Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  “She’s not going to die. Your mother is having an operation.” My auntie had rushed in, hearing my grief-stricken cries from the other room. Her eyes cut at my sister. But JoAnn knows that I am the bellwether. She throws me into the wind to catch the storm coming down the road.

  “What kin’a operation?” I ask between hiccupped breaths.

  “They have to take out a part of her stomach.”

  I fall onto the blankets, sobbing.

  My auntie looks down at me and then suddenly exits. My sister cries quietly next to me. Moments later, Auntie Eva calls me into her bedroom. JoAnn clings to the doorjamb just outside the room, desperately hoping her little sister’s tears will bring to her own numbing fear some assurance. Auntie Eva spreads out a thin white paper napkin over her palm. She picks up two diagonal corners and presses them together, then does so again with the opposite corners. It forms a small bag. “This is your mother’s stomach,” she tells me. I am transfixed by this little pocket of air. My mother’s life depends on it. “What the doctor is going to do is take out just a small part of the stomach that is sick. Like this.” She demonstrates, folding in one of the corners and reconnecting the rest into a puffy triangle. “And that’s it.”

  I have never loved my auntie as much as I did at that moment, especially now, thinking about how afraid she herself was at the very real prospect of losing the one person on whom she could count. Elvira was more than a second mother to Eva.

  The paper napkin demonstration had done the job. It quieted me down, although I would learn later that the “small part” turned out to be three-quarters of my mother’s stomach and the “cancer” a peptic ulcer that would require a second surgery due to complications.

  But Elvira survived it. More than a month later, my mother would stand in Eva’s front room, her hands raised in the air, while la señora seamstress measured my mother’s waistline and battle-scarred stomach. Her prayer answered, she would don the brown tela of San Antonio’s Franciscan garb for a full month, a rope wrapped ’round her waist, in gratitude for saving her life.

  “Obey your mother, so she doesn’t end up in the hospital again.” These were Auntie Eva’s parting words as we piled into my dad’s used Buick station wagon to make our way back to Huntington Beach. Barely recovered, my mother closes up our life at the Kenwood Hotel. And, in a matter of months, the place is put up for sale. Initially, my father was against it, having grown accustomed to the extra income my mother’s management of the Kenwood had provided. But the ulcer in my mother’s gut proved the enormous stress she had suffered to run the place (maybe it wasn’t her daughters’ fault after all) and my mother was adamant about the sale.

  Throughout the eighteen months we lived in Huntington Beach, Vera had assumed that her husband had been putting money away for our return to South Pasadena. Without a family to support during our absence and having rented out one of the bedrooms to a single tenant, there had to be some savings. But no, Vera discovered, as she navigated her way through our once home, now unrecognizable due to neglect, Joseph “didn’t have a damn penny to his name.”

  Aimless without his wife, he left bills unpaid, sink drains clogged, and year-old cereal boxes crawling with cockroaches. To make matters worse, the lingering threat of a lawsuit shadowed our return when he confessed to his wife that he was at fault for an auto accident involving an injury to an older female driver. He had let the insurance lapse, so upset was he by his wife’s illness. This is how he explained it: the drinking, the recklessness, and the utter neglect; he had been “upset.”

  * * *

  We are parked out in front of the injured party’s house. Our parents are there to plead with the woman not to sue. My mother instructs us three kids to sit up tall in our seats, to look well behaved as they go to the door. When the Anglo lady opens the door, my father says a few brief words to her. The woman’s eyes pass over my mother and then she quickly dismisses her, as my father is invited inside. Elvira is insulted, we can see it on her face coming down the walkway, but she does not say a word about the pinche cabrona until she gets back into the car. The wait seems endless. My mother fingers rosary beads. Finally, the lady and our father reappear at the front door. They step out onto the porch. We see our father indicate again the wife and the three children in the car, a last-ditch effort for her compassion. We sit up taller in our seats, affecting the somberness required. And then it is over. The lady returns into her house, and as my father comes back toward the car, we catch a small smile on his face and we know that as a family, we have prevailed. But where did all the money go? Women, booze, gambling? My mom both wanted and didn’t want to know. And yet there was no real reason to believe that my father had been unfaithful to my mother in any way other than the neglect of his wife, his children, and our home.

