I did more research on grandpa Guadalupe because we lose track of him in 1922 somewhere between Missouri and Illinois when he and grandma divorce, or just go their separate ways. I've posted his agricultural land owner's I.D. card because it's the only good picture i have of the man; there is another picture where his face is in shadow, he is wearing a guayavera and looks tallish and very thin.
Apparently, he winds up in Hamlin, Tx., which i'd never heard of, even though i've driven within 15 miles of the place. And, lo and behold! he gets his minister's license there from the Church of God, for heaven's sake.
That's a nice turn of events, right? well, this story takes a hard left somewhere. I heard this from my mom, and she may have told me this in confidence, but it turns out grandpa Lupe had an eye for the ladies.
The story goes, he and a married woman from his congragation run off together, and i wish i had more details, but really, what more do we need?
That was the late 1920's and my 10 year old father meets him in 1930, and we don't know what he's up to for about 25 years. In the mid to late 50's he's single again and a small land owner in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas, just south of Matamoros, Mexico. He's around 60 now, and he's walking along a road in this farm land and he sees this girl working in the field, and sees that she's working hard, and is impressed by that. He finds out who she, goes to visit her parents, apparently he introduces himself and tells them he own a certain amount of land and that he's looking for a bride. It turns out this young woman is 17 years old, but the parents don't call the authorities or kick him out; what's more, they allow him to come visit their daughter so they could meet. Of course, she's thinking: everyone has lost their minds! a reasonable asumption. I've seen a picture of this woman, there's nothing wrong with her, as far as i can see. I have a 17 year old daughter now, but i can't put myself in those parent's shoes, a different place and time; and i try not to dwell to much on this story because, by now, i think we all know where this is going.
It took a year or two of wooing for the Dominguez charm to work it's magic. They were married and had a good 30 years together, producing five or six children, it's difficult to keep everyone straight. I heard this story from my father's half sister, who is younger than me, i could see that she dearly loved her father. They all came here with their mother to visit my father, 10-12 years ago, a good, close knit family.
One of the nice things about being a self-employed bootmaker or cobbler is that if someone drops by to say hi and visit, you don't have to stop what you're doing; it's actually a more pleasent work experience that way. Not that i get many people stopping by to chew the fat, but my father did; mostly retired, elderly men. I mostly listen to the voices of NPR on the radio and i try not to listen to the voices in my head that tell me to turn on the Today show to get that day's sensationalism; it's not easy, i kinda got a little crush on Ann, but who doesn't, right?
I suppose that as long as people age, old men will seek each other out to speak of their past, for what is there to tell about their future?
So, if i tell people that my father was an alcoholic, it's nothing that he didn't tell all his friends and acqaintances. He used to tell them that you were either a wet alcoholic or a dry alcoholic, but once an [alcky], always an [alcky]. He told me once that he became an alcoholic because he owned a guitar; this was in Zacatecas, and he hung out with a bunch of guys who loved to party but did not have a guitar, and what's a party without a guitar? So, after the booze was procured they picked up young Elias and his guitar and he could drink all he wanted.
Sometimes, late at night, i would be laying in bed wondering what it would be like to live with the Flintstone's and i would hear my father playing his acustic guitar out on the porch or in the living room; he was quite good, sometimes he sang. I guess i was in my mid twenties the last time i heard him play; the neck had broken on his guitar and he had repaired it and it lasted a few more years before it came apart, and he never replaced that guitar.
I think it is important to know that my father was an alcoholic, but it is also important to know that he was Mexican through and through and that there doesn't seem to be a place where he came from like San Juan was for my mother.
Elias Dominguez Aguilar was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1920, the third child of my migrant grandparents; but, less than two years later, the couple split and jump three years later and grandma Concepcion is with another man, dad's stepfather, Manuel, who is the only father he would know and they are living in Manhattan, illinois; grandma has a child with that man in 1926. It is here in the story that grandma's younger brother, Magdaleno, appears and who's had some trouble with the law and winds up in juvinal hall. By 1928 uncle Magdaleno is out of juvi, but jobs are scarece and they head south to Texas, around Thorton and Marlin where another of grandma's brothers lived, growing cotton; his name was Prospero, we don't hear from him again. By this time, grandma's been wanting to bring her mother from Guanajuato to the U.S., so they go down to Laredo to wait for her arrival, but,for some reason she never shows up. While there, grandma and stepgrandpa split up and my ten year old dad starts to roam the streets, getting into mayhem and uncle Magdaleno takes it upon himself to beat the devil out of him. One night, Magdaleno had gone out on the town and had come back all excited; it turned out that he had run into Guadalupe, my dad's biological father, and asked to see his two children, Elias and Eva. Of course, he didn't ask to see Tiburcia, who was not his, she was Manuel's daughter; but, now i'm asking myself: why didn't he ask to see Rafael, his oldest? It may have been that he was no longer traveling with the family because dad told me once that Rafael had all the sudden decided to become a hobo, and started jumping trains. Anyway, the next day, grandma took Elias and Eva to see their father.
