Before leaving home, Pepito tried to learn English with the mp3 player his dad had left him when he went North two years earlier. The mp3 player only had one playlist on it: ‘musica gringa’, populated exclusively by low quality Blaze Foley rips his dad pirated off LimeWire on the house computer – before a virus harvested its electronic soul. He brought the mp3 player and his older sister’s earbuds with him on the bus ride to Tijuana. Crossing the border, he clutched it in the palm of his hand as he lay on the bed of a decrepit Chevy, covered in a canvas sheet. Just him, Blaze Foley, and 15 bags of oranges. No one bothered him. He shut his eyes and lost himself in the music; not many words stuck to him but he kept listening, just in case.

Somewhere in the Imperial Valley, the Chevy was intercepted by la migra, who tore the canvas off the truck bed and told Pepito they were going to drive him back to Tijuana and send him back home. At some point, on the somber drive back west in the white and green Border Patrol SUV, the agents must’ve had a crisis of conscience, because out of the blue they asked Pepito if he wanted to try anything while he was still here, in America; ‘can’t come all this way for nothin,’ they said, and timid Pepito, seeing his chance to practice what English he had learned, channeled his great American hero: ‘a big cheeseburger and good French fries,’ he told them, and the agents – eager to dole out a morsel of the American Dream ­– pulled the patrol car off Interstate 8 into a drive-in burger shack in El Centro and bought the boy his food. Pepito savored every bite, every note from Foley’s guitar, every word he didn’t understand, and every breath of California air.