Between Two Worlds

 

by Daniel Cano                               

                                                                                     

First generation Americans, Mom and childhood friend, Consuelo "Connie" Saenz

                                                                       

     Before she passed away, I had many discussions with my mother. I was interested about our family’s story, from Mexico to the U.S. This is a portion of one discussion. As she told me:                                   

        "My dad always talked about Mexico, but never about going back to live."

      My mother was born in Santa Monica in 1925. She grew up on 22^nd Street, the heart of the Mexican barrio, in her parents' home, just south of Olympic Boulevard, three miles from the Pacific Coast, she recalls, when Santa Monica was mostly farms and vacant land.

     As the youngest child of Nicolas Gonzalez and Eusbia Villalobos Gonzalez, she never knew her grandparents. They remained in Mexico when her parents migrated to the States in 1920, along with six young children. In fact, she didn’t think her parents ever saw their parents again. Travel to Mexico, in those days, was difficult, and war, of one type of another, raged on until the late 1920s.

     My mother said she heard stories about paternal grandfather, Juan Gonzalez, and her grandmother, Micaela de Los Santos Gonzalez, about their lives in Mitic, a rural rancho in Los Altos de Jalisco, in the province of Jalostotitlan, some eighty miles east of Guadalajara.

     According to historians, Mitic’s roots can be traced back to the early 1600s, an indigenous village when the Spanish arrived. Her maternal grandparents, Pablo and Refugio Villalobos, hailed from Las Palmas, a poor, neighboring ranch with a rich history. Of them, she knew little, but she did keep tabs on her Villalobos’ relatives, like her aunts Lupe and Micaela, who lived down the street in Santa Monica, and others who migrated north to San Jose, California.

     She visited Mitic once, in her early teens, after her grandparents had died. She recalled her Mexican relatives having a difficult time, having experienced years of violence and famine. Still, her parents must have instilled a lifelong connection to the land of their birth, since she spoke of it with both sadness and pride.

     Her family also owned portions of the ranch well into the 1960s, inherited from their great-grandfather, Juan, but they eventually sold to relatives who continue to work the land, up until today.

     Maybe it was because my mother’s family owned the ranch in Mexico, her parents chose to purchase a home in Santa Monica, rather than rent, even though many Mexicans, at the time, thought the U.S. might send them back to Mexico, and they’d lose everything. Like my grandmother, my mother, and her siblings, were frugal, thrifty, and tried to invest wisely.

       To make a point, my mother once told me, her grandfather, Juan, apparently, had a large savings, the family nest egg. I guess he didn’t trust banks, so he hid the money on the family ranch, but before he revealed its location, he died.

     For years, everyone searched, desperately looking for the savings. It was no use. Eventually, the family sold a portion of the land to a man of modest means, as the story goes, and within months, he built a home, farmed the land, and purchased livestock.

     The family, and the people of the rancho, began to question the source of his money. Yet, it wasn’t until before his death, the man told someone who told someone else that some time after he purchased the Gonzalez’s land, he demolished an old rock wall. There, beneath the foundation, he found a bag full of coins, a fortune to a poor man.

     When I asked my mother, and my older aunts, for details about the story, they said, "You need to ask your Uncle Chuy. He went back to live in Mitic and knows more than any of us about Mexico."

     Whether fact or myth, the story seeped into the family psyche. It was a story I heard repeated by other families in Mexico. Maybe, it was more like a “La Llorona” fable, invented to teach a lesson, this one about money and taking care of it. I do know my Gonzalez uncles and aunts worked hard, saved earnestly, and like their parents, invested wisely, in rental homes and apartments, but unlike their grandfather, shared their prosperity with their children.

                                                                                      

My Mexican grandfather, Nicolas Gonzalez

                                                                                     2.

    My grandfather, Nicolas, died before I was born. An anomaly, rather than tall and light-skinned, like other Gonzalez men, and the men of Jalisco, generally, he was short, dark skin, with the straight, thick hair of an Indian, perhaps evidence of our indigenous heritage. They say he was an easy-going, friendly man, who loved his family but tolerated no disrespect, to man or beast. My mother grew serious when she said, "But he wasn't as strict as my mom." 

