Chapter I

Rubén Cobos, his wife, Rita, and their three children—Evelia, Irving, and Hélène—moved into their new home on 420 Amherst SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the morning of August 9, 1946. The monsoons migrated from the Gulf of Mexico the night before bringing storms to New Mexico. Dark grey skies, harbingers of the coming weather, settled over New Mexico like quail protecting their nests. As the Cobos family packed boxes from their bungalow that night, staccato lightning flashed in the sky above, slicing the sky into a jigsaw puzzle, illuminating the Sandia Mountains, majestic extremities of the Rocky Mountains, until the peaks seemed to the children to be ghosts hovering in the sky, just about to pounce down upon them. They hurried to put the boxes, and with the help of friends, the furniture into the van while the thunder, pounding like tympani, cracked overhead. They worked with a frenzy to beat the rain. When the clouds opened up and hurled the splattering drops with hail upon the earth, they took shelter in their bungalow. They had no wish that night to navigate the flooded streets alongside arroyos (wide expansive ditches lined by the city with cement) of rushing muddy water, churning with turbulence like exploding lava within a volcano,arroyos which carried logs, branches and other debris to the Rio Grande River.

The next morning as they entered their new home, the skies were hazy, grey, like clouds of smoke from industrial plants. Hallowed light surrounded them from glimmers that peeked from the clouds. The air was clean after the rain; it had a fragrance of juniper and sage.

Rubén was a mestizo, a blend of the Spanish from Spain with indigenous Mexican native Indians. He claimed he was descended from Padre Cobos, a priest who emigrated to Mexico from Spain,“pollinating” native women and converting natives to Christianity as he traveled about Mexico.

“Will we have a swing?” inquired the children. In their former home on Girard SE, where they had lived one year previously, they had had a black tire hung with a rope tied to the front yard cottonwood tree.

“We’ll see,” replied their mother. They knew then that they’d not have a swing.“We’ll see” was their mother’s polite way of saying“no.”

There was nothing unique about this house with its square concrete porch, its uninspired square white house stucco design, and its flat roof. But the neighbors living in clean houses, although not similar to this for these were not tract homes, did not understand what this plain house meant to Rubén.

Rubén had been born into a grand house in Piedras Negras, Mexico, which is on the border of Mexico across from Eagle Pass, Texas. However, when his father died in 1918, leaving them in extreme poverty, and the Revolution of 1910 disrupted their lives further with soldiers coming into the residents’ homes at all hours to steal their food, and gun shots going on all around them at all times, Rubén’s mother, Lola Medina Cobos, took her children, Consuelo, Lupe, and Rubén to San Antonio (they walked across the border and hitchhiked) to live with her mother,“La Wenceslada” Pilsuski Medina, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Rubén lived in poverty in that crowded two-bedroom home with his grandmother and his mother and their families for seven years. He lay on the luxurious lawn of the city park with its bed of blue grass and clover, its outlines of honeysuckles and bougainvillea, the one place he could escape the confines of his ghetto dwelling, dreaming of the day he’d own his own home: a clean house big enough with bedrooms for all his children so they wouldn’t have to sleep on cots in the hall as he did.

“Come in, Chuchees,” invited Rubén.“Come see your new home.” Rubén began to whistle. The sound of the melodyCielito Lindo lightened their hearts, spattered the plain, pristine alabaster walls of all the rooms with imaginary hues of exotic beauty. His perfect pitch, gay rendition, airy timbre created an atmosphere of grandeur.

When Rubén and his mother and sisters moved to Albuquerque in 1927 they moved to a tiny one bedroom house on Iron Street SW, a neighborhood filled with alcoholics and people who slept in the streets. Rubén’s mother slept in the bedroom. Rubén and his sisters slept on mattresses on the floor of the living room. This house on Iron Street was a step up from the house in San Antonio, for it had running water and an indoor toilet. In Piedras Negras, Rubén used an outhouse that had a Sears Catalogue with which Rubén learned English.

“It’s big,” exclaimed Hélène, only four years old.

Rubén and Rita laughed. To them it seemed enormous after the tiny front room of the bungalow they had lived in. Actually it was 12&rsq