Journey to El Cielo

El Cielo means both sky and heaven.

  

The Boy Who Walks to the Sky (Copyright 2014)

By Lisa Mitchell-Bennett

He scoots to the edge of his chair at the desk that he shares with Manuela the girl who lives in the town of the small cement school that is painted green.

Maestra asks them to recite once more the number facts they have learned this week. He is anxious to leave, to be home in the clouds in the sky with his people. He wants the facts to finish soon so he can make his journey before the wet mist blocks the sun.

He bolts across the plaza like a puma, past the bandstand and the ancient ceiba tree. He stops at a store on the edge of town where his Tia works—the little store with the cot in the room in the back where he sleeps all week while he goes to school but it’s not the same—it’s not his home.

The road leaving town is lined with canvass-topped camiones and tourists who come from far away to see his mountains, to watch the trees with binoculars on their eyes searching for military macaws and azure crowned hummingbirds. A truck passes him on the road and the dust gets on his tongue and in his nose and eyes. He pulls out the bottle of limonada his Tia had shoved in his sack as he darted out of the store yelling “Hasta lunes!” The limonada washes his dry throat with tart lime and sweet sugar his Tia added after squeezing the limes from the tree behind the store.

The tourists smile and wave as the dust billows around the big tires that pass so close he has to step into the monte (brush) to avoid getting hit.

The rocky red ruts in the road are deep and hard from the rain that fell the week before. His sandals and toes are covered in red dust as he walks, mile after mile surrounded by a thick brush of thorny trees banana leaves and wild pineapple plants (bromelia pinguin).

With time the trees open up to a bed of amaryllis flowers and Christmas cactus. Ahead he spots a familiar large green plastic water jug on the side of the road. It is cut out and inside are carefully arranged dried flowers, a statue of Mother Mary and candles. He crosses himself and touches the shrine, remembering the souls departed including his Abuela Consuelo and his little primo Joaquin who died in the hospital in Ciudad Victoria last year.

Onward he walks to the grove of giant Montezuma cypress trees that remind him of ghosts with their shadowy branches like long fingers blowing in the wind.  Another hour passes and as the sky grows grayer he ascends into the clouds and mist that cool his head that was hot and wet with sweat from the steamy tropics below.

He reaches the half-way point home, a clearing of ancient rocks called “Elephants” for the shapes they resemble. He leans for a moment against the giant moss covered stone and opens his sack to eat cold pieces of gordita with pork rinds leftover from the lunch his Tia packed him for school. He feels small and alone and cold and so he walks on hoping to reach home before the cloudy mist descends to block the sun. A white crowned parrot lands on a branch across the road—his Abuelo would say this is a lucky sign.

His pace picks up remembering Abuelo’s stories of jaguars in the forest. A coyote howls and he feels a chill, knowing he is not alone after all with the breeze and the forest and the cloudy mist. Cyprus and oak trees give way to tall pines and the humid air is cooler than below. As he comes to the last turn in the road he sees the smoke from his mother’s kitchen where she cooks outside on a clay stove with lena and pine cones gathered by his little sister and brother from the forest behind their house.

He runs the last stretch of rocky path past his uncle’s braying burro and through the trees blanketed with ferns that his father gathers to sell to the man from Texas who comes in the truck to take them to florist shops en “el otro lado”.

Here at the top of the mountain in a clearing in the clouds in the sky he is home.

His mother doesn’t smile or say a word to greet him. She is always quiet but he knows she is happy because she brings him a warm bowl of asado de puerco and corn bread, his very favorite, to fill his empty tummy and she lets him sit in his papa’s chair by the fire to rest his dusty feet that are sore from his walk to his home in the sky.

   I have not been back to visit El Cielo for several years due to the cartel violence and unrest centered particularly in this region of Tamaulipas, Mexico. El Cielo is just a short 5 hour drive south of our home in Brownsville, Texas, about the same distance as driving to San Antonio--past Ciudad Victoria, Macaw Canyon, past the graffiti covered metal ball that marks the Tropic of Cancer and through winding hills blanketed with wild nochebuena (poinsettia), you reach a turn off to the small town of Gomez Farias. The cloud forest is just a few miles up the mountain, but because of the rugged road and steep shift in altitude, it is an isolated, unique and beautiful place now even more cut off in a region experiencing a relentless war. Thanks to years of effort by Mexican naturalists and advocates from Texas, 360,000 acres of it are somewhat protected from development and lumber exploitation by the El Cielo Biosphere Reserve, but locals often struggle to eke out a living causing a tension common in this type of setting.

     The last time I was there we drove up the bumpy, dusty road in the back of an open camion for hours to reach the cabins at Alta Cima, a cool pine forest that provided a lovely respite from our steamy gulf coast home in Brownsville. My children scampered through the misty cloud forest, climbed the giant rocks, explored the caves and gathered orchids that fell from the trees. A lovely family shared delicious meals with us, cooked on an outdoor fire at their home higher up the mountain in a very isolated area where they harvested the fern from the forest to sell to florists in the U.S. I remember passing a young boy walking down the road and stopping to pick him up. He explained that the only way for the kids living up the mountain to go to school was to walk the rugged road, hours and hours back and forth each weekend, and stay during the week in Gomez Farias where the closest school is located. He inspired me to write about one fictional boy’s reverse journey from town up the long, rutted, dusty road to his cloudy forest home, passing through the incredible biodiversity, geography and humanity that is El Cielo.

