The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,100
in Huntington Park, even those who still preferred the colors of other flags and the other kinds of order those banners represented.
With the clack-clack of Keenan’s suitcase resuming behind him, Victorino Alamillo took his Stars and Stripes and began to hammer, unaware that the sounds were rousing his neighbor Jack Salazar from his bed, causing him to pull back a curtain. Alamillo is putting up his flag. Finally! He waits until the actual Fourth! Jack Salazar also had a blue star in the window, and a son in Ramadi, Iraq, and two American flags that hung from the eaves 365 days a year. He noted that with the addition of Alamillo’s flag there were now three houses on the block that were bold enough to show their patriotism on Independence Day—a whole three!—though one of those belonged to a Pakistani family, and they almost didn’t count in Salazar’s right-leaning, fourth-generation Mexican-American opinion. The Pakistani family’s flag was plastic, and Salazar sensed they’d put it up so he would stop looking at them suspiciously, or so that he would come over and chat with them as if they were normal Americans, though the truth was that the Pakistani family put up that flag because their daughter Nadia had purchased it during an immigration-rights march in downtown Los Angeles. Nadia Bashir, a twenty-year-old UCLA biochemistry undergrad, had decided that hanging it over the front door would make for a personal and somewhat ironic statement about her family’s ongoing state of cultural evolution. On the day she put up the flag, she remembered her uncle Faisal and his tales of his first, carefree travels through middle Canada and middle America in a Volkswagen Beetle in the 1980s, selling bongs from the trunk. The U.S., he liked to say, was still the feel-good country he had known then.
“There are no clans here,” he’d say. “That is why the Americans prosper. They don’t have these silly, inbred resentments like we do. We are too clannish. It’s always held us back.”
To which Nadia very often answered, in the sassy and slightly nasal tones of a Los Angeles accent that sounded charmingly provincial to her Pakistani-born, London-educated uncle, “No clans? Gimme a break! Even in this tiny city, all we have is clans!” In Huntington Park there was a large Spanish-speaking Mexican clan, and the shrinking but still influential Mexican-American clan that never spoke Spanish, and a small clan of people who still called themselves white, and the scattered and reserved Koreans and Chinese, and now a very quickly growing Muslim clan, which was the newest in this part of the metropolis and thus the most feared and misunderstood by all the others. Add to this the warring clans of the street gangs with their baroque entanglements, and the caustic comedy delivered by the two political clans viciously facing off every other Tuesday at the meetings of the City Council, and it all looked as messy as anything on the subcontinent. There was an undercurrent of psychic violence to Huntington Park, Nadia thought, alive underneath a façade of coexistence that was as fragile as the quiet that had miraculously enveloped the neighborhood this morning, interrupted only by the clack-clack of three outsiders walking past her bedroom window.
“Maybe we should show someone the picture of our grandpa, to see if he lives around here,” Keenan said.
The same idea had occurred to Araceli, until she remembered how ancient the photograph was—she would only make a fool of herself. This neighborhood they were in now, Araceli noted, was clearly newer than the one that housed the shack where el abuelo Torres had lived a half century ago, and most of the people she could see stirring behind screen doors and windows were much younger than he was. They seemed unabashedly Mexican to her, despite the occasional U.S. flag. Araceli sensed they were, like her, relatively recent beneficiaries of the American cash boom, that they were housekeepers and laborers just a decade or so ahead of her in filling their dollar-bill piggy banks. No, they would not know John, Johnny, or Juan Torres, so she wouldn’t waste any energy asking. Instead, she would find Marisela’s uncle and ask him to tap into those rivers of American information that were still a bit of a mystery to Araceli, the lists of names and numbers that smart fingers could make appear on computer screens, and he would make a phone call, and liberate her from her charges and this journey.