Chicano Air Conditioner

An essay by

Leeanna Torres

Outside, Papa hooks up the trailer. After backing it up to the corrales, brother and I help him sort out the bacas. Papa deciding which are going, which are staying. A few of the besiritos resist getting in the trailer—kicking, running, dodging. Papa teaches us how to get the little calf in, prodding him with a palo and a few yells. Papa is always urgent but never cruel.

When everything is ready, all four of us pack inside the yellow Dodge truck's single-cab and turn south on Highway 47. 

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Memoir is a noun: a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation. Memory is also a noun: the act of retaining and recalling impressions, facts, events, or previous experience. But larger than this, deeper than nouns themselves (people, places, or things), there is memoria.

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Papa’s yellow-Dodge single-cab trudges down the highway; it’s not a big-ranch diesel truck, as might be expected, but instead a simple 1500, windows untinted, Papa’s homemade steel-headache-rack bolted onto the frame, spray-painted white.

Even before reaching the Allsup’s convenience store near Belen, I tug at the collar of my summer tee shirt, image of a green Care Bear accompanying my vocal gripe of, “It’s hot . . .”

This complaint is Papa’s cue, and before anyone else in the truck chimes in with another groan or whine, Papa quickly states - “Fine, let’s turn on the air-conditioner!”  

Up-roll the two truck windows, one on either side of Mama and Papa, closed and tight. Then Papa cranks on the heater, yes, the heater, full blast.  

Summer in the high-desert valley of central New Mexico. 

Four of us, tight in the single-cab of Papa’s truck, windows rolled up, heater blasting. It’s August. Brother pushes against me, squirming against the growing heat inside the cab. I push back against him, wordless, annoyed with his skin against mine, his scrawny arm touching what is supposed to be my space. Quickly the cab interior is thick with the heat of our own bodies, four figures in a single-cab truck. Hot air blasts from each of the two side vents, the center one too, and even the floor-board vents push out what feels like hot-breath against my bare shins.  

The truck pulls down the highway, four of us on the rural road towards the mountains. Who’ll be the first one to break a sweat?  Who’ll be the loser?  

“Angelo’s sweating already!” I shout, ratting out my hermanito, pointing to the line of thick sweat forming on his scalp, running down the side of his face. 

“Nah ahh!” my brother shouts, urgently defending himself, quickly wiping the sweat off, using the sleeve of his Spider-Man tee shirt. 

We drive on, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn singing a duet on the radio tape deck “Louisiana woman, Mississippi man . . .” 

The heater keeps on blasting. We keep driving. Papa keeps watch of the bacas in the back through the rear-view mirror.

Inside the cab, the heat feels nearly unbearable now. I shift and shuffle slightly between brother and seatbelt and Papa’s cheap canvas seat covers. Sweat gathers under my thighs, arms, and I fight the urge to give in and beg Papa to turn the heater off. I won’t give in. I won’t be the “loser.” Brother is just as squirmy, shifting, and restless beside me. Mama and Papa flank us, calm, both of them staring out onto the landscape thru the truck windshield, both caught in a gaze as ordinary as the day.

The stretch of Highway 47 after passing Belen is long and straight, leaning gently upwards towards the Manzanos. Llano stretches out to both sides, a horizon of Chamisa and sacate. 

Mama finally uses her shirt to wipe some of the sweat off her face. “How long has this heater been on?” I wonder.  Papa lets it roll, the beads of sweat along his forehead easily tricking down his face and onto his tee shirt. Were we fish sticks inside Nana’s Good Friday oven, is this what it would feel like?

When we can’t stand it anymore, Mama’s face beet red, brother fighting off dripping sweat with his Spider-Man shirt sleeve, me buckling against Mama, wordless, trying to stay strong, fidgeting and gritting my teeth - just then, and only then, does Papa shout, “OK, NOW!”  He shuts off the blowing heater, Mama rolls down her window, Papa the other window, and as fresh air rushes in, we sigh and ahhhhh!  

