It’s hard to hear but clear to see

A tale of two lions.

My cousin Beto and I are primos hermanos, we share both bloodlines. His dad is my mom’s brother, and my dad is his mom’s brother. (I’ll give you a second to piece it together) Our two families own ranches in close proximity to each other in the mountain town of Villamadero, Michoacán, and naturally romantic connections between the two families formed.

This week I am visiting him in his home of Morelia, Michoacán, an artist’s city.

Beto and I were very close in our infancy, he is a year older than me so we shared a crib when we lived in the mountainous Michoacán ranch, and later a room when his parents and my mother moved to a small apartment in Mexico City. In those days he was my older brother, we fought, played, and fought some more. We were extremely similar and inseparable. Then I left for the U.S. and we grew into the very different men we are now.

We share the blood of both our families, the Leóns and the Villas. Despite having spent more time with Villas, Beto favors the light skinned and mild mannered Leóns, whom I’ve always considered city dwellers since the brunt of that clan moved to Mexico City with my grandparents decades ago. I have always favored the Villas, darker skinned and temperamental, the rancher clan, the majority of which still inhabit the small town and mountains.

I visit Beto every ten years and it’s always a marathon linked together by sprints. He’s a bit of a musical local legend in this city. He started his career as a bouncer at hole in the wall bar called El Leon de Mecenas accepting payment in stage time at the end of the night, his talent and the fact that his last name was also in the name of the bar caught the attention of other local artists and he soon inhabited the artist scene entirely. It was very common, in my visits, to hear someone call out to him on the streets “Beto-Leon!”, a quick wave and a handshake, and we would continue on our way.

The marathon with Beto is his day, it starts with early rehearsals, where I am writing this now, continues to music lessons he gives young guitarists, followed by audio set up at Morelia’s premier theater, Teatro Mariano Matamoros, where he is the lead audio tech, then closing the day with him performing well into the night at a posh downtown restaurant or bar. The sprint with Beto is the spaces in between his day, carrying a guitar, amp, microphones, leading his 2 year old by the hand and a diaper bag from one place to another. He amazes me, never showing a hint of desperation through out his busy day, always making it to his next function despite him not knowing how to drive.

My experience as an artist has been different.

For the majority of my twenties I dedicated myself to acting. I didn’t have any interest in theater in grade school, when I started middle school immediately after my move from Veracruz, Mexico I was so out of touch with American pop-culture, current fashion trends, and wore the biggest bottle cap glasses on campus, I was preoccupied with avoiding bullies and not speaking in class. Acting took confidence, this was my lowest point of it.

On the last day of middle school my year long crush had agreed to be my girlfriend, I imagine she waited that long to save herself the embarrassment of dating the biggest nerd in school. I had carved her a wooden heart, painted it and embedded a poem inside. I may have had low self confidence, but I still favored my Villa side, and we are not cowards when it comes to matters of the heart.

Ally was a cheerleader, a flyer who’s enormous curly hair was almost bigger than her body. At the beginning of our summer she was to attend a cheerleader picnic, where all the girls showed of their boyfriends, most of them football players or some other type of cool I had never dipped a toe in. Ally dropped me off with her two best friends so they could give me a ”makeover“, by that time my skin had cleared up and all that was left was to dress me in some of their boyfriends’ more stylish clothes, comb the spikes out of my hair, and do something about my glasses. The solution came to them like out of a 90s teen movie. Just remove them. I remember that moment very clearly. The two girls removed my glasses, turned to each other wide eyed and said:

“You’re just going to have to go blind.”

Once at the picnic Ally didn’t let go of my hand, proudly introducing me to everyone there as her boyfriend. For the first time I felt wanted, cool, and attractive.

Ally dumped me a week later, but was shocked to see me start high school with a new found angst and contact lenses. Those two things carried me through the next four years, and I went from the biggest nerd to homecoming king.

New found self confidence, however, couldn’t get me into a university. I was still undocumented and these were the days before DACA. I started working full time as a teaching assistant at an elementary school and attended night classes at the local community college.

It infuriated me to see my old classmates who had copied off of me for years happy at four year colleges living the experience I had dreamed about since I had discovered American college culture. I was looking for an out and it was presented to me by a speech teacher who had given a very easy assignment, bring a monologue from film or theater and read it in front of class. I chose Hamlet and after class the professor asked me to stay.

“That was really good, have you ever considered acting?”

That was it. The little push I needed, why not after all? I’d gone from immigrant to fluent, repulsive to desirable, nerd to king. Why couldn’t I be an actor. I walked straight from his class to the student lounge, looked up acting schools, was lucky to find an accredited one in Dallas, the city I lived in, and applied. I finished the semester, quit my day job, and went in for my audition.

As I sat in the lobby of KD Conservatory, waiting to be called back for my audition into the acting program, I was approached by a gentleman with a clipboard.

”Are you here for the commercial audition?”

“Uhhhh, no I’m here for the…school…audition?”

“Doesn’t matter, you fit the role, come on back real quick.”

I looked into a camera, slated (introduced myself), and said the words, “It’s Nerf or nothing!”

”Ok, thank you, next”

I walked back into the lobby, was called back for my actual audition and explained what had just happened to the school director, who told me it was a promising sign and after my audition told me he’d give me a shot at his acting program.

A week later I got a call I had booked the commercial and was on my first set, I was confident I’d made the right choice with my life.

The next two years were filled with early camera classes, scene work, voice and movement training until I graduated and it was time to get to work. I signed on to an agency in Dallas and got to work, booking plays and commercials, not as often as I had imagined I would, but enough to keep me afloat, until I entered, what till this day, is my longest relationship.

A relationship had set me on the path of self confidence leading me to acting and a relationship took me out of it.

Lara was a young teacher I’d met while working my day job at an elementary school. She lived in a tall building in Uptown Dallas and came from a well off Jewish family. She had dark black hair, alabaster skin, and the face of a carefully painted portrait, to me she looked like a porcelain doll had come to life and grew into a beautiful woman.

Lara was always supportive of my struggling artist lifestyle until our relationship became more serious. We visited one of her childhood friends in his swanky downtown apartment and she was very impressed, it made my tiny apartment in the throws of the city look like shit. Once we left I felt the shift in her perspective of me.

“Sergio, I’m accustomed to a certain lifestyle and I need to know that you’ll be able to join me in it.”

So I re-enrolled in college and set off to finish my four year degree. Lara and I broke up before I had even received my acceptance letter.

Acting took a backseat to the pursuit of my bachelors degree and then took a backseat to my travels across Europe and eventually to my teaching career. I can’t pinpoint exactly when Acting got out of the car, but it was years ago.

Now sitting here in Morelia watching my cousin Beto rehearse for another show in which he will surely have audiences singing along or recording him on their phone I wonder what would’ve been if I had kept acting if I had grown up next to him. To be sure, I don’t regret leaving it, or leaving Mexico, growing separately from my the closest thing to a brother I have ever had. The path I took led me to be on TV, on stage, on top of mountains, and on foreign trains, the life not lived is one you shouldn’t ponder too hard.

I almost didn’t come to Morelia; for a moment I was convinced I wouldn’t leave Merida, it felt safe, but Lucia helped me see things differently.

“If you want to connect with your roots you won’t do so by living in a single place, but by visiting family.”

As I hear my cousin and his band mates rehearse love songs in Spanish I always had trouble connecting to, I find myself thinking of her now, she is the image painted by the words sang into the microphone and escaping through the amp.

It‘s loud in this little cafe being used as a rehearsal space, but it’s where I needed to be.

It’s hard to hear but clear to see.