When Segundo was ten his father left. The father went to the United States to work, and never returned. Segundo, growing up in Oaxaca with his mother and sister and brother and sister-in-law and then a niece and then a nephew, completed tenth grade. By then he was adept in the family employment. He was a rug maker, like everybody in his town of Teotitlán, which is located half an hour’s bus ride outside the city of Oaxaca, and is recommended on all the tourist destinations. Although the town is nicely situated at the foot of a mountain in a pretty area, it’s known only for producing rugs. All of Segundo’s life, along every street, householders opened their front rooms to show their wooden looms of all sizes and their hand-woven rugs for sale. When each tourist bus arrived the barelegged tourists, both women and men, strolled along the sidewalk and chattered like birds, but Segundo didn’t know what they were saying.

      When Segundo was still a child the wool for the rugs was dyed with natural dyes, made from flowers and dried insects. Segundo went with his mother to pick the flowers and then he helped her fill the big pots to boil the leaves and petals to produce the dyes. When he grew older he could draw the weaving designs, and plan the threads of different colors. But now he was thirty, a small man with a boyish face. Most of the rugs were colored with chemical dye. Too bad, the natural ingredients grew more remote in the neighboring hills every year. Something in his heart shrank, but the tourists didn’t always know the difference, or if they did, often preferred the gaudy chemical reds and yellows. His mother frequently felt too tired to climb. If Segundo did not spend entire days from early to late searching, his mother opened the packets of chemical colors she bought in the city, and poured them like salt into the boiling water.

      To make a little more money Segundo began to invite tourists into his mother’s house. His mother, notified in advance, put on an embroidered indigenous dress and wrapped her head with an indigenous cloth. Segundo led the tourists into the patio and showed them the boiling pots of colors, and demonstrated how to lean over the wood fire to stir the wool. He showed them his mother’s spindle, and his sister weaving. He gave them small square hand-woven coasters as gifts. His mother in her colorful dress took the tourists into their main room. It was a large rectangle with a cement floor and an altar adorned with flowers and images. From behind a crude table the mother offered soda, and home-made sweet breads. But when they departed the tourists were awkward. They didn’t know if they should give the mother or Segundo money, or how to do so; and often they didn’t want to buy the rugs which after all were not the very best quality.

      When the fiestas came, for Christmas or Semana Santa, he would bring their finished rugs into the big market in Oaxaca, and set up a stall to sell them. Around him a dozen other vendors of hand-woven rugs would also find places. The tourists argued about the prices, and bought very few, because rugs are heavy to take home on an airplane. Sometimes a tourist bought a wool shoulder bag. But it hardly paid the cost of the rented stall, the bus fare and food required while his mother and he took turns sitting in the stall surrounded by rugs. At night during a week of holiday market Segundo slept on the rugs so they wouldn’t be stolen. His mother took the bus back to Teotitlán and returned again in the morning.

      Segundo began to think of following his father to the other side. The father wrote to his family from time to time, and wired small sums of money, from which Segundo once bought American running shoes, white with a blue zigzag. His father wrote that he worked as a gardener, and cut bushes into the shapes of animals. He sent photographs of giraffes and elephants created from green bushes, which Segundo and his family understood from other photographs they saw in magazines. The father said work paid well in California where he lived.

      Segundo made inquiries. He spoke to some of the Americans residing in Oaxaca, who advised him it was dangerous to cross without documents. But Segundo couldn’t afford the hundreds of pesos for tourist documents. In addition, he would have to pay a bribe to the official who issued the documents, and then buy tickets for the long bus rides. Instead, he decided to go California the way so many others did, and obtain work with his father’s assistance.

      He began to study English so that he would be able to find his way to his father. He studied steadily in a determined way, and made the acquaintance of Americans who offered to teach him. The first American was a man who thought Segundo was eighteen. To help the boy he gave Segundo a small job painting his house, and affectionately embraced him during the English lessons. The second American Segundo met was an elderly woman. She invited him to sit in her patio while she named various things in English, and often lectured him about the dangers of crossing the frontier. In pity she bought from Segundo one of his woven wool shoulder bags, which she admired but never used.

