Growing Up Chicana/o

Bill Adler, A Lopez, Tiffany A. Lopez

• Verlag: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Jahr: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061763526
• Thema: Ciencias sociales
• Thema: Estudios étnicos

What Does It Mean To Grow Up Chicana/o?

When I was growing up, I never read anything in school by anyone who had a "Z" in their last name. This anthology is, in many ways, a public gift to that child who was always searching for herself whithin the pages of a book.
from the Introduction by Tiffany Ana Lopez

Louie The Foot Gonzalez tells of an eighty-nine-year-old woman with only one tooth who did strange and magical healings...
Her name was Dona Tona and she was never taken seriously until someone got sick and sent for her. She'd always show up, even if she had to drag herself, and she stayed as long as needed. Dona Tona didn't seem to mind that after she had helped them, they ridiculed her ways.

Rosa Elena Yzquierdo remembers when homemade tortillas and homespun wisdom went hand-in-hand...
As children we watched our abuelas lovingly make tortillas. In my own grandmother's kitchen, it was an opportunity for me to ask questions within the safety of that warm room...and the conversation carried resonance far beyond the kitchen...

Sandra Cisneros remembers growing up in Chicago...
Teachers thought if you were poor and Mexican you didn't have anything to say. Now I know, "We've got to tell our own history...making communication happen between cultures."

PASSAGES: WE WHO ARE NOT AS OTHERS

Divorce. Like a faceless statistic, the word should have simply died in the air. But in a conservative Texas town, in a Chicano neighborhood, the word was anathema. For lower-class, churchgoing Chicanos in 1963, divorce meant scandal; and my parents’ divorce—ironically a surprise to us children, furtively planned and consummated—had just gone through….

—Thelma Reyna, “Una Edad Muy Tierna, M’ija”

UNA EDAD MUY TIERNA, M’IJA
Thelma Reyna

Thelma Reyna was born in a small town in Texas and spent most of her childhood there. She presently lives in Pasadena, California. She is a school administrator and the author of short stories and poetry that have appeared in journals, including Voices and El Grito del Sol. In “Una Edad Muy Tierna, M’ija,” a horribly unsettling divorce traps a fifteen-year-old between her feelings for her parents and her own growing sense of self. The author says of the relation of her writings to her life: “Almost everything I have published is an account of something straight out of my childhood. My family life was turbulent, even though I generally consider my childhood to have been a happy one. One of my favorite brothers was killed in Vietnam at the age of eighteen, a loss that my mother never really overcame. Both of my maternal grandparents, who were very dear to me, died during my adolescence or early adulthood. Therefore, loss was a reality that colored many of my perceptions about growing up, and it was an inevitable companion to love. Oftentimes, I weep when I compose a story or poem, because, as I write it, I relive it, complete with all the pain and sorrow that attended it. It seems, unfortunately, that the events most filling my ‘writing mind’ are painful ones.”

IS THERE A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE, I WONDERED AS I WALKED THE dusty road of my neighborhood. The caliche of our unpaved street powdered my ankles gray. I didn’t care. Ordinarily, I would mumble my displeasure as I’d stumble among the larger chunks of gravel, but on that particular day the street could have been a swami’s spiked bed for all I cared.

The spikes were in my heart. My father had told me I was at a very tender age—una edad muy tierna, m’ija, not long after a particularly violent argument between him and my mother. I’d been caught in the middle, used as an alibi by them both, questioned by both, their jealous distrust of each other building to a crescendo until I’d run outside in tears.

My parents’ marriage was crumbling—ugly, vermin-eaten framework crumbling, rotting. For years, pieces had been chipping off in personality clashes, in marathon arguments that outdistanced midnight and heralded daylight without shame. And always, we children—nine of us in varying degrees of involvement, with varying degrees of comprehension—had pleaded heroically with them to stop, or had wept helplessly, or hid, or innocently sought refuge with TV or games in sympathetic neighbors’ homes. We older ones (I was second oldest, eldest daughter) had struggled with passionate involvement in their conflicts, or with sanity-maintaining apathy; shame that our calmer neighbors knew all too well the loud discord within our home, or defensive bitterness toward the busybody bastards with their horribly-disjointed noses; and the most heart-rending ambivalence of all: see-saw love and hate for our thirtyish, handsome, turbulent parents.

Es edad muy tierna, m’ija. Fifteen. And I’m so sorry that you’re going through all this. He’d been unable to hide his own tears that day, and I knew he knew better than I the resentment boiling just under my skin. We were all living in hell.

