Burnt Honey:
Compelling Tale of Professor’s Immigration to U.S.

“This is a novel,” said Arreguín-Bermúdez, Foreign Languages and Literatures, of his Miel Quemada, “but the stories are true. They are everything I observed.”

The collection of linked stories (translated as Burnt Honey by Sara Cooper, Foreign Languages and Literatures) brings to life the oppressive and dangerous experience of Mexican immigrant farm workers in the United States. In it we encounter the 14-year-old Little Clown, a young immigrant who finds hope through language. Little Clown’s journey reflects Arreguín-Bermúdez’s own in many ways—he too came to the United States alone, as a child, and found his way to a very different life through words and learning.

When Arreguín-Bermúdez crossed the border from Mexico illegally, at age 16, he had no visions of PhDs and faculty appointments.

Antonio Arreguín-Bermúdez

“I just wanted to help my parents,” he said, and he dropped out of eighth grade and left their small rural village in order to do so.

Arreguín-Bermúdez’s father, who had been a bracero in the 1960s, asked him not to go, telling him that life in the United States was more difficult than he could imagine. But in 1985, Arreguín-Bermúdez used all the money he had to take the train to Mexicali, and then made his way to Tijuana. He could not pay the $400 for help across the border. Instead, he was taken to a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, where the foreman paid the $400. In return, the foreman charged Arreguín-Bermúdez $1,000. “For months, I was just paying this—not making anything,” he said, “We also had to pay for rent and food.”

He was deported after a year, but back working at the same ranch, eight weeks later. When he returned, he decided to learn English. “I just started thinking about going to school and learning the language, with the hope that next time immigration arrived I could speak to them in English and they would leave me alone.”

He eventually enrolled in high school, leaving the ranch and spending all the money he had on a year’s rent in the town of Reedley. He ate a free lunch at school, surviving on that food alone for months. He knew no English when he started. But he loved every minute of it, he said. “The classrooms were so clean, the library was so warm in the winter. I loved my PE class because it was the opportunity to take a hot shower.”

He eventually got a job in an auto shop and did farm work during the summer. He planned to work his way through one year of high school, but that year became four, and he graduated in 1990.

ín-Bermúdez qualified for a temporary green card under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and was able to get financial aid to offset the costs of attending Fresno State. He got bachelor’s and master’s in Spanish before getting a PhD in Hispanic Literature at University of Arizona, Tucson.

Antonio Arreguín-Bermúdez pruned a fruit tree before he entered high school in 1986.

In spite of the physical hardships of immigrant life, Arreguín-Bermúdez’s most formidable challenges were psychological, he said. He was told by other illegal immigrants not to go to the park or walk down the sidewalk in daytime for fear of being discovered and deported. “It’s difficult to be an immigrant. Basically, you leave everything behind—your culture, your language, your friends, everything—for years at a time. I lost my identity for years, felt like I was in exile, felt like I was a criminal, in hiding. I loved school so much, to learn so much, but at the same time, I thought, ‘If they don’t want me here, why am I here?’ ”

Arreguín-Bermúdez now has two children—a son and a daughter. As his son approaches the age Arreguín-Bermúdez was when he left El Rodeo de San Antonio, the immensity of that decision becomes even more apparent. “When I think of my son going by himself to a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language, it makes me cry.

“I have a family here. I am happy here. But still, there’s an emptiness in my heart—I lost my childhood.”

Arreguín-Bermúdez is working on another book, this one of 25 short stories based on Dante’s Inferno. “Eight take place in Mexico, eight take place on the border—in purgatory—and eight take place in the U.S.,” he said. “The last story is a voice that doesn’t see the separation of the three worlds.”

—Anna Harris, Public Affairs and Publications