A whole country missing--The insidious war next door

When you've lived decades right on the border--I mean blocks away from an international crossing--you start to forget it's there at all. You forget the political and cultural differences that supposedly exist--forget the lines drawn and walls built by politicians a thousand miles away. Instead you see a river, a bridge and a neighboring city connected to your own, where friends and families of friends happen to live, just as if they might live in another neighborhood across town. Your children have friends who live on the other side of this border. They cross every day to come to school, and you send your kids to birthday parties and sleepovers at their houses in this other country. Some of your co-workers live there too and come across each day for work.You walk across this bridge for lunch or drinks after work because you like the tacos better or the live music in the bar or the cheap prices or memories from past outings. It is friendly and comfortable and familiar. You drive across "the bridge" to the pharmacy or dentist or a quincinera or a work meeting or to visit a friend's sick grandmother or to a celebration in the Plaza or to the market to buy avocados or a purse or pinata. You get your hair cut there. Sure you wait in a line coming back across the bridge and get questioned a bit by a U.S. customs agent, but when you are privileged with a U.S. passport, or have a Mexican passport and money enough to get a visa to cross back and forth whenever you please, you start to forget about the border at all. You forget it's another country and think of it as another neighborhood. It's that close. It's that familiar. It's part of your community, your people, your place, your home. Almost everyone you know has family living on both sides of this river.

So when suddenly part of your home is cut off--when war breaks out and you hear blasts and gun shots and grenades exploding. When your kids' friends post photos of soldiers and explosions outside their front door on Facebook, or people you know get kidnapped or go missing, you don't believe it. It feels surreal and you are in denial and defend the safety of this place across the river that is also your community. This country that was your birthplace and has been your work and travel destination for many, many years is so close but out of your reach. As the smoke plumes rise from across the river, less than a mile away from your own front door, you start to believe. When you are evacuated from your office to avoid bullets landing on your campus from across the river.When you plan your annual Thanksgiving road trip to camp beside pristine tropical aqua waterfalls just a day's drive south, everyone tells you not to go. You don't want to believe that the friendly roads you traveled year after year are now littered with dead bodies and threatening road blocks. You cancel your trip thinking it will be just this one time. Surely this will be over soon.

Time passes and you see more and more wealthy folks from across that river and beyond settling in your town. They huddle around laptops in groups at Starbucks whispering, pulling their money out of their home country and investing in businesses on this side of the river; reinventing themselves. They buy nice homes and send their kids to schools here and don't talk about the problems in public. Things seem to calm down, because you don't hear about the "detonaciones" anymore. But when you ask your co-workers and friends who live across they lower their voices and tell you not to go down that highway if you don't "have" to. You skip another trip, another year goes by. Bodies are discovered in mass graves, but nobody talks about it much. Just a quick mention on the evening news and life goes on.

"You can fly further south if you're missing Mexico. Just don't drive. Get on a plane and fly over the dangerous northern careteras (highways)!" friends tell you. Just fly over the troubles and suffering and fear and danger to safer tourist destinations like Cancun, San Miguel de Allende, Puerta Vallarta.

But you find yourself not wanting to forget those beautiful places and people that were always just a day drive away-such a part of your family life during holidays and anytime you had a weekend to spare: Real de Catorce, Tamasopo, El Cielo, La Pesca.  You can't bring yourself to fly over the friends who welcomed you into their homes year after year. Dona Luz who killed a chicken for delicious caldo on the wood stove of her thatched hut home after her husband rowed you in a lancha up the aqua blue Rio Tampaon to the roaring Tamul Falls. Lucio and Mayra who take your children on horses up to the mystic high desert Cero Quemado to see the Huichol Indians deliver religious offerings and then host you in their beautiful stone villa and share their home-cured prosciutto and pizza in their brick oven. Or the friendly ranch ladies who cook the crabs your young boys catch after releasing hundreds of sea turtles at dawn on the wild Tamaulipan coast.

Insidious is this war. Insidious like harmful but inticing and seductive. Insidious like having a gradual subtle and cumulative effect. The disappearing, erasing of a whole country that is right next door. But you have no right to complain for while the loss you feel is real, it pales in comparison to the loss of human life, income and the daily fear and pressure families living there face. As you stare through the bars of the border fence across the green Rio Grande, herons gently wading at water's edge, you are struck with the irony that thousands of longing immigrants have felt something similar but stronger as they stare across from the other side.

