Living Up The Street

During the summers of Soto’s childhood, if he and his siblings aren’t at the park, they’re watching TV. Since their mother works long hours at the factory, leaving them home alone during the summer months, the TV becomes a teacher for Soto. It’s while watching TV that Soto develops his ideas about the world beyond his Fresno neighborhood and his own family. This idea can be seen when Soto watches a television show about a Polynesian tribe eating turtle soup, and that night he asks his mother if they can try turtle soup sometime, too. As they’re eating their meal of beans and tortillas, his mother laughs at Soto’s idea and says that he’s a “crazy Mexican” (29) and people don’t eat turtles. Here, the TV leads Soto to his first discrepancy between what he sees on a show and what he lives. The TV shows him that there’s a big wide world in which people eat turtles, but not he and his family. More confusing for Soto is that his mother makes it a cultural issue, saying that the idea of eating turtle calls into question the essence of his “Mexican” roots, since, as she implies, Mexicans don’t eat turtle.

In another instance, Soto watches Father Knows Best, a show with a white cast whose “family was so uncomplicated in its routine that [he] very much wanted to imitate it” (26). From this show, Soto gathers that white families are successful and wealthy because they “wear shoes at dinner” (26). He tries to get his family to do the same, but again his mother thinks he’s being ridiculous. While watching Leave it to Beaver, another show with a white cast, he sees “the comfortable lives of white kids,” to which he did not experience:

There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh orange juice, and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit living room, and then dinner (30).

In both shows, Soto sees how different the lives of the white families are from his own experience. The white families on TV have a stay-at-home mom and plenty of money, yet Soto’s single mother is gone most of the day working long hours and still they don’t have extra money to spare. Since Soto can’t pinpoint why the white families on TV are well off and he and his family aren’t, he begins to think it’s just the act of being white that makes them happy and rich. This makes him tell his siblings that “if we improved the way we looked we might get along better in life. White people would like us more. They might invite us to places, like their homes or front yards. They might not hate us so much” (31).