by John Flórez
Hispanic Link News Service
With each new high-tech year, schoolchildren’s vocabularies travel in new orbits. Words commonplace in the typewriter era such as Wite-Out and carriage return and later, writing balls and Selectrics, are relegated to obsolescence, replaced by new generations’ conversations about texting, Twitter and WiFi.
The same applies to customs, cultures and certainly, social class.
Many years ago, at Salt Lake City’s Riverside Elementary, “watermarks” meant something unique to me and my classmates, both white and Latino. When we raised our hands, our teachers could easily spot the marks, the dirty streaks trailing down our forearms. They revealed which of our families — lacking running water — lined up each day with our siblings to take baths in our families’ increasingly soapy-brown galvanized tub.
Webster offers different definitions for “watermarks”: the height to which water has risen on the shoreline or, still common, the faint signature design impressed on sheets of paper The Flórez children were members of a different “watermark” generation.
My parents, Reyes and Chona, came to the United States at the turn of the 19th century from the Mexican state of Zacatecas to escape the Revolution. Crossing the border and starting anew in Utah, they scratched for the basics that we take for granted now. In many of our neighborhoods, outhouses were part of the skyline silhouettes. Homes were heated by wood and coal stoves. We ran around with holes in the soles of our shoes. I suspect it was our generation that started the tattered-clothes fashion era.
Schools were basic buildings. No cafeteria, no central heating, no air conditioning. We controlled classroom temperatures by opening the windows or wearing coats. Noontimes, we ate at our desks, which were bolted to each other and to the floor. Roy Rogers lunch boxes were ostentatious signs of our acculturation, our upward mobility.
My siblings and I carried our lunches to school in paper bags or wrapped in Wonder Bread cellophane. At first, I was embarrassed to bring out the gorditas my mother had lovingly made. They were thick baked tortillas much like today’s pocket bread. Our mother filled them with delicious eggs produced by our own chickens, and refried beans. Smart white classmates smelled them out and often offered to swap their bologna sandwiches with us. Sometimes I worked a trade.
Most of my contemporaries who were born in the USA talk about being from the east or west side of the tracks. I was neither. I was born in the middle. Our house was an aged wooden railroad passenger car, its wheels removed, abandoned in the middle of several lines of tracks.
I shared one end of it with my siblings. We had no electricity and a very cold outhouse. My father hauled our water from the nearby railroad tower. For our baths, my mother boiled some on the stove. My brother and sister and I took turns squatting in our galvanized tub. The last one in got the soap ring around it.
On winter nights, my father would fire up our potbellied stove with scrap blocks of creosote-soaked railroad ties. For cooking and heating, we gathered chunks of coal that the engineers would shake from the train. Mornings, we waited for our father to fire the potbelly up again. We had no refrigerators, only iceboxes. On hot summer days, one of the benefits of living close to the Denver and Rio Grande railroad depot was we could take our wooden wagon to collect chunks of ice thrown out by porterswho cleaned the railcars.
Now, as I turn on my warm shower each morning, I count my blessings. And whenever the option for a watermark is offered on a computer document, I wonder if these new generations are able to appreciate the blessings they have. Feliz año nuevo.
[John Flórez writes a weekly column for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has served on the staff of U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (RUtah) and filled various White House appointments, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor and on the Commission on Hispanic Education. Email him at jdflorez@comcast.net]
