Shame the Stars Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Settings

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Some book recommendations for Teachers and Mentors

  Newspaper Clipping Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title-Page

  Frontmatter

  Start of Content

  Table of Contents

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

  Jacket photos copyright © by Juanmonino/iStock, Sabphoto/Shutterstock, coka/Shutterstock, Kushch Dmitry/Shutterstock, ahidden/Dreamstime, Mosaic Stock Photos

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  TU BOOKS, an imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS Inc., 95 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  leeandlow.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America by Worzalla Publishing, September 2016

  Print book design by Neil Swaab

  ebook production by Kevin Callahan/BNGO Books

  First Edition

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress

  Para mi padre,

  el señor Onésimo García,

  un hombre de honor, integridad, y mucho valor!

  ¡Con todo mi corazón!

  Lupita

  Cast of Characters

  Joaquín del Toro — eighteen-year-old son of Don Acevedo and Doña Jovita del Toro

  Doña Jovita del Toro — Joaquín’s mother

  Don Acevedo del Toro — Joaquín’s father and owner of Las Moras

  Tomás del Toro — Joaquín’s brother and priest of Capilla del Sagrado Corazón

  Dulceña Villa — eighteen-year-old daughter of Don Rodrigo and Doña Serafina Villa

  Doña Serafina Estrada de Villa — mother of Dulceña

  Don Rodrigo Villa — Dulceña’s father and printer/publisher of El Sureño

  Mateo and Fito Torres — fraternal twin sons of Manuel and Doña Luz Torres

  Doña Luz Torres — housekeeper at Las Moras

  Manuel Torres — foreman at Las Moras

  Conchita Olivares — Mateo’s girlfriend, waitress at Donna’s Kitchen

  Captain Elliot Munro — leader of the Texas Rangers in Morado County

  Sheriff Benjamin Nolan — sheriff of Monteseco

  Miguel Caceres — deputy sheriff, second in command to Sheriff Nolan

  Carlos — tejano rebel leader

  Pollo and Chavito — tejano rebels

  Madame Josette — Dulceña’s tutor

  Sofia and Laura — young maids at Las Moras

  Gerardo Gutierrez — young ranch hand, tejano rebel

  Flora Gutierrez — Gerardo’s mother

  Apolonia Morales — Gerardo’s girlfriend

  Nacho — county-jail clerk

  Pat Thompson — justice of the peace

  Settings

  Las Moras — home of the del Toro family

  Monteseco — fictional town nearest Las Moras in fictitious Morado County

  Arroyo Morado — a creek that separates Las Moras from town

  Capilla del Sagrado Corazón — the town parish in Monteseco

  Excerpt from El Sureño, Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913

  TEJANO

  These are dangerous

  times in South Texas,

  times of trouble,

  times of loss.

  Tejano,

  Texas Mexican,

  laggard field hand, still

  your heartbeat, stay

  your station, till the earth,

  don’t you dare look up.

  Never mind the injustice.

  Your father’s land is not your

  own anymore. It has been sold,

  passed hands, bought and paid

  for. It’s history. It’s gone.

  Close your ears,

  mind your tongue,

  let the Rangers do their job.

  Tejano,

  suppliant borderman,

  vagrant son of Tenochtitlán,

  don’t you see? Don’t you know?

  Why can’t you understand?

  To seed, to plow,

  to weed, to tow, to toil

  for the Anglo immigrants,

  the new Texan, the new boss,

  that is now your lot in life.

  Close your ears,

  mind your tongue,

  let the Rangers do their job.

  Tejano,

  rustic campesino,

  sluggish farm worker,

  quell your subversive spirit,

  quiet your dissident heart,

  quit your questions.

  Suppress your rage

  and silence your thoughts.

  Don’t let your foolish

  mestizo pride defeat you,

  the conquistador in you beat you,

  the Nahua eat you.

  Close your ears,

  mind your tongue,

  let the Rangers do their job.

  Tejano,

  peon, ranch hand, Kineño,

  let the white man reap and sow.

  Let the King nation grow.

  Let him disseminate, propagate.

  He is keen. He is keeper.

  He is kind.

  Don’t listen to the roar of

  your ancestral blood.

  To quake, to quiver,

  to shake, to shiver, to watch

  your rebellious brothers hang,

  swing from tall, majestic trees,

  sway against the breeze,

  that is now your lot in life.

  Close your ears,

  mind your tongue,

  and let the Rangers do their job.

  Be safe. Be smart.

  Be innocuous.

  That is the best

  way to shame the stars!

