08/08/97

One Moment in Time

Merengue and salsa music mingled with the conversation and laughter of the migrant worker families, who had gathered to celebrate a successful sugar beet harvest before heading North where the tomato crop waited, ripe and ready for picking.

Gringo teachers organized this celebration each summer to say good-bye to the Chicano children, who attended school while their parents and older siblings brought in the crops. The teachers, I among them, and the children had spent many hours transforming ordinary classrooms into crepe-paper festooned dining and dance halls.

Brightly colored papier-mache pinatas shaped like tropical fish and farm animals decorated the school's main entrance. Inside, where the band played, stood cloth covered tables, heavy under the weight of casseroles, salads, desserts and drinks that the county school district had provided for the party-goers.

Children and adults, young and old, brown and white, swayed and swung to the contagious beat. The dancers' faces glistened in the late afternoon August sun.

Shouts, accompanied by staccato popping sounds, drifted in from outside. "They're breaking the pinatas," I thought, as I moved with the music toward the front door.

Suddenly, brown muscular arms grabbed my shoulders and held me against the wall, away from the doorway. "Don't move," the man whispered urgently against my hair. "Stay back."

"Let me go," I demanded angrily, trying to push him away.

He held me even tighter as screaming and more popping sounds erupted. Several people ran by us. Some hit the floor; others shouted orders.

"Abajo, abajo!" "Get away from the windows!" "Tienen pistolas!"

The music came to a ragged stop.

Straining against the man's arms to look past him out the doorway, I saw a blue pick-up truck speed away from the school. Two bare-chested men stood in the back gripping the side panels as the truck careened left onto the dirt road and disappeared in a cloud of gravel and dust.

In the quiet that followed, the man released me. I rushed outside along with several others to find out what had happened. Two young men lay inert in the schoolyard, one in the arms of a young girl, the other under the keening torso of his mother. An ambulance wailed in the distance.

Behind the violence was a lovers' feud. One of the men in the back of the truck had come to the party with armed friends to reclaim his girlfriend. They gunned down her new boyfriend and a cousin who tried to shield him. As they drove off they sprayed the crowd with bullets to keep people back. Miraculously, no one else was killed; two others were wounded.

Everyone but the girlfriend and mother remained eerily calm. We answered police questions; then mutely worked together to put things away and clean up. No one wanted to leave. Shared disbelief and horror held us there, as did the comfort we found from each other.

I didn't start shaking until much later that night. Alone at home, my mind reeled with the laughter, the music, the pinatas and the man who had instinctively protected me from the screaming, the splashed blood and the motionless bodies. In that one moment in time between life and death, two cultures became one, united by our needs for safety and protection. In that one moment in time, one of the motionless bodies could have been mine.

Have you ever had a brush with death?

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.