Introduction: West Real

The West is a big place, but not my West. The West for me is where I lived -- it is a house. And it's how I lived, and who I lived with. It's some people, and some streets, a border fence with Mexico in the distance, an arroyo across the highway, a dry landscape, Coronado Elementary School, the Nogales Apaches High School fight song. My West is like that, a place to live. When I was old enough to think about the West, it was gone. It had moved into the realm of capital letters.

I learned the West best growing up in it, not talking about it. I was born in Nogales, Arizona, on the border of Mexico. My father is from Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico, and my mother from Warrington, Lancashire, England. I grew up around my father's family, but I look like my mother -- which means I got to see two worlds from the beginning, and could even physically experience the difference growing up where I did: I could put, every day of my life, one foot in Mexico and one foot in the United States, at the same time.

For all practical purposes my first language was more or less Spanish, though the influence of my mother's British English clearly had its part. There was no problem with this, until first grade in the 1950s. That little kids can't make some very big decisions is not true. When we got to that first-grade classroom, my friends and I, we were told: You can't speak Spanish here.

That was crazy, of course, and we all raised our hands, saying,
Seguro que sí -- of course we can speak it! But no, they said, that's not what they meant. We were simply not to speak it, and some got swats, even for speaking Spanish on the playground.

We knew one got swatted for something bad -- our parents had taught us that. So if we got swatted for speaking Spanish, Spanish then must be bad.

There was a bargain in this, though: what we saw when we got to the first-grade classroom was clay, blackboards, cubbyholes, fingerpaints, kickballs that weren't flat. And when we got home that day, we looked around -- and didn't see any of that stuff. We knew what we wanted. The decision was easy. And if learning English was going to get these things for us -- well, we weren't dumb. We could play along.

But we kept learning. If speaking Spanish was bad, we then must be bad kids.

And our parents still spoke Spanish, so they had to be bad people. This was easy enough for children to grasp; so, though of course we loved them, we learned to be ashamed. One can imagine what PTA meetings were like -- we didn't have any. None of us ever took the notes home.

By junior high school and the beginning of high school, I could no longer speak Spanish -- which is to say, I didn't want to; I was embarrassed, and I didn't practice. Not until my later years of high school and college did I relearn Spanish, but that is what I had to do, relearn. And what I was relearning was not words, but my attitude toward those words. It was learning how to look at something in more than one way.

After all these years, however, this was the bonus. In having to pay double and triple attention to language -- first to forget, and then to relearn -- I began to see earnestly how everything, every object, every idea, had at
least two names, and that the process, rather than my counting it as any kind of a detriment in my life, worked instead, luckily, more like a pair of binoculars. It showed me how, by using
two lenses, one might see something more closely, and thereby understand it better.

I was relearning how to look at something, period. A language implies, after all, a different set of ideas -- different ways of looking at the world. My West is about edges, borders, about looking at something in more than one way, about all the things that make you do that. I can find no shame in this.

Still, there is sometimes a lingering confusion. The physical pain of being swatted, of thinking about being swatted -- this doesn't go away so easily. It's hard to choose sides, to know which way to go. It's hard to think that you even have to choose sides.

I am reminded of the Fourth of July. As a writer, I lean toward thinking of such events as metaphor: a sky full of colors over Arizona, and how much noise that makes. There ought to be some kind of lesson in that: how we can be so scared by the noise and so dazzled by the sight, this confusion of perspectives. My Fourth of July is from childhood. The day is also the
día de los Refugios, or the saint's day of people named Refugio. This was my great-grandmother and my grandmother's name, and coincidentally my mother-in-law's. Celebrating one's birthday as one's saint's day is common in Mexico.

We had a party every Fourth of July, and it was for the whole matriarchal line, and for everything Mexico, which is what they were, from the whole other set of words to the green-tinted glasses. These women played such great roles in my life that birthday fireworks for them later in the evening always seemed right. But it was the noise of everything American.

Some things like this don't make any sense, but there they are together making perfect sense anyway. For me now, I still see one thing but hear another: I wonder, for example, how in Arizona we've come to find a rhyme between
no way and
José, or why anyone would buy patio stones with drawings of sombreroed and seraped peasants leaning their backs against saguaros. You'd think either the peasant or the homeowner or the artist should know better about leaning against a cactus. And these are stepping stones no less. I don't even want to guess at the metaphor there.

