Cancion de Rocio

"Sorry, what do you call this?"

"It's a flower pot."

"Flower pot." Rocio repeated the words precisely, but I could see that her mind had migrated a thousand miles south. I was supposed to be helping her with her English vocabulary, but we both knew the lessons had not been her idea.

She reached across her cluttered dining room table to pick up the empty pot. "En español es una maceta." Since finding out I remembered some of my of high school Spanish, she often reverted to her native language. She turned the pot over and stuck a finger through the hole in the bottom. "How do you say, no hay planta?"

"It doesn't have a plant. Or you could say, 'The flowerpot is empty.'"

"Ah. Sí, empty. Vacia."

Rocio was a tiny woman, no taller than her fifth-grade daughter, Lisa. She had moved here from Mexico a few years ago for economic reasons. Subsistence agriculture was the only way of life in her village, way down near the Guatamalan border. After a few years of living with her sister in LA and working in a sweatshop, she'd found a warehouse job putting together gift packs at the Wisconsin Cheeseman and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I suppose back in rural Mexico the American minimum wage sounded like a lot of money, and that's why her family encouraged her to head north. But once here, Rocio discovered that our cost of living swallows minimum wage whole and then demands more.

Other practical difficulties dogged her. At first she had to get a ride to work every day, because she couldn't pass the written test for her driver's license. Eventually her boyfriend, Pablo, cribbed the answers from a friend so she could memorize them. At least then she could drive legally.

It was Pablo who insisted she find an English tutor through the local Literacy Council, in hopes she could get a better paying job. And so twice a week we would get together and talk, mostly about her life, about Lisa, and about her tiny hometown in the shadow of a volcano. I got the impression very little in her current life was her idea--not coming to a city so far north, not her job, certainly not learning English. She was seldom cheerful, but when she forgot her frustrations and smiled, her whole face changed. Then, a different Rocio came out, with quiet confidence hiding in the crinkles of that smile. Sometimes she would look up at her picture of Jesus and say, "He is protecting me."

When I signed on as her volunteer tutor, nobody told me about Pablo. Rocio's live-in boyfriend was a big guy with a smile like the cat who just swallowed Tweety Bird. He was paraplegic and wheelchair-bound, and had never worked in this country. At least, he had no legal employment. Soon it became obvious that he had a few sources of income after all. When the people coming in and out of the apartment's back bedroom became too much of a distraction, Rocio and I moved our biweekly English lessons to the public library. Lisa always tagged along; Rocio wouldn't leave her home alone with Pablo.

Working with Rocio made me realize how different life is now from the days at the beginning of the 20th century, when my grandparents left Portugal for California. Back then, many immigrants stuck together in farming communities, and made their living much as they had in the old country. Where my mother's parents settled, a third of the population was Portuguese. Everyone knew each other; they all farmed and went to the same Catholic church. Each family had an orchard of almonds, peaches, cherries, apricots, or whatever would earn them enough money to pay off their land. They never needed to learn a new trade, or much English. Though my grandparents had lived in America for many years before I was born, I could barely communicate with them. They could put down roots in their new country without changing who they were.

That farmland is in the middle of what is now Silicon Valley. That's how much the world has changed.

Coming to America was quite a different thing for Rocio. Farming is no longer an option for most new immigrants, so she needed to live in an urban area to find work. And while urban areas have Hispanic neighborhoods, they also have their risks; any neighborhood someone like Rocio can afford--anyplace I can afford, for that matter--is not a place to settle down in safety. It takes several low-paying jobs to make rent and pay for food and utilities. Rocio worried constantly about living in a complex where drugs, prostitution, and crime were part of daily life. Was she safe here, and was Lisa? Her daughter was everything to her. But the two of them couldn't make it solely on her wages, so she shared her apartment and car with Pablo. He relied on her wages, while she needed his street smarts.

Rocio could barely hide her contempt for the man. Once, by accident, I referred to Pablo as Lisa's father. "He is not her father," she said, with no attempt to hide her disgust.

After a while it all became too much for her. She missed half our lessons, and when we met she would mostly speak in Spanish about life in her small town. One day she called to say she was leaving. "I have to go back. My mother is sick."

"Oh, Rocio, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize--" The whole thing seemed awfully abrupt. "Are Lisa and Pablo going too?"

"Lisa, sí. Pablo, no." She hesitated before adding, "If he calls, you don't say where I am, okay?"

"Okay." I was relieved to hear he would be out of her life.

"I give you your books back."

"You can keep them, Rocio. Don't you think maybe someday you'll want to study English again, when you come back?"

"No." This sounded definite.

"Well, then I guess you can leave them with the librarian. But call me when you get back, okay?"

"Sí," she said quietly.

I never heard from her again. There's so much I don't know: what she planned to do back in Mexico, whether she stayed, whether she could count on her family for support, or even how she had managed to save up enough for the trip without Pablo finding out. I hope she found the home she was looking for. I hope she took the picture of Jesus with her.

In the end, maybe it wasn't the difficulty of learning English, or the low-wage work, or the money problems that sent her back. Perhaps she was starved for community. In that village she told me about, everybody knew each other, worked and lived together. Everyone went to the same church, where they celebrated and mourned with their neighbors. Adults kept an eye on all the children and wandering animals, and on the active volcano nearby. They had to trust each other to survive. How could she get a grip modern urban America, with people hurrying in and out of each others' lives? In many ways her third-world village seemed an enviable place to me, at least for those of us who feel modern life has some pieces missing. Rocio tried to make a family by living with a man who brought in some money, but unable to trust him, she found no happiness in the arrangement. She had grown up in the continuity of a place, but, unlike my grandparents, she found no surrogate here.

And so Rocio left America and Pablo, and went back to the warm, volcanic soil of the place she was raised, the place where she'd put down her roots.