Our shirts are drenched, but our faces are wide and smiling, finally so cool, so wonderfully frescos, Loretta and Conway still singing thru the tape deck “Making believe that you still love me . . .” 

After we’d do the Chicano air conditioner, the rest of the drive up to the rancho would find us all sharing a bag of chips, a Coke, and Little Debbie quequitos. Yes, I grew up with the Chicano air conditioner, and thus began my parent’s lessons of endurance, adaptability, resilience. Of humor and love.

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I finish telling the story to my husband, smiling at the thought of my own vivid memories, but he does not smile back. Instead he asks, “Isn’t that borderline child abuse?”

“What do you mean?” I snap back. 

“Well with that kind of ‘air conditioner’, you and your brother could have passed out, or gotten heat stroke . . . it was summer in New Mexico for God’s sake,” he pushes.

It’s evening, just before the Christmas holidays, and we’re clearing the dinner table. Rinsing the plates, I quickly reply back, “Hell no! That was what we did when we drove up to the rancho . . .”.

I continue to rinse each dish, running them under warm water, rubbing off red chile stains with my bare hands before handing them to Miguel to stack inside the dishwasher. He takes each one gently, but I’m still annoyed and frustrated that he cannot see what I see in telling my story. The love, the laughter, the nuances of a Chicano familia inside a single-cab Dodge truck.

Handing over coffee mugs and a set of forks, there is a sudden slight silence between Miguel and I. It’s then I begin to doubt my own story, my own remembering. Did I remember it falsely? Was it wrong to remember those days with such fondness? Did I remember it all wrong?

Christmas tunes play on in the background, and while Miguel and I have stopped talking, the sound of kitchen dishes fills the space. Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper” plays on his acoustic guitar's deep strum accompanied by a distant snare drum. “You’re in a hurry, my how time flies, and in the distance, the ringing of laughter, and in the midst of the laughter he cries, pretty paper, pretty ribbons of blue . . .”

It’s there in winter’s kitchen that I remind myself that memoria is more than a noun, more than just what happened or how we remember it. Memoria is sacred, a stance of reflection and of gratitude. Memoria is the fabric of who we are.

Memoria is my brother bending a spoon the instant we all realized Tio Eppy was dead. Memoria, the wide-saucer eyes on my husband’s face the moment they pulled our son from my belly. Memoria—the sound of my mother’s rustling in the kitchen the day she brought me home from school early, feverish, a “hissss” from beans in the pressure cooker heard all the way down the hall, comforting and familiar, and all the while too, Mama’s Crystal Gayle record playing, side one, side two.

Memoria—different than just memory, larger than ourselves—but also a softness, a smoke, a grinning Divine asking, “Can you see what life is now . . . can you see?”

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Our summer drives to the rancho were full of random entertainment—the four of us sharing a whole Hershey bar, brother and I shouting out the made-up-names of landmarks we knew as we passed them—a whaje, canyon de la muchacha perdida, el elephante, and Abo. Ours was as much a family outing/road trip as much as it was a work trip for Papa. Such were our adventures up to the rancho, seeped in memoria. A yellow-Dodge single cab truck making its way between the river valley of the Rio Grande, up across the Manzanos, and into the plains between Mountainair and Estancia. 

Asphalt turned to gravel, then dirt. Four of us on the road, and when we finally arrived, windows still rolled down, Mama swaying to Barbara Mandrell now playing on the tape deck, her shirt, our shirts, crusty with dry sweat, the thin cotton a deep shade of maroon.

Leeanna T. Torres is a native daughter of the American Southwest, with deep Indo-Hispanic roots in New Mexico. She has worked as an environmental professional throughout the West since 2001. Her creative nonfiction work has been published in Blue Mesa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and is forthcoming in an anthology about the Gila Wilderness by Torrey House Press (2021).