SANTOS: THE GOLD HUNTER
For a countryman like Santos who spent the first 20 years of his life harvesting maize and roping cattle, chipping cement under the eight-lane Mopac Bridge during its construction in the early 1970s hardly constituted an enjoyable task. But, then again, life for Santos was not about enjoyment.
In the half decade that followed, Santos meddled in more than a dozen industries. He washed dishes at La Cocina del Sur, a Mexican restaurant on Burnet Road, for about $15 a day; cut wood boards at a factory on South Congress for $3.35 an hour; cleared tables at Los Panchos, another Mexican restaurant in South Austin; and, a few years later, worked installing pipes that carried telecommunication cables alongside Oltorf Street. “I’ve had like 10,000 jobs,” Santos says with a smile. “And I never got in trouble. I never wasted my bosses or supervisors’ time (Santos uses the word “mayordomos” for the supervisors, an old-fashioned word meaning large estate stewards in Spanish). But I always kept looking for new jobs. I wanted more, I was hungry.”
Santos’s wandering life began 65 years ago on a farm near a remote, dirt-poor town in Mexico’s western highlands. The town bears the peculiar name of Cutzamala de Pinzón and lies near the northeastern edge of the state of Guerrero. At the time that Santos was born, it had neither a church nor a school. These institutional voids conspired with the material needs of the household, as they so often do in rural Latin America, to deprive this modest farm boy of a single day of schooling. Santos was the third of three brothers whose dad died of an ordinary cold before Santos’s second birthday. Thus, at the age of five, Santos was out in the fields, piling up corn stubble to be burned before the next sowing season. At seven, he was, in his own words, a “full-fledged peon” (peón completo), harvesting beans and clearing woods with his brothers and grandfather.
Looking back on his erratic career – if it can be called as much – Santos regrets that he never received any formal education. Even so, the event to which he traces what he sees as his stunted intellectual development is the shock from a lightning bolt that struck him, his brother, and two family friends as they walked home at the end of a long day of harvesting. Esteban, the middle child, took a full blow to the chest; he died in the field minutes later. Santos, who was nine at the time, survived the jolt without physical impairments. Yet he attributes his learning difficulties and short-term memory gaps to this childhood trauma.
In spite of the hardships he endured as a young boy, it was not poverty, or not poverty alone, that drove Santos from his god-forsaken hometown to the United States. As they grew up, he and his older brother José learned to make the most of the 200 hectares (roughly 500 acres) that their dad had left them when he died. They built with their hands an adobe house that Santos describes as a mansion, a “casa de haciendado” (i.e., rich landowners of Spanish descent, normally pronounced “hacendado”), where the two brothers lived with their mother and José’s wife.