by John Rechy
When Gloria was born, the daughter of Gabriel, it was difficult at first for Amalia to think of her and Juan as children of the same father, because she thought of Gabriel now as two men, the one she had married and who had left her, and the one who had found her only to make her pregnant again.
In her house Amalia would sometimes stand apart and watch her children. Imagine! They were hers and they loved her, perhaps as much as she loved them. She was proud of this: Her children had enough to eat, and she sewed and altered their clothes because she did not want anyone ridiculing them for being poor. She made ruffled dresses—out of her own—for Gloria, so that she looked like a flower.
Juan was always laughing now, like Gabriel when she had first met him. At times completely silent, Manny would watch over his brother and sister protectively, clearing away any possible hazard in the house. For a time Juan had terrible stomachaches, and Amalia soothed them by putting warm towels on him, the way Teresa had said would help. There was no heating in her unit; and so on cold California nights Amalia would leave the gas burners on. If the gas was turned off because of late payment, she would bring Juan and Gloria into her bed with her—Manny was growing up.
She met a new “boyfriend.” He looked like a Mexican gypsy. He even wore a red-print handkerchief like a bandanna around his forehead when he worked without a shirt in the car-garage he owned. His name was Emilio; was there a saint by that name? she had wondered, and thought there was. His garage was only blocks away from where she lived, and she was with him only in the room he occupied behind it, and only when her children—he knew about them, had seen her with them—were being cared for by one of the older girls in the court who kept them when she was at work.
He gave her a present, a pair of gleamy green earrings, loops within loops, which, delighted, she put on immediately. He told her he loved her and wanted to move in with her—a man shouldn’t be without a beautiful woman.
She considered it. Every day now there was another bill to pay, left unpaid—and nobody who wasn’t blind could say he wasn’t handsome, and hadn’t he given her this beautiful present? What would she tell the children when he moved in? She deliberated claiming he was Gloria and Juan’s real father, but then she would have to explain Gabriel. Did Juan remember him? Not that well, and Gloria had never seen him. Manny, of course, would. She could see his enormous eyes on her, asking—what? She might tell them that she and Emilio had run off and married. Well, she would think of something.
She invited him to visit.
“Bastard!” he shouted at Manny for spilling coffee on him.
“Bastard!” Manny mimicked. Juan giggled. Gloria began to cry.
Amalia continued to see the Mexican gypsy, but only at his place. He still wanted to move in, assuring her that everything would be all right and that he had a way with children. He had just been edgy that day—and, he whispered to her, he was thinking it might be time for him to join with a good woman “permanently.” Well, she might reconsider, she told him. Would he marry her, be a father to her children? Yes.
At home, Manny’s eyes followed her as she moved from one room to another.
The affair with Emilio ended when he told her that his wife—“I didn’t tell you I was only separated?” he answered her look of surprise—was coming back to live with him.
A woman in the court of bungalows told Amalia she might make more money working at one of the “clothes factories” in downtown Los Angeles—“sewing sweatshops,” a reporter doing a television story on conditions in the city’s garment district called them right after Amalia had started working there. That humiliated her, but she eventually decided that was an accurate description.
On the top floor of an old six-story building—just blocks away from glassy new ones—electric fans churned only hot air while dozens of Mexican women sewed steadily in crowded rows of buzzing machines. Under long tubes of icy fluorescent lights, even garments that would eventually boast famous labels appeared grayish on metallic racks here. By the end of the day steam from pressing irons was heavy with the odor of sweat. One woman brought her two-year-old child with her, keeping him secretly by her machine.
Still, Amalia told herself, this might be a move up from housework; she might become a “supervisor,” the owner, Mr. Lewis, told her when he hired her eagerly. “If” he said to her, “you play your cards right.” He was a short, thin, craggy-faced old man with a full head of still-dark hair. He constantly pushed up the right sleeve of his shirt to expose a wiry biceps. That prospect—of “moving up”—made the job bearable for Amalia, that and her friendship with Rosario, a small but powerful older woman who, Amalia knew immediately, was the intelligent one of the bunch.