Tamul Falls

                                                                    Real de Catorce

Las Cascadas de Tamasopo

Dona Luz Kitchen

Sea Turtle Release Rancho Los Ebanos

Rio Tampaon

Final Help

It's always hot and windy. It's always 4:00 a.m. She knocks softly, but consistently. I incorporate the knocking into my dreams until I feel my husband sit up abruptly in bed and say "Someone's at the door-- probably Marta!" I hear her panicked voice. He talks with her for a moment, then calls to me knowing this is my territory—getting her through the anxiety attack—trying to intervene in the latest crisis. You might ask why we put up with these intrusions into our relatively “normal” lives. At first we didn't  really have a choice. She would come knocking at the door in such a panic, kids in tow, it would have been inhumane and irresponsible to shut the door. Also that is who I am. I get pulled in and wrapped up in vulnerable people’s lives. Not that I don’t complain about it later, but I am a huge sucker for vulnerability. I don’t deny or regret it. And I've lost nothing from it (except a few hours of sleep) and gained so much understanding about how some people’s lives are just so unfairly hard. I've gained gratitude and admiration.

I left off the last post with young Marta (and baby) working for a despotic old woman who verbally abuses and shames her.  Her pregnancy, remember,  followed her father sending her away from her rural home in Mexico  by selling her into domestic servitude in Texas at the age of 13 where she had endured sexual abuse  by her employer. At 15 she was seduced by an older, unbeknownst to Marta, married man who promised her papers and education but who subsequently dumped her when she was pregnant. When the baby was due and she was no longer able to work she traveled back across the river to Matamoros, Mexico where she gave birth to her baby and lived briefly with her sister in a shack in a shantytown. She then made her way with baby in tow, back across the Rio Bravo and landed a “job” cleaning and cooking for a bitter old woman.

What decisions would I have made in her place, I ask myself? If I were 15, illiterate, alone, undocumented and unloved, I don’t imagine I would have done anything better, and I may have done a lot worse to survive and care for myself and my baby.

Fast forward ten years. Marta is married to a U.S. citizen, an alcoholic Vietnam Vet. There is no hope of him helping her get the legal status she has a right to because he derives a sense of power by keeping her vulnerable and “illegal”. They have a son together, born in the U.S., as well as her daughter. Her husband has periods of rage that disrupt their lives followed by long absences when he goes off and lives with another woman in San Antonio. “When he is gone we have peace in our family,” says Marta. “The worst is when he comes home in the middle of the night drunk, shouting at us all to get out of bed and make him something to eat or worse , demands sex.”

His financial “support” is sporadic and inadequate. He rarely gives her any cash for food, but one time brought home a big screen TV. “I needed money for medicine more than a TV. But my son was thrilled.” He uses Marta and her daughter’s undocumented status against them, especially when he is drunk, which is most of the time. He often threatens to call the Migra and get them deported, saying he’ll keep their U.S. citizen son and Marta will never see him again. The terror of being separated from her child  creates constant fear in Marta. She ekes out a living cleaning houses and ironing. She lives day to day in the squalor of the tiny rented room her daughter likens to a chicken coop. She also suffers from clinical depression and anxiety, an illness common to many people I know—my co-worker, several friends, a family member. But they all have access to medication and counseling and still struggle to manage it. Marta’s illness has gone untreated for years and rears its ugliness in the wee hours of the morning when she comes to my door in a panic, fearing she is dying, can’t breathe, having not slept for days at a time. These are rational fears considering her situation. But she acts irrationally and needs medication. Months of being on a waiting list at a local indigent health clinic, and hours of sitting in the waiting room finally yields a month’s supply of medication. The medication helps a lot, but of course she doesn't qualify for any government assistance (she's "illegal"), has to pay out of pocket for the meds, often can’t so her condition is uncontrolled. Coming to our door is actually an act of reason and sanity because she knows her children will have some peace, and cool air-conditioning, if even for a couple of hours.

One early morning visit to our door wasn't the usual escaping her husband’s rage, nor was it a panic attack. She came with concern over her 8 year old son, who had literally lost 10 pounds in a matter of days. His clothes hung loosely, suddenly sizes too big, his shorts held up with a rope. “He is peeing and drinking water all of the time—all night long. Something is wrong with him, she cried!” I drove them to the emergency room where he was subsequently admitted to the hospital and deemed dangerously close to a diabetic coma. Of all the injustices, why would this poor woman have to deal with her child having Type 1 diabetes?

After a week in the hospital, he was released. She came to our door that evening with a bag full of medicine samples and syringes. Her son looked better, she looked worse.  There were pamphlets and instruction sheets and forms. She dumped them all on our dining room table and said “No entendi nada de lo que me dijo la enfermera!” (I didn't understand anything the nurse told me!). My husband and I with our multiple graduate degrees couldn't figure it out either. There were so many details about keeping air bubbles out of the syringe, how to measure the insulin, the timing of when he eats, what to do when his blood sugar drops too low, how to use the glucometer, the strips,  etc. It was so overwhelming to think she would have to manage this along with figuring out how to feed her children and dodge her husband’s abuse.

