That night after the birthday barbecue and the familia had all gone home, my parents would walk along our gravelly driveway and watch me back my car out, following it and waving goodbye, until I was out of sight. As always, the last thing I saw as I spun my car into the street was my mother blessing the air of my passage with a prayer for my protection.
The next day, I would travel El Camino Real (The Royal Road) from Los Angeles to San Francisco, ironically retracing the steps of the very missionaries I was fleeing. It was 1977 and for this MexicanAmerican once Catholic daughter, Highway 101 was not royal but “real.” I had left that mission town of San Gabriel, having told my truth.
The truth will set you free. But, as the young philosopher* wrote, “not until it is finished with you.”
My mother had made sure of that.
PART II
NOTHING MÉXICO COULDN’T CURE
“Mi’ja, do you know where this is?” Elvira pulls from her purse a folded airplane napkin smudged with ballpoint writing, and hands it to me. A lady sitting next to her on the plane had seen my mother’s hands, full of pus, cracked and bleeding. She said she knew someone who could cure my mother, “un curandero en la ciudad.” We were standing in the airport of Mexico City and my mother said “la ciudad” like it was the size of a small neighborhood.
For several years, Elvira’s hands had been covered in a horrible rash. She had tried every kind of salve and ointment, Western medicine pills, homeopathy, and for some time she even went to an acupuncturist, but her hands would not heal.
As my parents stepped through the doors coming out of customs, I had seen Elvira scanning the crowd for her daughter’s face. I often tried to spy my mother first in such meetings so I could catch her eyes catching mine, her face falling into relief and just … well, joy. I confess I milked those moments—to feel a mother’s love.
At the time, I had been living in New York City for several years. Awaiting the publication of my first book of poetry and essays, I elected to finally make that long-awaited sojourn to México. I vainly fancied myself a kind of anonymous countryless writer as I boarded the plane for California to meet up with an old friend, Deborah, cross the border with her into Mexicali, and catch a train south into the Mexican heartland. My parents were to follow for a visit in a month’s time. My plan: to return my mother’s México back to her.
As Deborah and I arrived in Mexico City, not long after the election of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, the Mexican peso began to plummet. Little did even mexicanos know how suddenly and how permanently. For Deborah and me, it was as if overnight the value of our limited dollars made us, if not “ricas,” certainly worry-free financially. So, before my parents’ arrival, I got them a nice, but not fancy, hotel room in La Zona Rosa—a kind of hip, bohemian area with its pick of restaurants. This was before it “went gay.”
During this period in my mother’s life, my grandmother, well into her nineties, had become too fragile to live independently, even with a caretaker, so my mother took her into their home. Of all my mother’s siblings, Elvira had been the only one to do so. The arrangement lasted no more than a year. Working an assembly line full-time and feeding a never-ending trail of visiting relatives constantly in and out of the house, while being the primary caretaker for her mother, was more than my mother could handle. The tíos and tías consulted and the decision was made to move my grandmother to a nursing home.
But Grama was not going to go down quietly. Her fierce obstinacy had molded her shrinking bones into the shape of skeletal ocotillo. Her family knew, without saying, she would soon be returning to the Sonoran Desert of her origins. Once she was in a nursing home, her half dozen children visited her each and every day, my mom and Auntie Eva preparing her dishes, doing her laundry, bathing her; it was almost as much work as had she been at home. But at least the evenings were their own; but not really, not for my mother, in whom guilt lingered and stole her sleep. Somehow, she believed herself never enough para su madre exigente.
But there was something else. Elvira’s longing for her only son, someone with whom there had been a bitter unspoken rupture; someone whose wife, twenty years into marriage, still held my mother in little regard. Elvira denied it, the life she had hoped for in the generous charge of her son. She dreamed of una familia in abundance—with grandchildren, like my sister’s, who would sit by her side, hold her hand, and ask for her stories. Pero nada. No shared Christmases. No Thanksgivings. No Fourth of July or Mother’s Day picnics with my brother’s four children. No chismeando con la daughter-in-law and no offerings de consejo in the raising of those children.
