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(Courtesy\/Christina Franco)<\/p>\nMy dad\u2019s list is short and simple. He loves the Marines, his grandsons, menudo on Sundays, and Clint. If pressed, he\u2019ll own up to loving the Cowboys but admits they\u2019ve lost much of his admiration, largely thanks to Jerry Jones. It\u2019s best not to get him started on Jerry Jones.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daddy is a sentimental man plagued with nostalgia for his hometown: Clint, a hamlet of about 1,000 Texans just downriver from El Paso. He reminisces about picking cotton as a boy with his siblings, baling hay with his dad, Sunday church, and cruising the back roads of\u00a0the neighboring farm towns.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eighty-seven years old now, Daddy still sees Clint as it was when he was growing up. He sees cotton fields, pecan orchards, irrigation canals (where he played and learned how to swim), Don Poli\u2019s corner store, the San Lorenzo Church, and those dirt roads. He remembers the train blocking the main road in the heart of town during the most inconvenient times, and a tractor further slowing that same traffic when all anyone wanted was to get home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daddy doesn\u2019t live in Clint anymore. He\u2019s in an assisted living facility in the city, El Paso, but he visits for family gatherings. Each time, he asks his daughters \u201c\u00bfMijas, y mi pueblo?\u201d Without fail, he wants to know what has happened to his town.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
(Courtesy\/Christina Franco)<\/p>\n
He sees that many of the cotton fields are now housing developments. He remembers the farmers who used to own the land, their fields now rows of cookie-cutter homes. He recalls the braceros who worked the fields as they tried for a better life. He can still point to an old adobe bracero house, now crumbling because of neglect, and tell us who lived there.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daddy hearkens back to his own blood and sweat working in the fields. He remembers his aching back, battered hands, and\u00a0sore knees. I don\u2019t have to look too closely to recognize the scars of years of manual labor on his now-wrinkled hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also sees the for-sale signs on some of the farms that remain. We talk about how the farmers he knew had to sell. He tries to understand the reasons. We talk about climate change and the lack of water. We discuss the younger generations not wanting to farm anymore. We talk about how it\u2019s difficult for them to find work and how costs are too high. Always, he loses his train of thought and tells me about the old owners who could speak Spanish just as well as the braceros. \u201cEs verdad, mija, igual como nosotros.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And so Daddy worries. He worries about Clint. He worries about the families still trying to farm there. He worries about the people who live in Clint who stay because they prefer small-town life, many of them in Clint because their parents and grandparents had lived there too. Daddy notices pecan orchards being sold off for industrial parks. He sees the empty warehouses surrounding the town, recently built but not yet leased.\u00a0And he wonders what purpose they serve when the pecan trees are now gone.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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