Subsequent battles with the school nurse and the teachers followed. None of them really wanted this child back in school— just another poor, below average student with an illiterate mom who now has to be closely monitored because he is diabetic. Marta has fought battles to get supplies and medicine and to travel to the only pediatric endocrinologist within a 300 mile radius-- a two hour bus ride on a bus that could be boarded at any time by Border Patrol agents asking for documents from a mom who has none.  So much drama--none of which could have really been avoided by Marta. I sincerely believe she handles it with more cool than I ever would.

Marta’s story is just one. Sadly there are many similar stories with common themes here in this “poorest metropolitan area in the nation”—an area often neglected by the powerful in a state more concerned with providing benefits to oil companies and corrupt politicians than caring for children or investing in the future.

“But this is a region wealthy in so many other ways”, a friend recently commented when I posted something about our status as the poorest community in the U.S. She is right. The semi-arid/semi-tropical climate create natural beauty and the geographic location on the border allows for a unique blend of cultures. Wild parrots flock and palm trees are silhouetted against brilliant sunsets; sunny, 80 degree skies abound in winter months. The easy blue waters of the Gulf await beach goers and dolphins. Cheap labor and land allow middle class families to live like colonial aristocracy. Despite the structural injustice and arguable racism that has prevented  State Legislators from approving basic funding for a public hospital or medical school in a region with over a million very unhealthy people; despite our disregard for vulnerable children and young adults trafficked into our community to work as maids and baby-sitters in our homes; despite the fact that thousands of our neighbors are dehumanized and deemed “illegal” due to their economic inability to cross a river with documents, among them some of our highest achieving high school students raised here yet denied the ability to go to college and work; despite many families living in squalor housing conditions, lacking basic services. I imagine it could be one of the best places to live, if I didn't know so many real people like Marta who suffer and struggle daily “beneath the palms”.

This is a true story. Names have been changed.

Doña Leonor

     Have you ever met someone who give you the chills in a good way? When they speak, their words and wisdom touch you deeply; profoundly. I have been privileged to know such a woman, and to know her well because over the years we have shared many a coffee, pan dulce and even copa de vino (wine) while she poured out her wisdom through the stories of her life. When she talks I slow down and engage in the lost art of listening and I am transported to her past. She entertains, inspires and shares crucial lessons — always initiating the story with a Mexican dicho (saying). A woman who has worked harder than most of us over her 85 years of life, she is usually compelled to keep busy while she chats, washing the dishes of whomever’s kitchen she may be visiting, folding clothes or sewing a square of quilt.
     Doña Leonor was my neighbor for 12 years. We shared a quiet West Brownsville street. She cared for my kids, brought me atole after my babies were born, sewed on Boy Scout patches, and showed me the joy and therapy of hanging laundry in the sun to dry. She delivered us fresh, homemade tortillas every Saturday morning and her chile rellenos are to die for! The patio of her little casita was kid central for the neighborhood — and is covered with plants in colorful macetas, many of which are the ancestors of the herbs, flowers and trees that now landscape my yard. She possesses a green thumb in the garden and a magic touch in the kitchen. She cares for all of the lonely, elderly women in the neighborhood, making sure they get a plate to eat, a cup of coffee and good conversation when they need it. Her spirit brightens a room and she is able to converse with people from all backgrounds, cultures and every socio-economic strata.She has influenced me at a profound level.
     Doña Leonor comes from humble beginnings, a small mountain village in Michoacan, Mexico, where her mother died when she was still a young teen and she was forced to care for her many siblings. She eventually made her way to the border and married a shrimper from Port Isabel. She lived in what was then called “Mexican Town,” later completely wiped out by Hurricane Beulah. Although I’m sure it was a humble place of poor worker shacks, she describes the lovely bay breeze blowing in through the back door and out the front, keeping she and her seven kids cool without an air conditioner or fan, even in the hottest months of summer. While her husband was gone shrimping, Doña Leonor worked many jobs to make ends meet, mostly at night so she could leave the kids sleeping with one of their older siblings. She washed dishes and cooked for small restaurants and has spent much of her subsequent life working in kitchens, ironing, sewing and providing childcare.
Unfortunately the Shrimper drank a lot and was abusive to Leonor, so she planned her escape, not being one to stick around in an unhealthy situation. Her eldest son graduated from high school and had moved to Houston to work, so she packed up the kids and journeyed north with his support. Her first years in a Houston tenement were difficult — a single mom in a “foreign” city and she didn’t speak English (she has since learned it and become a U.S. citizen). She worked long hours for little pay. But her kids grew up and she eventually remarried Rafael, who passed away only a few years ago. She has not been without heartache and struggle — the loss of a daughter, daughter-in-law and sister to cancer, the long-term illness of another daughter and her greatest “Calvario” (cross to bear) as she calls it — caring for her husband Rafa for years after his multiple strokes disabled him physically and mentally.
     So what inspires me most about Doña Leonor? Her attitude toward life! While she accepts where she is and what she has been given, she doesn’t get stuck in it and she is able to move forward. For a person with only a few years of schooling, she reads and expands her world more than many college graduates I know, and is always learning and sharing new facts and skills. She intuitively knows that being with people and serving others gives her life purpose and keeps her active. When I ask her what motivates her to be the caretaker of all the elderly in her neighborhood, she answers: “I was robbed the privilege of caring for my own parents into old age, as they died so young. When I make a caldo for a neighbor, I imagine I am serving it to my own mother. I wouldn’t want my family members to be alone so why should I let it happen to anyone else?”
    I aspire to live more like Doña Leonor. Well into her eighties, she exudes health and energy, eats mostly fresh, healthy food, but is not so rigid that she can’t enjoy a good tamale. She does, however, walk everywhere and makes a point to carry groceries, water and anything that allows her some weight-bearing exercise as she has the beginnings of osteoporosis and some arthritis. She shovels and sweeps and moves as much as possible. And she eats fruits and vegetables in season and grows her own herbs, chiles and some citrus. She also does what the doctor tells her to do, is willing to change her habits, loves to learn new things, surrounds herself with people and has a positive attitude toward life — all factors proven related to improving and maintaining your health.
     So I end with some of Leonor’s favorite dichos, or sayings that sum up her disposition and ring through my brain daily, pleasantly reminding me of one of my heroes:

• Hay más tiempo que vida: Life is short; seize the moment. But don’t take things too seriously because there is a bigger picture.
• Más vale atole con risas, que chocolate con lágrimas:   Atole with laughter is preferable to cocoa with tears. Atole is a hot drink made out of ground maize. It’s very tasty in spite of being made out of ingredients that are cheap and easily accessible (in Mexico). Cocoa would be more of a luxury. Better to live a humble life in which there is love than a fancy life in which there are lamentations.
• A nuevos tiempos, nuevas costumbres: In changing times, new habits. Adapt your ways to life’s ever changing circumstances. Travel light along the road of life, only clinging to customs and practices which have good reason for existence.
•  El comer y el rascar, todo es empezar:  In matters of eating and scratching, it´s all a question of getting started. Tasks can seem overwhelming but the key is just to dive in and begin.
• Panza llena; corazón contento: Speaks for itself. A full belly makes a happy heart. “But not to excess,” according to Doña Leonor!

The Help (Part 2)

     I met her then 10-year-old daughter at the door of Marta’s tiny one room apartment at the top of a rickety iron staircase down a long tilting public hallway strewn with beer cans. Two little boys in chones (underwear) shot water guns at me as I walked by, yelling “pow, pow”. It was an outdoor balcony hallway and I honestly felt like it would collapse if I stepped too far to the downward tilting side. Their tiny one room apartment at the end of the hall was dark and stifling hot with no windows. It smelled like animal urine and was furnished with an old mattress, a beach chair, folding table and a tiny TV. Her daughter was holding a mangy cat and peered through the cracked open door. “Mi mama esta dormida.” (My mom is asleep).
     It was 3:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon and I was worried I hadn’t seen Marta all week. She had been coming by my house for a few weeks now, almost every day, asking for work and favors. She cleaned my house a couple of times, and watched the boys for a few minutes while I ran to the store. The last time I had seen her at my door she was burning up with a fever, really sick. I gave her some juice, Tylenol and a ride home since she was carrying a bag of groceries and her toddler son. That’s how I learned she lived just a few blocks away, in a crumbling, should be condemned apartment tenement aptly named “Villa Francesa” (French Villa), right next to our favorite Raspa stand. I didn’t go in with her that day, but asked her about her apartment as we unloaded her son from the car.“Hay tantas ratas, y cucarachas. A veces se caen del techo cuando estamos dormidos. Pero no me quejo porque no me han subido la renta. ” (There are so many rats and cockroaches, sometimes they fall from the ceiling while we are sleeping. But I don’t complain because they haven’t raised the rent). “It doesn’t have any windows because it used to be a storage room. I do wish it had a window. My daughter says she feels like we are ‘gallinas in a gallinero’ (hens in a hen house)."  

     Marta’s daughter, Emilia, was the thinnest, most demur 10 year old I had seen. I would have guessed she was more like 7. She was shy, and still is, but after some months I got to know her better and she would come ask for help on school work or to use our computer. She did pretty well in school, and was a serious student. Amazingly well considering her mother was illiterate and she had never had any books at home.  Now, years later and 20, she should be in college, but is working at a restaurant, part-time. Her dream was always to be a teacher, but luck would have it she was born in Mexico so, although she doesn’t remember anything about her birth country, having come to the U.S. at the age of one, she is not eligible to receive higher education since she is "illegal". Athough she graduated with decent grades from high school in Brownsville, she is one of many disenfranchised young people who are without a country— undocumented, unwanted. By no choice of her own, her mother returned to Mexico to have her, and then brought her without papers back to this side of the border where she was raised to become an American—without any of the rights or freedoms shared by the rest of us.

     “How did Emilia come to be born in Mexico?” I asked Marta one day several months later. After all, you were only 13 when you came across (the river)? Were you back in Mexico when you had her?"

