Home for the Holidays

It's been a year since I left my hometown. A year since I've seen my mother and father. A year since I've played my brothers on the banks of the river near our house. A year ago, I was an eighteen-year-old, wide-eyed kid from rural Mexico. Today, I feel like a tired old man sulking in his own desolation in the California central valley. Here it feels like I never really left Mexico. All of the field workers look just like me. Same dirt colored skin, oily black hair, and same dirt-caked fingernails. Although everything looks the same, it all feels different. Everyone here is by their self, competing with their compatriots for the few jobs available in the fields and orchards. People hardly talk but when they do we always talk about food.
"My abuelita makes the best pozole, I'm telling you," says one.
"I can't wait 'til I get a chance to go home so I can try my tia's chicken enchiladas," says another.
When these conversations happen I'm transported back to the crowded dining room of my parent's casita. I picture my two brothers fighting over the last tortilla while my baby sister gives my father puppy eyes so she won't have to eat her greens. I can't think of these times too often because whenever I do, I hurt inside. I yearn for the day I have enough money to proudly return to my pueblo and show the people I grew up with what I have made of myself in America. When I go back, I'll bring everyone with me: Mamá, Papá, Juan, Carlitos, and Vanessa. We'll be together here in Tulare. We'll all be happy, and my younger siblings can go to school, my father can find a job on one of the cattle ranches, maybe my mother can find work as a seamstress in the area. It's all so perfect when I think about it. But until then, all I can do is dream.
Christmas is coming up and all I can think of is the preparations taking place in the plaza. The lights being hung up, the nativity scenes being prepared, and the pan dulce being baked. This time of year hurts the most. Some of the other people from the camp I live in are having a midnight rosary on noche buena. I'll probably go. At least I'll know that somewhere, thousands of miles away, my family will be reciting the same prayer I am, and that will give me comfort.