Under the Wire
- When The Circuit starts, we don't know our narrator's name yet, but we do find out that he's got some seriously big dreams. You see, when he was a kid in the late 1940s, he lived in Mexico in a town called El Rancho Blanco, but his family has been chatting about moving to California. And you can bet he's excited.
- And he's not the only one—the whole entire family is stoked. The narrator's Mamá, Papá, and older bro Roberto all can't wait to travel to California. Roberto gets extra amped up after visiting his cousin, Fito, in Guadalajara. Fito has some modern amenities like running water and electricity, and Roberto can't wait to have those things too.
- Finally it's time for the trip. Wahoo. The narrator and his family hop on a train to California. While on the train, they chat about what Cali will be like.
- Fast fact: Our narrator has a nickname—it's Panchito.
- Eventually the train reaches its destination: Mexicali (a.k.a. the area just south of the California border). The narrator and his family call this area la frontera and they can't wait to cross it.
- There's just one problem: a humongous barbed wire fence patrolled by guards with guns. Yep, that's border patrol and this family is going to have to find a way around them.
- So they walk a super long way until they find an area where they can crawl under the fence. Papá pays a woman to drive them to Guadalupe, a coastal town where they're hoping to find work as laborers.
- The next day, they meet some nice folks in the worker's camp. The good news is that the camp foreman lends them a tent to sleep in, but the bad news is that they can't start picking strawberries for another two weeks. And that's a big bummer.
- So here's how they spend the next two weeks while they wait to start work: Mamá is a resourceful lady and she finds a way to cook outside on a stove she whips up herself, while Papá hunts for small wild animals for Mamá to cook up. Roberto and Panchito watch the train come by at noon every day, which they think is pretty fun. Plus the conductor always waves at them, and once he even drops a bag of fruit and candy out the window as a gift, which is actually pretty cool.