School years

Loyola Graduate

In November 1951, Jorge, the tenth of the Murillos was born. He is currently in vogue because he looks like me but with blue eyes and that is suppose to make more handsome. In any case, my parents closed production with a golden brooch. I’m two years older than the second, Mercedes, and seventeen than Jorge.

I studied junior year in the group that edited the school paper and with the debaters and public oratorical contestants. I got the sixth place overall and finally, by my senior year; I was with the elite group. In this classroom you could not find an athlete, a politician or generally any activists. We were nerds, studious and unbearable. When I graduated, in June 1952, I finished in first place.

You will not believe it but this is the first time that this is told and almost no one has seen my high school transcript. That was always my father’s policy: to be discreet, not to provoke envies and keep a low profile. It is until now that I break his rules. In this select group we took physics with workshop, chemistry with lab, spatial geometry besides sociology, English and contemporary themes. The easiest groups had mechanical shop, singing, physical education and such.

I was examined twice to determine my I.Q. In the California test the range of IQ that is considered average is 100 more or less 10%. For those who have fewer than 90 there should be a certain difficult in learning and for those over 110 there should be a certain ease. There have been important scientists and very many successful businessmen with barely 100. During my first year of high school, with a year and a half in the States, I got an IQ of 101 and beginning senior year with four years if residency I came out with 119. Good marks no doubt but not out of the ordinary. The IQ average of my nerd class was 123 so that I was somewhat responsible for lowering it. Since grammar school even during my studies at college, I was lucky to have two or three exceptional students in my classroom. It is not humiliating…it just is so.

Coming back and forth from L. A. I had some memorable experiences. During a trip I saw the Tijuana zebras (donkeys with stripes painted) a major silliness if there are some. In several occasions I flew from Culiacan to Tijuana with a stopover in Guaymas. Unbelievable.

In a trip, when I was 17, I met a young man my age who invited me to Del Mar horse racetrack, in the U.S.A. near Tijuana. He lost his and part of my money very quickly and would not allow me to stop playing with entreaties and begging me that he had inside information on the next race. He moaned when I told him I had to stop playing. When I had practically only enough money to continue my trip to L.A. I decided to stop. I had to punch him in the chest in order to leave the racetrack. I regretted the big ox I had been. I was humiliated by the experience since I thought I was an experienced adult. How sad to see first hand the compulsion to gamble. We are exposing our people, precisely to that vice, in authorizing casinos in Mexico.

I miss President Cardenas who closed the Agua Caliente gambling facilities in Tijuana. It was also a brothel and a drug provider to San Diego and L.A. How sad to forget our history and the poverty and drug addiction problems we have already had with gambling saloons and more so when the owners have the effrontery to name them “Caliente”.

I was invited to spend, during the winter, weekends in the mountains near L.A. With families of fellow students I visited Lake Arrowhead, Little and Big Bear. In rustic wood log cabins, like the ones we had in Altata that were nothing like the palatial beach homes we have built lately. I learned to sleigh, skate and ski. Besides the novelty, for a Culiacan resident, to learn winter culture there was the attraction of participating in family dinners having dishes everyone shared. Fondue, greasy gravies with smashed potatoes, very fatty chunks of meat boiled or roasted or fat fish with its skin and jellies near their spine, boiled eggs and other culinary offenses that help to weather the cold.

A great experience was joining the debating team. Actual subject matter was studied and we traveled to have meets against other schools from Southern California. My English became better and in the last year in the States, five all together, I managed to join the second ranked debating team of my school. The first team was composed of two excellent speakers that competed successfully in regional and national oratorical contests. Battaglia who ascended in politics up to First Secretary of Governor Reagan, and O’Donnell who is now a prestigious gynecologist in L.A. O’Donnell was U.S. champion in a contest speaking of their independence heroes.

