A Mother's Day Tale: Fighting for the American Dream

                                                                               

The Dream Maker

    My mother told me she and my father married after the war, in 1946. It wasn't an easy time. Many of their relatives and friends didn't return from Europe or the Pacific, kids like Nick Villa, Trini Hernandez, Chava Guajardo. Their Japanese friends were returning from relocation camps, after losing everything. Families had to find a way forward.

    My parents moved in with my father’s family, who lived in West Los Angeles, two blocks from the railroad tracks, off Sepulveda and Santa Monica boulevards, where many immigrant families settled, taking up residence in wood shacks and old frame homes scattered among the warehouses that lined the tracks.

     When employment in the area was slow, a man could always find temporary, back-breaking work, loading and unloading cargo, or working in the packing sheds near the railroads, nothing desirable but better than starving.

     Today, most of the old neighborhood shacks and dirt lots have vanished, giving way to the 405 freeway at trendy Santa Monica Boulevard, or to apartments, condos, high tech companies, dog grooming businesses, and an assortment of companies, some suspiciously anonymous, no names on the doors or buildings.

     At the time, it was considered the heart of the old neighborhood, a mixture of Mexican, Japanese, and migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas. According to my mother, her new neighborhood “was not a good arrangement.” 

     People lived in shacks facing dusty, dirt alleys. You could hear the trains all day long. To her, it seemed people were piled on top of each other. “Everybody was there, living in your grandparents’ house," she recalled, "your dad’s sisters and their kids, his brothers, grown men, and their kids. It was a mad house. Nobody seemed to work steadily." Some barrios just can't be romanticized..

                                                                                     

Early days in the Sawtelle, my Escarcega cousins

                             

     She said living there was a shock, compared to her Santa Monica neighborhood, about three miles west, where everybody knew each other, mostly relatives and friends who migrated from San Juan de Los Lagos and Jalostotitlan, Mexico. Families lived in their own homes, and had steady work in the brickyards. Once children married, they moved out to their own homes. If families came from Mexico, they stayed with relatives until they found a job and their own homes.

     My mother said she lived with my father’s family for about six months, until she found a location, she laughed, close to the Sawtelle City Dump, near Olympic and Barrington. 

     That was when I was born. My mom said our house was small, more of a shack, and rented for twenty dollars a month. She missed Santa Monica, her family and friends.

     We lived in West Los Angeles, what the old-timers called Sawtelle, the original name, for about two years. My parents must have separated for a brief period because I remember my father visiting us in Santa Monica, at my grandmother’s 22^nd Street house, where my mother and I lived with her unmarried sisters, all of them fawning over me, the only child in the house, dubbed el consentido, "spoiled, pampered, and coddled" according  to el diccionario conciso internacional de Simon and Schuster.

     We didn’t stay long. From there, we moved down the hill, to a wood bungalow, owned by a woman I remember as Chavela, who owned other property in the area and lived, with her family, in the front house.

     My dad’s mother had died, and my grandfather, Maximiano Cano, who migrated north in 1917, during the Revolution, moved into an adjoining room. 

     An Army veteran, my father found work as a laborer for the City of Los Angeles, a good steady job but low pay. My mom, always the youthful, go-getter, found a work at Sacks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, where many of her friends also worked. Each day she rode the bus to her job from West L.A. She said a few times she had to make the long trek from home by foot, when the bus didn't come.

     She remembered spending most of her time in the famed department store folding and organizing clothes on the different display tables. Her supervisor, a sophisticated, beautiful woman, really liked my mother and appreciated how hard she worked. When a promotion to the next level opened up, my mom figured she was a shoo-in. Instead, the job went to a newly hired Anglo woman. My mother told me her supervisor admitted they made her promote the other woman. That my mother was Mexican was never mentioned.

     During this time, my grandfather, who had been hurt in a work accident, took care of me. In 1950, my sister Kathy was born. By this time, my mother had found a job working at Gilfillan, an electronics company on Bundy Drive near the Santa Monica-West L.A. border. As she jogged her memory recalling these days, she said we always lived in places “one step ahead of the bulldozers.”

     In postwar Los Angeles, developers on the westside were quickly demolishing the old shacks and buying up farmland to make way for the new tract-homes that would covert much of the vacant land to new suburbs. The West Los Angeles Soldiers Home, administration and hospital, along with UCLA, and many new companies needed housing for the employees in their growing businesses.

