“Aren’t you ashamed,” Bowman asked him in their meeting, hiring him on the spot, “that your little sister has to do this for you? What kind of man are you?” Her brother’s response was to keep the “drapes” and head for the cantina, never appearing for a day’s work.
But Bowman was no saint. I knew from the sheer math of it that he was close to sixty as he bestowed his kindnesses upon the teenaged Elvira; and that, as she grew older, her required sexual submission would come to be a simple matter of payback. He would twice try to arrange a sexual liaison with her, for which fate and faith dictated a different outcome. I sensed there was some guilt in this for my mother (because she did believe she owed him), mixed with an insistent pride that she had slipped from his imperious grasp. Malinche she was not.
* * *
I lie.
Of course Elvira was Malinche. Malintzín Tenepal, our sixteenth-century Indigenous mother, sold into slavery by her own relations, transported from the Nahuatl language of her origins to the Mayan of her esclavitud. There among the Tabascans embattled by the Spanish, on the southern edge of the gulf waters, she is presented to El Conquistador, Hernán Cortés, in a gesture of reconciliation.
As Malinche shows prowess in multiple tongues, Cortés takes her as his concubine and interpreter. And with her as strategic guide at his side, the conquest of Indigenous México is realized.
Or so the story goes.
The figure of Malinche wrestles inside the collective unconscious of every Mexican female. She murmurs in a distant indiscernible voice that the official story is not the whole story; that Malinche was not free and was proffered freedom for her services. We hear the devil temptation in the tale; that our sex is our sin and our salvation; that it can be used, along with our wits and wiles, to save ourselves, our families, and our people; that there are mouths to feed and men who are not doing their share for their own good reasons.
Maybe those reasons are historical disappointments, the cultural memory of themselves as once Aztec royalty or Spanish rancheros. I deserve better than this, the Mexican man senses somewhere in his DNA and maybe he resents his wife, who wears a little brighter skin, a little more Spanish entitlement or at least the “airs” to suggest it, and so the father drinks and the sons drink after him and they hustle the gringo in the best way they can, güey, because they remember better days, days better than the white man (so inferior in looks and intelligence) running the joint, the construction company, the downtown restaurant, the stock exchange, and the whole pinche Rancho del Norte.
Beneath this grand sweep of history resides the small whispered story of a woman. In this story, the Mexican man uses his daughter to do the stepping and the fetching. He sells her out to do his bidding. And he remains uncompromised. In this story, Elvira is sold over and over like Malinche was sold into slavery and a life of treachery. And like Malinche, Elvira marvels at her destiny, that she, somehow, is not one of the two million Mexicans put into boxcars and returned to a life of poverty. Instead, she walks south across the border as the stock market crashes behind her. And, like the Indian Malinche, she learns to talk out of both sides of her mouth. They made me a slave and condemn me when I act like one. This split tongue was my mother’s language, as she negotiated the advances of her own Cortés in the person of Wirt Bowman.
* * *
In the early 1930s, Rosarito Beach is a short day trip down the coast from Tijuana. My mother is now eighteen years old and has been working for Bowman for nearly four years. He invites her to accompany him to the famous, newly renovated resort Hotel Rosarito. The limousine, driven by Felipe, the chauffeur, arrives to pick her up. Bowman is in the back seat. Felipe, a friend and coworker of Elvira’s, averts his eyes as he opens the door to let her in. This ritual of propriety that attempts to mask the unspoken intent of the excursion embarrasses them equally. Felipe and she both know that she is neither Bowman’s wife nor his daughter. The Rosarito Beach Hotel, which movie stars and Mexican dignitaries frequent, does not proffer entrada to an unmarried Mexican girl without a maid’s wash bin or her patrón’s elbow. She knows how she will be viewed as she crosses under the Moorish archways of the hotel.