During those years, American soldiers engaged in the Korean War. In the summer of 1950, President Truman sent troops to Korea. MacArthur was its commander. In April 1951, Truman removed MacArthur from command and ordered him to return to the U.S. It became known that the general disagreed with Truman’s policy in conducting the war. Due to China’s intervention, MacArthur wanted to use all U.S. power to defeat the Chinese, including atom bombs. He didn’t understand the limited answer concept of new warfare. The American people received, both in San Francisco and in New York, MacArthur as a hero but his intention of becoming a presidential candidate was a failure. Korean War became a stalemate and ended with the Treaty of Panmunjom in 1953. Korea was the first war that the U.S. didn’t win, then came Vietnam that was the first it lost and they haven’t learned their lesson because they are about to lose the Iraqi and the Afghanistan wars.

When I graduated from Loyola I foretold that I would become a civil engineer. I entered the Technological Institute of Monterrey in Mexico, Tech, to make true my prediction.

School years

Arrival at Loyola

I studied freshman and sophomore years of high school from September of 1948 to June of 1950. In 49, my sister Margarita was born. Intelligent, a good observer and curious, she was the joy of my parents and aunt Carmen with her reports of what was happening in our block.

When I arrived to my bedroom at Loyola, an assigned room with four beds, two boys were torturing, throwing his books to the ground, a smaller dark haired boy. As I walked in I ordered them to stop. The bullies, quite bigger than I, heeded my commands. They looked at me and didn’t understand why a boy as small as the one they were hurting was making dispositions. It must have been my body language or the wild smell I probably had from the orphanage, there must have been something but the fact is that they stopped.

From that day forward Walter Bell, such was the victim’s name, would be my friend. Having decided to learn about American literature Walter had a card from the L.A. Public Library. I still have the one he made me acquire. Walter withdrew three books a week which he read in that period. Eventually he suffered several nervous crisis and was expelled from Loyola when he tried to commit suicide. He would be readmitted and finally graduated with us. I had to protect Walter from the harassment he suffered from our fellow students.

Loyola had an educational system that would be impossible in these democratic times. From the entrance exam and from the grades you got during the first year you were assigned to a group of similar abilities thus giving, those who could, a heavier academic load. I was then assigned to the lighter load classroom for the first year. I became friends with the best sports players and school politicians that is those who asked you to vote for them to be student body officers.

When I started sophomore year, I was not placed in the select group but was assigned an intermediate classroom even though I had ranked twelft in freshmen year. This group had a few sports players and the actors of our theater. I obtained the eight rank and yet still was not assigned to the nerd’s class.

For patriotic reasons, not having the duty of saluting daily the American flag, I did not join ROTC. Consequently I did not learn to take apart the Colt 45 pistol, the Garand 30 or the B.A.R. I did not learn to read maps nor march in formation. I was not trained to shoot real bullets in our rifle range and did not then participate in regional and national marksman contests. I now consider my patriotism as exaggerated and ask myself: How exactly act Mexican students in military academies or at West Point?

The Jesuits managed to stop me from getting into fights. When I arrived for the second year I was roomed with the light weight boxing champion of the school. John Roth was a senior and a good athlete. Besides boxing he played halfback and ran the 400 and the 800 yard races. He was surely of Jewish ascendancy and probably on a scholarship. In any case, because of my room mate, older students would no longer menace me and the ones my age or size would not dare confront me because Roth was told to make me balance my time between my books and exercise. Since then I have done sit-ups, abs, shadow boxing and push ups besides running, now walking and haven’t got a defensive disposition but feel quite confident.

In 1948, in Culiacan, we had the first planting irrigating land with water from our new Sanalona dam. The building of the dam and the clearing of the shrubbery of the land and the first crops made our first prosperous young men with money to spare. Dreams of wealth begin and conversations turn to whiskey and cognac, to our local Tambora, serenades to girls, travels, women and spending. I heard them many times: The attitudes that we still hear and that come from that brief time. The same bragging, showing off and despise for those who don’t know what money is for. Many lost their way.

In 1949, the U.S.A. lost China. It had never being his but that’s the way they expressed themselves to indicate that Mao Tze Tung, and the communists, had triumphed over Chiang Kai Check, and the nationalists. Both sides claimed to be the successors of the republic founded by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen after the fall of the Manchu dynasty.

