An American Son: A Memoir by Marco Rubio

and let him run, which he did very well. My dad liked Larry. He promised to buy him a Burger King Whopper after the game for every touchdown he scored, and was astonished that Larry could consume two Whoppers in one sitting.
    Larry and I became friends. Most of the friends I made at my new school were black. In order to fit in with my new social circle, I started listening to R&B music. I watched
Soul Train
on Saturday mornings, and became a big Michael Jackson fan. By the end of sixth grade, I had begun enjoying a new kind of music, rap, and I’ve been listening to it ever since. My white friends liked hard rock acts—Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne and others. I didn’t care for that kind of music anymore, and they didn’t care for my preferences, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.
    I was exposed to something else I had been unfamiliar with before sixth grade: inner-city gang violence. Street gangs from LA were expanding to other cities, and spin-off gangs from the infamous Bloods and Crips appeared in my friends’ neighborhood. It wasn’t a problem at school, but I could see it distressed my friends. They often told me they had to be careful not to wear blue or red clothes, which were gang colors and could be mistaken as a sign they were affiliated with one gang and a target for the violent enmity of the other. Some of my friends had brothers who had joined gangsand been hurt in a fight or jailed. Every afternoon I took the bus home to my peaceful neighborhood, while my friends returned to their increasingly violent one.
    We had a pool party for my twelfth birthday. My uncle Aurelio, Elda’s husband, had given us an aboveground pool his family no longer used, and my father had reassembled it in our backyard. I invited friends from the neighborhood and my old school as well as some of my black friends from sixth grade and the Cavaliers. Everyone seemed to have a good time—I certainly did. But I later learned that several friends from the same family were no longer allowed to come to our house. They told me their parents would let them play with us outside but had forbidden them to enter our house again because we had entertained black kids there, and they didn’t want their kids making friends with them. I was mystified and irritated.
    It was an eventful time in my life—a new school, new football team, new friends, new music and new interests. I soon had a new church, too. I had kept in touch with a friend from elementary school, a Catholic, though not a very devout one. Yet his religious identity piqued my curiosity about my former faith, and early in 1983 I began a new research project. I read about the Church in my
World Book
. I checked out books on Catholicism from the school library. I pestered my mother about her religious upbringing. During Easter Week of 1983, when the most sacred traditions of the Catholic liturgy are on display and a papal Mass is broadcast on television, I made up my mind. I wanted to be a Catholic again.
    The depth of our commitment to the Mormon Church hadn’t progressed beyond attending Sunday services and social functions. My father had never felt comfortable there, and my mother had mostly joined the Mormon Church because she believed it was a safe and welcoming place for her children that would make us happy. So my parents posed no objection when I argued we should return to the Catholic Church, and in the spring of 1983 Veronica and I enrolled in CCD, the Catholic Church’s religious instruction program.
    My aunt Lola was upset, as was her entire family. I think Lola’s family suspected my aunt Irma, a vocal critic of Mormonism, of convincing us to return to Catholicism. But it had really just been my decision. We left the Mormon Church with nothing but admiration for the place that had beenour first spiritual home in Las Vegas, and had been so generous to us. I still feel that way.
    I’ve often remarked that my parents couldn’t give us everything we wanted, but they made