      By now Segundo was thirty-two and had no wife, nor hope that he could afford one. His niece and nephew slept in a brick room that lacked a window. It was little more than a shed with a dirt floor, built on one side of the patio, and sometimes mice ran through. The family was in debt for the brother’s wedding, because the local tradition obliges the man’s family to pay for the marriage festival and since the brother’s festival was very large, everybody in the community contributed. One future day they would ask for a return contribution for their own festivals. It’s a good system, but Segundo knew it meant that he would never be free of obligations.

      Segundo could not explain his despair to the American man or to the old American woman, neither in English nor Spanish. These people each lived alone without family, on money which came from the United States. His father earned money there too. So clearly Segundo must go, or live out his life in the small rug town of Teotitlán, among the others who made rugs.

      Segundo made his contact with a pollero, to get him across from Tijuana. He paid a good man, and crossed without being robbed or murdered. It was a good start.

      He made his way to Los Angeles and found his father in a small house living with an American wife and three American children. His father would never return to Mexico, he was a green card worker. Segundo didn’t dislike the wife, or the children who were teenagers and so sophisticated he understood nothing of what they said. He listened with them to the music they played on their stereo but he didn’t know how to jump in that kind of dance. Worse, there was no work. His father apologized that at this moment the United States suffered an economic downturn, and many people who used to hire the father to cut their bushes into animals and water their flowers and lawns no longer did so.

      Segundo looked around for other work. The street corners filled with other small brown-skinned Mexicans like himself, dressed in laundered jeans and wearing Mexican sombreros. Like him, they spoke a certain amount of English, carefully and slowly. Among themselves they spoke the language of their towns if they were indigenous men, or if not, they spoke Spanish. They began their wait every morning at seven o’clock in front of certain well-known stores where they could buy a bottle of coke and a cigarette or two. An American would drive up, and stop to offer them work. This work was sometimes gardening or painting or picking fruit, but while Segundo waited no automobile or truck stopped. There was no work.

      The house of Segundo’s father was crowded with the teenagers and music and movie magazines. Segundo didn’t understand the American TV or the American food, which seemed to be mostly hamburgers covered with ketchup. His father’s woman was born in the United States and although she looked Mexican, she didn’t talk in Spanish or cook right. Segundo knew his father had to request that his woman permit Segundo to sleep on the living room floor. He had to ask permission of his woman, an unheard of thing. The reason was that their marriage could not be legal if the father had already a prior wife in Teotitlán. Therefore the father was not justified to hold the precious green card of a resident married to an American citizen. This came out in a strong argument after one week. The angry woman could not be placated and she shouted American words at Segundo’s father.

      Segundo moved to a boarding house where he shared a room with two other men. They took turns sleeping in the one bed. It was easier for the other two because they had employment and left every day. But Segundo had no employment, and when his turn came to sleep he often lay awake, staring at the odd stains on the ceiling of the yellow room. He had no money to go the movies while his room-mates needed to sleep in the one bed. He was afraid to loiter too long on the street or in the park. He gave himself one more week of waiting on the corner for work. Also he would speak with others in the Mexican neighborhood. Then if no work came, he would return to Mexico. He wouldn’t even need to pay bus fare back across the border. The US government would drive him.

      Some months later, Segundo was again walking on the sidewalk in Oaxaca toward the second class bus station, from a small job painting a house. Unexpectedly he met the old American woman who had advised him not to go to the United States. “But you weren’t hurt!” she marveled, as if this must be the most important part of his adventure. “You weren’t killed or sent to jail! Did you see your father?”

      This was Segundo’s own fault, that he had told this bent and wrinkled woman who wore jeans like a girl, that he had a father in California who was a gardener and who would help his son Segundo find work there.

      The old woman continued gesturing and asking him questions, in the bright sun on the street.

      Finally Segundo spoke. “I didn’t like it there,” he said. He gazed at the old American woman wearing jeans. She continued to smile and move her hands about like wind-stirred leaves. From her shoulder dangled a cloth bag of the type sewed in Guatemala.

      “The food didn’t suit me. It’s better here.” Politely he smiled. “Well then, goodbye,” he said. He stepped past the woman and continued on his way.