As China Hands are known the officials of the U.S.A. Foreign Service who had informed their government that the nationalists were incompetent and corrupt and that eventually the communists would win. They advised, furthermore, as a tactical and secure policy to begin negotiations with Mao and to be confident that the Chinese were not lackeys of Stalin or the Russians. Curiously the commander of the land forces in Asia during WWII, General Stillwell informed and advised the same. When he returned to the U.S.A. after the war he was ordered to keep silent about Chinese affairs. His documents are known because his widow, angry at the treatment her husband had received, made them public. It became common knowledge that Stillwell referred to Chiang as the “Peanut” and since he called himself the generalissimo, Stilwell nicknamed Chiang’s wife the “madamissima” that in American English has the connotation of meaning the brothel manager.

The diplomatic career of the China Hands was ruined and they were persecuted as communist sympathizers by McCarthyism. Some of these were the sons of missionaries, had been born in China, had gone to school there and were fellow pupils of many of the communist leaders. Their sin was to inform honestly what was happening in China. It is common that superiors become angry when they receive news they do not want to hear.

School years

Eight grade. Grammar school in the USA.

In the summer of 1947, in Guadalajara, my beautiful sister Teresa is born. Tall and looking a bit like my mother we’ve become friends lately.

Since our mailed applications to enter high schools had failed, my father decides to travel to Los Angeles to visit schools personally. First we try St. Catherine’s, a small militarized catholic junior high school. They had recently had students from Culiacan and they did not want another one. We then visit St. John’s, another small militarized catholic junior high where a first cousin had been a student and consequently I’m refused.

To celebrate the opening of temples for worship, Culiacan had an Eucharistic Congress in 1943. American clergy had sent Father McGuken as its representative and he was now the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. My father had officially and politely attended him during his visit. He recommends St. John Bosco that depended from the dioceses. The school was practically a correctional so the Principal pitied me and refused to admit me. Thank God. I finally enter a nuns’ recently established grammar school where I would board. I was enrolled in eight grade of the American grammar school. I don‘t know if the school was an orphanage or a disciplinary school but luckily sixth, seven and eight grades received classes together. A great windfall for me since I did not speak English but had the advantage of having done first year of secondary schools in Mexico, that is I had already studied most of the general knowledge courses.

In less time that I’m taking to tell you about this school year, I’m fighting a blond guy that looked like Richard Windmark, the movie actor of that age. We are quickly separated. A short time later I‘m in a brawl with a boy much bigger than I. Several days later I’m alone in the gym surrounded by most of the tough guys of the school. The head of the pack, a tall and strong boy which we called or was named Tuna or Tona tells me: We don’t want any trouble here. Will you fight me?– No, I said. I have a bad temper but do not chew embers. Ok, will you fight Windmark?– Yes, I answered and we immediately engage in the scrap. My nose is bleeding and I have a black eye so Tuna stops the fight. We have order here– he declares– I run this show and my second in command is Windmark. You’ll be third and the rest obey.– I don’t know how much of these proceedings were known by the nuns but I sometimes think they had run a jail in Ireland before coming to the States.

Banshee, the spirit of woman in Gaelic, is the equivalent of Mexico’s Llorona. The little people, that are the leprechauns or gnomes, are the same size and have the same naughtiness, sometimes cruel, of Sinaloan “Fascicos” about to disappear from our folklore. Remember the jingle: “That Fascico that is in the cheese chest should put in his legs that are showing”. They also have the size and character of Aluxes who are also playful but sometimes helpers of Xtabay, the woman in white, related to the moon that enchants and devours solitary men in the woods of Yucatan. Or maybe the size of the Nibelungs that, in German mythology, are the dwarfs that treasure and guard the gold that lies in the Rhine River.

I receive all the charm of the Irish, a poor, enamoured, dreaming, pugnacious and indolent people. I mix it with Spanish, half breed Mexican and Indian traditions inherited from infancy. (To mention that Ireland is growing fast takes the romanticism out of the comment but gives hope that Mexico will wake up someday) Apparitions, charms, talismans, treasures buried by bandits and never found: the Nahual that is the devil as a black dog; demons and totemic animals like owls that strike the roofs of houses in full moon nights. In brief seven months: singing of the girl left behind, of longing for the green hills, of the beau that promised to return, of the town’s band, of the pub and regional beers and of the light morning mist; I learn English. The songs are very similar to Sinaloan songs. “At the strike of dawn the mist is light” says one of our favorites.