  The hotel sold quickly and the money was used as down payment for a house in nearby San Gabriel. But there was no celebration. Something had broken between my parents by the time we repacked our things and made what would be our family’s final move to that mission town just three miles southeast.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS

  For twenty-two years, México lived next door to us in the body of my forever-anciana grandmother, Dolores Rodríguez de Moraga. To live in proximity to my abuelita was to daily remember an América before Anglo intrusion. Born in 1888 in Sonora, México, but baptized in Florence, Arizona (the document of which she used as proof of U.S. citizenship), my abuelita remained faithful to her position as surviving matriarch of the family and to her mexicanismo until she passed in 1984.

  The México my abuelita brought to my daily life was one of a Sonoran Desert of covered-wagon entrepreneurship and the high dusty drama of an untelevised West. She rides shotgun (without shotgun) at my grandfather’s side, as they pull up into a Yaqui pueblo, pots and pans and kitchen utensils for sale clanking their arrival. The Yaqui families sit silently in a circle around the mestizo vendors. Nobody moves. The minutes pass slowly. Young Dolores grows impatient. “Vámonos, no quieren nada,” she snaps at my twenty-year-old grandfather. He urges her to wait and watch. Many long minutes pass again until at last one man stands and approaches the wagon. Moments later, the whole community follows. Business was good that day for the newlywed Moragas.

  The México my abuelita brought to my daily life was the length of her fingers threaded into the mouth of my antiwar folk guitar. She sang songs I do not remember the words to now, her voice a Chavela Vargas gravel, as she plucked at the strings with arthritic fingers having long lost the finesse of her girlhood musicianship. She came from una familia de músicos, she told me in her broken English. And yes, once, I remember seeing such a family portrait: the brass instruments resting across high-water woolen trousers, violins pressed against proud chests.

  The México my abuelita brought was of familial memory, sleeping beneath the blond furniture headboard that held the small retrato of her long-dead mother, my bisabuela. At night with our evening prayers, we kissed the pursed mouth of the small sprig of a woman, clad in a black high-collared dress, a chonguito atop her head. Bisabuela had died in her nineties, as my abuelita would two decades later. Her mourning of her mother had never lessened as I watched her become the same pursed-mouthed figure as the one in the photo. The same figure my mother would assume in the last months of her life. Me, too, I imagine. Me, too, one day.

  * * *

  When Grama Dolores moved to San Gabriel in 1962, she had already spawned the makings of a full tribe of more than one hundred descendants: eight living children who birthed thirty-three grandchildren, who would birth sixty-five great-grandchildren and counting. Following her daughter Elvira, she left a South Central Los Angeles plagued by interracial conflicts—Black against Mexican against newly arrived Asian immigrant—that still afflict it today. My abuelita was reluctant to make the move until that fateful afternoon when poor eyesight reconfigured the light-skinned Black man who entered her bedroom to be her son Roberto. Holding a knife to her throat, he de
manded she not make a move while he ran off through the rest of the house to scavenge for cash and anything of worth he could carry inside the deep pockets of his trousers. In the meantime, my abuelita, who was already in her seventies, crawled through the open window of her bedroom and dropped a full ten feet to the crabgrass beneath her, running to her youngest daughter’s house for refuge.

  Before her move to San Gabriel there had been one last L.A. apartment in a courtyard of one-bedrooms, surrounded by Chinese immigrants who sang scoldings to their children in Cantonese from their one-step stoops. But the Chinese court was a temporary stay until the Moraga clan, in one huge migratory wave, landed in el valle de San Gabriel. That first cluster of suburban towns just east of East Los Angeles—Montebello, Alhambra, Monterey Park, and San Gabriel itself, with its Mission and Catholic schools—became our own familial cosmos of first and second cousins, aunties and uncles, compadres y comadres.

