A booming knock at the door raised Cristo Mendoza from the old and tattered couch in his father’s living room on a day in March. Inside the craftsman bungalow on Fairway Avenue in Southeast Dallas, the one that peeks through gaps in the foliage of sprawling and overgrown oaks, down at the end of the cul-de-sac, he watched his nieces and nephews play in the center of the living room of his home. At the door, Mendoza met two strange women and an inspector, insistent on examining the bargain house they said they had just purchased, his house, the only one his family has ever known, and a house that hasn’t been on the market since 1998.
But the women insist they had bought it, fair and square. Cristo called his father, Martin Mendoza Sr., who had just slipped off to the grocery store, and insisted the house couldn’t have been purchased because he never tried to sell it. When he got back to the house, the women didn’t recognize the older man. This wasn’t the Martin Mendoza who sold them the home. The women told Cristo they had spoken with someone much younger, who had tattoos, a shaved head and a perpetual grimace. That description matches Martin Mendoza Jr, or just Junior, Cristo’s older half-brother, who has bounced between couches, the home on Fairway Avenue and prison his entire life.
The Mendozas were used to getting spam offer letters in the mail from gentrifiers chasing a quick buck. Many of their neighbors have been bought out and their homes converted to short-term rentals, but the Mendozas have remained; they don’t have any intention of leaving the neighborhood they’ve called home for more than 25 years. They waved the women off, chalking the strange interaction up to some clerical error or a fraudulent quick cash grab from the oldest Mendoza son, who, up until January, was in prison for assault…