Through my wet eyes now, I glanced to left and right and wondered how many of the neighbors were watching me as I plodded skinnily down the street. I walked quickly, my pigeon feet unfocused as I watched them almost tripping. I glanced from house to passing house, wondering, wondering. Do they know? wishing, wishing that a rut in the corduroy street would suddenly yawn and take me into it, out of this hell, maybe into Hell itself. Houses with neighbors I’d never met and even those kindly ones I’d known metamorphosed suddenly into cells of malice. I heard the neighbors’ whisperings in the dusty silence: “Look. There she goes, the poor child. Yes, yes. Have you heard? Bebe and Raul have divorced.”

Divorce. Like a faceless statistic, the word should have simply died in the air. But in a conservative Texas town, in a Chicano neighborhood, the word was anathema. For lower-class, churchgoing Chicanos in 1963, divorce meant scandal; and my parents’ divorce—ironically a surprise to us children, furtively planned and consummated—had just gone through.

The whispered scandals skipped from mouth to mouth in each alien house I passed: “Did you hear Bebe and Raul fighting last night? Did you know he left?” My neighbors were omniscient bastards! “It was the worst one yet. He had to go. She divorced him, and he didn’t even know. Can you believe that?” My tears streamed silently. “He had to go. The police were there.” Then, in a conspiratorial hush my heart heard: “Were you the one who called them?”

Sudden red light pulsating against the living room wall. Authoritative knock on the screen door. Red noise. When I’d gone to the door, the two policemen’s bulk blocked out the porch light. Who called them? They squeezed into the narrow hallway, looking for my father.

“Where is he?”

Who called them? Which of our good neighbors called the police on my father again? Let us have hell in this house in peace!

I hurried to the rear hallway while the policemen boomed their questions at my weeping mother in the living room. In the hallway my father was also weeping. Half-dressed, he knelt on the floor and hugged my small brothers tightly, stammering reassurances nobody understood. Five children in the hallway, five small children surrounding a manchild sobbing wildly, saying goodbye to a family he did not know when he’d see again. In the living room: the police voices, my mother’s confusion. And in the darkness of the alley, I saw my half-naked father run toward his car. His slight figure shrunk to nothing in the near-blackness, and I prayed my thanks to God that his car finally started, finally tugged away just as the policemen’s boots thundered toward where I stood on the back porch.

Goodbye, dear father, goodbyegoodbye. You’ve left a burning home, father. You’ve left your share of tonight’s violent, vulgar words hanging in the air here. You left a few tufts of hair on the floor where mother pulled them out in rage. We hate you we love you we’re glad you’re gone so maybe now we can have peace but come back come back come back dear father.

I watched the thin clouds of caliche dust rise about my ankles. I’d left school early that day, for who can concentrate on books when life intrudes? All morning a gray plug had blocked my throat. Child of scandal, child of hate. Why hadn’t I sprung forth from man and woman bound so tightly in love, that they became manwoman instead? What was it in a union that chafed and wore the bonds until love whimpered away to nothingness?

I gasped. I’d seen fire and spring, ugliness and filth and radiance in my father, in my mother. How many times had my whimpers of disappointment and fear—yes, hate, too—filled my room? I’d whimpered, but my love for them had never whimpered itself into nonexistence.

Child of hate, child of love.

I stopped suddenly in the street and faced the small, nondescript houses ranged opposite me. I looked from one to the other and nodded slowly.

“Yes, yes. Child of love, do you hear me?” I waited for an answer. A fifteen-year-old scandal waited in the dust. No faces showed in windows. No figures sat on front porches. No busy neighbors walked the street or watered anemic flowers.

“Yes, yes. Do you hear me?” I waited in the hot silence and allowed the tears to flow. I was a child again, a more-child child. Memories flowed.

“I’m a child of love, do you hear?” I shouted. “He used to love her, damn it! He told me once she was like a lily to him on their wedding night. She was the first woman he ever knew, and he knew her for twenty years!”

Twenty years.

The tears flowed. My defiance was still mute, but I knew the world could hear. I knew as I stood under the sultry sky that day that the world watched. In a supreme, salving effort, my subconscious choked out scene after scene which had been pushed to the back rows of my memory. There had been loving times! These had been almost obliterated, and the thought that misery could wipe away joy so easily shamed me more deeply than my parents’ present scandal.

The film my mind played back flashed on a giant screen, there in the loneliness of midday:

My mother’s hands routinely grooming him: trimming his thick, reddish-brown mustache, clipping the hairs in his nose and ears gently. He gazed at her steadily in her aqua chenille robe, placed his hands on her hips or breasts occasionally. She gossiped nonchalantly as he sang or teased…

The film whirred:

He arranged her red negligee so it hung over her legs and over the edge of the couch more smoothly, then stepped back to catch the pose. Her black, immaculate hairdo was perfect, queenly, for this private cheesecake photo session. They didn’t know we sneaked a look…

Scene after scene flashed:

My father’s voice, thin but urgent, his hands tugging on the telephone cord: “I want the doctor now!” His voice pushed itself onto the other party. “I think the baby’s coming any minute!” Red face—red with impatience, with pride, with joy. Worry and excitement as keen about his ninth child as with his first.