The sisters gather all the schools students to announce that even though recently arrived in the States, two of their students will apply to enter Loyola, the most academically prestigious high school of Southern California. A guy named Murphy and I have to stand and receive applause. We are told to represent our school worthily.

Days later the good sisters do not speak to Murphy and me. We had flunked the entrance exam. When we meet them at corridors they turn their head. What a disappointment, what a shame.

The sisters tell my father that I had come out 250 of the 500 that took the exam and that Loyola admitted only the first 200. My rank seems good enough for father since I took the test with scarce seven months in the States. We return to see bishop McGuken and father asks me:

– Isn’t so my son that you are not a dullard?

– Nope, pop.– I answer.

– As you can see, your Excellence, the boys tries. Isn’t true, my son, that you want to study?

– Yep, pop– I answer.

– As you can see, your Excellence, the boy has a will.

The bishop laughs at the charade and he then talks to me knowing that a year before I didn’t speak English. He then phones the nuns and after many entreaties from father he agrees to recommend me to Loyola. That is the way I entered it.

It wasn’t easy for McGuken to recommend me to a Jesuit school. Bishops administer and shepherd their dioceses and authorize the establishment of religious orders in them. But once in many orders have their own authorities and no longer depend from episcopal authority. McGuken was actually asking for a favor from the Jesuits and he didn’t know how they would collect that commitment. Don Arturo could be that persuasive.

I spent the summer in Guadalajara, as always, but since I studied away I’m beginning to miss my friends of Culiacan, Furthermore I’m an adolescent of full 14 years.

School years

First grade. Secondary school.

I turned twelve in the summer of 1946. The family is in Guadalajara for the holidays and I am registered at the Institute of Sciences, a Jesuit secondary and preparatory school. I also entered the Kostka boarding home, an independent facility which the Institute recommended. No less than twenty students will live in an old and beautiful house of many bedrooms in the corner Vallarta and Marsella.

The change from grammar school at the Cervantes in Culiacan to secondary in the Institute at Guadalajara is not so big inasmuch as school duties but it is enormous for other reasons. You have lo leave the home and foods you are used to; you leave the warmth of a loving mother, you will be far away from friends and cease to be the older brother and begin to live with boys bigger and older than you; a fact to which you have to adapt since they can make life difficult or beat you if that is the case.

A short time after being a boarder, I watched, in October of 1946, the biggest and most impressive sky spectacle since the appearance of comet Halley in 1910.

The best known star rain or meteor shower is the crossing of the orbit of Earth with the remnants of the comet Temple that burst and kept in a large elliptical orbit around the Sun. The meteors are called Leonidas. The last shower was in November 1999. We saw it in Altata and it was fun but not spectacular. The shower of 1946 was a celestial accident and was not the Leonidas but the Dragonidas because the spatial debris seems to come out of Draco, the Dragon constellation. Earth crosses this spatial junk every seven years. In the Guadalajara of that year, we had clear skies, no moon and still no smog. The house was a bit away from downtown and we had very little reflection from the few lights of the city. We climbed to the roof of the house placed thick blankets and lied supine watching the firmament. The shower lasted for at least an hour maybe for two and it was a constant flashing of dozens of vanishing stars. My friend and double compadre Dr. Peraza saw the shower in Culiacan.

The comet Kohoutec, in 1974, was seen as a large Venus; the Star of Bethlehem, the conjunction of several planets is unique but not astonishing; Comet Halley, in 1986 was poorly seen in Culiacan and won’t return until 76 years have passed; And even though I had the opportunity of watching the comet Hale-Bopp, in March of 1997, to the northeast and the size of a full moon when at zenith and even though its tail was beautiful, this phenomenon appears fixed in the sky instead of crossing it fast as falling stars do. There has been nothing in my lifetime that has compared with the meteor shower of 1946.

In this year, transitional because I would go to the U.S. of A. as soon as admitted, I remember my taste for soccer games and for the popular snacks of Guadalajara.