The other women—when the owner was not there overseeing them—would gossip over the sound of the pick-picking of their machines and especially during their lunch break. Most often they would discuss the serials they watched on Mexican television. Some of the women lamented that they could not watch the daytime American soap operas. “Good,” Rosario said, and so Amalia kept to herself that she enjoyed following the stories the women discussed, about errant women and faithful husbands, errant husbands and faithful wives, and, always, loyal mothers who believed in God and the Virgin Mother.
Amalia was often teased by the other women because she wore pretty dresses scooped to display her breasts. “La Elizabeth Taylor,” one called her, and another said, “You look like you want to be discovered for the Night of Stars,” referring to a Mexican variety program they all seemed to watch on Sundays. It did not help that Mr. Lewis, the owner, who was usually drunk by late afternoon, sought Amalia out, peering into her blouse.
“Play your cards right,” one of the women said to Amalia, apparently echoing Lewis’s familiar words, “and he might marry you—he’s a widower, and horny” The other women added their mock encouragement. But she would never marry for money, Amalia thought, God would never forgive that.
“It’s about time for a raid from ‘la migra,’” Rosario warned Amalia. La migra was the Immigration and Naturalization Service; a “migra” one of its agents. Sporadic raids occurred when several migras would appear suddenly and one would bark, “Workplace survey!” The stern men would then interrogate the workers about their “papers.” Amalia assured Rosario that she always carried her birth certificate—“from Texas”—with her.
Still, she felt horrified when two men did appear one early afternoon. “Cálmate” Rosario soothed Amalia, “those are just building inspectors. Watch what happens.”
The two men wandered about the premises. Red-faced with anger, Lewis followed them.
“Bolts of flammable cloth blocking exit corridors,” one of the inspectors, displaying hairy arms under short sleeves, dictated to the other, fat, wheezing, who scribbled on a long yellow pad. “Electrical cords wrapped around water pipes,” the hairy man continued his list of observations. “Security gates locked, unopenable, blocking fire escapes and stairs.” Then the three—the two inspectors darkly serious, Lewis speaking hurriedly—disappeared into Mr. Lewis’s office. The frowns on the faces of the two inspectors were gone and Lewis was smiling when they emerged.
“In a fire we would all burn,” Rosario said dourly.
Amalia convinced herself that the older woman was just exaggerating, because everything remained the same at the sweatshop—Amalia now called it that herself.
At lunch, one of the women, Milagros—Amalia marveled that so ordinary a woman could be named Miracles—had launched into a spirited recounting of her favorite television serial, “Lagrimas de Honor”: “Aurelio has just discovered that his rich wife—her name is Blanca or Concha—one is his mistress, the other is the wife—”
Blanca is the wife, Amalia said to herself. Because “Blanca” means “white”—pure.
“Well, the wife—yes, her name is Blanca—has just confronted Concha, his mistress,” Milagros was going on. “Blanca told Concha she knows she’s having an affair with Aurelio, although it’s cle
arly not Aurelio’s fault, he’s a good man seduced. Yes, says the brazen Concha, and right under your nose. You mean while I was pregnant with my little Anuncio? Blanca demands, although she’s so overwhelmed by the terrible affront that she has to sit down with her rosary in order to keep from fainting. Precisely, that vile Concha says.”
“She’s an evil woman, that Concha,” another woman offered.
Amalia noticed that Rosario was eating her sandwich with her head lowered.
“She’s evil all right,” Milagros said. “Last week we learned that once—in a hospital officiated over by holy nuns—she had pretended to be a nurse, to that sweet old man who had made his peace with God and was ready to die; she was there in order to get his enormous wealth, which he was leaving to his son and to the Church.”
“Why else would a woman like her be in a convent?” a woman assumed.
