Benjamín wore his pants pegged and his shoes curved upward to a point. If he had lived in the 40s, he would have worn a suit jacket, preferably striped, with padded shoulders—and a watch on a chain, and a feather in his wide-brimmed hat. In 1961, with his duck-tail and sideburns, he was a fading remnant of the pachúco style, not the subculture that it’s widely considered, but the part of the chicáno mainstream youth that refused to relinquish their persóna to the blanket of peonage and its attendant debasement under Mexican rule that even immigration to America had not helped their parents to escape.
He was the worst (according to some sources) of the bad enough culture that was mainly tolerated because of their fruit picking abilities. The vátos that wore jeans and polo shirts to school like the Anglos and sometimes even made it past the ninth grade, considered them trash. The difference between a kid that couldn’t read enough English to fill out an employment application and one that could, only to have it wadded up and pitched as soon as he turned his back, was just barely moot. But there was a sense of embarrassment rising through Mexican-American society about someone of the same race as them who displayed his ethnic fixation too blatantly, like the pachucos.
Benjamin was tried and convicted in a court of law of being no more than himself; his honor, more sacred than his life, had no one to defend it.
The trial lawyer, Guzmán, asked Póncho, the next to the last witness, if he knew Benjamin before the incident that forced these proceedings.
Poncho said, “I’d seen him around.”
“Had he seen you?”
“I guess.”
“Was there any show of hostility between you?”
“We didn’t talk to each other.”
“Did you try?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he was from the bárrio from the other side of town, and they didn’t like anybody who wasn’t from there.”
“Did he belong to a gang?”
“They said he was one of the Zorros.”
“What were you doing in his neighborhood?”
“Just passing through.”
“A witness says you circled the block twice.”
“He called me a bad name. I asked him why he called me that name.”
“Is that when you threw the empty beer bottle at him?”
“I didn’t throw nothing at nobody.”
Poncho and his buddy, B.J., told identical stories. The prosecutor asked B.J. who it was that threw the bottle. B.J. was the last witness for the defense.
B.J. said, “I was driving. I didn’t see nobody throw nothing.”
“Were you drinking beer?”
“No.”
“Who threw the bottle then?”
“It could’ve been anybody. Maybe it was them.”
“By them, you mean Benjamin and Raúl?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that what started the fight?”
“There wasn’t no fight. We drove away.”
“How did you wind up in a fight later, out in the country in the middle of nowhere, five miles from the barrio?”
“They followed us. We stopped to see what they wanted and they started a fight. Raul cut Poncho with a knife.”
“Is that when you shot Benjamin?”
“I don’t know. We were fighting and before I knew it there was a gun in my hand. It wasn’t my gun.”
“How did it get in your hand?”
“I must have took it off of him.”
“You never got out of the car! Poncho got back in after Raul cut him, but you shot Benjamin while you were sitting in the driver’s seat. You never even got out of the car when you dropped Poncho off at the hospital. You were hiding in your brother’s house when you were arrested two days later.”
“I don’t know what happened, man! All I know is that those guys were going to kill us. I don’t remember carrying no gun, but if I was the one that killed that bastard, it was self-defense.”
There was a name—lost in memory now—in those days for baiting and luring Zorros out to beat them up. Nobody was ever punished for killing one. It doesn’t help to remember. Benjamin wasn’t the one being tried for murder back then, but he was the one found guilty. The only truth that came out of that courtroom was that he was dead.
Noe.
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