I played soccer in the lowest ranked division, third, of the Institute with a team named Necaxa. I look funny in the photo of the team, kneeling with my socks fallen over my ankles in the tradition of the barrio. Too bad said barrio is in Buenos Aires.

Atlas was the team of that epoch. Someone decided that Mexican players did not have the size, the speed and the stamina to play speedily and with long shots to goal. Atlas brought an Argentine coach who taught us to faint, dribble, and keep the ball and not to lend it to the opposing team. It was the era in which we used to say: “We played as never before and lost as always”. It’s good that has changed for now our national selection fights any team, winning or losing but truly competing.

I can not let pass a comment of the Guadalajara snacks. Sherbets made from fresh fruits like strawberry or guanabana; the tostadas of pigs feet and drowned tortas at the Sanctuary; chinchayote, cured pulque, truly you could approach the pulque provider at the corner of Corona market and buy a large glass of pulque even though you were only twelve. I also remember the thick milk cream, the salty French bread, the tender corn ears, the juices from crushed sugar cane and the cactus pears of different colors. And of course Chapala’s candies: the Jamaica sugared hard candies and the burnt milk bonbons.

A common pastime was skating with roller skates in the divider of Lafayette Boulevard, now called Chapultepec. Tightening the claws of the skates against the winged soles of my shoes I would make pirouettes hoping to be seen by the young girl of my preference. Were she to smile or say hello I would of course turn red as a flaming tomato.

Mexicans exuded optimism. International credit flowed to build dams, roads, schools and to electrify the country. Aleman, the president, was a smiling, gallant, and true coastal and port man and a tireless promoter of modern economy. His enrichment and that of his rapacious helpers was tolerated because Mexico was entering the contemporary world leaving behind subsistence economy, the love of land and the scale of values of the farmer class. Richness would no longer come from savings but from promotion. The aspirations of politicians ceased to be to have good horse or a fine breeding bull in good lands, they now wished for a flat in Acapulco and a building in downtown Mexico City. Today it has gotten worse.

The school yearbook, Memories (Recuerdos), from 1946 to 1947, says that in first grade group B, Arturo Murillo and Juan Vergara, who no doubt must be someone, ran even in progress in the Spanish language.

School Years

Sixth grade. Grammar School.

The so called “Nuremberg Trials” were held from November 1945 to October 1946. The allies put on trial captured German political, economic and military leaders. There were sentences of from ten to twenty years of imprisonment and also many death sentences. The Asian Holocaust, applying that term to war crimes committed by the Japanese, shadows the Jewish Holocaust but the Tokyo trials are rarely mentioned. The Japanese were accused and sentenced for civilian massacres, as the one in Nanking, as well as experimenting with bacteriological warfare on occupied nations and using chemical weapons; submitting non combatants to forced labor and prostituting women to service its soldiers; of looting, torturing prisoners and other horrors that are difficult to conceive and forget.

Independently that the allies also committed unpardonable abuses and that the delivery of atomic bombs is still morally reprehensible, the horror of the crimes is such that, even though there was a war on, we must think them as crimes of the human gender in order to forget who the perpetrators were.

It is particularly difficult to judge the proceedings of the military governor of occupied Japan, General Douglas MacArthur. He protected Emperor Hirohito and his family and did not permit that they be tried. This contributed to reestablish dignity of the Japanese and helped to cure the trauma of defeat but on the other hand many of the royal family were guilty of war crimes. Something different occurred to the military officers that fought for Japan. The ones that had not directly fought MacArthur were made civil administrators of occupied Japan and named governors and mayors of the cities but the ones that did fight against him were sentenced as war criminals.

The Constitution and the establishment of present day Japan is principally the work of MacArthur. He gave women the vote, eliminated castes and watched that the Japan government worked well before ending U.S. intervention.

The sixth grade teacher was Professor Zazueta Russell. He had substituted teacher Guerra at midterm. Zazueta was an amiable man who taught through great empathy with his students. I finished grammar school having had the privilege of one good teacher after the other.

