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For my sister, JoAnn. And for our ancestors.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ON NAMING
Some people’s names in this memoir were changed or were replaced with generic identifiers.
ON LANGUAGE
The Spanish in this work emerged when the writing naturally evoked it. Not that much, but enough, I hope, for the reader to experience this writing as a MexicanAmerican work.
There came a time in my life when I began to look backwards, like those mixed-race figures depicted in eighteenth-century Mexican Casta paintings. In the portrait where I imagine myself, I am “una salta pa’tras,” a “throwback” mixed-blood child. She sits upon the white father’s lap and twists her head almost violently backwards to gaze upon the countenance and the continent of the Indian mother.
—C.M.
PROLOGUE—UNA SALTA PA’TRAS
Elvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature. Few bemoan the memory loss of the unlettered. My mother—and her generation of MexicanAmerican women—was to disappear quietly, unmarked by the letter of memory, the memory of letter. But when our storytellers go, taking their unrecorded memory with them, we their descendants go too, I fear.
Maybe it’s about turning sixty. Maybe at such a substantive age, one can finally weave together enough of the threads of one’s life to interpret a design from them. For my part, I hold one thickly braided cord as story—my queer self and my writer self, and each would bring me home to my Mexicanism. And my Mexicanism would bring me home to an earlier América; to the Indian memory of bay leaf and madrone, desert chaparral, the Pacific always an ocean breeze away. It would also bring home to me a culture of memory and prophesy—the harbinger of loss upon the horizon.
As a U.S. inheritor of Mexican ancestry, I have walked the reddening road of an “Occupied America” that anoints membership only to those born north of the watery divide of el Río Grande. A border of river as thirsty as the desert into which it bleeds, leaving my relatives to drown in its grit. Growing up, my elders, well-meaning, told my generation—Go that way, hijos. Look north to your future. They asked us to betray them, to forget them.
Walk that way, mi’ja.
They didn’t know the cost.
* * *
How to explain the complexity of this? What it means to be—not just me but us. To know yourself as a member of a pueblo on the edge of a kind of extinction, and at the same time a lesbian lover and mother, where you truly do live your life in constant navigation through whatever part of your identity is being snuffed out that morning—in the classroom, at the community meeting, the gasoline station, the take-out counter—Mexican, mixed-blood, queer, female, almost-Indian. And a poverty masked by circumstance.
For all my feminism, this is why I left a white women’s movement in the late 1970s. So I wouldn’t have to explain anymore, translate anymore. Because translating, I knew, would keep me from the harder work of going home: of trying to figure out, within the context of my ethnicity and culture, what Mexican & American / Indian & Catholic / rape & racism had to do with sexual desire and a contrary gender. And, just maybe, my return as a writer would matter to my pueblo. Maybe, in some small way, my visible queerness—which I knew was representative of so many others—could help make us a more resilient people.
Perhaps my writing has never really been about me. Perhaps it was about she all along: she without letters; she fallen off the map of recorded histories; she that is my history and my future with every mexicana female worker who comes to, or is born into, these lands of an ill-manifested destiny. She, the first and last point of my return.
* * *
There was no library in our home growing up. I did not sneak to read beneath the secrecy of flashlights under blankets. My reading stumbled out loud and my handwriting fell thick and crooked on wide-ruled paper. But I knew to listen. I listened to Elvira’s stories, to my tías’ stories, to my sister’s promptings, “Remember this moment, hermanita.” I made mental records of their words, of being read to at night by that same sister who believed in romance, something that came on a horse and swept a woman up, not so unlike Elvira’s dreams.
I had only one romance—the love of an intractable Elvira, and this is what would shape my lesbianism and this is what would mark my road as a Mexican and this is what would require me to remember before and beyond my mother. I am a woman who knew myself daughter and son at once—a protector and provider for women and children. I have learned to confront police and rapists and silent enemies from within and have lived to tell of it.
I had never fully grasped the early years of my mother’s life until I slowed down long enough to silently witness her last ones. In her final handful of years, the full distance of a near-century lifetime would flash back in a second of recall, never to reappear. And yet my mother’s failing mind once and forever convinced me of the body’s ability to hold memory, which long surpassed her ability to speak it. It seems that when the body goes, memory resides in the molecules about us. We breathe in the last exhale of our mothers’ breath. This is what they bequeath to us. As they also bequeath their stories.
Elvira’s is the story of our forgotten, the landscape of loss paved over by American dreams come true. And maybe that’s the worst of it (or what I fear)—that our dreams can come true in “America,” but at the cost of a profound senility of spirit. If we forget ourselves, who will be left to remember us?
And so I followed the trail of my mother’s fleeting reminiscences, picking up in the wake of her steps each and every discarded scrap of unwritten testimonio. This is what the spiritual country of my mother’s departure asked of me, in the unspoken world of the deeply human.