     “I was 15, pregnant and had nowhere to go. I had been in the U.S. for three years. I knew I couldn’t go home, in such a shameful state, and anyhow, I had stopped communication with my parents since my dad kept sending the creepy coyote to collect my pay. I left the house I was working at in Harlingen after the first year, after los problemas. So my dad didn’t know where I was and I really didn’t care. A friend of mine helped me find another house to work at in Brownsville. I was there for a couple of years, when  I met Rafael, through a neighbor girl who worked for another Senora down the street. He was a friend of the family she worked for, and he had seen me sweeping the front porch. He told my friend (the maid) he wanted to know my name, and then he started sending me notes, which I couldn't read but the neighbor girl read to me. He was really handsome and drove a nice car. He was older, Mexicano, but seemed rich like the gringos, and I was flattered. He would come to take me to the movies and to a restaurant on Sunday afternoons, my only day off. I had no idea he was married since I never saw him with a woman and he never spoke of her. I didn’t find that out until I was already pregnant and she came pounding on the door of the house where I worked, calling me a ‘puta’ (whore) and other bad words I had never heard. I was so innocent. It all happened so fast. He was the first man who treated me kindly, tenderly. He told me I was pretty and that we would get married and I could have my own papers and I wouldn’t ever have to work as a maid again—that he would take care of me. Looking back I was so ignorant. I was just a girl from the rancho. I really believed him.”

     According to Marta, the lady she worked for was nice and  let her stay until she was so pregnant she couldn’t work much. "I decided to go to Matamoros (Mexico), where one of my sisters was now living, to have the baby. I stayed with her and her boyfriend. On a sticky hot July afternoon I walked two miles to the Hospital Pumarejo, the poor people’s hospital, to have Emilia. She was so small—too small—and I was so young and didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like a burden to my sister and her boyfriend who were barely surviving themselves and had to share their tin roof shack and outhouse with me and my new baby. So when Emilia was old enough to carry across the Rio, I wrapped her tightly on my back in a reboso, and stole away with a plastic bag filled with my belongings to a well known crossing point north of the old Brownsville-Matamoros bridge. That night was so scary since this time I didn’t have the strong arms of the coyote man to guide me across the current of the river. At one point I lost my footing and thought we would both go under. But God protected us and so I promised Him I would go to Mass every week.   On the bank of the river I wrung out my wet skirt and took my shoes out of the plastic bag and put them on my soaking, muddy feet. I walked along the dirt levee road, trying to avoid the migra by staying in the monte (brush). Several times I saw the glowing eyes of wild animals staring at me through the night, but Emilia started crying and they disappeared. Eventually she fell asleep on my back as I walked all the way under the highway and to the Senora’s house. I sat in her backyard until dawn, shivering and tired, holding Emilia close to keep her warm. I finally got up the courage to knock on the door. She looked shocked to see me, and kind of annoyed, but she let me in and let me fix some breakfast. I made avena (oatmeal) and spooned it into Emilias tiny mouth and we both fell asleep on the Senora’s couch. When I woke I heard her on the phone, talking about me and the baby. She was pleading with someone to take me, telling them I would work for room and board. Finally, after several calls, she said, “Ya está. Te encontre trabajo pero tienes que portarte bien! (It’s done. I found you work but you have to behave). This friend of mine is doing you a big favor, to take in you and your daughter. Try to keep  her quiet and do as much work as you can while the baby sleeps. This lady is old but it won’t be too bad because there are no kids to take care of.”

        A few hours later a big old Cadillac sedan pulled up in front of the house. When I first saw her I couldn’t help but stare at her icy grey eyes. They looked cold and I felt a chill when she looked back into my eyes.     “Don’t just stand there staring! Get your things and your baby, I don’t have all day! I can’t believe I’m taking in orphans now. God knows I have done enough for Him already. I hope you don’t think you’re on some kind of vacation!”  Marta said it never got better. For months she endured the old lady’s belittling and harsh words, usually culminating in her final condemnation of Marta’s state of single-motherhood. “I don’t know why you girls come here thinking you can just have a baby and get papers from a man. And then get all these benefits from the government. “I didn’t understand what she meant. I had never received anything from the government, of any country, other than some free medicine and a night at the hospital in Matamoros, Mexico when I had Emilia. I suppose my parents received their plot of land on the ejido from the government, and I went to school a couple of years. But I really couldn’t understand most of what she said to me. She was always rambling on and on and her accent was different. She said she spoke the real Spanish…what was it called…Castellano? She also talked badly about Mexicans, especially Mexicans who came and lived in the U.S. , but she was from Mexico, so I didn’t understand. I just tried to do what she said, keep my baby quiet and say “Si Senora”. I also learned not to look into her eyes. I felt like she was giving me the evil eye. She treated me better when I looked down at the floor. When the rare visitor would come to the house she would call me her ‘servienta’.” 

      Marta told me the best part of living with the Viejita was going to Mass. “She made me go, which was good because I had made that promise to God back at the river. I liked how it was peaceful in the old church, and I got to sit on my own in the closed in crying room. Even if Emilia was fussy, it felt like our time alone and away. I admit I didn’t really listen to the homily, I just sat quietly and watched my baby crawl across the floor or play with another toddler in the crying room. Sometimes I thought about my life back on the ejido, and all the chickens and geese that always wandered around our dusty rancho. It seemed a million miles away, and for all intent and purposes it was, because I knew I could never go back, and never make it  across the Rio Bravo again. I was a mama now and had two mouths to feed.”