Our school festival was held at the city’s social club, that is the building that id now the Culture Casino. Finishing grammar school I wanted to receive the only award that we respected: the diploma of progress. The school gave out medals and ribbons for attendance to classes; for punctuality; hygiene, for arriving clean and bathed; honor for being respectful; and for anything else you can imagine even for paying tuition on time. When we were leaving the club, after the ceremony, a fellow student griped saying: “You received the progress diploma”– How can you still complain?– I said– if you are the most decorated student of our generation. What more do you want?– He became very quiet and said: “I would exchange all these tin chips and ribbons for that diploma you won”.

That's the way it was. Someone, whose name I don’t remember, was first place of our class. Another, whose name I forget, was second. I came out third and with the last claim to the diploma.

The country had prospered during the war. 1946 was an election year and Mexicans would vote for president of the republic. The Candidates were Padilla, who was Foreign Relations minister and Aleman, who was Secretary of State. Both candidates had negotiated the settlement of U.S. claims for the oil expropriation that President Cardenas had made. Nevertheless, Aleman, judging consequences for the coming election, allowed Padilla to take all the merit. This had distanced Padilla from the strong left wing of the official party that chose Aleman. Padilla entered as an independent and was well accepted but no enough to beat the official party. I tell you this because I went to the meeting where Padilla spoke during his candidacy. The country furthermore became more civilized. Padilla was not murdered and he was not required to leave the country.

During 1945, the only grandparents I met passed away. My maternal grandmother in March and my paternal grandfather in December. When you are young you do not think of death. It comes and goes and you do not understand it but with years it begins to poke you in the ribs to remind you that it's waiting.

During the summer I would become twelve and my parents were delivering on what to do with me. The pondering of what secondary school to send me begins. I’m not sure if because there weren’t any good secondary schools at home or because of my bad temperament I didn’t get along with my brothers and sisters and needed as much attention as everyone else together.

My father decides to send me to the U.S.A. and makes applications to several schools. They refuse me because grammar school in the States lasts for eight years and my father had written that I had finished six. I was sent to the Science Institute in Guadalajara, a prestigious preparatory school ran by Jesuits.

School years

Fifth grade. Grammar school.

During the school year that began in September of 1944 and ended in June of 1945, I went through the fifth year of grammar school. Several of my few readers have asked me why was I, at such an early age, knowledgeable about World War II. I believe the following paragraphs will answer this.

When the war began, September of 1939, I was only five years old and seven when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. I knew nothing about the War. When I was nine I joined the street gang that gathered every evening in the corner of Rosales and Morelos, a block around the corner of my home on Angel Flores Street. The older boys of this group were from two to five years older than I and were very conscious of the battles in Europe and the Pacific. We heard the radio and read newspapers that offered news, official news that is, but there were other ways of getting information. In my neighborhood “La Opinion” was printed. This paper published news given by Radio Berlin which had programs in Spanish. In short wave radios anyone could hear these programs. In those times, movie shows always presented newsreels that offered filmed information of the War. These were 15 day old news but no one was in so much of a hurry then. We also collected small chewing gum wrappers that depicted photos of war actions. With these effigies we filled an album that progressed with the War even to photographing the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the first atom bomb.

To begin with I was born in the hospital that was owned by the German doctor, as Dr. Wiereger was called. The hospital was located in the building that now houses the Escuela Libre de Derecho. Dr. Wiereger left Culiacan in 1936 to join his country’s army. More than that, on Rosales street, near my grandfather’s home, lived the Timmermanns that owned Atlas Tannery, neighbors in El Barrio, the small town east of Culiacan, of Murillo Tannery that was run by my father. Timmerman had two sons and a daughter in the German forces. On the same block lived Herr Max Hach whose family, years later, have been so close to the Murillo that we consider them a part of ours. Also, not far away lived the Schiller and the Haberman families that had sons about my age and that have been my friends since. Herren Radke and Gerzabeck were teachers of our University of Sinaloa now called UAS. On Colón Street lived Herr Pauwells father of Gilda, Leo and Inga, loved friends since then. We use to tell Leo and Gustavo Haberman that they were Nazis and instead of getting angry they rejoiced. My pediatrician was the elder Dr. Okamura, my dentist was Dr. Koyama, the pop bottler in Culiacan was Ninomiya, the best ice-cream was made by Monobe and the tin sheet works that the tannery needed were made by Arturo Shimizu. After the War, from Sonora would come to establish as merchants and industrials: misters Kuroda, Ohara and Inukai and the Satos were about to receive their professional degrees as doctors and engineers as was Gironobo Baba as an accountant. Men and women of good behavior, useful, hard working, respected and appreciated in Culiacan. Furthermore the only Americans that lived here had German surnames: Heisser and Grenfeld. During those years, still bursting with patriotism we recited with the poet Lopez Velarde: “Fatherland, your mutilated territory is still so large that trains go through you like fantasy toys”

