“Mijo. Venga. Ayúdeme.” I rouse myself out of bed at two in the morning. “Mijo, lléveme a El Salto,” he tells me as I enter his bedroom. I sit by his bed, reach over the railing, release his grip.…
I wrote this piece as I was processing the death of both my parents, my mother in 2017 and my father in 2019.
María Luisa Herrera Montero and Jaime Humberto Herrera Álvarez were both born and raised in México, and I owe everything to them, quite literally. By the time I came along, they were married and living on the Mexican side of the border, in Juárez. I was born on the other side, El Paso, but we continued living in our dear barrio in Juárez until we moved to El Paso.
They gave me a childhood in Juárez, and that was beautiful. They gave me opportunities, including the opportunity to grow up bilingual and bicultural, and that was beautiful.
They loved me all my life, and when I married, they loved my wife and our daughters. They loved and helped raise my nephew José (when they passed, he mourned them as if he had lost his parents); he and I still miss them. My parents were married for a lifetime, and they had their rough patches, but they loved each other and cared for each other all their lives, even as their lives changed, up until the end. They have always served me as an example of what it means to be a loving and giving partner, parent, grandparent, human being. I got my first two tattoos in honor of each of them, their names on each forearm, and every time I struggle or every time I don’t struggle, when I am sad, when I have joy, I look at my forearms and I talk to them.
Mi madre y mi padre. Gracias. Los quiero.
I started writing this piece when I came back from Durango, fresh from lots of crying, and also knowing that I was fulfilling my father’s wish. It was an honor to do so. My father connected me to México, in our own travels and in the stories he told me about México, and as he shared in the stories I told him as I traveled more and more in México. As he got older and stayed home more, I knew he was living vicariously through me and my stories, and that made both of us happy. He always wanted to hear about my “adventures” in México, including El Salto as well, I am sure.
There is also the backdrop of the violence of México in the story, and originally part of the memoir was about the time he and my nephew and I were going to go to Durango and drive the new autopista from Durango to Mazatlán. He was seventy-five, I was fifty, and his dear grandson José was twenty-five. Three generations of Herreras twenty-five years apart. But when my father called my godfather in Durango, El Colorado told my father that it was not safe to travel there at the moment, so we ended up not going and then not being able to go at all as his health deteriorated.
So I wanted to take him there. And honor him. And love him. And I did.
JAIME H. HERRERA grew up bilingually and biculturally in Juárez, Chihuahua, México, across the border from El Paso, Texas. He thanks his parents for his education, his bilingualism, for raising him in that Borderspace. Gracias. Jaime always carries the border with him, and writes about the Borderspace—Nepantla—in essays, short stories, and poetry.