PART I
COYOTE’S DAUGHTER
My mother, in her little black sweater with the faux fur collar and fake string of pearls, is celebrating her ninetieth birthday. Seeing her made-up like this, even amid the obligatory pleasantly pastel decor of twenty-first-century eldercare suburbia, I catch a momentary glimpse of Elvira’s past, she who appeared in the sepia-toned photographs of a late-1920s “Golden Age” Tijuana: Elvirita, linking arms with her girlfriends in front of the Foreign Club; sprawled beneath the bare arm of a fledgling city tree; hip to hip with her cuate, Esperanza, on the bumper of a Model A Ford. Elvira: in the calf-length shapely skirt, the matching white heels, and the low-slung blouse with its draping bow. The bright red lips that do not smile, but invite, as is appropriate for the era. Elvira had a grand life before her children ever came into it.
* * *
There were no fathers in the Moraga clan, not in those first Aztlán turn-into-the-twenty-first-century generations. There were men, yes; men who came and left the household with a single man’s prerogative and secrets; men who answered to no one, and never to a female.
It is 1925. Elvirita is eleven years old. She is picking cotton in the Imperial Vall
ey, just north of the California-Mexico border. Her father is the freelance contractor for the job. He has hired out his school-aged unmarried children (what remain of the nine) to work the fields. Elvira wears one sack draped over the square bone of her thin shoulder. As she stuffs it full of cotton balls, she drags another sack, laden with the three-year-old weight of her littlest brother, Eduardito.
My mother cried the first time she told me this story. I was a little girl and I cried, too, at the picture of it. A picture of hardship, yes; but more than that—injustice. For most of her childhood in California, my mother’s father regularly pulled his children out of school and bartered them out to labor in the fields. She never said the word profit—that the fewer laborers he contracted outside of la familia, the more money would end up in his personal pocket. As I left the kitchen of my mother’s stories, I came to understand that her sense of injustice was not so much that she and her young siblings had to work in the fields. Many of my Chicano and Chicana counterparts knew farmwork as a regular occurrence growing up, their school schedules shaved off at both ends to accommodate the seasons. And although, of course, child labor in a just world would be outlawed, within a U.S.-Mexican context where poverty is law, child labor was common practice. It was the intimacy of the injustice that seemed to wound my mother the most; that although the near-dozen Moragas struggled economically, she believed my grandfather had a choice in the matter.
Born on the U.S. side of the border, they had also always lived on the other side of the (Mexican) tracks (or so my mother made a point of saying). She also insisted that when she was a girl her family never sat in the Mexican section of the movie house. “We were a difernt claz of peepo,” referring to herself and her eight Spanish-speaking siblings. Years of migrant farm labor did not, in my mother’s mind, bind them economically (or culturally) to the rest of the Mexican immigrant population. Or so she protested against an immutable and unspoken identification with them.
For most of my childhood, my mother hid the truth of her father’s drunkenness and outlaw scams: Moraga the bootlegger, Moraga the labor contractor, Moraga the human smuggler. Like el coyote, that illusive trickster who shuttles between worlds, Esteban Moraga rode the counterfeit borders of the Southwest with a vaquero flair of Mexican independence and macho bravado. Yeah, it was a Wild West life, but at its heart Elvira remained a naïve and tender teenaged girl relinquishing her wages and tips to buy the carne for the caldo, the harina for the tortillas, la manteca para los frijoles. This was the political economy my mother had known since childhood and that would continue as the Depression hit and Esteban Moraga moved the familia south to Tijuana’s “Golden Age of Vice.”
My mother would never return to school after that. It had already become too embarrassing: a girl of eleven stuck into classrooms with third graders. “The last time I was in school, I was so big, the teacher would step out and leave me in charge half the time.” My mother’s bitterness (or better said, shame) about her lack of formal education was tacitly evident in every palsied signature she applied to grocery store checks, every job application my sister and I helped her complete, every school notice we brought home to sit abandoned and unread on the kitchen table.
Her inability to read and write well remained an open wound for Elvira her entire life, as she believed it was the single thing that separated her from that coveted other life of an office job where women wore skirts and stockings to work each day, and used their minds instead of their hands to bring home a paycheck. Despite that belief, Elvira’s full decade of employment in 1930s Tijuana was to provide her with an education far beyond the confines of the labor camp and the schoolyard.
* * *
In 1929, as white men were taking nosedives off skyscrapers on Wall Street and Prohibition was in full swing, “Border Baron” Wirt Bowman was making a handsome profit six miles south of the border through his investment in the casino and racetrack business, notably the Agua Caliente and the Foreign Club. While Dust Bowl survivors blew into the agricultural fields of California, two million Mexicans (including MexicanAmericans) were “repatriated” to México to make room for them. But the Moraga clan was not among the families herded onto boxcars, without regard to citizenship, in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. Theirs was a voluntary exodus, inspired by rising anti-Mexican sentiment and joblessness in Alta California, while Baja California witnessed a swelling American-financed industry of gambling and prostitution afloat in a Pacific Ocean of unrestricted liquor.
