Before the I-5, My Father Was Mexican

While attending a conference in San Diego, I am cooped up in a hotel that is coincidentally on the same street as my paternal family’s first home in America. I decide to look up the address because it will make me feel like I knew my father. 17—, I type into Google. An image of a faded yellow bungalow that sits beneath a billboard encircled by skyscrapers is the top search result. Immediately, I am reminded of the film Up. I scroll down the page, selecting a link that references historical resources. 

An attempt was made recently to designate the surviving half of this community of bungalows as historically significant. The other half had been destroyed when the state sliced through the neighborhood to make way for Interstate 5 in the 1960s.  

The report, which denies the request, reads: 

There are hundreds of similar, or better, examples of Craftsman architecture…

Additionally, [the buildings] are not associated with historically significant persons or events

The report talks about the Italian community, but my family was Mexican, even though they later changed their last names to masquerade as Europeans and escape discriminatory attitudes.  

not associated with historically significant persons or events

I consider the significance of my father, who looms large in my mind even though I refer to him in past tense when discussing him with others. My father was, my father would. Strangers must think he is dead, but really, he left my mother for a mistress and then left that mistress for another mistress and forgot he had a daughter. 

Before I looked it up, I had imagined the house flattened, recalling the ending of the film Love & Mercy, when Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys goes back to his childhood home in Hawthorne to find it no longer exists. In a way, I am disappointed Dad’s home is still standing; it would have been a cleaner ending if it were gone.  

I stare at the bungalow online and envisage myself being dropped off on the side of the busy road, knocking on the door, and announcing my entrance. My grandparents greeting me. My father not yet marred by my authoritarian grandfather. Who would he have been? I see him before the I-5, before he could remember the sound of heavy machinery severing the neighborhood, before his family claimed French heritage: when he was Mexican. 

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.