"Man and His Fence"

Tales from the Simons Brickyard

By kiki

When living in the Simons brickyard (El Hoyo) in the early 1950s my friends and I used to light up a fire in the evenings. When we would run out of wood to burn, we would go to plan B, which was to go to the rackas (racks) and dump the bricks that were drying on wooden paletas (pallets). We would take the paletas and used them for firewood. We had to hide them as the night watchman would sneak up on us to see if he could get us burning paletas, which was a big no-no in Simons, you just didn’t burn Simons Brickyard paletas without getting your ass in trouble with the local chota (sheriff/watchman), not to mention the ass whipping at home.

When the watchman was keeping a close eye on us we would go to plan C, which was to rip the wooden fences from the nearby houses, hey! We needed firewood, didn’t we? Tacho’s house was the one nearest to us. Tacho, at least once a week was fixing his fence. One day my dad was walking by and seen Tacho working on his fence, my dad asked him “fixing that fence again?” “eso’s cabrones (meaning us) keep burning my fence” replied Tacho….Days of innocence!

UPDATED: 3-21-2013

I mention above about the chota keeping an eye on us to keep us from burning the paletas. Well we kids came up with an idea to get back at him for chasing us when he would bust us burning paletas. We came up with the bright idea of digging a hole for the chota to fall in as he chased us. About four or five of us kids dug a hole about four feet deep and four feet wide, I say “about” four by four because I am not really sure how deep or how wide it was, I do know that it was deep enough that at its deepest if one of us jumped in the hole we couldn’t get out on our own, we had to be helped out.

We dug the hole about twenty feet away from the fire over a period of nights. We would dig some and when it was time to go home we would cover it up with thin plywood; put some dirt/grass on top of the plywood to keep it from been seen. 

One night with the hole covered up we were hanging around the fire when the chota came running towards the fire yelling at the top of his lungs “cabrones, quemedo patletas!!” as soon as we heard him we all ran towards the hole, and as we ran around the hole; he ran over the hole and hit the thin plywood at top speed and as he disappeared into deep pit of darkness we could hear him yell “Cabrones!!”

Don’t know how he got out, but next day the chisme around the brickyard was “did you hear what happened to the chota last night? No? well; he said the earth opened up and tried to swallow him!”

“Cabrones!”