Francisco Gonzales, Serranos

“The trailer park was our domain.”

Hiding behind a wall of corrugated tin at Rancho View Mobile Estates in rural Southern California, a community of undocumented farm workers live as quietly as possible. In order to survive, they stay under the radar, avoid banks, doctors’ offices, church. They “endure,” focusing their hopes and dreams on the children who have citizenship by right of birth. When a new group of undocumented workers move into one of the vacant broken-down trailers, the original residents worry they will bring unwanted attention to their circumspect community. The newbies, the Serranos, do just that. They blast country music on a portable radio and tie American flags to the garish children’s bicycles they ride the six miles to work at a Greek restaurant. The children are caught in the middle, excited by the newcomers and disappointed in parents who can’t read, who speak broken English.

Narrated in first person plural (we/us), sets up an us-versus-them scenario that takes the story to a universal level, beyond this little spotlight on life. These two groups of undocumented workers should have each other’s backs, but they don’t. They come at each other. Only one of the original residents counsels understanding: “They’re our brethren,’ they said, ‘not our adversaries. Haven’t we all crossed the same border? Aren’t we all just workers following the work?’”

This beautifully articulated short story is certainly appropriate to our times, maybe to all times.

“Serranos,” by Francisco Gonzales, was first published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. It was also awarded the O. Henry Prize in 2024. Gonzalez is a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a Steinbeck fellow at San José State University. He lives in East Los Angeles.