Nothing Mexican for miles.
She was useless to her son, her hands so empty of his touch, of his children’s golden silk strands beneath her fingers. In horror, she watched her hands curl into ravaged claws of want. And so she arrives in México with a napkin-inscribed prescription for a cure.
The only word I recognize in the smudged ink is Coyoacán.
“Sí, Mamá,” I say, “pero Coyoacán es un lugar muy grande.”
No matter, this is our first order of business.
* * *
Stepping out of the hotel, we get a taxi and hire the driver for the day. I get into the front seat, as my father, Deborah, and Elvira squeeze into the back. I show the driver the napkin address, which is no address at all really—just the name of a main boulevard that runs for miles, with no building number and simply the words El Doctor scrawled on it. The driver figures he’ll take us to the central area of Coyoacán and we’ll see where to go from there. I agree. As we draw near, I see that we are not so far from Frida Kahlo’s house and I make a mental note to take my parents there during their week’s stay.
We make a turn onto a quieter street, driving now at a walking pace for no other reason than my mother says to slow down. And then suddenly, “Pare aquí, por favor.” The driver stops the car. We are at the corner of a small dead-end cobblestoned street.
“I think this is it,” my mother says. I look back at Deborah. We both know that there is no logical reason to stop here. I am nervous when my mother insists that the driver leave us there, but we pay him and wave him on.
And there we are—strangers in a strange land. (Or so I thought.) The four of us standing in the middle of an unknown street, looking for an unknown healer, just blocks away from what was once the sixteenth-century home of our ancestral foremother, Malintzín Tenepal.
My mother leads the pack of us as we walk down the center of the street, sentineled on each side by colonial-era buildings, fortressed with huge wooden front doors. What is Elvira looking for? She grabs my hand as we cross to a building about halfway down the street. To me, it feels absolutely arbitrary. To my mother, it is as it is. We approach the door. I knock. A few times. There is no response and then just as I lift my knuckles for a last try, a small kind of speakeasy viewing panel within the massive door opens. A middle-aged woman’s face appears from within.
“Sí?”
Nervously I begin to explain our pursuit of the nameless curandero. The woman cuts me off.
“Vuelvan a las dos.” El Doctor would see us between two and four p.m., she said. And then she shuts the panel on my stunned face. But my mother wasn’t stunned. She knew she was right where she belonged.
The moment my parents had stepped off the plane, I witnessed an aspect of Elvira I had never seen before. In their one-week stay, she moved about the boulevards and back roads of the city as if it were a 1930s Tijuana. For all the stories my mother had told me of her life en el otro lado de la frontera, that young urban “Tijuanensa” was not the MexicanAmerican mother I knew. She was fluent in a Spanish I had never fully heard, which put everyone at ease, from concierges to waiters to the elder indígenas who dragged their knees across the cobblestones to La Basilica de la Virgen de Guadalupe. Elvira had walked with them, her daily vernacular told them, as a once teenaged worker in the Agua Caliente and on the next morning, when her own knees would scrape the cobblestones at
las indígenas’ side.
With two hours to kill before the curandero would return, I decided to walk my parents over to Frida Kahlo’s La Casa Azul. As we turn the corner onto Londres, I stop in my tracks. There is Frida Kahlo herself standing among a small circle of men—middle-aged bohemian types, beards and baggy pants. Remember, this is 1983, long before the remaking of Frida into a cultural icon, where her ubiquitous unibrow face would appear on shopping bags, socks, T-shirts, and as a regular feature in drag lookalike contests entre la jotería.
But there she is—the living figure in full Frida regalia: Tehuana dress with rebozo, her black hair mounted upon her head with flowers, she leaning into a cane at her hip for support. And then I get it, seeing the movie camera hoisted over the shoulder of one man, the mics and cables. “Oh, they’re making a movie,” I say. And sure enough, as we approach La Casa, we learn that the house is closed for the filming.
