Scholar, Dropout, Leader, Mentor

In Memoriam: My Mother: Scholar, Dropout, Leader, Mentor On Her Heavenly 100th Birthday

By Thelma T. Reyna

My mother, Maria Elia Guerra—small-town Texas girl known for her beauty and school smarts—was destined for great things. But she was smitten with a Laredo sailor stationed locally and dropped out after the eleventh grade to marry him. He was a junior high dropout, and poor…but she was smitten!

She married the sailor—Raul Clemente Tellez, my father—and they went on to have nine children. Their rocky 20-year marriage ended inevitably in divorce, which broke my heart, for I loved him deeply, as I loved her. But this is her story, how contradictions filled her life and defined her. But overall, a propitious beginning for the stellar student was waylaid by a teenaged couple—he aged 19 and she 17—who made unwise decisions and moved too fast.

A high-school dropout, my mother was my first mentor, my first role model of female leadership and success in the professional world. Lacking educational credentials, my mother turned to her native intelligence to break past the gatekeepers. She scored highly on the entrance test and quickly became a highly-ranked administrative supervisor at the local military base. She was queenly, a turban-like “beehive hairdo” adding six inches to her height. “She liked to run the show,” my cousins tell me. Energetic, highly competent. Never shied away from speaking out. Never feared challenges in this male world. She became a rare Mexican-American woman leading White people, mainly, in their work, telling high school and college grads what to do. Mom was also the only career woman in our poor neighborhood. 

But she didn’t acquire a veneer of gentility. She cursed “like a sailor,” my uncles would say. She had a facility with, and penchant for, profanity. She learned it from her father, my laconic Grandpa Guerra. Even in calm kitchen-table conversations devoid of conflict, smiling, engaged, my mother peppered her sentences with curse words. “Just a habit,” she intoned nonchalantly, when criticized. But her tongue became an excoriating furnace of fire when angered. Her mother once chastised her, saying, “Las maldiciones de una madre duelen mucho.” Yes, indeed. Because of the environment her words created, I vowed as a young girl to avoid profane language, and have upheld this. Ironically, my mother’s focus on being her natural self taught me behaviors in the opposite direction.

Conversely, my mother’s tough but kind heart provided respite and refuge to disenfranchised souls. Like stray pups taken benevolently in, fed and housed, runaway kids, or kids kicked out of their homes by draconian parents, found a landing spot in our house. Admittedly, with two young girls in our home, this was risky. But my brothers watched their friends and sisters like hawks, always protective. We had five bedrooms and three bathrooms, sufficient space for those in need of compassion.

Finally, piety didn’t lose against the arts of the occult, both domains embraced by my mother. She consulted tarot cards and fortune tellers. She traveled a hundred dusty miles to lie under the healing hands of curanderos in remote ranchitos. In evening hours, if churches had locked their doors for the day, mother sat on their steps, rosary in hand, and whispered the prayers she could recite in sleep. But such it is with our culture, where tradition and modern community allow dualities to co-exist.

This was my mother, replete with contradictions: incompletely educated yet brilliant; lacking glass-ceiling-breaking credentials but making up for this through her native intelligence and drive; rising in the professional world yet clinging to crude, profane habits diametric to her new persona; speaking tough yet sheltering discarded youths; and dabbling in occult practices while continuing to practice her conventional religion. Our family survived and thrived to our utmost, but financial stability escaped my mother, though she worked hard all her life. My love for her does not dim with time.

IN MEMORIAM
Maria Elia Guerra Tellez Ruth
July 27, 1926 - September 11, 2008

  

 

 

Wondering What My Mother Would Be Like at Age 76

 

Earlier this month. I attended Gunpowder Press’s release of their new anthology: Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. Since 2025 commemorates the 175^th anniversary of California’s statehood, the anthology features 175 California writers. My mother, Blanca Estela Palacio, would have been the same age as many of the women represented in the collection. December 5, she would be 76. For the world, she is forever immortalized at age 44. I am older than she was the last time I saw her alive, but not old enough to contribute to this anthology. The collection gives me an insight into what her life concerns would be as an aging Baby Boomer. Many favorite people and poets are included in this impressive poetry collection, a few micro essays are also tucked in.

As a child, I remember thinking that my mom was an exceptional women who had grown up with the best music. I was the oddball teenager who preferred her parents’ music and dances to her own generation’s. My mother was proud of the fact that she was a Baby Boomer, the generation of children born to parents who lived through World War Two, who protested the Vietnam War, who marched for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and affirmative action.

Blanca Estela and Melinda Palacio

While my mother was born in Texas, she is very much a California girl. California is where she grew up, became a teacher, an activist, and a single mother who also took care of her parents and siblings during her short life. Because I keep aging and my mother does not, I often wonder what her life would be like now. I become wistful around women who have the opportunity for mother-daughter dates. There’s so much about my life in Santa Barbara that I wish I could have shared with my mother. We often took summer road trips from Los Angeles to San Francisco and on several occasions visited my uncle who was stationed at Vandenberg Airforce Base in Lompoc, but we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I don’t think my mom knew the town existed. Solvang was our usual stopping point. To this day, I have no explanation as to why we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I know she would have loved Santa Barbara, given that she enjoyed Solvang’s small town charm.

Ten years after my mother passed, I met a mother traveling with her adult daughter. I was so happy for the two of them. I told them how lucky they were. Mother and daughter Lucy agreed. They had the same round face and blue eyes. It still puts a smile on my face to think of the two women sharing an aisle on the airplane with twenty-year old younger me. While I can no longer travel with my mother, we sure shared some fun travels together to Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. In reading Women In a Golden State, I see my mother in so many of the poems. Sharon Langley’s poem, I Saw My Mom Today, reminds me that I only need to look in the mirror see my mother: “Purse. Pucker, now pose./That’s her smile for sure./I saw my mom today.”

Thanks to Gunpowder Press editors Diana Raab and Chryss Yost, there’s a collection of 175 poems that share the concerns of Women in a Golden State and the anthology my mother would be included in if she were a living poet. 

 

 

 

*This article also appears in the Santa Barbara Independent