It is unclear to me if this meeting took place before or after Concepcion and Manuel split up and wheather Guadalupe was with anyone at this time; or even the reason for the split from either men.
But, apparently, grandma Concepcion lived the rest of her life single, and, i believe, father would see grandpa one more time, as a grown man.
For a few years, dad and i had two shop, the other one was in Wichita Falls, but for one reason or another, we closed it. That was 1992, and for the next 10 years he and i worked together. During that time i learned to make boots, and heard all these stories in snippets, and in no chronological order. Now i find myself putting them in some kind of order to get to where he meets my mom. I wasn't the kind of son that would say: dad! stop, if you're going to tell me the story of your life, tell it in sequence; and for god's sake give me state of mind and some background story. I'm not like my kids, the other day one of them walked by me and said: you smell funny. My father smelled like garlic most days, did i complain? i showed respect for my father.
It is a municipality (county seat) in the center of the state of Durango. It is the birthplace of Pancho Villa in 1878 and my mother in 1925, two of my favorite people.
456 years ago Spanish missionaries arrived in this valley; a year later, on June 24, 1555, the conquistadors arrived and named the valley San Juan, being that date's name day, or feast day. In 1563 the first haciendas appear and in 1592 the town was founded. The river that runs through this valley is also the San Juan, but the "del Rio" in the town name was in honor of Rodrigo del Rio de Loza, a conquistador who arrived with Francisco de Ibarra and apparently stayed in the valley. Ibarra went on from there to establish Nueva Viscaya which became Durango, the capital.
The 1790 census records: 2,236 Spanish; 2,789 indigenous; 1,875 mestizo (like me); and 4,000 other. Today, of the less than 14,000 people in the municipality, more than half live in San Juan del Rio; and 17 of those people spoke an indigenous language. A part of the history of the state of Durango is the rebellion of the area's indegenous people against the Spanish invaders; there were two or three tribes that caused the most trouble, but on occasion, the Comanche would wander down and join the "party".
There are no records, written or oral, to indicate that either of my grandparents families came to live in San Juan from somewhere else, which tells me that their roots must run deep in this valley. The
narrow streets in San Juan are cobblestone, but you have to leave town and the cobblestones, walk a quarter-mile north on a gravel road flanked by four-foot high walls made of stacked stone to get to my grandparent's hacienda. It is an agricultural community and livestock is often penned in with that same stacked stone or adobe walls; sometimes barbed wire is placed on top of the stone. My grandparents home is made of adobe walls that are a foot thick; the walls of the house have been stuccoed, but the ones around the corral, which are 10 feet high, are not. When i began to visit this house i was nine, and there was no plumbing, you went out to the corral with the chickens and the pigs and you did business with them. The river is about 100 yards from the back door, and there is where we bathed, washed clothes, and got our drinking water, but for that you dug a hole on the bank after you had cleared a space of stones, some as big as bowling balls; it filled up with water and when it settled, you drank it or collected it to take home.
Going to the river was a daily thing for the women, because this was primarily women's work back then; what am i saying? in Mexico it still is. In the interest of getting as much done in one trip they had adopted the practice of carrying buckets or large clay pots filled with water on their heads. My first experience of seeing this spectacle, as you might imagine, was pure awe; but, i was not prepared to see my own mother arrive one day from the river with a bucket of clean dishes on her head and carrying a bucket of laundry in each hand; that just blew my mind. As far as the coolness factor for a kid today, compare it to, let's say, seeing your mom kick ass at beer pong, but maybe that's just me.
As i have explained before, my grandmother died of cancer when mom was 18; when mom was 32 my grandfather became ill. Mom was living in California at the time and my older sister was two when they went to live in San Juan to help take care of him even though, at the time, she had seven living brothers and sisters. She helped take care of her father for over a year before he died; they never found out exactly what he died of.
