Topic:My Grandmother, and her dedication and love of her family.
Abstract:My grandmother was born in Juarez, Mexico, in 1934. She was the youngest of three children. At the age of twelve, her father past away and she could no longer attend school, dropping out in the sixth grade. At that young age, she worked side by side with her mother and sister while her brother worked jobs designated for men. All was done for low wages. Times were rough and family came first. While working in Juarez, she met and fell in love with a very handsome man I call Grandpa. Married in 1957, they moved to El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. in better hopes for their family’s future. Four of their six children were born in Texas and their journey to support them began. Later they moved to California, where the last two of their six children were born. From children to grandchildren and grandchildren to great grandchildren, her love and family dedication never faded. She held the family together and kept our culture and traditions alive.
Keywords:Childhood in Juarez, Working Young to Support the Family, Marriage and New Hopes in El Paso, California’s Opportunity, Raising Mexican- American Children, Parenthood with American-Mexican Grandchild.
Familia, A Mexican Story
Juarez, Mexico, presently has a reputation of being a brutal border city. Corrupted, with kidnappings and murder, and polluted, with drugs and gangs. Juarez it is now an overcrowded jungle of paved and dirt roads trimmed with crucifixes dedicated to lost family members. The cities biggest employer is the drug cartel, employing everyone from young children to the elderly. Gangs supply the muscle to the drug trade, making the streets of Juarez a very dangerous place to live.
Juarez is the beginning point to my family’s odyssey. It is the place where my elders connected and their love formed to what is now my family. All my family roots can traced to this border city along the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande is the only thing that separated El Paso from Juarez, Mexico from America. In the time when my Grandmother was a girl, she describes Juarez or “Chihuahua” as she calls it, as a poor but nice place to live. Beautiful and filled with wonders and adventures. It was not dangerous to her, it was home and she thought the world of it.
My Grandmother was a child like any other. She use to play with her neighbor friends while her mother and sister prepared food for dinner. Outside in the front yard she would laugh, participate in games, and race around with her Chihuahua “Chita”, while waiting for her father and brother to return home from work. She also played with a doll her mother saved to buy her and clothed it with dresses her sister made from left over dress material. She was enjoying her time as a child, and all was made possible by the rest of her family. She seen the dedication needed to maintaining family life at an early age.
Her daily chores consisted of maintaining cleanliness of the house, by sweeping and dusting, and watering of the garden vegetables and fruits. She enjoyed helping out and she always was ready for something else to do. Before dinner, her last chore was to walk to the corner store with a nickel and buy a pint of milk and two pan dulces for her father and brother. Since they were the men of the house, working long physical days, they needed extra at dinner. The milk and pan dulce was like a reward at the end of their hard days work. A tradition passed on to future family generations.
The childhood she knew came to an end when my Grandmother’s family was shortened by one. She was twelve years old when her father mysteriously died of unknown causes. The loss was hard since her father always paid attention to her. She was his “Mijita“. With the loss of her father came a loss of income, and that is when my Grandmother dropped out of school in the sixth grade.
School became a luxury that the family could no longer afford. That meant my Grandmother had to pull her weight and help out her mother and sister with their jobs. She helped prepare and package tortillas that were sold to restaurants or along the roadsides. Other jobs consisted of her washing, hanging, and folding clothes for the upper class residents of Juarez. All this hard work still left her with the daily chores of the house. She still had to walk to the store with a nickel to buy the pint of milk and pan dulces, only for her brother now, the only man of the house.
This part of her life continued for a few years with an occasional change in jobs every once in awhile. All the hard work and search for better promise did have a good outcome outside of income. She met and fell in love with a handsome, smooth talking, pachuco baseball pitcher. This sharp dressed individual later became her husband and the man I call Grandpa. They were married at the age of twenty-three in 1957 and he was barely clearing a dollar a day working. She loved him regardless and he thought of himself as the luckiest man in the world for being with her. Together they dreamed of better lives for their family and knew America had promise in achieving that goal.
The year they were married, the two of them moved to El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. in hopes for better opportunities and higher paying jobs. Living with my Grandfathers sister, they reconstructed a garage into their first home together. That two-car garage later housed them and their first four children, two boys and two girls who were all born American citizens. The two of them were constantly working, hoping to save for a bigger place and the chance to become citizens themselves. My grandmother worked a couple of jobs, as did my Grandpa, but she still had the duties of cooking, cleaning, and raising the children as well.
Lack of sleep was a common reality in my Grandmother’s life of caring for her husband, raising children, and working. At times when there was no transportation, she would not make an excuse; she would just wake up earlier and walk. Sometimes having to walk a great distance before having to work long hours. Her focus was always on making life easier for the family. She seen it growing up and knew sacrifice was needed. That life was too hard to ever be easy. It was a part of her life and she took it in stride.
Steady jobs with decent wages were hard to find in the big city of El Paso. My Grandfather had a cousin who recently migrated to California, and word of jobs and great salaries began to float around in conversations all over the neighborhood. It was not a hard decision to make since times were tough and living quarters were scarce. My Grandmother insisted on my Grandfather to leave for California, claiming she would be able to maintain the family in El Paso in his absence. My Grandfather left with the determination to succeed for the sake of his family. My Grandma believed in her husband and prayed for him constantly.
