About five years ago, when our department was under pressure to hire “diverse” faculty members, I tried to find evidence for something my father used to tell us, which was that he was a Yaqui Indian. When he first told us this, I had quizzed him extensively for some kind of papers or anything that would prove his Indian status, so that I could get scholarship money available to Native Americans. But nothing ever came of it.
Spurred by the possibility that I myself might be able to offer some semblance of diversity to our department, I renewed my efforts. I had not known my father well. He was in and out of our lives, and then he died. But my mother had told us that he’d grown up at Boys Town, the Rev. Edward J. Flanagan’s home for orphaned boys.
So I wrote to Boys Town, hoping that they had some information. They sent me his file, which revealed the following story.
On June 18, 1940, a 14-year-old boy appeared at Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, in Boys Town, Nebraska. He gave his name as Jeff Delton and said he was Italian. He said he was the second of two children born to Frank and Mary Grayson Delton, of Eagle Pass, Texas. His mother had died of stomach ulcers in 1935, and his father died a year later, in a truck accident in Fort Worth. Since his parents’ death, he had been living with his mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Parker, in Ponca, Oklahoma. Miss Parker was no longer able to care for him, so he ran away to Boys Town, where Father Flanagan took him in.
A year and a half later, a Reverend Mulvihill, of Salina, Kansas, wrote to Father Flanagan informing him that two Mexican sisters by the name of Quintero thought they had recognized their nephew, Alfred Quintero, in the Boys Town Times, which was handed out at a second-run showing of the movie Boys Town. Alfred had run away more than a year earlier. Father Flanagan invited the sisters to Boys Town to identify the boy. They could not afford the journey, but the two parties exchanged photographs and established that the boy who called himself Jeff Delton, from Eagle Pass, Texas, was, in fact, Alfred Quintero, from Salina, Kansas.
The boy, however, denied any relationship to the Quinteros. Whoever recorded the interviews with him noted that though Jeff denied the relationship, his manner made it evident that he was not telling the truth. One of the boy’s aunts eventually wrote to Father Flanagan stating her perplexity at the boy’s refusal to recognize his family. She would not interfere in whatever plans were made for him, but she would like to hear from him occasionally. She also wrote a letter to Jeff and enclosed a picture of his brother. The notes indicate that Jeff was visibly disturbed when he viewed the photograph. But still he would not admit who he was.
Over the next two years, Jeff Delton distinguished himself at Boys Town High School. He was on the honor roll and participated in choir, football, and tennis. In September 1943, Father Flanagan accompanied him to the Douglas County District Court, in Omaha, where he petitioned to have his name changed from Alfred Quintero to Jeff John Delton.
The documentation for the petition reveals the story he was running away from. He was the oldest of three boys born to the late Frank Quintero and a woman named Rafalita, who did die in 1935. His father had not died in a truck accident, though, as the boy had told Father Flanagan, but was shot to death by an angry husband, in what a jury ruled a “justifiable homicide.” Jeff had not been in the care of a Miss Parker but rather had lived with his father’s mother, a Mexican native named Louise Quintero, who spoke no English. Also in the home were Jeff’s brothers, Frank and Edward (described as a “cripple”), his two aunts, Antonia and Eulalia Quintero, two cousins, Fernando and Guadalupe Anaya (described as an “imbecile”), and an uncle, Leo Quintero, just released from the Kansas State Insane Asylum.
The social worker who dispensed an Aid to Dependent Children grant to the family described the household as friendly and neat, striving to be self-sufficient, and devoutly Roman Catholic. The family had told her that Alfred disappeared two years previously, a few days after falling and injuring his head at a carnival. The family thought that it was a youthful prank at first, that he would return home soon. Some time later, they discovered that he was at Boys Town.
The inclusion of this “social history” in the petition for a name change suggests that Alfred/Jeff had to acknowledge the truth of his story in order to be free of it. The court found the name “Alfred Quintero” difficult to pronounce, of foreign origin, and detracting from the young Quintero’s social standing, and so granted his request to change his name to Jeff John Delton.
And that was how my father became Anglo. It was that easy. He graduated a year early so that he could be trained to fight in the war. When he returned, he contacted his family briefly, making arrangements for his little brother Frank to attend Boys Town High School (on the condition that nobody there would know they were brothers—in blatant contradiction to Boys Town’s motto, “He ain’t heavy, Father ... he’s m’ brother”). And then he left. He never contacted his family again. He married a German-American woman from Minnesota whom he’d met through a Catholic pen-pal club. They had four children, none of whom ever knew that he was originally Mexican or that he had family in Kansas.
So he wasn’t Indian; he was Mexican—"brown” in the racial slang of the 1940s, “Hispanic” in today’s diversity parlance. In terms of ancestry, then, I am half-Mexican. But does ancestry determine identity? Could I retake my father’s rightful name and identify as Hispanic? All that is required for a faculty member to be “diverse” is to have a name like Quintero, to identify as Hispanic. Indeed, it’s as easy for someone to be Hispanic today as it was for my father not to be.
But my father fixed things so that I, his offspring, would not actually be Mexican or Hispanic. I grew up as a regular American, and if anyone asked what I “was,” I said I was German, which was the only heritage I knew of.
It is tempting to think that my father thought he was opening up opportunities for his children, opportunities that would have been denied to him as long as his name was Quintero. But what 14-year-old boy is thinking about his unborn children? No, he was thinking about himself. His was an extraordinary act of self-making—shedding his birth family and adopting a generic American identity. I don’t think I can, in good faith, undo his choice. Not only have I lived my entire life as a non-Hispanic white, but it is also doubtful whether my mother would ever have married a man named Quintero. My existence hinges on that changed name.
And yet I feel somehow that this is a quintessentially Hispanic story, as well as an American one. Our ostensibly white population is a lot more diverse than search committees typically assume. I am sure my father was not alone.