* * *
“Cigarettes, candy, chewing gum.”
Amid spinning roulette wheels and the red and black flashes of diamonds and spades, a petite five-feet-one-inch fourteen-year-old Elvira stands a few inches taller in first-time high heels teetering over her sales tray of the icons of American advertising: Camel, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield cigarettes; Hershey’s and Milky Way candy bars; Chiclets, Juicy Fruit, and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. Lying about her age with a fairly fluid bilingualism, she wrangled a job as a cigarette and hatcheck girl at the coveted Salón de Oro at the Agua Caliente, a high-stakes gambling room frequented by Hollywood’s finest. Elvira would remain in its employ until President Lázaro Cárdenas outlawed casinos in 1935.
“Check your hats and coats here, please.”
I often wondered if my mother’s years in the Salón de Oro had ruined her—made an ordinary Mexican life in the United States impossible; made her relationship to Gringolandia an ever-promise that would betray her. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Tijuana in the ’30s?
At Agua Caliente, Elvira glimpsed a world that was dream years away from the home of makeshift tents they had posted in the melon fields of Imperial Valley just months before. In Tijuana, Elvira literally touched hands with movie stars—Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow—and Mafia bosses, Al Capone included, as they dropped silver dollars into her open palm. The tips spilled into her pockets like jackpot winnings. Then after her shift, returning home at four o’clock in the morning, she would deposit all her earnings into the open coffer of her mother’s expectant hands.
“I never thought to keep any of it for myself. I bought my clothes for work, but all the rest was for them. Maybe that was stupid of me. I was just a girl.”
Elvira was loath to tell that as she made her way home a few hours before dawn each night, she often encountered her father headed along the same path, stumbling with a belly full of drink, at times his face in a ditch vomiting. “I would just take another street home,” she told me. “I hated to see him like that.”
My mother’s silence around her father was unlike her invocation to another man, whose name fell from her lips with a kind of hallowed reverence. It bothered me, how her voice would change when she spoke of “Mr. Bowman” all those years later. A slightly affected tone, almost flirtatious. There was a lie in it somehow; it hinted of something unreconciled, undone.
Wirt Bowman, as a major owner of Agua Caliente, appeared in my mother’s Tijuana stories as a faceless benefactor. Although he died in 1949, one year into my mother’s marriage to my father, Bowman seemed to hold a part of Elvira’s history hostage. I never knew his first name, never asked her, only looked it up years later when it occurred to me that the man might’ve been some kind of real big shot in his time.
I first found his name mentioned in a thin paperback I was never able to find again. Years later, however, at a used bookstore in L.A. I landed upon a title, Pozo del Mundo, a book copyrighted in 1970 that depicts Tijuana and the world of the Mexican-American border, employing every stereotype of Mexican low-life debauchery ever invented by the gringo imagination. The book also contains several pages on Bowman and his many incarnations as cattleman, bootlegger, gunrunner during the Mexican revolution (for profit, not politics), casino owner, and, after Mexican gambling was outlawed, an Arizona statesman (predictably).
To us, growing up, he was just “Mr. Bowman,” who had featured in my mother’s life as a kind of silent patron. Patrón, as
it is understood in Spanish, may be more apropos; for, first and foremost, Bowman was my mother’s boss. Still, there were the unaccounted-for benefits. “He paid for my father’s funeral,” she told me. “He didn’t have to do that.” Like he didn’t have to give her a full month’s paid leave to recover from a bronchitis they had feared was tuberculosis, which had left her on the verge of collapse and her family without any means of support. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without him,” she said, almost contrite.
Even before her father’s death from pneumonia in 1934, Elvira was the financial mainstay of the family of eight still living at home. By the late 1920s, since the older sisters, Dolores, Victoria, and Hortensia, had all married in their teens, Elvira shouldered the bulk of the family financial burden, along with a reluctant Josefina, a few years younger. Her older brother, Esteban, was the missing link in the chain of family responsibilities. “He was a very good-looking man” was the parenthetical spliced between the mostly nonstory told about his work life, his love life, his family life.
One time, at her mother’s urging, Elvira asked Bowman to give Esteban Jr. a job interview. “I had bought him a new suit. Shoes, a hat, the works,” my mother recounts the event I had already memorized. But I love her telling of it. She describes the quality fabric of the suit; how my uncle’s broad shoulders filled it with an actor’s elegance. The brim of his hat bent over the intelligent brow and warm mouth. It is what my mother always did best—to own a piece of a man in that way, in the way we women so often prop them up for the visuals, the look of someone who could be a man, a provider, someone you can count on.
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