In fifth grade the arithmetic rule of three got complicated, from directly to inversely proportional and combining several factors son that you had to handle the feared fractions. Our teacher, professor Marquez, was tall, thin, violent, mistreated his students and was impatient and desperate. He used to yell at us saying: “Pay attention, you hopeless piece of dung: How can you expect to learn? The piece of chalk and the blackboard eraser were frequent missiles hurled at us. All this, of course, impossible in these more permissive times in which Marquez would not have lasted a minute as a teacher. Even so, it’s hard for me to speak against the first teacher who taught me complex arithmetic concepts.

In Catholic schools and in the simulated lay ones, like the one I was in, we sang patriotic songs. The Song of our Regiment, the hymn to Joan of Arc, etc. whereas in public schools they sang the workers hymn or the communist anthem called the International.

Considering that the soldiers that fought at the war fronts, no matter what side, were workers or their sons and that no bourgeois were there: Communism was against the war. Nevertheless, in order to boost Russian pride Stalin abandons this principle and promotes the nationalist feeling of Russians. He declares that the war is the Great Patriotic War to save Mother Russia. Consequently in our public schools they abandoned internationalism and began to sing the Mexican bird sellers song.

Having thrown the Japanese from most of the Pacific islands, Americans had to displace them out of Japan’s Interior Sea islands. In January the Japanese are expelled from the Philippines and then out of Japanese islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On the 7 and 8 of May, 1945, Germany surrenders. Its cities devastated, its people starving and twenty million lives lost. For what?

We were to travel by train from Culiacan to Guadalajara. I remember the nervousness previous to the trip. I hear my mother complaining that the expected child is restless. It’s not yet the expected date for the birth so father and our aunt Carmen decide that it’s the anxiety for the trip. Father stayed in Culiacan. At dusk the train departs and a few miles south, near La Cruz, on the Pullman wagon named Aristotle, on the 26 of July, my brother Fernando Heriberto is born. “Feri” since then because of his name and because he was born on a train. (Ferrocarril in Spanish) A midwife assists the birth that comes without hitches. The train continues south and mother gets down in Mazatlan while we keep going in the care of Aunt Carmen.

Summer holidays in Guadalajara gave us the opportunity of seeing professional soccer. Older cousins that lived there took cousin Enrique and me to the games. Very good soccer players, refugees from the Spanish Civil War, still played. I saw

Pepe Valtonrrá with team Atlante, Luís Regueiro with the Asturias and many others. Some were in the latter years of their careers but were still excellent. A separate mention merits having seen Isidro Langara play. Langara was three times champion scorer in the Spanish league. In America, he played four years with San Lorenzo de Almagro, in Argentina, and was champion scorer in 1942. Later on, in Mexico, playing for the España, he was twice champion scorer.

The United States decides to force the unconditional surrender of Japan. It drops the first atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the beginning of August 1945, in Guadalajara, before noon, the bells from all the churches began tolling announcing the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII. I had just turned eleven.

School years

Fourth grade. Grammar school

I was in fourth grade from September 1943 to June 1944. I don’t know why fourth is considered easy while third and fifth are thought of as difficult, but that is so. The rule of three becomes proportionally inverse and somewhat difficult; grammar becomes tedious, geography interesting and national history a delight.