  With Abuelita as neighboring matriarch, our small home in San Gabriel would become the familial locus for the greater tribu Moraga for a full generation. Located just south of Las Tunas Drive (the dividing line between us and the affluent Anglo homes to the north), our Anglo-surnamed and Mexican-mothered household occupied a kind of holding zone between Gringolandia and the forgotten mestizo-indio herencia of the town. The Native origins of the region had long been absorbed, close to extinction, into the culture of landless “Mexicans” who now resided on the other side of the tracks of AngloAmerica, in the shadow of ever-expanding freeway interchanges.

  * * *

  In 1961, the San Gabriel we had moved to already showed the markings of a ghost town. Our home, a stone’s throw away from the Old Mission, sat upon what was no doubt a kind of extended Indian burial site where six thousand unmarked Tongva graves lay buried beneath the Mission grounds. Even our street address bore the name of that ardent and ruthless crusader of Native conversion, Junípero Serra, and provided a daily reminder of that epoch of Spanish Catholic invasion nearly two hundred years prior. I often wondered if it was not the historical consequence of the brutal colonization of Native California that had siphoned off from this town what little ánima it had left in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  I remember, just days after my family’s move to San Gabriel, we took a shortcut through the open field behind our house for our first day of Mission Grammar School. My mother is fully made-up and perfumed, flanked by her three children, pressed into freshly starched uniforms. My sister and I walk gingerly across the moist morning earth in an effort to retain the whiteness of our newly polished Catholic school oxfords. I can still picture that lush-earthed empty field and the after-school games it promised, the winter smog-red sun rising at its eastern gate. But within months, a huge apartment complex replaced the field, with endless barracks-like rows of carports lined up against the chain link of our backyard.

  The dream of Suburban America required its residents to believe that posted city limits, railroad tracks, and tree-lined boulevards protected them from the color of violence in the inner city. In the case of San Gabriel, “color” had always been there in the Uto-Aztecan descendants of the region, now carrying Spanish surnames on the south side of the tracks. By the 1960s, those same Natives and their mestizo relations from the south had evolved from the filero-toting pachucos of the forties to become khaki-clad cholos, cruising over “las lomas de East Los” into el valle de San Gabriel. Soon after they started coming home in Army body bags and a president and a would-be president and a Baptist freedom preacher and a freedom fighter and another freedom fighter got shot dead, and the suburbs, we came to learn, would not protect us.

  * * *

  In the heyday of my childhood, Las Tunas Drive, the main street of the town, featured the Edwards Theater, where, for a 25-cent admission ticket, I could cast my pre-adolescent eyes upon Latina-esque Suzanne Pleshette’s beckoning cleavage magnified on the big screen. Just down the block from there was Las Tunas Market, a three-block, three-times-a-day walk from our house, which my sister and younger cousin Cynthia and I obligingly trekked on errands for my mother or abuelita. The market was eventually replaced by Julie’s bakery, which had come to replace the “Helms Man” who each afternoon had brought to our street chocolate-dipped doughnuts and éclairs drawn from six-foot-long drawers opening from the back of the Helms van.

  A few blocks away stood a local library, the size and prefabricated look of a jump-strip market, which provided my sister and me with endless distraction during the long smog-laden summer months. Never the reader my sister was, I’d still manage to keep up with her bookworm record by reading athlete biographies a third the length of her Wuthering Heights. A block down from there stood a pharmacist-owned corner drugstore where I worked into my late teens for $1.50 an hour when the minimum wage was $1.65. This is also where I would snag my first and only can of spermicide foam just in case the condom didn’t work.

  Crossing city limits, Las Tunas Drive became Main Street, Alhambra. With a Woolworth’s five-and-dime and a Lerner’s dress shop, the 25-cent bus drive to Alhambra soon replaced our regular shopping trips to Downtown Los Angeles. But Alhambra could never replace the wonder of L.A.’s “Angel’s Flight.” As little girls, JoAnn and I had held tight to our mother’s straight-lined skirt riding up a near ninety-degree angle on the famous funicular railway on Bunker Hill.

