“Hey,” I said. “Maybe I could come work with you guys.” The Hermanos Brothers glanced at each other dubiously. “It’s hard work,” one of them said.

THE HERMANOS BROTHERS BY STEVEN MCBREARTY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 19

I was lifting weights in a back bedroom of my family’s home in suburban San Antonio when my mother barged in, wearing her famous Guatemalan peasant’s dress, decorated in bright, jagged bands of color. The dress was a statement that she was moving forward, catching the waves of change coursing through the contemporary, post-modern world. She moved in a certain distinctive way that she didn’t move in any other piece of clothing, swishing around with a smart, determined, cheerful demeanor, a housewife who knew that she was really no longer just an ordinary housewife, instead a new, advanced form of housewife, almost a mutation of species. I doubt there were many actual Guatemalan peasants with my oh-soAmerican mother’s sense of sunny self-sufficiency.

It was a balmy, languid late April morning in South Texas, the sun shuttling in and out of puffy cumulus clouds, a soft breeze rustling the foliage. The grass was green,…