by Daniel Cano
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| 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 22nd
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