As the car door slams behind her, Bowman slaps the leather seat, a summons for Elvira to slide over next to him. She does. He does not touch her, except paternally, but Elvira knows what is up ahead at the end of the dusty road. This is not how she imagined it. Todavía una señorita, she would be ruined after this, but is utterly unable to say no. Her family depends upon her. So Elvira did the only thing she knew to do, she prayed and prayed and prayed toward the god of that endless ocean, steady and insistent outside her window, responding to Bowman’s idle conversation in murmured monosyllables.
Until without warning, the car begins to lurch and spit and slowly sputters to a dead stop.
“Señor Bowman,” the chauffeur also sputters, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I promise you, I filled the tank just before leaving.”
The bone-dry tank was testimony to my mother’s faith in God, or this is how she told the story to us as little girls. I was so little in those earliest tellings, I remember not quite knowing what it was that Mr. Bowman wanted from my mother. I came to understand this more fully later, along with suspecting it was not a “miracle” but the chauffeur who had purposely underfilled the gas tank for my mother’s sake.
Or … maybe not.
“What god are you praying to?” was all Bowman had to say to my mother. And with that el patrón himself ran out of gas against the protest of my mother’s prayers.
Several years later, in the 1940s, Bowman would make one last effort to collect on his generosity. After the newly elected President Cárdenas had closed down the casinos in Tijuana, my mother stayed on for a spell at the Foreign Club, selling perfumes. By 1939, she and the family had returned to Los Angeles, and within a year her elder brother would be dead. My mother describes the barroom brawl, the heavy metal napkin holder flying across the room and landing on the side of Esteban’s face. “He wasn’t part of the fight,” she insists. “He was just on his way to the bathroom.” Esteban would die of lockjaw from the infected wound.
Fatherless and now without her elder brother’s presence, Elvira remained tethered to her mother’s incessant demands, serving as second mother to her two youngest siblings while serving as breadwinner and tortilla maker to all. Her younger brother, Roberto, barely eighteen, was busing tables at the Biltmore Hotel, through a connection Elvira had with Bowman and Bowman had with the Biltmore.
Almost twenty-five years old and Elvira is without a husband, reciting silently to herself a troubled litany of Mexican suitors on both sides of the border—one who turned up with a wife, another with unmentioned children or more insidious secrets. There were serenades and marriage proposals that would not stick. Meanwhile, her middle-aged mother, who had been married since the age of fourteen, seeks out a love life of her own.
Elvira receives notice from Bowman, who summons her to appear at the bar of the Biltmore, where he is staying. She arrives, dressed to the nines. She knows he will want her, but the dress-up is not meant to entice him. Instead she intends to reflect that she is holding herself up with some “class,” my mother’s word for dignity.
She describes the melting drink between them, the perspiration rising on her forehead. Her hands cling to the pocketbook on her lap. He is slightly irritated by Elvira’s obvious nervousness, her body in a fever of fear. He tries not to show it, as he wants to remind her through his composure that he is entitled. Suddenly the moment is interrupted. The waiter approaches apologetically, bringing the heavy metal phone, with its long cord-tail, to the table. The conversation takes less than a minute. Bowman has to leave right away. There are no apologies on his part, but as she watches his back exiting, Elvira whispers aloud, “God forgive me.”
* * *
There is another way to tell my mother’s story. It is an Indian story of the encounter between Europe and Native America, between man and w
oman. In it resides the heartbeat of an abiding contradiction, a compromise my family, like millions of families of MexicanAmerica, has made with AngloAmerica. We do not speak of it, but this is what we know: that we were here first and forever; that our Native origins matter at a profoundly unspoken site of knowing. We know this, even as our feigned collective denial continues to wind itself into the twisted knot of a perjured history, rooted in the same soil as the severed hands, burnt corpses, violated female bodies of the Spanish invasion, and of all the conquests of flesh and spirit that succeeded it.
I come from a long line of vendidas. I inscribe these words as an act of Chicana feminist reclamation, naming the women in my familia traitors within an impossible patriarchy.
