FIFTIES
The situation in the Jewish community turned into a hell. While the public-school teacher protected me, I had few allies in the Hebrew school. During the early years, the bullying mainly came from moréh Pablo. As I mentioned before, Pablo despised me. He looked for any occasion to make a fool out of me in class. The mockery was so intense that there was no way for me to learn Hebrew, and this would prevent me from ever being good at other languages. I was later enrolled in the Ken, a kind of Boy Scouts. If the Hebrew School was already a hell, the Ken would double the torments.
It was more of a military center than a sports or recrea-tional one: marches, anthems, field trips, self-defense, uniforms, and vertical leadership.
The new generation born in the country had assi-milated the macho discourse. What their parents didn’t care about in terms of gestures or ways of speaking of other men became an obsession for them. This change in mentality was linked to the trauma of the war. After 1945, the Shoah promoted Zionist activism as the community was shocked by the disappearance of ninety percent of Polish Jewry; they felt they had to do something about it. The change was planned for their children, and they brought military instructors 47
from abroad to try to shape a new generation that would never be led like sheep to the slaughter again.
The reaction of the young people was first against their parents: firstly, if machismo means power and control, these immigrants didn’t speak Spanish well or understand the new culture and became dependent on their women and children to represent them.
Additionally, they didn’t play any sports other than cards, they didn’t drink or dance, they received insults without protesting, and they avoided street confrontations; finally, they sold feminine things like clothes, fabrics, and household items.
The kids rejected the Polish construction of gender: they smoked, drank, danced, had sex, and, of course, fought. This generation of boys was a Yiddish version of American gangs: rebellious teenagers who hated their parents and, ultimately, themselves; they adopted “pachuco” 18 or gang slang, mistreated women, and sought out “playos” (queers) to beat them.
Particularly perverse were Mono Rubio and Ernesto’s sons. The first, as his nickname suggests, was ugly, prehistoric, and beastly. Ernesto’s sons were more pleasant to look at but no less despicable; they 18 The term “pachuco” refers to a counterculture that emerged on the Mexico-U.S. border in the 1930s, where young people of Mexican origin expressed their way of life and their interests, with the desire to stand out against the marginalization they faced in the U.S. territory.
They are well-known for their slang and their distinctive style of dress.
In Costa Rica, Pachuco was someone vulgar who dressed ridiculously and who used “gomina” in his hair. Gomina was a hair gel, hair fixer or pomade used to shape and hold the hair in a particular hairstyle...