I started to think about my father picking cotton as a kid & the hierarchy of the fields. How poor whites & Mexican-Americans got first pick. How undocumented workers went in second & African-Americans picked last. How my father said getting first-pick made him feel special until one very hot day, in Lubbock, during a break, his family went looking for water. How none of the white people in town would give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African-American farm hands offered them some. How they didn’t even have to ask. How my father says we’re all living like that—not even knowing who our friends are. How my father passes for white until he speaks. How a farmer & his wife, in College Station, told my grandmother they would adopt my father & raise him as white when he was four years old. How the men who hired my father at AT&T in the seventies laughed & said they were meeting the requirements of affirmative action with a man who “talks like a Mexican but looks white.” How, when my father tells this story, he doesn’t even seem mad.