One Last Time by Gary Soto
...es at school. He blames it on problems with his stepfather and he simply did not care anymore. Some people and family believed that he would never do anything with his life. They kept telling him that he would work like a donkey and that he would marry the first Mexican girl that came across. He was reminded of this so often that he started to believe it himself. Because of the vowed he made of not picking up grapes, young Soto decided to pick up cotton with his brother Rick. He liked the pay, and cotton did not have the stigma of being a low class job as picking up grapes did. After the cotton season was over, there were no other seasonable jobs available except for grapes. In the end Soto had to swallow his pride and stoop like a Mexican “One Last Time.” I relate with this young boy, because just like him, I came to the United States when I was 17 years old. I remembered wanting to fit in and be the same as those other kids that were born here. I was so embarrassed of my accent that most of the time I just kept quiet; I did not want them to know that I was an outsider. Even to this day I am self-conscious of my accent, even though not as often as when I was a young boy, but I still think about it when I speak to people I meet for the first time. “I ate my words,” is what Soto meant when he was getting ready to go back to pick up grapes. I too have eaten my own words before. I have done jobs that I said I would never do, like, cleaning toilets and cleaning the “compactor area” where the trash is thrown-away at a Hotel in San Francisco where I got my first job. When I was confronted with the decision of doing these two jobs or get laid off, I did not hesitate for a moment. That experience taught me that more often than no we must do thi...