He was usually there on early evenings, a gray-haired man with crinkles around his eyes trudging east along the cracked pavement of Adams Boulevard.
Those who passed by him may have noticed the blue satchel over his shoulder, the black boots on his feet.
His name was Alberto Castañeda Aco and he was on his way home, having spent the day, as he often did, stitching together collared shirts and cotton trousers.
Once, long ago, he had been an amateur boxer in Mexico, dubbed “Campeon” by those who saw him spar professional fighters. But children came, three daughters, two sons, and the aspirations of a champion gave way to practicality.
And so Mr. Castañeda Aco built a different sort of life, one in which he prided himself on his handiwork at garment factories around Los Angeles.
At 72 years old, he found comfort in the buzz of the sewing machines and the company of colleagues. They laughed at his one-liners, called him Don Alberto. He had no plans to retire.
“He still felt useful,” his daughter Martha Correa, 49, said.
Mr. Castañeda Aco did not own a car, nor was he fond of public transportation. He often walked nearly 2.5 miles home on streets lined with warehouses and auto repair shops.
On a Wednesday in January, he was headed toward the yellow house in which he rented a room big enough for a twin bed and television, and where he enjoyed sitting by the balcony window, listening to the trill of his landlord’s lovebirds.
At the corner of Adams Boulevard and Main Street stood a sewing machine shop whose owner Mr. Castañeda Aco had known for two decades. They would wave at the sight of each other and call out, “See you tomorrow.”
It was just after 6 p.m. that day when Mr. Castañeda Aco approached this intersection. The pedestrian signal flashed. As he had done thousands of times, he stepped into the crosswalk.
Walking Felt Like Freedom
In Los Angeles, the streets belong to the drivers. That is never more clear than during rush hour, the grueling bookend of each weekday that stretches on in a uniquely congested city.
But there are those whose daily commutes are relegated to the sidewalks, who wend their way through neighborhoods on foot. Among the chorus of cars, they are muted, blurry figures on the edge of a scene.
Mr. Castañeda Aco had grown accustomed to being an outlier, ambling down streets with discount stores, laundromats and strip malls as traffic roared around him.
He had given up driving around the time he turned 50, worried that old boxing injuries had slowed his reflexes. Waiting for a bus could be tedious and, lately, troublesome riders made him feel vulnerable. Walking saved money and was good exercise. He also liked his independence.
Mr. Castañeda Aco had been mostly on his own since arriving in the 1980s, leaving behind his wife and children in Mexico City as he searched for employment.
Living in the downtown area, he picked up jobs at various garment factories and sent money home. He had a reputation for being upbeat and social, chatting as he hunched over his machine.
But he was serious about his output. “No one can make buttonholes like I do,” he would say in private. He often trained new immigrants, encouraging them with the motto “Échale ganas.” Give it your best.
The years slipped by, during which he made only two visits back home. By the time his family was able to join him in Los Angeles, his children were teenagers.
Mr. Castañeda Aco continued laboring as he aged, and even as his health declined. He was diabetic, but he did not have health insurance and was wary of calling attention to his undocumented status. He lost teeth; his hearing dulled. He needed a new prescription for his glasses.
His children implored him to retire. It was time to rest, to stop the hazardous walking. His oldest, Claudia Reyes, an executive assistant for administrators at a school, urged him to move into a garage that she planned to convert into a living space on her property.
Retirement did not appeal to Mr. Castañeda Aco. Working gave him purpose. Walking felt like freedom.
There was, however, a deeper reason for his reluctance. He did not want to burden his children and disrupt what was a newfound relationship.
He had been estranged from them for most of his life. But in recent years they had offered up a gift he never expected. Forgiveness.
Seeing Him in Need
He was 21 when he became a father. Soon he was juggling a growing household with a day job and his dreams.
For a while he tried to keep up his training as a boxer. Rising before the sun, he would head to a nearby park, children in tow. He jogged or did situps as they swung on the playground or climbed on his feet. Then he headed to his job overseeing deliveries of water heaters.
His children also tagged along with him to the gym where he taught them how to shadowbox and master the speed bag. They loved the lessons, but were upset whenever he came home from matches with swollen eyes and bruises on the bridge of his nose.
Playful and lighthearted, Mr. Castañeda Aco was the kind of father who bantered with the cashier at the market, who did imitations of his wife to make his children laugh.
But when he left for Los Angeles, his relationship with his children withered. They did not own a phone at home, so they heard news about their father only when he called their mother at her work. They knew their parents had intense arguments, often about money. The children sided with their mother, who managed the household while holding down a night job at a microchip factory.
When the family finally reunited in the United States, Mr. Castañeda Aco was the odd one out. For too many years, he had been a faraway figure.
He once presented Ms. Reyes, his daughter, with an olive green suit that he had made with pockets on the blazer and a slit on the skirt with hidden stitching. She still remembers the look on his face when he handed it to her, that he could provide her with something so refined.
The moment could not mend what had long been broken. When Mr. Castañeda Aco and his wife separated, the tension with his children only grew.
Much of the resentment was fueled by memories of their father’s temper. He had sometimes resorted to hitting them or using a belt for discipline. It had not been unusual in that era, but it sullied their affections.
As adults in Los Angeles, they had little use for him in their American lives. When they saw him at gatherings and holidays, the exchanges were stilted, obligatory.
So it went for decades.
But when their father’s health issues surfaced several years ago, his children reached out with a dutiful offer. They would give him rides to medical appointments. One, they discovered, was at a clandestine dental facility operating without a license.
Together, the siblings managed to get their father signed up for Medi-Cal, found a more reputable dentist, made arrangements for other doctors and pooled their money for any payments.