SOMETHING BETTER
We began as a mixed-race family of five, Joseph and Vera (as Elvira was called in English) and we three stepladder siblings—James, JoAnn, and I—born within a span of four years in that boom of babies following World War II. In the early 1950s, South Pasadena was at first glance as close as you could get to a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. As children, we would leaf through the magazine’s pictures on our occasional visits to the family doctor. That we had a family doctor, given my father’s meager wages, who also made home visits, carrying his small black medicine bag, speaks to the Midwest-movie-set feel of the town. We also had a milkman and an egg man, delivering fresh each week. For us kids, the place was pure Technicolor, a curious confluence of cultures and economic classes that stood about seven miles north of los barrios of East L.A. and the rest of la familia on the south side.
My father operated the town’s one-man Santa Fe Railroad station, which stood two short blocks from our house. Within the decade, Santa Fe would witness the retirement of the steam engine locomotive. On the occasion of the engine’s historic last stop at the station, we three kids posed for a photo in front of the daunting old Chief, as it was called, dwarfed by its black immensity. The Chief was soon to be replaced by its offspring, the diesel locomotive. Painted in New Mexican burnt orange and yellow, the Zia Pueblo sun symbol announced the Super Chief’s entrance into the Southwest of the 1960s. Many years later, I would come to think of the naming as a perverse requiem for the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo effected by the railroad a hundred years earlier in Indian country.
As our father studied train schedules just down the street, our “stay-at-home mother” took in baskets of ironing and babies full of need to supplement the family’s modest income. Elvira was a miracle worker with the babies. She could lay hands on a child and cure him of virtually any malaise, if given enough time. I remember the far-too-skinny white lady bringing her towheaded baby to us. He gazed sleepily through red-rimmed swollen eyes. When my mother pulled back the thin blanket, I heard her suck in her breath at the sight of the drum-hard extended belly, its navel protruding, close to bursting. The baby was old enough to walk but was too weak. There was something wrong with the woman, too. She trembled as she dropped the infant into my mother’s arms. That the woman was to blame for the baby’s illness I could tell from our mother’s cold way with her. She judged her, couldn’t understand how someone could let a child starve like that. The baby just needed “love,” our mother said when we asked.
So Elvira gave the child love, feeding it to him in tiny teaspoon-size servings like a small bird, until gradually the swollen stomach shrank and I came home from school one day to find the baby standing, grabbing on to the bars of the playpen, like a happy miracle.
Most of what I remember about South Pasadena in those early years was “happy.” You wouldn’t know it, though, for all my mother’s complaints: about a husband who never understood the function of a screwdriver, a spark plug, a pint of paint, or a lawn mower. I remember that my mother’s rantings at our father (and at us) were so constant that Kenny Duncan, our neighbor (who looked like a Mexican but didn’t know a word of Spanish), would always laugh knowingly when we’d go over to his house to get out of our mother’s hair. “Same old jazz, Momma!” he used to chant every time we appeared at his back door, begging entrance.
“We’re Indian,” his eldest, Linda, introduced herself with a kind of defensive pride. “Sioux,” she announced, “on our dad’s side.” And since our mom was Mexican, we were pretty much on the same side. Linda’s mother was lazy and white and too fat (my mother’s opinion) for the ruggedly handsome Mr. Duncan, a plumber and “a man who worked with his hands,” which my mother of course admired. I used to think about how much better a couple Mr. Duncan and my mom would’ve made; he always caring for their front yard, trimming and watering the dichondra, while his wife stayed indoors, reading women’s magazines after work. They owned and we rented; that was one difference, but the other one was my father’s utter lack of interest in physical labor of any kind. Sometimes, Mr. Duncan would feel so sorry for my mom, who always kept herself as lean and manicured as his dichondra, that he’d come over and mow our front yard bristling with raggedy crabgrass.
“Doesn’t it make you ashamed?” my mom would ask my dad. His silence always answered the question.
My mother’s at-home childcare enterprise forged deep relationships with single working mothers and their children that would last for decades. Norma Delgado equaled my mom in good looks and work ethic and in their whispered histories of handsome and faithless suitors. I remember the two of them in the late afternoon, cigarette raised in one hand, coffee cup at their fingertips in the other, laughing in a seamless Spanglish that dotted my imagination. Between the intervals of words I recognized and those I did not, full stories were hidden. In the years to come, holding court among the tías in her afternoon kitchen, Elvira would never tell all, but what she did tell affected a moral rectitude that kept us niñas rooted to the drama, piecing together the plotline between languages.