My aunt Socorro and her two daughters lived in the house for many years and then it was divided in half and uncle Jose and his wife moved in, they had nine children.
One of the first things that come to mind about my mom is that she preferred to go barefoot; she said she grew up barefoot in San Juan. When she had to start school, grandma made her put on some shoes before she left the house to go into town. Up the road, she would climb over the stone wall, into one of her father's fields, and hide her shoes there. One of her sister, and i want to say it was aunt Socorro because it sounds like something she would do, would, if she found them, take them back inside the house; so, mom would have to try and sneak into the house without her mom seeing her. This was before the television, they used their imaginations to create their own entertainment.
In the pictures, my oldest, Jorge, when he was five in San Juan.
It was Christmas 1996, we were visiting my in-laws in Durango and i took him with me on the 50 miles drive north to visit my aunt and uncle in San Juan. The year before, in February, we had buried my mom in the San Juan cemetary next to her mom and dad.
I've mentioned that my inspiration for blogging about my life is for my children to get to know dear old dad and why he is the way he is. This blog is not required reading for them, it's just here for them for when they grow out of that self-absorbed, narcissistic phase my offspring, apparently, seem to go through.
I had a taste of life in Mexico as a child, my children know Mexico only from infrequent visits to their maternal gradparents home in Durango. My children, as i did from age seven, know life as Mexican-Americans.
I am no historian, i'm no sociologist, this is my skewd point of view looking from inside the glass bowl, not really an objective observer.
If i'm critical of Mexico and Mexicans, myself included, it is only to be taken as personal observation, and in no way an indication of a sense of superiority from living in the U.S. Being a naturalized citizen of this country, i may feel a reluctance to criticize it from some deep seeded feeling of gratitude towards an adoptive country. In any case, i have nothing new to add to the criticizims of the U.S. already out there from white people actually born here, who can't so easily be told they can go back to where they came from, for only the natives of this continent cannot be told to go back to wherever they came from.
Being half native is a source of pride for me, like the fact that Mexicans were living in Texas for centuries before the white man showed up, but in the end it's politics that determines our place in the world. These man made rules are what we follow, not the natural order we started to step out of when we began taking our first steps on two legs.
I suppose one can argue that being Mexican is a state of mind, not the state in which Mexico leaves it's citizens; nature versus nurture. That may simply be what this look at the smudge i'm leaving in the space-time continueum is all about: so my kids can look at it and determine if they want to make the same sort of smudge or a more stylish, colorful one.
When we moved to Burkburnett, i was seven and had a first grade education in spanish, and i was put in second grade at Hardin Elementary. I enjoyed going to school, from that first day that i drew a crowd during morning recess, in the playground. It was a cloudy day in September, so i didn't have to worry about nosebleeds from being
under the sun too long. The word spread that i didn't speak english, so they all gathered 'round to get a look, i guess, i don't think i minded.
I was given to Mrs. Mullins to deal with; she must have had a good deal of patience to get me started, not only learning english, but this new educational system with its bells, lunch tickets, lunch lines, and books, so many books. In Matamoros, i remember having just one textbook; the one depicting Cortez putting Moctezuma's feet to the fire to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold; Cortez was a punk, if you ask me.
There were 27 of us students in Mrs. Mullins room, and, i'm sure, at least a dozen of us from that class graduated high school together.
They were all great kids in that class, and all through elementary, the kids that came and went in my class.
When i got to fifth grade, without any setbacks that i can recall, something happened: i was put in remedial reading. Not immediately,
it may have been just the second half of the school year. Apparently, i was failing regular reading class where you read a story and then answer comprehension questions. I think spelling was included in that subject, that would not surprise me; i'm still a bad speller. So, during reading, Carl, Beatriz, and i would get up while the rest of the kids stared at us (which i was kinda used to) and walked down the hall, to Mrs. Lindsey's classroom, who taught what was called: special ed. She, and her young assistant, taught the mentally disabled and helped kids who had difficulties reading. So, we did that for what seemed like the longest time; it wasn't for the whole year, but i seem to remember one of my companions saying that they could do without the stares.