My Grandmother held the family together for close to a year by herself. My Grandpa sent money as often as he could, and my Grandma saved what was left over. In 1962, a great job at a winery on the outskirts of Hollister named Almaden Vineyards, gave my Grandpa the chance he needed for the success of his family. Almaden had a migrant camp available for its workers and those houses had three bedrooms. A sufficient amount of room for the family and my Grandfather did not hesitate. He drove the eighteen to twenty hour drive back to El Paso to pick up his family and whatever could be packed. The family was united again and all were happy with the new unknown adventure of California.
California and Almaden gave my family what it needed to survive comfortably. With access to living quarters, open space, and better schools, the family remained stable. My Grandparents worked only one job for the first time in years. My grandfather had his winery job and my Grandma cleaned houses for Caucasian families in the area. Just like that, two more family members were born concluding the assembly of their family. While my Grandma tended to the new additions, my Grandpa taught his sons the game of baseball in a dirt field converted to a diamond of bases. California life was looking good for their family’s future.
For the next ten or twelve years they worked to support their family, embedding the Mexican culture and traditions they grew up knowing. Spanish was always the first and only language spoken when in conversation with my grandparents. It was seen as disrespectful to speak anything else. All their children grew up Catholic with strong beliefs, from baptisms to confirmations, from Lent to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. They all grew up on customary foods of beans, rice, and tortillas, served on the side of dishes like chile relleno and chile verde. Piñatas at fiestas and tamales at Christmas were common family traditions, as were stories of The Llorona, Chupacabra, and The Cucuy.
“Hard work has always been in the blood of Mexicans”, as told by my Grandpa. “Sacrifice is a part of life” as said by my Grandma. Their boys learned to work outside and fix things, while their girls all learned to cook, sew, and clean the house. All understood the meaning of hard work. Therefore, when they were not in school for the summer, they would work in the apricot orchards picking and cutting apricots or in the walnut orchards filling crates with walnuts. A majority of their earnings went to my Grandparents, and all were happy to help with the family.
When back in school, they were expected to excel to the best of their capabilities. Finishing school was mandatory for their children. Since the chance of completing their education was not available to the both of my grandparents, their children’s education was very important. College was a word that was not heard of to my Grandparents, so the chance of higher education was foreign to them. The choice of college was up to their children.
Eventually, the raising of children leads to them becoming adults. The older two of the six children, both boys, decided to join the U.S. Navy after graduating high school with hopes of a career and college funds. The oldest of their daughters marries and moves out with her husband. The second oldest daughter made the decision to go to college while the remaining two daughters continued with their high school and elementary education. My Grandma was happy with the way her family was evolving to American society. She was doing an excellent job. She even completed her GED and became an American citizen with Grandpa. For not being wealthy, she was rich in family happiness.
In 1979, the news of her first grandchild arrived. Her second oldest son, twenty at the time, returned home unexpectedly married with expected child on the way. The couple was young and the wife was nothing of the caliber of my Grandma. She was selfish with no discipline and that eventually led to divorce. The divorce was hard on the young sailor and the responsibility of raising his child was heavy on his shoulders. The stress pushed the angered sailor to alcoholism and that helped his decision in giving up his burden to his mother.
Almost through with the completion of raising her own children, youngest being twelve, she started parenthood all over again. My Grandma seen raising her grandchild not as a burden, but as a blessing. “God always has a plan for us and family always comes first”, a motto my Grandma lives by. She became the mother her Grandson needed. He belonged to her since he was ten months old. He became her new baby and she was always there for him. Supporting her grandchild with no help from her son.
During the first few years of raising her grandchild, Almaden closed. This meant that no more worker housing. The family by this time had lightened by one when the youngest of my Grandma’s children joined the U.S. Air Force. The family (grandparents, daughter, and grandchild) moved into a trailer park (where they reside to this day), and my Grandpa began a new job as a carpenter, while Grandma stayed cleaning houses raising her grandson.
Being a mother to her grandson, she taught him Spanish while he taught her English. She loved him when he needed it, and punished him when he deserved to learn a good lesson. She played with him, teaching him how to smile and to be proud of his heritage, beliefs, and family. She showed him the time and love put into every piece of Mexican food. She showed him to never take what you have been given for granted and raised him to the best of her abilities, protecting him from whatever she could. She became the angel of his life, the person he saw as home. For that, I will always love her.
She is such a beautiful person who makes me feel like everything is all right. Everything was tolerable, because she did all the suffering for us. She raised me fulltime all the way through to adulthood. She is definitely the heart of the family and I am very thankful she is my Grandmother, my Mom. I am now my own man with my own family and she is still always there, willing to help out with whatever.
My children, her great grandchildren, also think the world of her and she loves the chance to watch them. She tells them stories of when she was a girl in Juarez and how she met Grandpa. She shows them pictures of Grandpa and her posing in El Paso like Pachucos and the drive from Texas to California. Pictures of me as a kid with all the goofy stories of what I was afraid and what made me happy. She makes my children fresh tortillas and empanadas, allowing my daughters to help with the tamale assembly. She also teaches songs in Spanish like “Sana, Sana”, which she sings to my son when he is banged up playing football. Religion and Mexican heritage are always on display at Grandma’s house blended with generations of family photos.
My Grandma’s story of rough times means a lot to me as an individual. Working to support the future of one’s family is always necessary and my Grandma is living proof of that. Her struggles made her a very strong and proud Mexican woman who never asked or begged for anything in her life. She understood hard work and its purpose in securing future generations. Her life, possibly seen as poor, was seen by her a rich and fulfilling. Being wealthy in spirit and right with God made her life acceptable. Your world is as unpleasant as you let it be, and my Grandmother took charge of her family’s destiny!