“Don’t ask me how she got away with the impersonation,” Milagros resumed, “because one look at her, with her lacquered nails and that bleached hair and you’d know she’s not an angel of mercy. Of course it’s all inevitable when you consider that her mother had once been involved in a ring of fake jewelry, including holy treasures, and that her father—But before all that, Blanca could not give her full attention to Aurelio, during that crucial time when he was involved with those trouble-making godless unionists—”
Amalia saw Rosario’s head jerk up.
“—and Concha knew that. Blanca had fallen into a deep depression because, despite her devout prayers, the birth of her child—”
Rosario set her sandwich aside as if, Amalia thought, something, not the food, had disgusted her profoundly. The older woman made her way toward Milagros and asked her quietly, “What is godless about unionists?”
“What?” Milagros had already forgotten what she had said earlier.
“What is godless about unionists!” Rosario raised her voice, and some of the women looked at her, puzzled.
Amalia began to suspect that Rosario, who was so smart, stayed here in order to question the women this way. Now she hoped fervently that no one would come up with a good reason why God did not like unionists.
“I’ll tell you what’s godless about unions, Rosario,” the woman who brought her child to work was volunteering. “That if you join one you’ll get fired.”
“Or threatened with la migra” another woman added.
There was approving laughter, and then they all returned to the buzz of their sewing machines.
Well, Amalia thought in relief, they certainly hadn’t convinced her that God wasn’t on Rosario’s side, whatever that was.
That same day, they discovered Mr. Lewis was not a widower. His blonde wife—years younger than he was—came to pick him up. She was a pretty woman, Amalia knew; why deny it?—and she might have looked even prettier if she had known how to do herself up better. She wore plain clothes, expensive, though. She had a pampered complexion—that was obvious—but you hardly even saw the makeup she wore. Her breasts were a good size—you could tell despite the loose-fitting blouse, Amalia allowed—but her own were fuller, and—
“What a pretty dress,” Mr. Lewis’s wife came over to her and said.
Amalia thought: What a stupid woman, doesn’t she know I’m sewing a shirt now?
“Did you make it yourself?”
Then Amalia realized the woman was asking about her dress, a low-cut one, yellow with large purplish dots, a favorite that never failed to arouse enthusiastic whistles from the men working in the garment district. Made it herself! Amalia felt her face hot with humiliation. “No, I bought it,” she managed to say. She was about to add, “And it was expensive”—but she knew this blonde woman’s clothes had cost at least a dozen times what she had paid.
“I’m sorry,” the woman seemed honestly flustered.
That annoyed Amalia even more. She could understand a remark of envy, but this woman seemed to have meant her comment genuinely. Seemed to! Amalia brushed away any good intention. She’s jealous of my breasts, she resolved it, and added: What would she think if she knew her husband is always hovering around me? Then confusion, anger, and hurt mixed.
Rosario placed a reassuring hand on hers. “She meant it looked much too fine to have been bought, corazón” She called Amalia that, “heart.”
Amalia said softly, “Thank you.”
Increasingly, Amalia listened to Rosario because she was always eager to figure things out, and the world was baffling. Even so, it seemed to her that Rosario brought up only problems, always about injustice, and Amalia wondered about the solutions.
As Manny grew—he was ten, Amalia marveled—he became moodier, but, also, more wonderful to her. He brought her a small present, a shiny pin, which he attached to her chest. Oh, where had he got it? Amalia did not want to ask him. He was in school but never seemed to carry any books—and he never spoke about anything that occurred there.
Amalia returned home to the odor of glue. Manny seemed dizzy, almost falling. That sent Juan, five years old, into convulsions of laughter. Amalia told herself she was smelling paint, someone in the unit had finally decided to paint some walls—and Manny was just clowning for Juan.
Soon after, she came to find Juan and Gloria each with a pint of expensive ice cream. Their faces were smeared from their efforts to gobble it all. “I bought it for them,” Manny told her.
“Why don’t you carry any books to school?” She decided on a less disturbing question.
“I do, but I hide them,” he told her. “Because if they see you with books, they’ll jump you.”
