In this personal narrative, the speaker recounts growing up between the United States and Mexico, describing his desire to fit in with American peers who seemed privileged yet miserable and entitled. He contrasts them with his Mexican friends who lived in poverty—some in cardboard shacks with absent fathers—but appeared genuinely happier. By age eight or nine, he realizes that happiness is unrelated to wealth, noting the hypocrisy of people who say one thing and act another. He also reflects on how soccer became a central activity and a source of personal skill, further tying his identity to his Mexican upbringing while yearning to be American.
Chapters
like, you know, I get to make friends. I want to be an American. I want to hang out with American kids. Like, these are my people, right? Yeah. And a lot of them were from Washington because that's where we were from, and that's where we would— there were Seahawks fans, right? Like the whole thing. So I just remember how miserable those kids were. Like, these kids had everything I wanted. Their parents were like middle class. They went to school, they lived in the country, they went to school. They were very singular in their existence, where I had these two odd existences that didn't make any sense. And they were entitled. They were difficult to get along with. They had bad attitudes. They would throw tantrums. They would complain about stuff. So they would complain about the food or the water, just simple stuff It's a struggle there. Water's a struggle there. You know, you, you, uh, you can't just go to a restaurant there. It just doesn't exist out in that part where we lived, you know. And so, um, I remember thinking like, these kids that I play with all the time that are my friends in Mexico that live in a cardboard shack, whose dad's been gone for a year and mom's raising 5 kids or whatever. And I had these 2 kids that were kind of my friends that lived on the same block that we lived in. Were happier than these Americans that had everything. And I would think about that a lot. Like, being happy has nothing to do with money. And in fact, the people that had the thing that I thought I wanted seemed miserable and entitled. And I, like, I'm telling you, like, I'm 8 or 9 when I'm starting to notice this. Sort of stuff like that. People say one thing and they do another, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. So I'm really good at soccer because that's all we do is play soccer.