Marta won’t talk much about the troubles she had at that first house where she worked as a 13 year old country girl, just arrived in the U.S. But it definitely had something to do with the man of the house, I suspect molesting her or even raping her by the way she refers to the times. Pain washes across her face when she speaks of them.

     “La senora at that first house was nice to me until her husband started flirting with me. I felt so dirty and bad and I tried so hard not to be alone with him, or even look at him. I lost my innocence at that house, and I knew I would never be a child again. All of my mom’s warnings about staying a Virgin were useless now. I felt my life spinning out of control. Once I moved to Brownsville and worked with a couple of  families, I was stable for a few years. That is until I met Rafael and shortly after became pregnant. Here I was, una servienta, ilegal, madre soltera con una hija bastarda,  ignorante (a servant, illegal, single mom with a bastard child, ignorant)”.

     I didn’t feel that way about Marta at all. I was amazed at how she had survived and thought she was doing a pretty good job of raising her kids. Especially given the worse problems she would soon reveal to me.

The Help (Part I)

I first met her at my door on a blistering hot Easter Sunday afternoon. She always has a knack for showing up on holidays; Christmas morning, Thanksgiving. She seems to be unaware of any dates or time of day that might be inappropriate for interruption.  She doesn’t mean any harm, because after all, when you are desperate for food, medication or just struggling to survive, holidays are a luxury.  Also, when you never learned to read, calendars are irrelevant.

She stood sweating in the heat holding her toddler son’s hand.  I asked her what I could do for her. She never looked at me, her eyes staring at the ground. “Senora,  ¿Usted no  necesita ayuda en la casa? Con la limpieza, los ninos?” Here she nodded in the direction of my 2 year old son, hanging off my hip, and then down at my 4 year old who was buzzing around like an airplane, colorful confetti from the cascarones (confetti eggs) still stuck in his hair . She explained that the neighbor told her the White family surely needed help.  We often had folks come to our door asking for money and/or work. Neighbors borrowed gas money, wrinkled men on bicycles offered to cut our grass with a machete;  cheerful ladies sold us empanadas. But this was different. She seemed defeated.

I didn’t have a housekeeper, never had. Sure, I paid my friend’s mother a fair wage to babysit my boys while I worked, and for that I was uber-grateful. But first we were friends, and then she cared for my kids.  Someone just to clean the house was way too bourgeois for me. My parents had had house help in Mexico of course, because everyone did. But growing up in California only really rich people had housekeepers so my working mom (and my sister and I) did all the housework.  Here in Brownsville, where labor is cheap and there is always a supply of undocumented folks in need of work, almost every “middle class” person I know has a housekeeper. Many of my friends have live-in full-time help from the time they have their babies, whether they work outside of the home or not. So I’m not sure why I had been so reluctant.  

In fact, my parents had a 13 year old Indian girl living with them in Chiapas, Mexico. She watched my sister  and helped around the house.  "She came from a very poor village where she was only a burden to her parents and at least with us she had plenty of food and a nice place to live.” But still, with childish honesty I was always concerned. In my parents defense, they sent her to school, but I also remember hearing  how little work she did around the house. I wonder how much help my 13 year old would be if we sent him away to live in a strange city with people he didn't know. But I digress.

Marta* and her young son stood at my door asking, no begging, for work. We were getting ready to go to the beach for an Easter picnic, and I really didn’t want to deal with making a commitment, so I handed her some money and said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning?”

“Si Senora.”   She grabbed the money and turned and continued down the street. No “thank you”, not even a smile. I admit it sort of irked me. She should be grateful for my generosity, right?

Marta was a stranger first. Then she was a “housekeeper”, and now she is my friend. I think. The relationship between the people who employ house help, and the women who care for our babies, fold our underwear and clean our bathrooms, is often an awkward dance between powerful and powerless, dependent and patron characterized by intimacy, distrust and obligation.

First she depended on me—to give her work, cash, drive her son to the doctor, fill out forms she couldn’t read, intervene when her abusive drunk husband threatened her.  But over the years I’ve come to depend on her—to mop my floors, fold my laundry and make my kids sopita for lunch.

Crisis seems to follow Marta. But isn’t that how it is when you live in the margins, undocumented, illiterate, unwanted, abused, barely surviving? Over the years Marta has slowly shared bits and pieces of her story which has made me respect her journey all the more.