Norma’s daughter Cecilia was older, thick-limbed and a deep café brown in contrast to her baby sister, la güerita. The baby sister was of little interest to me, but Cecilia was full of fun and early teen knowledge. As she lifted me up onto my gift of her hand-me-down Schwinn, we were both disappointed to discover that my feet couldn’t quite reach the pedals. So, not to be dissuaded, she held the bike strong, as I fixed my unsteady feet onto the pedals, and with one great shove, Cecilia sent me off down Meridian Street, me standing upright and pedaling furiously all the way around the block and back again.
Of all the children my mother cared for, I remember little Paul the most clearly: he, standing in the playpen, his thick black Navajo hair poking straight up from his head, his eager smile—so wide it dug arrowheads into the twin mounds of his cafecito-colored cheeks. I felt Paul as my own little brother, taking that kind of care with him, helping my mom feed him and chasing after him as he learned to walk. His mother, Vee, eventually lost her mixed-blood husband and children to her love of alcohol. I remember my mother’s rejection of her, years later, after the divorce, when she came to visit my parents in our home in San Gabriel.
“Give me a drink, Joe,” Vee hollered at my father, barely a foot into the door and plopping down on the couch. This was how my mother described it. Elvira’s thick contempt for those she once loved who had disappointed her distanced my mother from the heartbreak of it. In my mother’s relationships, she offered good counsel that might be rejected once, twice, maybe even a third time; but after that it was over.
Vee would not be fixed.
I remember Vee’s deep brown eyes, her round chata face, and what I heard as a slight swallowing of her syllables that I came to understand later as a Dineh inflection. There was so much I came to understand later, how the broad planes of Kenny Duncan’s face were sculpted with the same engravings I saw upon the faces of the Lakota; that the small twig of his aged and silent mother held a place in history, which located the modern-day Kenny, his lookalike brother, and their crazy ever-partying little sister, Peggy, in a longed-for landscape of post–World War II American entitlement. Hadn’t they earned inclusion? For their generation of urban Indian
, what use was there in remembering? But by 1969, there was the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Alcatraz and the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee that would not forget.
In the decade following, my almost-little-brother, Paul, would grow up to be a doctor, doing his residency on his mother’s rez in Arizona. Several years later, Vee’s youngest son would come by to see my mom, like so many of her friend’s children eventually did. I was there on a visit when he walked into my mother’s kitchen—a veritable Hollywood Indian beauty, tall and lean and hungry—and that’s where he was headed: to Hollywood.
“Figure I can find work there,” he said. He had just come by to get my mother’s blessing. And, no doubt, a taco or two of her steak picado.
* * *
Looking back to that first decade after World War II, which everyone wanted to believe was the “good war,” the three and a half square miles of South Pasadena served as a kind of suburban holding zone with all manner of people arriving into Greater Los Angeles at the prospect of a 1950s culture of optimism. Still, even in my child’s mind there was an “us and them” in the world we occupied, which drew a line between Mexican and gringo culture (my father notwithstanding). Mexican could mean pretty much anyone brown or sort of brown or somehow “foreign” in an English-speaking world. It didn’t mean Black. Black was “American” and had its own relationship to “them” (white people), which, as a child, I hardly understood. Until the Civil Rights movement exposed the horror of that relationship; until Black Power shoved it righteously into our faces and Black people became the very measure of injustice and equal rights in this country.
What I remember most about South Pasadena of that period were the parties where all the Moraga relatives came to visit and drank and danced and drank some more and we kids were lined up like sardines in double beds while the grown-ups partied into the night. This was a MexicanAmerican life, just like the life of those striving Indians and Black folk, of World War II vets and their pregnant wives with steady work and hopes, finally, of something better.
Native Country of the Heart Page 2
