Recuerdos de un Chicano
When I was sixteen, I got a traffic ticket.
I thought the ticket was wrong, so I did something I suppose was already characteristic of me.
I fought it.
I went to court, argued my case, and won.
That should have been the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
After ruling in my favor, the judge looked at me and told me that by the time I was eighteen I would either be dead or in prison.
I have never been quite sure what triggered him.
Maybe I said something he did not like. Maybe I was too argumentative. Maybe a sixteen-year-old challenging a ticket irritated him. Maybe he simply looked at me and decided he knew what kind of future a kid like me was going to have.
I cannot say.
I remember only the prediction.
Dead or in prison by eighteen.
There was something strange about it even then.
I had not run from the law.
I had gone to court.
I had used the system exactly the way Americans are told the system is supposed to work. I believed I had been wrongly accused; I challenged the accusation, and the court agreed with me.
I won.
Yet somehow I walked out of that courtroom with a judge predicting that within two years I would either be behind bars or buried.
Neither happened.
I finished school.
I went to college.
Years later, I went to law school and became an attorney.
And eventually, for a time, I became a judge myself.
I have wondered occasionally what that judge would have thought if somebody had shown him the future of the sixteen-year-old standing in front of him.
He had given me two possibilities.
Prison or the grave.
He missed a third one.
The other side of the bench.
