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

Border Expat

Expat: A person who lives outside their native country.

Border Expat: A person who lives in a zone between countries that feels like another country yet is their own.

                                          Photo: Meredith Linsky

No stranger to expatriation, I was born in Mexico City to Gringo parents who were living in Chiapas, near the border of Guatemala. By my early twenties  I had lived, worked, studied or spent significant time in Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia, Switzerland, Spain, Costa Rica and Peru. Yet somehow I landed in Texas. The Rio Grande Valley,Texas. Brownsville to be exact. "On the Border, by the Sea" as the Brownsville Visitor and Convention Bureau likes to advertise, hoping somehow to erase the daily bad press about drug wars, kidnappings, poverty, teen pregnancy, obesity, dengue fever and hurricanes.

I am very much at home on the border, having lived here now for 20 years, longer than I have lived anywhere else. I love the biculturalism, the warm humidity and wildlife, the beach, and being able to walk to Mexico from my office, which is a block from the Rio Grande. I love the unique oddities that make this place special--and quirky. Like elote trucks with speakers blaring Christmas carols in the summer, raspa stands, tortillerias, ropa usada housed in crumbling historic buildings, resacas, wrinkled men riding 3 wheeled bikes strapped with rakes and shovels, Charro Days, hierberias, curanderas,  parteras, and quinceneras. Some of these things are not unique to this region at all, but the way they play out here is always a little "Valley" as they say. That is, different than in, say, LA where there are also many influences from Mexico, yet there is still much cultural segregation. I know this you see, because I mostly grew up in Southern California. To really mix things up, the aspects of culture here that are not influenced by Mexico, are totally Texas. Which is, according to the State motto, and my personal experience, "A Whole Other Country" in itself.

I met my husband here, had my babies here, bought my first home here--yet I will never really be from here. I know my offspring feel at home, yet they are daily aware of their "differentness". They are Third Culture Kids in a way. Having endured hundreds of curious hands running through their blonde hair and comments about their "colored" eyes, "hey white boy!",they are often cornered by local abuelas trying to fatten up their skinny, white bodies with pozole, champurrado and homemade flour tortillas. At home they hear their parents rant against Texans worship of football and guns, and then go to school and speak Spanglish with their Mexican, football playing, hunting rifle carrying friends.

As for me, I will always be a Border Expat, because, as is true of many provincial places in the world, unless your family has lived here at least a few generations, you are forever an outsider. But not in a bad way really. Anyone who has ever been around Mexicanos knows you are welcome, at the table, in the kitchen, on the porch, on the fishing boat and at the carne asada, even if you are a stranger, and especially if you like Micheladas. It's actually harder to break in with the few native Anglos and wealthy Mexicanos, whose families have ruled the roost for generations by getting rich off of inherited ranch land and by exploiting hardworking Mexican labor.

When I arrived in the dusty, blistering heat of Harlingen, Texas that August day back in 1991, I planned to stay for exactly one year. I'm not sure I even knew where I was on the map and I most certainly never intended to live in Texas. I was a young, idealistic twenty-something volunteer coming to "help" the thousands of Central American refugees camped out on the border to escape wars the U.S. created in their home countries. I left for a few years, came back, one thing led to another and here I still am, living, learning and thriving each day, finding my place in this curious culture. An out of town guest recently suggested that I should write about the uniqueness of the Valley. When I asked what she meant by unique, she replied, "Are you kidding? We're in the United States yet a war rages literally blocks away from tranquil downtown Brownsville, tropical birds converge on your yard everyday, your grocery stores have taquerias and sell gorditas and people have the border wall in their backyards. Bombs, grenades and burning sugar cane fields fill the air with smoke and everyone always starts conversations in Spanish. People live without plumbing, roads, adequate shelter, literacy, jobs, or healthcare literally down the street from upscale country club neighborhoods with opulent mansions." I guess she is right. For a "first world country", the dichotomies around here are huge; poverty juxtaposed with great wealth, flowing now more than ever from Mexico as violence drives people with money to resettle here on this side of the border.

So this is my home and it is truly an imperfect but beautiful place. And writing about it makes me grin.