It wasn’t until several years later that I realized that the Frida I saw standing on the corner of Londres and Ignacio Allende was the Mexican actress Ofelia Medina and the film was Frida: Naturaleza viva by the Mexican director Paul Leduc. Sitting in a San Francisco movie house, I immediately recognized Medina’s face and was suddenly reminded of the strange coincidence that occurred on that trip with Elvira. The surrealism of seeing the living Frida just outside her Blue House in Coyoacán made as much sense as landing on an unnamed street in that same neighborhood, with a wrinkled napkin as guide, that would lead us to the very healer my mother had so desperately needed.
At two o’clock, we enter the waiting room of el curandero and add our name to the long list of people—gente de la comunidad, working people. The long wait en la sala of the doctor’s office would allow me time to assess the situation. Between two open doorways, I can see a handsome young man who passes quietly and familiarly among the back rooms. A cat, equally lithe, follows in his footsteps. Another cat also appears and disappears, or is it the same cat reappearing? Images of cats abound—small statues on end tables and paintings, along with literature about Eastern mysticism and … more cats.
I pick up a pamphlet with a line drawing of a cat on its cover and notice that it is written by El Doctor. It tells the personal story of his own spiritual awakening. After years of practicing Hinduism, he finally makes the pilgrimage to India en route to a guru he has longed to know. He is met by a woman who directs him to the waiting room. He sits alone in the room. No one else enters, but there is a cat in the corner of the room. It watches him as he waits and waits and waits—hours upon hours. The waiting is interminable as the young man grows more and more impatient and even agitated in spite of years of meditation practice. He begins to doubt himself: Why has he made the journey—wasted time and money? What if the guru never shows up? What was he looking for?
And then the cat echoes the man’s own thoughts: “What are you waiting for?” The cat speaks aloud in the room. “What do you imagine the guru can tell you that you do not already know?” It is a simple question and the only one worth asking; its answer already resides in the body of the seeker. And with that, the young doctor packs it up and returns home to begin his healing practice in Mexico City.
* * *
When we enter the curandero’s office, he and the young man I had seen earlier have a brief exchange. My mother and I both recognize the quality of their intimacy. She will say later, “Él es como tú.” This is clearly no white-coat doctor. He wears comfortable clothes and is assisted by his gay lover in an open people’s clinic where cats abound. He sits behind a wide carved wooden desk. We—my mother, Deborah, and I—occupy the other side. My dad is satisfied to remain in the waiting room.
Within minutes my mother will confess all that ails her. She pulls off the cotton gloves she wears to expose the landscape of her lament. It is my brother. It is her mother. It is a husband who cannot respond to her. And his “Entiendo, señora” may be all she needed to hear to lay down the burden of her sorrow. He touches her hands, fingers the crevices of her cracked wounds. They bleed lightly as he presses in, massaging and opening, dragging his thumb along the surface of her swollen and broken skin.
It takes only a few minutes. He tells her that she has to let go of the sorrow. Really, that’s all he says. He reaches for a shelf and hands her a pint-size bottle of a clear liquid that looks like plain water. He instructs her on how to apply it to her wounds. He writes a prescription and directs me to the herbal pharmacy nearby. There will be tinctures of herbs and other remedies to pick up.
But my mother’s hands seem to have already begun to heal, even before we exit through the giant wood door and out into the Coyoacán afternoon light. Elvira will soon run out of the bottled water and the tinctures, but she would not run out of the medicine the good doctor had provided. Miraculously, her hands (if not her heart) would remain healed for the rest of her life.
The next day, Deborah returned to California, boarding a plane home; and, as planned, I would have my parents all to myself. Our month of travel together hadn’t been easy on Deborah’s and my friendship. Since my move to the Northeast in 1980, I had become fully immersed, personally and politically, in its latinidad. In the context of México, Deborah’s cultural whiteness shed light on my own vehement rejection of it. And, I suspect, I had not been so nice about it. Still, our friendship would survive this and the many years of change ahead of us.
