One summer morning, when I was back home in the Rio Grande Valley, my father and I headed to the Granjeno cemetery. It was still early. (His telenovelas didn’t come on until noon.) We drove through downtown Mission and into Madero, the south-side immigrant community where he had grown up.

This was my father’s side of the family and everyone still lived a few houses from one another. He was born and raised about as close as you could get to the Rio Grande without actually being in it. His Mexican father, Buenaventura, worked for the Hidalgo County Water District as a pompero, maintaining the nearby pump that pulled water from the river into the network of irrigation canals that crisscrossed this part of the Valley. The house they lived in came with the job.

From the house, my father said they had to climb up and over a levee to get to a bridge, where they waited for the school bus they called El Gallinero—The Chicken Coop.

“It was an old bus with chicken wire on the windows,” he explained to me. Though he didn't know why they’d put chicken wire. “Maybe so the kids wouldn’t fall out?”

As we drove, he pointed out the bridge where the railroad tracks passed over a ditch. That was where they waited as kids.

“Hijo,” he whistled sadly, as we passed that spot along the side of the road and in his recuerdos. “I don’t know how we survived those years. Maybe when you’re young, you don’t see your own poverty.”

What my father remembered most clearly was the sound of the church bell ringing each Sunday morning at La Lomita, the little "mission" on the hill for which our town was named.

“When you heard the bells, that meant you had half an hour to get to church,” he said. “And then you saw all these people walking along the levee to the capillita.” The pews were hard. But as a kid, he said, he still daydreamed as he looked out the windows during mass. On weekends, his family went to the Granjeno cemetery in an uncle’s horse-drawn wagon. And on Dia de los Muertos they made a day of righting tombstones and cleaning up the individual plots.

But that was a long time ago.

On this gray morning in my thirties, we didn't stop to visit any of the living relatives the way we used to when I was a kid. I left home the summer after graduating high school and rarely returned. On this trip back, my father and I drove past the houses in Madero and headed to the cemetery to leave flowers for family members who’d been gone for as long as I’d been. The deserted cemetery was a bright mess. Ribbons and glittery bows and the lopped heads of artificial flowers were scattered over the cracked earth. Along the gravel drives, banking the chain-link fence, there were trash heaps of faded funeral arrangements, Styrofoam, and wire exposed like unhinged skulls.

My father parked his truck beside a stone crypt with a robed Virgin Mary embracing the slumped form of Jesus after crucifixion. The statuary had not crumbled or been disintegrated by time or the harsh South Texas sun since those tear-blurred days of my childhood when we buried my grandparents, first my grandmother Anita Cruz Guerra, then my grandfather Buenaventura Guerra.

Neither of their graves had a stone marker. So how had my father been able to remember where his parents lay buried all these years later? But then, how could anyone ever forget?

Uncle Victor, my father’s oldest brother, lay buried next to them. We placed the flowers on the graves and then my father stood, smoking a Salem, blowing the cigarette smoke out to the surrounding tilled fields, land that he used to work as a child farmworker, the pesticide from crop dusters falling like holy water on his scrawny brown arms. He used to tell me about the “gotitas” that would fall on him from above as he worked. Now he kicked the dirt with his boot and pointed out a few markers of people he once knew. Unopened bottles of Miller Lite were dug into the dirt at a number of graves where the men buried were no older than I was on that summer morning.