The war continues and defeats of the Axis forces pile up nevertheless cruel battles ensue. Germans are retreating in the Russian front. The B17 American bombers, called flying fortresses, daily cross the skies destroying German cities. Americans land in Sicily, in 1943, and by January of 1944 they land close to Rome itself and at several beaches in the South of the Italian boot. The Japanese are folding back in the Pacific. War itself, if it ever had it, becomes senseless. The Axis is defeated but begins to put hope on developing miraculous weapons. Time becomes a technological race to see who will first invent weapons of mass destruction. The Germans bomb London with airplanes and with the V1 and V2 rockets and then they build the first turbine propelled planes, the jets. Speculation begins over who will first make an atom bomb. In June 1944, the Allies land in Normandy and advance on Germany while the Russians are leveling all resistance in their drive to Berlin.

Bombing blackouts and rehearsals became one more of our ridiculous pranks. Over the roof of what is now the Sinaloa Museum of Art a siren would wail at the first hours of darkness. What size was Culiacan in that year that everyone heard it and proceeded to turn off all home lights so that the planes that were to bomb us would not see us and continue on their way. Of course we knew that the blackouts were silly inasmuch that the range of the age’s airplanes was way short, so then: Why the civic rehearsals? Why then the blackouts and with block inspectors watching that you comply?

For the first time in my life I’m exposed to a shameful event. Our teacher is expelled accused of fondling students. The topic is evaded at homes even though we all knew what had happened. I played the drum in our military band, the company of older preadolescent boys instructed us with the disinformation you can imagine. That was the way it was. Parents didn’t touch the subject. Among us the affair was full of mysterious and sinister sins. We were from 9 to 10 years old.

It was about this time that I changed barrios. Not that we had moved but that my friends from Flores Street didn’t confront our rivals from the University plaza neighborhood who would invade our territory looking for fights. I had to face them with very bad results. When I changed barrio I began to meet with the guys in the corner of Rosales and Morelos. A block and a half away from my home. Amado Blancarte, Humberto Lizárraga, Oscar Armienta and Antonio Amezquita were older than I; Alvaro and my cousin Enrique were about the same age; and Eduardo Valenzuela and Jaime Díaz were a year younger. We were convinced fans of the Axis and ridiculed Allied propaganda and went to the movies to laugh at the impossible feats of America soldiers as they acted them out.

The other recurrent conversation was the violence in Sinaloa. On the 21 February 1944, during Carnival in Mazatlan, Cornel Loaiza, the governor is murdered. Rodolfo Valdez, alias the Gypsy, is arrested, tried and sentenced. Then different scenarios of the crime are proposed. That Valdez was outside talking with someone when the shots were heard, that another hit man was the one responsible, that Loaiza was shot due to the land conflicts in the south of the state, that conflicts between cardenistas, as Loaiza, and camachistas, the new president followers were responsible. Etc, etc.

At any chance, boxing gloves appear and we stopped throwing whirlwind punches but instead we learn to lead with your left and cross with your right, to dance on the toes looking for your enemy’s opening to then plant your feet to punch with force. Fights are no longer a question of anger and fury but of agility, technique and slyness.

The food everyone ate was simple. For dinner it wasn’t strange to have a small portion of fried beans with a slice of fresh cheese on them and a kitchen spoon serving of pigweed leaves. Next evening the dinner would be the same beans with a portion of squash or purslane. And next day beans again with fried dried beef or one tamale. I assure you that we ate comparatively well at home. If you don’t like to remember or contradict me it’s only because you have a lousy memory or many quirks in your head.

We played with wooden tops, cup and ball toys, yoyos and crystal marbles. The more common ones were oven cooked clay marbles. The most rustic and very cheap you can imagine. A frequent game was to make two ice pick holes in a flattened coke cap, to pass a string through one hole and then the other, to tie the string and to make the chip twirl pulling on the string. You can guess how much there was to do in the poor Culiacan that we had before the Sanalona dam guaranteed irrigation for the lands in the valley. Another game was to make a hook on the end of a wire and with it to push the inner ring of a bicycle wheel and run after it.

When walking the sidewalks, on any given Sunday, from all homes you could hear from radios the sinister music of a pipe organ and a cavernous voice saying: “No one knew and no one knows of the mysterious case of the poisoned lily”, the music would go louder and after a crazy laugh the clinch: “The crazy monk knows”.