Free Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan Page A

showing him, Chango,” somebody said.
    Then Chango grinned, and I could see why the nickname. With his brown face, small size, and simian smile there could be no other. “You wanna join our gang?” he asked. “I think you’ll do.” What if I say no? I thought. But the bell saved me, because they started to amble back to class. “Meet us on the steps after school,” Chango shouted. I nodded, brushing the dust from my cords as I hurried off.
    That was how I became one of Los Indios, which was what we called ourselves. It was all pretty innocent, not at all what people think of when they see brown faces, hear Spanish words, and are told about gangs. It was a club really, like any kid club. It made us more than nonentities. It was a recognition, like the medal for bravery given to the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz.
    What we mostly did was walk home together through enemy territory. Since we were Los Indios, it was the cowboys and the settlers we had to watch out for. The Anglo ones.
Vaqueros y paisanos
were okay. Also, it was a relief to slip into Spanish again after guarding my tongue all day so it wouldn’tincite Sister Mary Margaret. It got so I even began to dream in English and that made me feel very uncomfortable, as if I were betraying something very deep and ancient and basic.
    Some of the times, too, there were fights. As I said before, we were outnumbered two to one, and the sound of words in another language sometimes outraged other students, although they didn’t seem to think about that when we all prayed in Latin. In our parish it was a twist on the old cliché; the students that pray together fight together—against each other.
    But there was more to Los Indios than that. Most important were the movies. I forget the name of the theater. I think it was the Rio. But no matter. We called it the Rat House. When it was very quiet during the scary part of the movie, just before the villain was going to pounce on the heroine, you could hear the scamper of little feet across the floor. We sat with our smelly tennis shoes up on the torn seats—we couldn’t have done any more harm to those uncomfortable lumps. And one day someone swore he saw a large, gray furry something slither through the cold, stale popcorn in the machine in the lobby. None of us would ever have bought popcorn after that, even if we’d had the money.
    For a dime, though, you still couldn’t beat the Rat House. Saturday matinees were their specialty, although at night during the week they showed Spanish-language movies that parents and aunts and uncles went to see. Saturdays, though, were for American Westerns, monster movies, and serials.
    Since I was one of the few who ever had money, I was initiated into a special assignment that first Saturday. I was the front man, paying hard cash for a ticket that allowed me to hurry past the candy counter—no point in being tempted by what you couldn’t get. I slipped down the left aisle near the screen, where behind a half-drawn curtain was a door onwhich was painted “Exit.” No one could see the sign because the light bulb was burned out, and they never replaced it in all the years we went there. I guess they figured if the lights were too strong, the patrons would see what a terrible wreck the theater was and not come back.
    The owner was a short, round, excitable man with the wrinkles and quavering voice of a person in his seventies but with black, black hair. We kept trying to figure out whether it was a toupee or not, and if it was, how we could snatch it off.
    For all his wrinkles, though, he could rush up and down the aisles and grab an unruly kid by the collar and march him out like nothing you ever saw. So fast that we nicknamed him Flash Gordo. We would explode into fits of laughter when one of us saw him zoom down the aisle and whispered “Flash Gordo” to the rest of us. He gave us almost as many laughs as Chris-Pin Martin of the movies.
    I counted out my money that first