My mother, bundled in the softest blanket he could find, carried as precious luggage to the car. My weary father returning home only after his ninth child, his seventh son, was born.

The film whirred smoothly, endlessly. “Yes, yes. Child of love.” (He lay in their narrow bed and rubbed her inner thighs.) They loved each other. (As he rubbed, he sang to her a song he made up about the white silkiness of her skin.) He loved my mother! (She smiled at him, then he told us children to go outside and play.)

I no longer shouted. I didn’t need to hide. My terribly misguided parents had been manwoman once. For twenty years, their union had been love/hate. The ultimate scandal last night, incredibly, had been love, too—gasping, distorted, on its knees, love not flawless as it once was, but love in its nadir.

It could not have been anything less.

I, Salomon, tell you this so that you may know the meaning of life and death. How well I know it now, how clear are the events of the day I killed the giant river turtle. Since that day I have been a storyteller, forced by the order of my destiny to reveal my story. I speak to tell you how the killing became a horror….

—Rudolfo Anaya, “Salomon’s Story” from Tortuga

SALOMON’S STORY
from TORTUGA
Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya is a professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of New Mexico, and one of the most prolific and acclaimed Chicano short story writers and novelists. Among his novels are Bless Me, Ultima (1972), The Silence of the Llano (1982), Heart of Aztlán (1976), Tortuga (1979), and Albuquerque (1992; winner of the 1993 PEN Center USA West Literary Award). His nonfiction books include, among others, his coedited Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1989) and A Chicano in China (1986). This selection from Tortuga tells the story of a boy who is injured in a near-fatal accident and must wear a full body cast, which earns him the nickname of Tortuga (Turtle). Salomon is a curandero, a paralytic mute who communicates with Tortuga telepathically. Salomon introduces the boy Tortuga to Tortuga Mountain, a place of agua bendita (holy water) that has curative power. Salomon tells Tortuga of the mysterious healing found in the power of storytelling. Anaya says of this work: “The story reflects my growing up along the river and the fishing and hunting that we used to do as kids. Later on in life, reflecting on that aspect of our nature as hunters, I realized that we had done some things wrong. I also learned that the relationship between the hunter and the animal that is hunted is very special, and I learned that from my friend who was a man from Taos Pueblo.”

BEFORE I CAME HERE I WAS A HUNTER, BUT THAT WAS LONG AGO. Still, it was in the pursuit of the hunt that I came face to face with my destiny. This is my story.

We called ourselves a tribe and we spent our time hunting and fishing along the river. For young boys that was a great adventure. Each morning I stole away from my father’s home to meet my fellow hunters by the river. My father was a farmer who planted corn on the hills bordering the river. He was a good man. He kept the ritual of the seasons, marked the path of the sun and the moon across the sky, and he prayed each day that the order of things not be disturbed.

He did his duty and tried to teach me about the rhythm in the weather and the seasons, but a wild urge in my blood drove me from him. I went willingly to join the tribe along the river. The call of the hunt was exciting, and daily the slaughter of the animals with the smell of blood drove us deeper and deeper into the dark river. I became a member of the tribe, and I forgot the fields of my father. We hunted birds with our crude weapons and battered to death stray raccoons and rabbits. Then we skinned the animals and filled the air with the smoke of roasting meat. The tribe was pleased with me and welcomed me as a hunter. They prepared for my initiation.

I, Salomon, tell you this so that you may know the meaning of life and death. How well I know it now, how clear are the events of the day I killed the giant river turtle. Since that day I have been a storyteller, forced by the order of my destiny to reveal my story. I speak to tell you how the killing became a horror.

The silence of the river was heavier than usual that day. The heat stuck to our sweating skin like a sticky syrup and the insects sucked our blood. Our half-naked bodies moved like shadows in the brush. Those ahead and behind me whispered from time to time, complaining that we were lost and suggesting that we turn back. I said nothing, it was the day of my initiation, I could not speak. There had been a fight at camp the night before and the bad feelings still lingered. But we hunted anyway, there was nothing else to do. We were compelled to hunt in the dark shadows of the river. Some days the spirit for the hunt was not good, fellow hunters quarreled over small things, and still we had to start early at daybreak to begin the long day’s journey which would not bring us out until sunset.

In the branches above us the bird cries were sharp and frightful. More than once the leader lifted his arm and the line froze, ready for action. The humid air was tense. Somewhere to my left I heard the river murmur as it swept south, and for the fi...