Several years ago I worked on what was then called the Papago Reservation near Sells. I took the third-graders on a field trip, and as we were walking back to the school they proposed playing a game. Sure, I agreed. What should we play?
Cowboys and Indians, they said, and then began to run. They shouted at me to run as well, because, they said,
The Indians are going to get you, the Indians are going to get you. When we returned to the school and calmed down, I asked them if they were Indians.
No, they said.
We're Papago.

And of course. They knew what "Indians" were, and they weren't exactly that-they had seen the movies, with half-naked people shouting war whoops and shooting arrows. This isn't what they were. The people in their families wore boots, cowboy shirts, jeans; they drove pickup trucks; and they were good guys. They knew what they wanted.

For Christmas my son wanted and got a wooden map of the United States, the kind with the states sawn into puzzle pieces. He assembled the puzzle readily, and got all the states correctly placed after only three or four times, and then he was ready for something more.
Dad, I'm going to rearrange the country, he said, and then he did. When he was done, it was clear that people from Wisconsin would have to drink cheese coladas in what used to be Florida, and Maine residents were going to start ferrying across the Mississippi if they wanted to get to Virginia for peanuts and RCs. What was curious, however, was that he didn't touch any of the western states-only all those scrunched up eastern ones. That's what he said-
scrunched up. They need a little room.

None of us seems quite able to get a hold of the West. Perhaps it's too big to consider, so it just gets left alone. We think ourselves incapable of defining it-which therefore makes it a scary place, ripe for conquest, for domination, for purchase. Those odd things we do to that which we don't understand.

Maybe the writing on the map is bigger in the West. Maybe the puzzle parts for the western states satisfy something childlike, so that they fit just fine. You don't have to bother with them. They take care of themselves.

I am reminded of a small example used in every Spanish class about a central cultural difference between English speakers and Spanish speakers. In English, one says,
I dropped the glass, should such a thing happen. It is an "I"-centered instance, rugged individualism in its smallest moment. In Spanish, one says, "
Se me calló el vaso," which means, "The glass, it fell from me." This is a different world view, a way of accommodating the world, of living with it instead of changing it. Which is the better view is not the point, but I do think that our notions of the West as representing rugged individualism may, in fact, be faulty. There's a messy middle, something in between. I think that's the language of this place. It's a rugged pluralism.

I have no memory of the first time I came to the West. I was just always here. What I remember instead are the times I went away, the first time to New York, and my profound and lasting embarrassment at the rudeness of the cab driver honking his horn at someone the moment he pulled away from the curb. First at someone, then at someone else, and then just for the sake of honking, as if it were conversation, and he were an authority. I also remember getting off a subway station very late one night, a small stop, and sensing that nobody else was there as the train pulled away-and that if there were indeed such a thing as fear, this would be the time to feel it. In the West, having nobody else around is pretty normal, a good feeling of the everyday; a crowd means something's gone wrong. It was just the opposite in New York. And other places have other opposites.

The irony in all this, of course, is that I must seem some kind of opposite myself. As a Westerner, I'm an urban dweller, not a cowboy. I've been a cowboy, but I'm not now. I have cable, and I've been to England. Something about that changes the rules. I was reading lately in our newspaper that the West is in fact the most urban-dwelling part of the country. Per capita, as a percentage of population, that makes sense, in the same way that Arizona, per capita, has the most boat owners in the country-even though there's basically no water here.

Sometimes the confusion in perspectives is good, sometimes it gets in the way. But somebody's got to be able to talk about it all. We can't be afraid.

These things would, after all, not seem to make sense. But the West is constantly being compared to and contrasted with other places, and this never works-it never makes sense. The West's juxtapositions are already there, built in. Comparisons of the West must first be made to itself. It creates, in this way, its own definitions. It speaks a good language made of these words, but to hear it one must listen.

This issue of
Ploughshares is itself a puzzle. I don't know if it rearranges anything about the West or not. I don't know if I got a hold of it. But the West is speaking West here. It's not all the West there is, but it is all the space a scrunched journal can provide, this time. My point in offering these works is to try and take away nothing from anyone-that's my view of a newer West. And in trying to find work, there is so much that it's hard. But only hard.