     Nicolas enjoyed his home, reading the newspapers, talking to neighbors, and tending the pig, chickens, and goat he kept in the back yard. My mother remembered, as a young girl, seeing him in the back yard, telling stories to the neighborhood boys, like the Romo, Guajardo, and Garcia brothers, Juan, Vicente, and Beto, who lived in the neighborhood. "Oh, my dad loved to tell them stories."

     Though many have passed, the families remained lifelong friends, even into their elder years.

     As the youngest of eight children, two boys and six girls, my mother always felt her father wanted a son instead of a daughter. “He treated me like a boy,” she said.

     He taught her to feed and care for the chickens, ducks, and pig. Alongside him, she learned to tend the garden, chores he had never taught his other five daughters. At the time, his two sons, Chuy and Joe, were grown and working. She said, “My dad treated me like a pal."

     She said, stressing, her dad could be firm when needed, like the time she watched prepare to kill a chicken for dinner. She said she insisted she knew how to do it. Rather than wait for his instruction, she took the chicken from his hands and began to choke the animal as she had seen him do. She felt the animal’s neck stretch, like a piece of rubber in her hands. Terrified, she dropped the bird. It leaped up and ran around the yard, its head dangling to one side. Her father caught the animal, and quickly finished it.

     "Oh, he was mad…mostly because I didn't listen to him."

     She remembered him slapping her, hard across the face, something he had never done. He said, "That's what you get for making the chicken suffer." 

     Another time she saw her father’s anger was when some neighborhood boys, Chava Guajardo, among them, had given her sister Toni a box filled with corn. Toni didn’t know the boys had taken the corn, and sugar cane, from a neighbor's yard. That's what they really wanted, the sugar cane. It was like candy. 

                                                                                            

My Mexican grandmother, Eusebia Villalobos Gonzalez

     Mr. Gutierrez, the neighbor, came to tell Nicolas about the theft, and when both men looked over at Toni, they saw the box of corn. Toni tried to explain. Nicolas didn’t give her the chance. He began hitting her with his hand and he wouldn't stop. Toni cried out, begging to explain. Eusebia heard the cries from a neighbor’s house and came running. She pulled Nicolas away from Toni.

     "I thought he would have killed her," my mother said, in a low voice as she finished telling the story. Apparently, my grandfather would tolerate much but not a thief in his family. According to one of my mother’s sisters, Nicolas had once told his son, Chuy, “I would rather see my child dead before I see him as a thief.”

     Harsh? I suppose, looking at it from my generation’s perspective, but perhaps. in my grandfather's Mexican world, a man was only as good as his word. Back in Mitic, a man's word could buy food, a horse, a house, or a plot of land. In this system of honor, a family, including the children, was judged by its actions. If anyone questioned a man’s word, he also questioned his character. If men could not place their trust in a handshake, a man’s word carried no value, neither did his life, as the song goes, La Vida No Vale Nada. 

     I asked my mom about boys, in general, who stole, in those days and how it reflected on them and their families. She said some boys were just playing around, getting their "kicks." Travieso, mischievous, was the word used to describe this behavior. But what was simply an adolescent prank in the U.S. was considered a lack of family control in Mexico.

     For me, her story indicated the difference between Mexican parents and their American-reared children, who preferred to speak English instead of Spanish, who attended American schools, played baseball, football, and knew little of agriculture or ranching. The responsibilities and duties assigned to children on Mexican ranches did not apply to them in American neighborhoods. In their parents’ eyes: had they been in Mexico, they would have been working the land rather than sitting in a classroom.

     They knew little of life in Mexico. Also, the depression years, poverty, and hunger, caused many people to behave in ways they would not normally behave. As she ended the story, my mother remembered, Chava, a close friend, who later was killed in the invasion of Guadalcanal during World War II. His sisters and my mother had been best friends well into their senior years.

     She also talked about the good times, like each year, when her father had a matanza (a slaughter). He would butcher the pig. His friends from their Santa Monica barrio came to his house to dig a pit in the backyard and stoke a fire at the bottom, where they buried the pig in burning ash, cooking it for hours. She described it as a neighborhood affair.