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Genre: Fiction (realistic)
Topic: Gonzalo reflects on his immigrant family’s experience adapting to life in the U.S.
Author: Paul Fleischman
Source: Seedfolks (1997)
Special Note: used on G4 MCAS 2004

Gonzalo
by Paul Fleischman
1 The older you are, the younger you get when you move to the United States.

2 They don’t teach you that equation in school. Big Brain, Mr. Smoltz, my eighth-grade
math teacher, hasn’t even heard of it. It’s not in Gateway to Algebra. It’s Garcia’s
Equation. I’m the Garcia.
3 Two years after my father and I moved here from Guatemala I could speak English. I
learned it on the playground and watching lots of TV. Don’t believe what people say—
cartoons make you smart. But my father, he worked all day in a kitchen with Mexicans
and Salvadorans. His English was worse than a kindergartner’s. He would only buy food
at the bodega1 down the block. Outside of there he lowered his eyes and tried to get
by on mumbles and smiles. He didn’t want strangers to hear his mistakes. So he used
me to make phone calls and to talk to the landlady and to buy things in stores where
you had to use English. He got younger. I got older.
4 Then my younger brothers and mother and Tío Juan, her uncle, came north and
joined us. Tío Juan was the oldest man in his pueblo2. But here he became a little baby.
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza3 and
talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by
might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around
the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
5 One morning he wandered outside and down the street. My

mother practically fainted. He doesn’t speak Spanish, just an Indian language. I finally
found him standing in front of the beauty parlor, staring through the glass at a woman
with a drier over her head. He must have wondered what weird planet he’d moved to. I
led him home, holding his hand, the way you would with a three-year-old. Since then
I’m supposed to babysit him after school.
6 One afternoon I was watching TV, getting smart on The Brady Bunch.4 Suddenly I
looked up. He was gone. I checked the halls on all five floors of the apartment house. I
ran to the street. He wasn’t in the bodega or the pawnshop. I called his name, imag-
ining my mother’s face when she found out he’d fallen through a manhole or been run
over. I turned the corner, looking for the white straw hat he always wore. Two blocks
down I spotted it. I flew down the sidewalk and found him standing in front of a vacant
lot, making gestures to a man with a shovel.
7 I took his hand, but he pulled me through the trash and into the lot. I recognized the
man with the shovel—he was the janitor at my old school. He had a little garden
planted. Different shades of green leaves were coming up in rows. Tío Juan was smiling
and trying to tell him something. The man couldn’t understand him and finally went
back to digging. I turned Tío Juan around and led him home.
8 That night he told my mother all about it. She was the only one who could
understand him. When she got home from work the next day she asked me to take him
back there. I did. He studied the sun. Then the soil. He felt it, then smelled it, then
actually tasted it. He chose a spot not too far from the sidewalk. Where my mother
changed busses she’d gone into a store and bought him a trowel and four packets of
seeds. I cleared the trash, he turned the soil. I wished we were farther from the street
and I was praying that none of my friends or girlfriends or enemies saw me. Tío Juan
didn’t even notice people—he was totally wrapped up in the work.
9 He showed me exactly how far apart the rows should be and how deep. He couldn’t
read the words on the seed packets, but he knew from the pictures what seeds were
inside. He poured them into his hand and smiled. He seemed to recognize them, like old
friends. Watching him carefully sprinkling them into the troughs he’d made, I realized
that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at
his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not far away or confused. He’d
changed from a baby back into a man.

Style: The narrator’s voice is pronounced, bringing the character of Gonzalo to life. FAST-
R: Formative Assessments of Student Thinking in Reading. The passage text by Paul
Fleischman is from Seedfolks. Copyright © 1997 by Paul Fleischman. Some questions
were drawn or adapted from the G4 MCAS Spring 2004 test. All other materials are
Copyright 2007 by the Boston Plan for Excellence.

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Gonzalo

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Gonzalo