The night before my parents’ return to California, my mother and I sat at a piano bar late into the night, my dad dozing off—full of gin and the day’s fatigue. Elvira spoke of her longing for the México of her past in a way I had never quite heard. She admitted that in 1939, she had not wanted to return to the Anglo world of the U.S. It seemed this short stay in La Ciudad de México had stirred up feelings she had long ago suppressed upon leaving Tijuana. Or perhaps it was the quality of our conversation, because for the first time in our lives we spoke to each other in an uninterrupted Spanish. Or maybe I was just queer and finally grown enough to understand that desire breaks rules as it breaks hearts.
Nothing México couldn’t cure, I thought.
* * *
In the weeks that followed, I found myself alone and holed up in a small, more affordable hotel in another part of town. I was tired of traveling and there was so much to think about. One morning, a postal package was delivered to my room. I already knew its contents, but I had not been expecting the delivery so soon.
I open the brown wrapping. I observe the book’s mauve and gold Aztec design, running my fingers over its title, subtitle, my name printed in bold caps. I turn the book over to see my own earnest face staring back at me. And with that, I prop myself up on that springy hotel bed in a dispassionate Mexico City and read Loving in the War Years, word by word, line by line, and page by page, stopping again and again on that paradoxical glyph of words: “Chicana Lesbian.”
It was 1983 and I had never, in my life, read those two words as the subject of a book.
“Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios.” What have I done?
* * *
My next trip to México would be two summers later. This time I traveled alone, at times dangerously, at times meeting up with friends. In the last weeks of my two-month stay, skirting the possibility of running into the young man with whom I had had a confused sexual encounter the previous night, I boarded a dawn bus from the then quiet seaside town of Zihuatanejo to Mexico City. A three-hundred-mile bus ride, on which I suddenly became so ill and progressively sicker as the miles blurred past me in a haze of fever.
I landed in the same no-frills hotel that I had stayed in two years earlier. (Within a month, it would be destroyed by the 1985 earthquake.) This time I arrived with a raging temperature, and within hours, I was shivering in sheets soaked with sweat. I was so sick that even the housekeeper, fresh sábanas in her arms, brought me manzanilla tea and worried over my condition. “¿No quiere ver a un doctor?” But physically I’d get over it—the fear in my gut was another question.
I was su
ch a long way from home, México reminded me, in a Spanish I struggled to perfect; masked in a light-skinned face that betrayed my loyalties to a country of which I longed membership but held no right to. How I wanted to blend in as one of them. But I was not one of them and I was not gringa, but something/someone other than either. This is what brought the fever to the surface of my skin: the trepidation that who I was would never find home again.
Ten days later, regaining my strength, I decided to make my way down to el zócalo to attend a gathering to which I had been invited. Cuarto Creciente, a women’s cultural center, stood just blocks away from where the huge stone disk of Coyolxauhqui, the Moon Goddess of the Mexica (Aztec) pantheon, was uncovered by electrical workers in 1978. Its discovery would lead to the full excavation of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan.
What I discovered at Cuarto Creciente was a feminism that mirrored the cultural politics and racial and class biases of the white women’s movement I had abandoned in the late seventies. Disoriented, I made my way through the labyrinth of those sixteenth-century walls, looking for a place to collect myself. And then I see her: a short brown-skinned woman standing at a window, looking out at the vast zócalo plaza. Her black hair hangs to her waist, she wears a huipil.
Again, I am disoriented. In my few visits to México, I quickly came to learn that most mexicanas do not wear Native huipiles unless they are bona fide members of an Indigenous pueblo or bourgeois artist types à la Frida. This woman was neither, I knew the second she turned around. “Hi, Cherríe,” she says. It is that unmistakable chola California Chicana inflection. Her voice ran through me, a fire hot enough to melt me.
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