  — Anonymous

  Prologue

  The sun was still warm and bright that Easter Sunday afternoon. It bounced off the water in the cement fountain, gleamed off every new blade of grass, and blinded us as Dulceña and I chase
d each other around the courtyard behind the main house at Las Moras.

  My two best friends, Mateo and Fito, the fraternal twin sons of our housekeeper, Doña Luz, and our foreman, Manuel Torres, were too busy to join us. While their mother and father helped Mamá keep the younger children engaged in the day’s activities, the twins were huddled together on a nearby bench.

  The twins were counting the pennies, nickels, and dimes they had collected after I made seventy-three children very happy by swinging with all my might and busting open the giant piñata dangling from a tall oak tree in our courtyard that morning. The younger kids, sons and daughters of the field workers and ranch hands who resided at Las Moras, had all thrown themselves to the ground and grappled for the pieces of candy. The rest of us, being older and wiser, knew there was money in the tiny Floral satchels my mother had stuffed in the piñata.

  While we all entertained ourselves in our own different ways, Mamá sat on a nearby bench under a jacaranda tree beside Dulceña’s mother, Doña Serafina Estrada de Villa, watching over us. The day’s revelry had, for the most part, wound down, and the evening star was growing brighter and brighter on the dusky horizon behind us.

  “Gotcha!” I said, cracking a cascarón over Dulceña’s head and rubbing it against her scalp to release all the confetti inside. Then, because Dulceña shook her head vigorously and recovered quicker than I’d expected, I started running. Dulceña held her white lace skirt above her shins as she chased after me, up the garden path toward the main house.

  She almost caught up to me, but I swooped around the birdbath, cutting across the rosebushes and rounding back toward the house like a jackrabbit. I was about to bound up the porch steps when I overheard Dulceña’s father laughing.

  Papá was with him. They were sitting in their usual chairs at the table on our back porch, drinking their favorite Madero brandy and smoking cigars. I slowed down to take the stairs one step at a time because Papá didn’t approve of me running around like a child anymore. I was, after all, sixteen years old, a man in my father’s eyes.

  “Ah, here they come. Where’s your mother, Joaquín?” Papá asked.

  “She’s on her way,” I said, peeking around the porch and seeing that Dulceña had stopped to wait for our mothers.

  I stood by the stairs, waiting for the women while my father and Don Rodrigo continued their conversation. The two men on the porch couldn’t have been more different. My father, Don Acevedo del Toro, was a giant of a man, light-haired and fair-skinned like an Anglo, but he was all mejicano — tejano to the core. In contrast, Don Rodrigo, Dulceña’s father, was small, dark, and so wiry you’d think he was a compressed metal coil, wound up and ready to spring into action.

  Dulceña came up the steps looking less than dignified with her confetti-ratted hair and her stained white satin dress. It was obvious she’d been playing in the cobbled courtyard all morning, but she smiled demurely and walked slowly up the stairs, because being the same age as me meant she too had to act like a grown-up, a refined lady, befitting her station as the printer’s daughter. Let’s just say her father would not have approved of all the running around she’d been doing that morning.

  “Hola, Papi,” she said, going over to Don Rodrigo and leaning in to kiss him on the cheek.

  “¡M’ija! You look like you’ve had a bit too much fun today,” he said, tugging on a strand of Dulceña’s long, curly black hair. “Did those niños get the better of you?”

  “Yes, you know how children are,” Dulceña said, lifting her eyebrows as she made eye contact with me. Smiling, she picked several pieces of confetti off her ruffled sleeve and tossed them over the railing, where the wind caught and swept them away.

  I pulled out a chair for Dulceña next to her father. When our mothers came onto the porch, I pulled out chairs for them too, seating them next to each other between their husbands. My father began reading the special Easter edition of El Sureño, the newspaper Don Rodrigo’s family had been printing in Monteseco for more than twenty-five years.

  My heart raced when I saw that Papá had just started looking at the front page. He was reading the main story at his leisure, as if he didn’t have anything better to do, which was not true because my father always had something better to do. As heir and sole proprietor of Las Moras, six hundred acres of fertile farmland owned by our family since 1775, before Tejas became Texas, Papá was always busy.

  I waited quietly, wondering how long it would take him to get to the poem. Because my father was a reserved man who preferred we stay away from politics and public life, I wondered what he would say about a poem with such charged overtones, disparaging the Texas Rangers and every­thing they stood for.

  I didn’t have to wait long. My father perused a few more pages and then stopped to read the editorial section, which is where Don Rodrigo had managed to squeeze in the poem, “Tejano.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Dulceña’s father asked when he saw my father read the poem with interest. “It’s a nice little verse, don’t you think? It came in the mail two weeks ago, but I saved it for today. I wanted it to get into as many hands as possible, and I knew today’s edition would sell well. Holiday editions are always sellouts.”

