Canto CCCLXIII: My Grandpa's Fingers

Gentle cabrones:

Last week, I attended a wake for the dad of my cousin’s wife, whom I’ve known almost my entire life because she and her family are from the rancho. The pews at St. Anthony Claret in Anacrime were packed, and would’ve been even more packed if half of Jerez wasn’t on vacation in the motherland.

I sat at the very back corner, the better to look at the crowd. On the other side of my pew was one cousin, and I introduced myself to his wife as the primo who never shows up to family parties, which made her laugh. Soon after showed up another cousin, who sat right next to me.

We caught up, and I congratulated her on her daughter’s quinceañera, which I wrote about in a canto earlier this year. We heard the homily, heard our mutual friend’s touching tribute to her father, and went through the misterios gozosos of the Rosary. When the prayers ended, we got up like everyone else to offer our condolences to the Saldivar family.

Then my prima said something I would’ve never expected.

“You have my grandpa’s fingers!”

I do!

Skinny, long, wrinkled, with huge, thick cream-colored — but not white — nails and a barely visible lunula. They look like the digits of a Mexican E.T.

I can’t remember when I first realized that my fingers weren’t that common, but I do remember the insults that came when others realized it. I never got many, mostly because there are many other things to insult me about. But my face would always scrunch in disgusted bafflement whenever someone would zero in on my hands — of all the things!

It was an unpleasant reminder that the bully’s capacity to notice the tiniest thing that doesn’t match their worldview and use it against their target knows no low.

Others would notice my fingers and say they were “unique” and they had never seen them like it. My response was always that it was a hereditary trait I got from my maternal grandpa, mi Papá Je. They would offer an awkward “Ah!” and move on.

My cousin was the first person besides my mami to ever compliment my fingers.

I told her thank you, told her told her how people in the past had insulted me about them, and said how proud I was that I was blessed with them. Then we began to say hi to others, and we went off to our night.

But I’ve been thinking about my fingers ever since.

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I wrote at length about my Papá Je in my barely read 2008 memoir Orange County: A Personal History. But the quick story goes like this: Born in El Cargadero, Jerez, Zacatecas in 1906. Basically abandoned by his mom, so raised by his dad, Plácido Miranda, and his sister, one of the first people from El Cargadero or Jerez to move up to Anacrime. Came to Anacrime with my Papá Plácido in 1918, stayed here for about a decade, then returned to El Cargadero to court my Mamá Chela.

They moved with their children to the United States in 1963, but moved back to the rancho in the late 1960s. Mi Papá Je (that’s what we called him) and mi Mamá Chela moved back to the U.S. permanently around 1988, and he passed away at the end of 1991, when I was 11.

I don’t think about my Papá Je as much as I should, even if my memories remain vivid. He was kind, liked to smoke and had the gravelly voice to prove it, always wore a suit jacket and fedora (a legacy of his time in the U.S.) and never lost his head of hair. He also suffered a lot in his life, from his childhood abandonment trauma to health issues that forced him to stop working early to too many people taking advantage of his kindness, the latter trait of which I sadly inherited.

I still have his leather gloves, which I keep in the back of my shirts and shorts drawers so that I’m assured I remember him whenever I have to do laundry. But I never have a chance to talk anymore about mi Papá Je to people who aren’t my family. Having my cousin bring up my fingers reminded me I should, and that I do only when other people throw shade at me.

We shouldn’t wait for others or happenstance to provoke us into action, or remembrance, or emotions, or witness about things we love, lessons we can impart. There are only so many hours to the days, but they shouldn’t be spent waiting. Take a hint from the cosmos, or from your body, or from others — praise what and who needs to be praised, do what needs to be done.

Thank you, prima, for the reminder. I’ll try to show up to more family parties — I’ve done good this year, but we can always do better. We should always do better.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Virgen de Guadalupe statue at the Birrería Chalio off 1st Street in East Los Angeles.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb” — Herman Melville, on Moby Dick

LISTENING: “Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations. My honey is rewatching HBO’s incredible Watchmen, and early on in this series this JAM of a jam plays — when it growled out on the screen, I immediately knew this show wasn’t going to mess around (well, that and Regina King, of course). Motown’s most popular guy group (best? Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, of course) doing their five-leader-singers brilliance one final time, armed with prophetic lyrics by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. Swap Taylor Swift for the Beatles, and EVERYTHING in this song remains relevant — and the band played on…

READING: “In the Green Room”: I’m luck to be able to moderate panels for Zócalo Public Square every once in a while, and if you don’t know what Zócalo is, you’re missing out: They offer great panels and commission great essays. But my favorite thing they do is a list of random questions to their guests — and I mean random. I’m lucky to have gone through this, and it’s turning into a rite of passage for SoCal’s literati set. Never a boring response.

BUY MY NEW CO-BOOK! People’s Guide to Orange County tells an alternative history of OC through the scholarship and reporting of myself, Elaine Lewinnek, and Thuy Vo Dang. There’ll be signings all year — in meanwhile, buy your copy TODAY. And, yes: I’ll autograph it!

Gustavo Events  

Sept. 21, 1:30 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with Mike Madrid, longtime GOP strategist turned Trump mega-hater and author of the new book The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy at Alta Baja Market, 201 E. 4th St., Ste. 101, SanTana. Lecture, FREE but register here.

August 28, 7 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with Eugene Rodriguez, founder and executive director of the legendary Los Cenzontles, about his new memoir at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave. Los Angeles. Lecture FREE — more details here.

Gustavo in the News

“Report: Undocumented Immigrants Paid $96.7 Billion in 2022 Taxes”: The great — if generically named — The Latino Newsletter shouts out a columna of mine.

“Latinx Files: America is getting older. Not all racial and ethnic groups are aging at the same rate”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“‘Tacos forever’: 101 reasons to love Los Angeles”: Another Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“LibroMobile”: SanTana’s PoC bookstore posts a photo of myself and the compa author Alex Espinoza.

“Times Series Explores the Decline of Local News in California“: The Los Angeles Times internal news newsletter shouts out a columna and an EC of mine (no link unless you’re in)

“Letters to the Editor: Where’s the Beef?”: Alta Journal readers have (good!) thoughts about my most recent story for them.

“The pod that really could save America”: Mike Madrid’s podcast through the UCI School of Social Ecology that I’m in finally drops.

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Did Disney retaliate against workers wearing union buttons?”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary previews the historic contract Mouse workers just ratified — and the labor struggles that remain.

"Keri Blakinger”: My brilliant L.A. Times colleague — whom covers the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department but does other stuff as well — has a cool IG/TikTok series where she asks Timespeople questions about our jobs. In this one, the question was where was the strangest place we had ever filed a story from…and I have the stupidest, of course!

“There’s Always Room for Jell-O”: My latest Alta Journal story is a review of the jellied beef consommé at the legendary Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood. KEY QUOTE: “Maybe it was the booze, but I swore to everyone that the jellied consommé was filling, flavorful, and perfect.”

“Why Latinos are missing from the Kamala Harris vice president sweepstakes”: My latest L.A. Times columna examines the question in the headline. KEY QUOTE: “All these politicians are veritable minor lords, at best, in the Democratic Party kingdom — and any opportunity to climb up the hierarchy seem further away than ever.”

“The California roots of Trump’s anti-immigrant pitch to Black voters”: My next latest L.A. Times columna tackles Trump’s vile campaign strategy. KEY QUOTE: “The reality is that Black people aren’t as receptive to an anti-immigrant message as Trump and the GOP would like to think.”

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