Born on a dusty ejido outside of the town of Rio Verde in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Marta was the second oldest of 10 kids—the first daughter. They harvested mangos and corn on their land and lived in a two room shack with palm thatched roof, outdoor cook stove and an outhouse. She describes her father as enojado (angry), her mother as very religious. She remembers most of her conversations with her mother being about how she needed to remain a pure virgin. “She never explained what a virgin was. It was always a mystery yet I knew I had to strive to remain in this illusive condition. Of course we never talked about sex or our bodies or even menstruation. When I started my period, I thought I was dying. I had seen a lot of animals being butchered, and a couple of people die, mostly in car accidents along the highway that ran a few miles down a dirt road from our rancho. Every death I had seen involved a lot of bleeding, so I assumed I was dying as well. I ran crying to my mama about the blood and she shushed me and led me behind the house where she told me I was now a woman and needed to wrap my chest with a tight cloth so boys wouldn’t see my developing breasts. She also warned me that if I ever lost my virginity she would kick me out of the house. I asked her again what the word  meant and she said, ‘Only dirty girls want to talk about this stuff. Just stay away from boys and don’t let them touch you!’  I went away in shame, knowing that I had already lost the battle, no longer a virgin. After all, just the month before I had let Jose Angel, a boy from the ejido, hold my hand as we walked the lunches out to our fathers working in the fields.” 

According to Marta, that was the beginning her of habit of self-loathing that she continues to this day. It wasn’t until she was working as a maid in a house in Harlingen, Texas a year later that she learned the hard way the meanings of the words virginity, sex and rape.

Marta spent her childhood helping her mother make tortillas, get water, hand wash clothes, gather the lena (wood for their cook stove) and take lunch out to her father in the fields. She did have some free time in the early afternoon to wander the dusty ranch and play with the other kids on the ejido, picking fruit from the trees and letting the sweet mango juice drip down their arms as they sat in the shade. She went to school for a couple of years until the last two babies were born and her father told her to stay home and help her mother, who was very ill after the birth of the twins. “I never learned much at school because we were all crammed into one room, ages 6 to 12, with a teacher who mostly made us repeat and memorize long arithmetic problems. She never really got around to teaching us to read.

Shortly after Marta “became a woman”, her father sent her away to work en el otro lado (the other side of the Rio Grande). He arranged everything, including the coyote (trafficker) whose breath smelled of Tequila and who fondled her in the back of the truck on the way to the border. He was also the one who showed up at the house where she worked as a maid to collect her earnings--$30 every week. Some of the money, she learned later, went to her father but most was kept by the coyote  to pay off her debt of transport and river crossing.

So here she was, 13 years old and already working as a live in “servienta”. She slept on a mattress on the floor of the family’s 6 month old baby’s room and tried to learn how to clean and cook very different food in a kitchen with equipment she’d never seen. She was often scolded for not using the dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, both of which scared her with their loud noises. As the eldest daughter of ten kids, she had had lots of experience watching young children back at home, and there were only two in this household. But the five year old boy was a terror and seemed out to destroy the young Marta. He would yell at her, bite her and order her around. He found ways to purposely get her in trouble. And then there was the father. That is another story, and perhaps the beginning of Marta’s real troubles.

*Her name has been changed. 

Cuetes*

I know all boys love firecrackers. But really, my boys use them in ways I could never have imagined, having grown up in a family of girls. I'm not sure if they developed their close relationship to firecrackers because we live here on the border where they are so commonly used to express feelings of "celebration" or simply because it is in their genes and they have been fortunate to land in this culture that encourages their innate desire to shoot off loud little red sticks. In fact explosions are a constant theme in the Mitchell-Bennett back yard, but I digress. That is fodder for another post.

When we lived in West Brownsville, a center of  firecracker-shooting universe, my boys spent hours roving the neighborhood barefoot and shirtless looking for "unexploded leftovers" the day after celebrations. 16 de Septiembre, Halloween/Dia de los Muertos, Christmas, New Years, Easter, Fourth of July, etc. all convert the quiet Hawthorne Street into a chaotic, smokey, war zone serenaded by blaring ranchera music. Adults drink and BBQ,  toddlers in diapers wander the streets aimlessly while packs of pre-pubesant boys huddle and disperse as firecrackers in cans, bottles, stuck into oranges, and taped together into dynamite size bundles explode everywhere. It is really great fun, yet if you landed in our neighborhood for the first time, unaware of the joy this kind of celebration brings, your reaction may be to call the police, child protective services, the army, the marines and an ambulence.

Both the police and the Migra (Border Patrol) frequent West Brownsville during firecracker off-season, really on a daily basis. Yet they stay away during these explosive nights, perhaps knowing that while deporting and arresting in this part of town is their job, even poor undocumented folks don't deserve to have such joy interrupted.

Now that we have moved to a more "upscale" neighborhood, we don't get to enjoy this all-out expression of boyness as frequently, yet my sons continue to find creative ways to bring that spirit to our country-club community, much to the chagrin of our neighbors. So today, no particular holiday, and not even a weekend, I was enjoying the convergence of tropical and shore birds in my backyard with a cup of cafe Bustelo while my daughter peacefully colored by my side. I spotted pink spoon bills, kiskadees, herons, ibis, pelicans, wild parrots and sea gulls. I was suddenly shaken from my tranquility by a series of gun shot sounding blasts. The birds took flight at once. It was quite spectacular as their wings blended in a blur of color in the sky. Birds gone, boys yelling "awesome", banana stuffed with five firecrackers--exploded on our driveway. Cuetes forever!

*firecrackers