  “Couldn’t you have found something better? If you had to publish poetry at all — certainly you had many more suitable pieces to choose from, especially for the Easter Sunday edition. You should have asked Tomás to submit one of his sermons. He might have written something more appropriate for this edition.”

  “What do you mean, appropriate?” Don Rodrigo’s left eye twitched as he looked directly at my father.

  “I mean something less . . . incendiary,” Papá answered. My heart sank at the sight of his eyebrows almost touching as he frowned distastefully at the poem.

  A dull hotness washed over my face. I picked up the pitcher and a tall glass from the tray sitting in the center of the table and poured myself some lemonade. The tartness made my tongue tingle and my eyes water, but I drank it down without adding more sugar to it. I needed something cold to offset the embarrassing flush taking me over.

  “Incendiary!” Don Rodrigo repeated, only, the word coming out of his lips sounded loaded, like a barrel full of gunpowder.

  “Yes,” Papá said. “This makes you look like an agitator, trying to stir something up between the people of Morado County and the Rangers, as if there isn’t enough racial tension between us already. It’s the wrong tone for a family-run paper. Don’t you think?”

  Mamá picked up the paper then. A tiny ghost of a smile played with the corners of her mouth as she read it over and said, “It’s not so bad, Acevedo. Most people in Monteseco know what’s going on. They see how tejanos are being treated in this country. This isn’t going to offend anyone. At least, I don’t think so.”

  From her spot, standing just within the frame of the back door, our housekeeper, Doña Luz, cleared her throat and asked, “Shall I bring out the capirotada, Doña?”

  “Oh, yes, I almost forgot about it. I made my special bread pudding this morning.” Mamá pushed back her chair and got up.

  “Wait. Let me help you with it,” Dulceña’s mother said, getting up herself. “Come on, Dulceña. Come help us.”

  I picked up the paper and pretended to read it. “I think Mamá is right,” I said as the women went into the house. “I don’t think the poem is meant as an affront to anyone in particular. It’s more of a statement about the troubles tejanos are experiencing in this country.”

  “Tell that to Munro,” Papá said, referring to Captain Elliot Munro, the man in charge of the Texas Rangers in our area. He was responsible for upholding the law in Morado County, even more feared than the local authority, Sheriff Benjamin Nolan, in Monteseco. “Now, there’s an explanation I wouldn’t want to have to give.”

  Don Rodrigo smirked at my father. “Really? I thought you were friends with him, compadre.”
<
br />   “Munro respects me and my family. He and his men have always taken care of us out here.” My father took the newspaper back from me and looked over the poem again. “But I don’t know that he would take kindly to what’s being implied by this scathing little piece. It’s just too — ”

  “Sardonic?” Don Rodrigo gritted his teeth. “Filled with irony and truth?”

  “It’s seditious!” Papá said, punctuating the last word by folding the paper and tossing it to the side in Don Rodrigo’s direction.

  I stared at my poem lying on the porch floor and regretted sending it in.

  “It’s candid,” Dulceña’s father said. “That’s why I printed it, Acevedo.”

  Papá smoothed out his mustache. “I wasn’t going to say it, but it concerns me, Rodrigo,” my father admitted. “The direction you’ve been taking with El Sureño lately. That long article about the Mexican Revolution, the outrageous editorials glorifying insurrection, and now this nonsense about tejanos and injustices and Texas Rangers. Well . . . it’s all very dangerous.”

  “I’m a journalist, Acevedo.” Don Rodrigo took the paper and laid it in front of Papá, tapping it directly over my poem. “These things need to be said. They need to be read and talked about, discussed by every member of our community. Your son Tomás certainly understands that. He tends to our people. He sees their struggles, listens to their afflictions.”

  “Yes, but Tomás doesn’t concern himself with politics.” My father was suddenly furious. “My son is a good shepherd. He has to listen to these people, but like the rest of us, he knows better than to question the law, especially the Texas Rangers. That’s not his job. To listen to confession, that’s his job. That’s all he does, listen. But he knows to keep his mouth shut.”

  Don Rodrigo glared at Papá. “Then whose job is it to start these conversations, if not yours and mine, Acevedo? As leaders of this community, as landowners and businessmen, we owe it to our friends and neighbors to speak out against such prejudices!”

  “He’s right,” I said from my seat between them. “It’s important to print things like this, Papá. To get the people thinking and reacting. It’s the only way to wake them up, to make them stand up for their rights, to call attention to their situation.”