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