                                                                              

The Old Soldiers Home

     My mother said when she laid eyes on those new, two-bedroom homes, with garages, driveways, and grass yards, she dreamed of living in her own. Realistically, she couldn’t see much hope since their prices were beyond her reach. Still, hope was just an emotion, right, abstract and fallible? If her parents had travelled from central Mexico, during a revolution, hauling six children, with nothing but their clothes, starting a new life in a foreign country, and buying their own home, who’s to say she couldn’t have her dream? Besides, she always had a hard time taking “no” for an answer. She was a woman who lived by dichos, "Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres," "strike while the iron is hot," or "if there's a will, there's a way."  

     On a whim, she stopped at realtors’ offices and talked to the people inside, learning whatever she could about home searches, loans, and financing. She combed the neighborhoods to see if a good deal might open up. She continued pestering the realtors, an early researcher before the term became a cliche..

     It was 1952, and one of the agents told her about a home located in West Los Angeles, near Olympic boulevard and Bundy drive, that might fit her budget. The house was located on Granville Avenue, a beautiful street lined with large pine trees, right down the street from a public park, maybe a mile or so from where she and my father had rented their first home, near the city dump. She told the realtor she did not need to see the house. She wanted it regardless of the condition, “sight unseen.”

     She knew the area and had passed it often on her searches. To her, it was the most beautiful neighborhood in town. Mostly Anglo families lived on the street, which made no difference to her. In her mind, she was as American as anybody, born in the Santa Monica Hospital and educated in SM schools.

    When she learned the purchase price was $10,600, and a down payment of $2300, she saw her dream get hazy. She counted their savings. My dad had received a “mustering-out” pay from the military, which she saved, for $1,000. Coming from Mexican parents who preached saving over spending and buying a house over renting, she had also  managed squirrel away a few hundred more. Still, she was shy $1,000 needed for the down payment.

     She had inquired and found out a G.I. loan would secure the remaining mortgage, but raising $1300 in 1952 when workers averaged less than $60 a week seemed impossible.

     She walked by the house nearly every day, figuring a way to pay for it. One day, she got up her nerve and knocked on the door. The owners answered, nice people who listened to her. She explained how much she loved their home and told them she didn’t have enough for the down payment, but she was working on it. They told her they understood. She told them she would try to raise the money and hope they didn’t sell it before.

     She thought maybe she could get another loan on the house, a second, but no bank would approve it, not on their salary. She thought of asking her mother for a loan, but she’d always been taught borrowing from family was a bad idea. She realized she had nobody to turn to for the money.

     Disheartened, she returned to talk to the owners to tell them she was still working on it. As she talked, she was unable to hold back her emotion, and she burst into tears and sobbed. The woman who owned the house could see how much my mother wanted the house. She said she would be willing to carry the down payment at a reduced rate and a modest interest. My mom didn't think she'd heard correctly. They discussed it further. Yes, the woman said, in essence, she'd lend them the money. My mom made the calculations and realized it was possible. They signed the papers and made all the necessary arrangements.

     My mom said, "Grandpa was so excited he started going to the house even before the people had moved out. He wanted to keep the lawn and plants green, so he did the watering. I told him he couldn't go over there, but he wouldn't listen. He just said I didn't know how it worked."

      The responsibility of home ownership weighed heavily on my parents. They both had to work extra to earn the money to maintain the house. My father found a job in construction, brutal work, carrying cement all day across narrow scaffolds, but much better pay than working for the City, and still time for Little League and Boy Scouts. 

     The day of the stay-at-home mother and sole working father was quickly disappearing. After my parents purchased their home, their friends began buying homes near them, leaving the shacks near the railroad tracks and fighting to make their own dreams real.

     Many found work, mainly in electronic factories throughout the Westside, and at Douglas and Hughes Aircraft companies. No longer the slow community of Sawtelle, people began to call the area West Los Angeles. Electronics firms, toy factories, ceramics shops, and other companies opened, and industrial businesses set up shop. 

     Mothers began working eight hours a day, soldering microscopic size wires to boards that would control radios, televisions, and telephones. The times were definitely changing, and Chicana mothers were at the heart of that change. For some, making dreams come true is more about determination than a good night's sleep.