaseñor
It was truly a good thing that I'd found writing as my outlet or I was sure I would have become a mass murderer, killing all those heartless, racist teachers who'd beat us Mexican kids down since kindergarten

Victor Villaseñor
A whole bunch of people towards the back of the room were now getting up to leave. But these teachers were not going to intimidate me. I wasn't my father's and mother's son for nada-nothing. I wasn't my two indigenous grandmothers' grandson for nada-nothing either. I came from a long line of people…who'd lived through starvation, revolutions, and massacre. AND YOU! I yelled into the microphone. Over there in the back…who are getting up to leave…I'M GLAD THAT YOU'RE LEAVING!

Victor Villaseñor
Someone finally understood all the hell that I'd been through since a child when I'd first tried to understand language. And yet in other forms of communications, like painting, sculpture, music, math, problem-solving, and chess, I'd been very good. In fact, in high school, once I learned how to play chess, I'd play lightning-fast, intuitively seeing all these different possibilities at the same time, and I'd won well over a hundred chess games without losing a single game. And that included beating some of our faculty members who thought that they were very good at chess.

Victor Villaseñor
Because the most important thing any man can do in all his life is pick the right woman to breed with—I mean, marry first, then breed, because from the woman comes the— —comes the instinct to survive, I said, having heard this for as long as I could remember. Good, said mi papa,

Victor Villaseñor