The Year of Santa Ana

Episode Two: “All About Memo, The Payaso”

Twenty-four years and three months before Memo moved into his slick new apartment on 17th Street in Santa Ana, he was born Guillermo Mateo de Lhosa in the Central American nation of Nicaragua. He was the only child of a mountain couple who scraped by working on coffee plantations owned by huge multi-national corporations. And then, in 1998, when Memo was two, Hurricane Mitch ransacked Central America, laying waste to most of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, including the hillside where the young de Lhosa family’s cinder-block home sat. The three barely made it out before a giant mudslide wiped out the entire southern face of their mountain.

Eventually, they made their way to an emergency shelter in Managua, where they waited and waited for something, anything, to happen. Months later, a miracle occurred — the news came that then-President Clinton was declaring Temporary Protected Status for most victims of the hurricane, and Señor and Señora de Lhosa were quick to meet with U.S. State Department representatives who had been sent to the shelter. They were then one of the first families allowed to make their way north and into the great United States of America.

They chose a flight to El Paso, reasoning that the muchos Hispanicos there made it an obvious choice. But all the family…