Smuggling Parrots

This essay appeared in the 2008 issue of Pembroke Magazine. No. 40 edited by Dr. Liliana Wendorff, chair of the Foreign Languages Department at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke.




CHRISTINE GRANADOS

As a child, I helped my mother smuggle parrots into El Paso, Texas, from Juárez, Mexico. My mother’s smuggling wasn’t premeditated, and she didn’t do it for profit. She bypassed Customs or "didn't declare all she had in her car" because she wanted to right a wrong. This was before the Bird Conservation Act of 1992, before the Mexican government banned the exporting of exotic birds, and before the avian bird flu. There were plenty of times we’d drive into Juárez for fruit, medicine, or to visit the dentist, and she didn’t look twice at the vendors selling birds by the side of road. But some of the trips were different.

Bird smuggling for her was an emotional response to inhumane treatment that disgusted her. She smuggled when she saw a particularly sickly bird, or if she didn’t like the way one of the vendors was handling the birds. She’d roll down the car window, and ssht ssht the vendor over to us. Before I knew it, she’d be handing me a brown paper sack and barking instructions: "Under the seat. Don’t crush the bird. Be gentle. Hurry up. God Damn it gently, I said." We’d drive through customs and lie about what we had in the car, then ride home. The risks she took were for naught because the birds usually died within days, all except for Perico.

My first encounters with Dagoberto Gilb reminded me of those trips to Juárez. When I met him he was doing his own type of smuggling to counter an injustice he saw, and still sees, in the American education system. He invited me, an aspiring writer, to his home for a workshop. I believe he was pissed off just as my mother felt when she saw the poor birds from Veracruz jammed into dented, rusted birdcages smeared with feces. She saw past their eyes dulled by heat, tequila, and traffic, underneath the coating of dust on their feathers and knew what magnificent birds they were.

After hearing my tales of rejection—four writing programs had told me to polish my writing skills and reapply—and even after reading my fiction, Dagoberto Gilb was still optimistic about my future. He said my material was great, but my punctuation and writing skills were getting in the way of my telling a good story. He knew that, like the birds on the border, my writing was fogged. He knew that in the right environment I could flourish and I'm sure he did some fast-talking and bargaining to get me into Texas State University like Mom when she bargained for Perico.

Perico was the smallest bird inside the cage. He still had fur on his tail feathers. The vendor tried to talk her out of buying him. He said the parrot would die before we got him home. Hearing that, Mom changed her tactic, and she began to badger the vendor into giving her the bird for free. He never knew what hit him. We left him standing on the street with the dirty string tied to his belt loop and the other end tied to another parrot’s foot, and one less bird in the cage.

Gilb offered me a safe place to perch until I understood fiction and honed my writing skills. He referred to the workshop he invited me to be a part of as the "Undocumented Illegal" writing workshop. There were four of us at his house in South Austin—four Mexican Americans who couldn’t get into MFA programs. And there was Dagoberto, a professor, friend, someone exactly like us, someone whose parents weren’t Ph.D.s but store clerks and laundry workers. Here was someone from a working-class background who was actually teaching at one the universities we were trying to get into. I never felt more comfortable with a professor than I did with Dagoberto. He talked too loud, cussed too much and nagged incessantly, exactly like my mother. And like her, there is no pretense to the man. Honesty, however brutal, is Dagoberto’s best quality. If you saw him walking on a dark night, you might cross to the other side of the street because he's big. Some might call him intimidating as one would have to be when you live in rough neighborhoods. His black hair hangs down past his chin and he glares at you with such intensity you have to look away. He is the anti-professor. That is, until he starts talking about books and writing. He's been published in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and done stints for NPR’s Fresh Air.

Being asked by Dagoberto Gilb to come over to read one of your stories is like Pete Sampras asking you to hit some balls, or Wynton Marsalis asking you to come over and jam, or Sandy D’Amato asking for one of your recipes. You get the picture. For some reason, he saw something in us. Three of us eventually made it into writing programs. Two went to Texas State University, one to the University of Iowa and the other is a director of Latino affairs for a Midwestern state—all because he saw something.

Once inside the walls of Texas State, I felt like one of those parrots stuffed into a brown paper sack and hidden under the car seat. I was slowly suffocating because I wasn’t well read enough, couldn’t string an eloquent sentence together, and sometimes didn’t understand what the hell the professors or students were talking about during class.

During that time, Dagoberto became my surrogate mother. It may seem strange to compare this big, Mexican-German writer to my mother, five foot two in heels. But if you ever meet her, you'll never forget her. It’s the same with Dagoberto. Like her, he can talk a blue streak, and he’d talk me down from my neuroses and self-esteem issues, there in his little closet of an office that they give professors at universities. He’s also got my mother’s stubborn tenacity. He, like her, goes against the grain, sees the unfair advantages the strong have over the weak, rich over the poor, finds the underdog and fights for it, for us. He wrote about the disadvantaged, people just like me, in an essay, "Poverty Is Always Starting Over." He said: "Poverty is about starting over again and then yet again. It’s about talent fully shaped, but which, unencouraged, discouraged, lasts the briefest moment."

He hunts down talent with an eye focused on the disadvantaged, just the way Mom picked which parrot she was going to save from the Chihuahuan Desert’s 100-degree heat. Those beautiful birds from the Gulf only lasted a day or two at our house. And my writing could have gone the way of the birds if not for Dagoberto’s encouragement. The simplicity and brilliance of getting a group of Mexican American students together to work on their writing is reminiscent of my mother’s solo animal-rights quest. Hers was a small step that made a big difference in the life one bird, Perico. The only bird we smuggled across that survived. He lived with us for two years. Because Mom didn’t have the heart to confine him yet again, he walked around freely, perching on chairs and couches. He walked around that house until he got strong enough to fly. One day, he was brave enough to fly out the door, and he lived in our backyard for a month. Each day, he’d take longer and longer trips away from the yard, until one day he flew off and never returned.

I gained strength under Dagoberto’s distracted and reluctant guidance. Found my voice in that office that he so completely filled. He listened to my rants. Let me speak freely about being the only Mexican American in some of the classes I was taking, maybe even the only person whose parents didn’t have college degrees, whose parents lived paycheck to paycheck, whose parents never once mentioned college as a possible future. He let me talk, and more importantly, he listened and validated my existence, through both his presence on campus and his writing.

My first collection of short stories Brides and Sinners in El Chuco was published in 2006 by University of Arizona Press and Gilb, like my mother, said he had nothing to do with it but I know the truth.

CHRISTINE GRANADOS was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. She is a stay-at-home mother of two sons and a freelance journalist. Her collection of short stories, Brides and Sinners in El Chuco, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2006. She was winner of the 2006 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, a grant given by author Sandra Cisneros to further the aspirations of new writers. Her stories have been featured in Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature, Not Quite What I was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (HarperCollins 2008); Texas Observer, El Andar Magazine, Big Tex[t] and the Newspaper Tree. She is a graduate of UT El Paso's School of Communications and the MFA creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.