They …? Gang members. No, they couldn’t exist in grammar school. Amalia did not ask Manny any more questions.
“Workplace survey!” Two burly immigration inspectors appeared one early morning in the sewing factory. The large room was suddenly charged with quiet tension. The two migras scanned the rows of women, who looked down intently at their machines. Then the two men walked slowly along the narrow aisles, stopping abruptly to demand to see the papers of one or another of the women; backtracking suddenly to question someone who had sighed too quickly in relief at having been bypassed. A few of the women were now lining up quietly, knowing they would be taken to Customs.
“Your papers.”
Amalia was indignant. Did she look like an illegal? Didn’t this man see that her dress was pretty, fresh, that she wore sophisticated makeup? She answered in her best English that she was an American citizen, born in El Paso, in Texas.
Still, he demanded her papers.
Humiliation deepened. Amalia fished into her purse, showing it off, a modern purse.
Before she could find anything to show him as proof, the man walked away, winking at his partner.
“El cabrón had his eyes on you from the moment he walked in. I saw him. He just wanted to try to look down your dress,” Rosario assured her.
That was it! But Amalia was disturbed that she had felt humiliated, in a way she didn’t want to feel, at being mistaken for an illegal.
There was an uglier incident.
Jorge, a slight sixty-year-old man who gathered the clothes from the women, had been stopped by one of the inspectors. “These papers are forged.”
“They are not.” Jorge stared evenly at the man.
“Come with us.” The man reached for Jorge.
“I will not. Check those papers again.”
The man grabbed at Jorge. The women gasped.
Rosario stood up.
Jorge resisted. The two men wrenched him down. “Kneel, motherfucker!”
“I’ll kneel to God, not to cabrónes,” Jorge said.
Another inspector hit Jorge at the knees, to force him down. The first one pushed on his shoulders until Jorge was crouched before them.
Rosario ran to Lewis’s small office. He was hard of hearing, and so she yelled loudly, “There’s trouble, Lewis!”
Amalia wished she had done that, but she had felt so trapped by fear she could not even stand up.
&n
bsp; Lewis came out. “Hello, boys. Some trouble here? Jorge’s a little too defiant for his own good—I know that—but his papers are in order.”
The men released Jorge. He stood up. “Cabrones.”
“Now, now, Jorge,” Lewis soothed. “These men are just doing their job, and they do it damn well, too. Why, look at how often some of these women fool me into thinking they’re legal. Wouldn’t hire them otherwise.”
Rosario stared coldly at Lewis until he looked back at her, and quickly away.
The men left, wishing Lewis a nice day.
Rosario went to Jorge, talking to him, holding his hand.
At lunch, the women were chattering about their television serials. “Well, Blanca couldn’t believe the rumors the servants were circulating, she’s such a holy woman …”
Amalia noticed Rosario staring hard at them, and so she made it clear she was not listening to the babble; she sat closer to Rosario.
Milagros continued, “But Aurelio took her to the church, and there in full view of the Holy Virgin he confessed to her that once he had—”
Suddenly trembling, Rosario shouted at them: “Estúpidas! Don’t you care about what happened to Jorge just now? Don’t you care about the women who work next to you?—arrested and sent back without even their wages! For God’s sake, don’t you see your own sons shoved around by cops only because they’re Mexicans? Don’t you wonder why they join the terrible gangas, and take drogas?” She inhaled and then said with added disgust: “And then they turn into killers of their own people!” Her brown face darkened. “Haven’t you seen the women line up to visit their sons and husbands in jail?” She shook her head, over and over. “Why so many of us? People desperate—” she began to stammer. “Don’t you care? Don’t you see?” Her words choked, stopped.
For long minutes, all the women were quiet. Then Milagros addressed Rosario. “What are you babbling about, mujer? Do you know?”—and they all laughed, and Milagros continued her account of the tribulations of Blanca and Aurelio, who “finally did what they had to do, turned to a priest for God’s counsel.”