  In short, life in San Gabriel along Las Tunas Drive and its vicinity was in many ways what it was intended to be: ordinary, a kind of Anyplace USA, without a memory bank to invest in. What was not ordinary to me was that San Gabriel was to provide the final stomping ground for that band of Mexicans—once españoles, once indios—that our familia would never be again.

  By the turn into the twenty-first century, my parents’ regular excursion to Dandy’s, a coffee shop run by a Chinese woman, who called my parents “mama and papa,” proved to be the highlight of the Las Tunas Drive experience. Catering to an aging Anglo and MexicanAmerican clientele and some younger Chicano familias, the budget meals provided a kind of landing spot for my parents where routine far outweighed the need for quality taste.

  At the same time, in those final decades, San Gabriel had gradually become home to a near majority of Asian immigrants. Once, in the mid-nineties, passing the site of the old Del Mar Drive-In Theater, where we used to go as teenagers, now a huge Asian shopping mall, my mother declared, “And we [meaning Mexicans] have been here from the beginning and we don’t got a damn thing to show for it.” Did she feel the same way about Anglo incursion? I wondered, but imagined not, since Anglos had reigned as landlord in Alta California since the generation before her parents’ birth. To my mother, Anglo incursion was law and preceded my mother’s quiet protest by more than a century.

  Anglo incursion was also the intimate matter of family, my mother being the first and only one of her generation to invite one into her marriage bed, setting a trend for the generations that followed. But you can’t really escape Mexicanism in California. In my parents’ final decades in San Gabriel, single-family houses were largely replaced by particleboard apartment complexes, squeezing eight families into a lot size that used to house one. Mexicans began to return en masse to my childhood neighborhood and my mother’s position there returned to its origins. Young married neighbors referred to her as “La Señora Vira,” as she assumed the role of la viejita de la vecindad, cuidando sus plantitas and serving as resident consejera for abandoned wives and wayward children. Culturally speaking, she ended up en el mismo mundo mexicano en donde había empezado su vida.

  JUST EAT YOUR CHICKEN

  La fuerza de Elvira. I cast the character of my mother in Spanish because all that I understand as strong, as capable, as having principled values, resided first in the one-hundred-pound mestiza body of my mother. She was someone who could handle so much and so many in the world. In our extended familia, she served as the planet around which our near-hundred relations hovered like orbiting moons. Over the years, I came to realize that what had kept u
s all gravitating to the sphere of my mother’s kitchen (aside from her incomparable chile colorado) was our shared sense de su fuerza incansable. She was not always right, but she was always, until the last years of her life, “present.” In the very way my father was not.

  As a little girl, I often watched my father’s face above his daily cup of black coffee, his eyelids fluttering to a close in his inherent shyness in front of others. I would contemplate the lengthening space of his forehead with his receding hairline, searching for signs of soul, ánima. To us, our father was a kind of functionary, the breadwinner, the black steel lunch box that waited for him on the kitchen counter each afternoon. He was the hill of blankets and the stagnated smell of stale breath sleeping throughout the morning hours. Keep your voice down, your father’s sleeping.

  Culturally, he was guided in the ways of Mexicanism through his wife’s insistence. In his later years, he would dutifully drive Grama’s caretakers to and from their homes every weekend, filling the quiet of what was an interminable drive, for both him and “Maria,” in a broken and awkward Spanglish. There was no hint of superiority in his dealings. My father entered his wife’s culture without prejudice and with little need for defense of his own. He was our biological father, yes, but he did not fertilize the seeds of culture. This was my mother’s task, to sow and hoe and grow us up with a Mexican heart in an AngloAmerica that had already occupied the village.

  Elvira raised her children, and guided all those that came through her door for counsel, with a foundational set of values that can best be summed up in the phrase “No te dejes.” Don’t get used … taken advantage of … abused. Although not always told to me in Spanish, it was later that I learned that so much of what my mother taught her familia were translations from a worldview conjured from an invaded and fractured México, but one that proffered the welded tools for our survival in Gringolandia.