How My Mother Saved Me From My Mexican Kindergarten Bully

I had a horrible time in Mexican Kindergarten. Much of it had it can be blamed on me. I had not developed any kind of social instincts at the age of five. I was easily distracted. I was not yet conditioned like the rest of the “good” children. The classroom I was in only had three walls, with a playground where the fourth one should have been. I had never experienced the joy of grasshoppers, beetles or ladybugs. Those were the days where everything with more than two legs captivated my attention. The nun at the head of the class was secondary. We did not get along too well. She had already hit me for not knowing the words to the Mexican national anthem and for having dirt under my fingernails.

My mother was partially to blame for my lack of adaptation. She dressed me every day with these creased navy blue slacks and blindingly white shirts. This gave the student body the impression that I felt I was better than them. Secondly, my mother would always pack what others considered a luxurious lunch for me in a school where that was almost unheard of. There was no cafeteria and the other children were told to go home for lunch and then expected to come back to conclude the day. There was a span of time where I was hit or beat up on a daily basis by either the older students or the nuns. I hated school. I hated being beat up for an egg sandwich I was not going to eat anyway.

The thing was that at that point, Mexico did not believe in social promotion. This meant that you had pre-teen second and third graders. My older cousin was a second grader when I started, and did not go much further after that. Belén celebrated her quinceañera as a third grader. She was already 18 when the school decided that enough was enough and gave her a participation degree — which was more of a handshake than a culmination certificate. There was this one student who went by the name Rascala. He was either 13 or 14 and a fourth grader. He would seek me out across the yard in order to take my lunch and beat me up as some kind of sick dessert ritual. The beatings continued until the day my mother decided to intervene.

My mother was a proud momma wolf. She grabbed Rascala by the shoulders and demanded to know why he was messing with her cub. He said that I was an arrogant American-born jerk that went around with sandwiches while everyone else had nothing to eat. He was tired of me calling him, “Waquala.” My mother explained to him that, due to a speech impediment, I could not roll my Rs correctly. I was 12 before I stopped calling trees “angoles.” They both sort of laughed it off, and then Rascala promised that he would stop beating me up.

From that day out, my mother paid for my protection. She would pack two sandwiches. I would give Rascala the egg sandwich and would keep the bolillo with cajeta for myself. I even started making friends because they would all marvel at how English translations sounded funny. I started being funny and riffing Seinfieldian humor by commenting on how the English translations to monster and mustard sounded almost identical. I had a captive audience for my one-man recess show. By the way, those that did not laugh had to answer to Rascala, so I had most of my bases covered. Lucky for me, my mom’s egg sandwiches were the crack cocaine of that day.