A couple of months before the end of the school year, we got a new
student in Mrs. A's class, and soon after, he was joining us on our daily trek to Mrs. Lindsey's classroom. The new guy, RJ (nothisrealname), was a blond-haired, freckled faced, thin boy who, judging by the way he dressed, had a sense of style. He had hazel eyes, i know because he used to work that fact into conversation for some reason; and, he bore a striking resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, not the young Katharine in the black and white pictures , but what she looked like in 1972, the year i'm writing about. I liked RJ, right off the bat he talked to us like we were old friends, and he told us everything we needed to know about himself. His step-dad was air force, they probably moved around so much he'd learned how to make friends fast. He called us something like: "my fine feathered friends."
So, this one day we four went over to Mrs. Lindsey's classroom, but she told us that she wasn't done with the class that was still there and could we come back in 15 minutes. When we walked back into Mrs. A's room and told her, well, she had a cow: she told us that she was about to give the class a test and we would be disrupting them. Towering over us at about six feet tall and with her high pitched voice on full blast, she told us to just wait out in the hall until Mrs. Lindsey was ready for us. So, we went back out and sat on the floor for a while.
Beatriz was crying a little bit, she was pissed, Carl and i just sat there like a couple of clods. RJ put his hand on her shoulder, patted her back and talked to her; he said the usual stuff and then he said some more stuff that had us all giggling like....well, like school children. That was impressive to me because it was something i couldn't do then and still have troube with: saying the right thing. We all have our talents.
Over all, i was an average student. I had my fair share of A's in english of all subjects, some D's, mostly in math, plenty of C's, and lots of B's; my grades were all over the place. My only F, in high school, was the result of a "teacher" who did not teach, so i did not try. When i got to fifth grade i could read, i just didn't comprehend everything i read. Before fifth grade, i was at a level that i could handle, i suppose, and maybe by fouth grade i just barely passed reading and spelling. There came a time in Mrs. Lindsey's class when she started telling me to go sit by a book shelf and just read what i wanted because it was obvious that i didn't need help reading; i remember listening to the other kids struggling to read, thinking: i don't have that problem.
One of my problems was that i was still behind in language skills. We only spoke spanish at home, and how much could The Flintstone's and
Gilligan's Island improve my language skills? Once, we were watching cartoons or something, and i asked my dad: what does "stay tuned" mean? I knew that they were telling me not to change the channel, i just wanted to know why "staying tuned" meant that. My dad, who had a third grade education, told me it meant that there were more catoons to come. Later, when we learned about the radio and the tuner, i figured it out, learning about the word "tune" like i learned about the word "vieja". What i needed was to be taught how to use a Funk 'n Wagnells and a tutor wouldn't have hurt, either.
P.S. RJ told us that his stepdad would be transferred during the summer, and we never saw him again--military life.
The other day, my aunt Carmen sent me a message telling me that i should blog about her favorite story about me from when we lived in Matamoros; i only really know it from hearing her tell it.
I would be about five years old and the nurses that were providing immunizations had set up at the mercado Trevino Zapata, where my mom and aunt had their store. So, mom takes me to the nurses to get my shot, but i was having none of that; so, i took off running and screamed: "no me piquen, viejas putas!"
That's the story. I don't know how cute it is, but i tell it here to illustrate a point about language: literally translated what i screamed at the nurses means: "don't stick me, old whores"; but, translating for a parallel intent in english it would be more like: "don't stick me you slutty bitches". Of course, i'm not talking about my intent, but the intent of the men i learned these disrespectful words from. I hung around this market a lot while my mom was working; there were and still are vendors of all types there, and back then, apparently, plenty of young and middle aged men who worked there or just hung out, who weren't exactly Rhode Scholars; i was their go-fer, mostly buying cigarettes for them.
Actually, "vieja" means old woman and is used like "my old lady" in english; but, "vieja", used with the right tone--well, you might as well say "bitch". "Puta", no matter how you says it, always means the same thing. And here's some layman's anthropology to go with that spanish lesson: Mexican men, of a certain class, when faced with women who have hurt them, or feel threatened by them will not only label them as a "bitch", but question their chasteness; and these are the guys i'm learning spanish from at age five. What should be impressive, though,
is that, at that age, i spotted a woman who was about to cause me pain, and chauvinistic and rude as it was, i got the terminology
correct.
In the end, i was caught and given my shot, which should be punishment enough; although, i did get a parting shot of my own, at the nurse: vieja puta! My mother said that when we moved to Burkburnett, i stopped using those words.
