BOOKMARK : The Object of Countless Mexican Prayers and Dreams Is a Rumor

Mexican immigrants are bound to feel out of place in America, the author contends, because for while they come from a culture that cherishes memory, ours has the fly-by-night spirit of a 24-hour diner. An adaptation of “Mexico’s Children,” a chapter in “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father” (Viking). * V ETE PERO NO ME OLVIDES .

Go, but do not forget me, someone has written on the side of a building near the border in Tijuana.

Mexicans may know their souls are imperiled in America but they do not recognize the risk by its proper name.

Two Mexican teen-agers say they are going to los Estados Unidos for a job. Nothing more.

For three or four generations now, Mexican villages have lived under the rumor of America, a rumor vaguer than paradise. America exists in thousands of maternal prayers and in thousands of pubescent dreams. Everyone knows someone who has been. Everyone knows someone who never came back.

Mexicans know little of the United States, though they have seen America, the TV show, and America, the movie. Mexico’s poet Octavio Paz writes of the United States as an idea of no characteristic mansion or spice. Paz has traveled and taught in America, but his writing relegates America to ineluctability--a jut of optimism, an aerodynamic law.

Coming from Mexico, a country that is so thoroughly there , where things are not necessarily different from when your father was your age, Mexicans are unable to puncture the abstraction. For Mexicans, even death is less abstract than America.

Mexican teen-agers waiting along the levee in Tijuana are bound to be fooled by the United States because they do not yet realize the future will be as binding as the past. The U.S. job will introduce the Mexican to an industry, a solitude nowhere described in Mexico’s theology.

How can two Mexican teen-agers know this, clutching the paper bags their mamas packed for them in the morning? The past is already the future, for the bags contain only a change of underwear. These two may have seen “Dallas” on TV and they may think they are privy to the logic and locution of America. But that is not the same thing as having 20 American dollars in their own pockets.

In order to show you America, I would have to take you out. I would take you to the restaurant--OPEN 24 HOURS--alongside a freeway, any freeway in the U.S.A. The waitress is a blond or a redhead--not the same color as at her last job. She is divorced. Her eyebrows are jet-black migraines painted on, or relaxed, clownish domes of cinnamon brown. Morning and the bloom of youth are painted on her cheeks. She is at once anti-maternal--the kind of woman you’re not supposed to know--and supra-maternal, the nurturer of lost boys.

She is the priestess of the short order, curator of the apple pie. She administers all the consolation of America. She has no illusions. She knows the score; she hands you the Bill of Rights printed on plastic, decorated with an heraldic tumble of French fries and drumsticks and steam.

Your table may yet be littered with bitten toast and spilled coffee and a dollar tip. Now you will see the greatness of America. As one complete gesture, the waitress pockets the tip, stacks dishes along one strong forearm, produces a damp rag soaked in lethe water, which she then passes over the Formica.

There! With that one swipe of the rag, the past has been obliterated. The Formica gleams like new. You can order anything you want.

If I were to show you Mexico, I would take you home; with the greatest reluctance I would take you home, where family snapshots crowd upon the mantel. For the Mexican, the past is firmly held from within. While outside, a few miles away in the American city, there is only loosening, unraveling; generations living apart. Old ladies living out their lives in fiercely flowered housedresses. Their sons are divorced; wear shorts, ride bikes; are not men, really; not really. Their granddaughters are not fresh, are not lovely or keen, are not even nice.

Seek the Mexican in the embrace of the family, where there is much noise. The family stands as a consolation, because in the certainty of generation there is protection against an uncertain future. At the center of this gravity the child is enshrined. He is not rock-a-bye baby at the very top of the family tree, as it is with American families. The child does not represent distance from the past, but reflux. She is not expected to fly away, to find herself. He is not expected to live his own life.

I went to a village in the state of Michoacan, along Lake Chapala.

A dusty road leads past eucalyptus, past the cemetery, to the village. For most of the year the village is empty--nearly. There are a few old people, quite a few hungry dogs. The sun comes up; the sun goes down. Most of the villagers have left Mexico for the United States. Jan. 23 is the feast day of the patron saint of the village, when the saint is accustomed to being rocked upon his hillock of velvet through the streets. On that day, the villagers--and lately the children of the villagers--return. They come in caravans. Most come from Austin, Tex., from Hollister, Calif., and from Stockton, Calif. For a week every year, the village comes alive, a Mexican Brigadoon. Doors are unlocked. Shutters are opened. Floors are swept. Music is played. Beer is drunk. Expressed fragments of memory flow outward like cigarette smoke to tumble the dust of the dead.

Every night is a carnival. Men who work at canneries or factories in California parade down the village street in black suits. Women who are waitresses in California put on high heels and evening gowns. The promenade under the Mexican stars becomes a celebration of American desire.

At the end of the week, the tabernacle of memory is dismantled, distributed among the villagers in their vans, and carried out of Mexico.

Richard Rodriguez, 1992. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” by Richard Rodriguez, appears on Page 1 of the Book Review section.

DR, NANCY OHANIAN / For The Times