Mr. Castañeda Aco, who loved conchas, a Mexican sweet bread, and any Gamesa brand cookies, had not been monitoring his glucose levels. His children had to teach him how to draw his own blood and record the results.
He became a frequent subject in the siblings’ group chat. They had already been caring for their mother, who also lived in Los Angeles and had her own health problems. Their feelings toward their father began to soften.
“I think it was just seeing him as a human, someone who needed help,” Ms. Reyes, 51, said.
She and her siblings took turns driving. Stuck together in the tedium of traffic, they found themselves slipping into deep conversations, even subjects on which they were politically divided.
Their father, they realized, had lived a mostly sheltered life. He had continuously taken English language classes, writing words out phonetically in notebooks along with phrases like “What do you want?” and “How much?” But he struggled to communicate more fully outside of Spanish.
Eking out a simple living within his neighborhood and what he knew, he had not explored the rest of the city.
They also learned that he had been sending money to his own sisters at the same time that he was supporting his wife and children from afar. It explained some of the fights between their parents, who had been so young when they started a family.
“I could understand him more, certain decisions that he made or why he was the way he was,” Ms. Correa, his daughter, said. “He lacked the resources to know how to talk to his kids and to his wife.”
By then, Ms. Correa, who works in training and development for the Los Angeles Unified School District, had taken on the empathy of a parent. She also saw her father as her two daughters’ link to their Mexican roots.
Ms. Correa and her sisters began taking their father to lunches, eager to introduce him to steaming bowls of pho or beef noodle soup or some other cuisine he had never eaten. They convinced him to try chapulines, or fried grasshoppers, laughing at his dismay.
Over meals, Mr. Castañeda Aco would reminisce about growing up in Puebla, Mexico, a life he had not spoken much about before. One of seven children whose father owned a coffee plantation, he had initially finished only third grade. He was thrilled that his children and grandchildren could have college degrees.
Mr. Castañeda Aco had grown more effusive as a senior, more comfortable with emotion.
Last New Year’s Eve, he was especially spirited. During a phone call, he told Ms. Correa, “I love you so much. I love my granddaughters. Tell my son-in-law I love him. I’ll see you next year.”
A City of Cars
On Jan. 3, a stolen black Infiniti barreled south on Main Street and blew through a red light. A crossing sedan crashed into its right side.
The Infiniti swiveled and careened into Mr. Castañeda Aco. His body slammed against the windshield and was thrown more than 100 feet.
At least four people were seen exiting the car before hastily scattering, according to the police report. One dragged what appeared to be a nitrous oxide tank. Inside the car was a deflated purple balloon.
It took more than five months for the driver, a 16-year-old boy, to be tracked down and arrested. This week, appearing in court with his parents, he admitted to a felony charge of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The incident was mentioned in the news, the most public attention that Mr. Castañeda Aco had ever received in America. But the rhythm of traffic collisions in Los Angeles can be numbing. Last year, deadly car crashes in the city outnumbered homicides, with more than 330 people killed, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Within that number, about half of the victims were pedestrians, and about one-third were killed by hit-and-run drivers.
Some end up in both of these categories: a pedestrian whose vulnerability was no match against a vehicle; a life that was of no concern to the driver who fled.
That Wednesday night, as Mr. Castañeda Aco lay on the pavement, both of his legs broken, blood in his ears, he was not seen as a former boxer, a dedicated employee, a grandfather of eight.
Instead, he became another tally mark of misfortune in a city of cars.
Around him, drivers who saw the crash pulled over. A witness called 911 and performed chest compressions on the body. The owner of the nearby sewing machine shop walked up. He lay a hand on the victim’s chest and could feel his heart beating wildly. “It’s him,” he said. “It’s Don Alberto.”
Mr. Castañeda Aco was whisked away to a hospital. By the time his children arrived, he had died.
His Final Years
In his final years, Mr. Castañeda Aco was reflective and deeply regretful. There had been difficult conversations between the father and his children. He apologized for lashing out at them long ago.
“He knew that he did wrong to us,” Ms. Reyes said. “He understood everything we went through.”
Families in all of their truth can be complicated. Sometimes there is no going forward. Sometimes you forge ahead anyway.
The siblings focused on how to make up the years that had passed. They kept a list of experiences they wanted to share with him. He had never been camping or visited a museum or gone on a road trip.
The coronavirus pandemic had slowed their relationship, but they hoped to one day take him to see the sequoias in the Sierra Nevada, to get him good seats at a concert by Los Tigres del Norte, his favorite norteño band. They started to supplement his rent. At the factory, he had been paid only for the pieces he produced.
This year, he was planning on finally getting a hearing aid and dentures.
“Everything was falling into place for him to enjoy his life and his family,” Ms. Correa said. “He had a lot more things that he could have experienced.”
She and her siblings think often of last summer, when they convinced their father to attend a grandson’s wedding at a vineyard 90 miles south in Temecula. He had declined at first, nervous about being far from home and closer to the Mexican border.
Ms. Reyes took him to buy a gray suit and hoped that she might interest him in some dress shoes. Instead he chose boots and a straw fedora. When he finally entered the hotel room reserved for him, he remarked: “Really? This is for me?”
That night he marveled at the serenity of the sprawling land, drank sparkling lemon wine and danced with his daughters, his eyes shining with exhilaration.
Mr. Castañeda Aco was always cognizant of his children’s change of heart and their generosity. “Que dios te pague porque no puedo,” he would say.
May God repay you because I cannot.
The post The Mortal American Dream of Alberto Castañeda Aco appeared first on New York Times.
