Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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Driving Distance

It has been many years since Lucia, my foster mother, died in a car accident. I was not surprised. Lucia was always on the road. Everywhere she wanted to go was driving distance.

When two of her girls worked in the polio wards at the hospital in Harlingen, she not only dropped them off in the evening but was there in her dressing gown early in the morning to pick them up.

More often than not we accompanied her on her errands, even going across the border in search of Mexican maids. She'd park the car on the Mexican side of the bridge at Brownsville and ask passers-by if they knew of anybody who wanted to come across to work. She usually found one or two girls who shared employment among relatives.

Sometimes we took long drives in the evening, just to get out of the house. Cruising along Rio Hondo Road one day, she pointed out at a cluster of very old trees in the distance and told me their story. All the sons in that family had been hanged one by one, she said, by the Texas Rangers long ago. The Rangers believed that the old couple had gold buried on the premises, but they only had a Spanish land grant. And their sons. A twisted history and dusty old trees remained.

The Montalvos were a very large and united family of Spanish descent. Lucia's father-in-law was still alive in those days, and she picked him up and brought him home for dinner every day.

Lucia's husband, Uncle Fred, and two of his brothers, Benito and Fausto, owned Montalvo's Lumber Yard. According to Lucia, the town of San Benito had been named after her brother-in-law Benito Montalvo. The official records name an Anglo as being the person San Benito was named after, but they are wrong. The records are not only racist but incorrect.

I thought that San Benito inhabitants displayed a particularly gentle tolerance towards their eccentrics.

One day when I was in the car with her, we saw a man in his forties walking down the street. He nodded at her and she called out a greeting. Then she said, "The compadre is a little odd. Now and then he has to dress in women's clothing. Then he gets it out of his system and he's well, until next time." Yet there he was at every Sunday Mass, austere and dignified, passing the collection basket with all the macho Mexicans!

Tolerance didn't touch small-town sensitivities regarding the priesthood and marriage. I had my eye on a very beautiful boy. He was popular with the boys as well as with the girls. He was just nice. He was drinking heavily at a Christmas dance. When he asked me to go outside with him so he could kiss me, I refused. He had already announced that he was leaving for the seminary soon. Besides, I never trusted the motives of very popular or extremely handsome boys.

Years later Lucia told me that he eventually became a priest. When he fell in love and decided to leave the priesthood, his family vehemently opposed this, so he killed himself.

The histories of the Valley communities were interrelated, as family members married into other families just miles up the road.

Football games provided good partner-scouting opportunities for the young people. I was once invited to go to a game in McAllen by Tommy Mendez, a neighbourhood boy who played in the school band. I was tempted to take Tommy up on his offer because I'd met his mother and she had known my mother and father before I was born. His mother, Minnie Mendez, offered to fill in details about my father, his parents, and family. She thought it was important I learn these facts I never heard from my mother, but she was a nurse, wasn't easily accessible, and we never made the time. As for going alone in a car with a boy, that just wasn't going to happen. So I missed the opportunity to walk into my father's house and see him surrounded by his family, my other relatives. He was killed in a car train crash a year later.

In those days homosexuals kept their sexuality secret, but according to Lucia there was a gay janitor at San Benito High School. The teenage boys were vicious to him, when they weren't seeking sexual favours. I remember him as a chubby, timid-looking man, in khaki shirt and trousers, always wearing a baseball cap.

Everone knew the location of the small red-light district in San Benito, and the hotel that catered to this business, but mostly the men went across the border to the Zona Roja. We girls suspected that the Anglos were disrespectful to us because they identified us with the poor girls they used in those brothels.

One day after dropping off a Mexican maid across the border, we took the wrong turn. A policeman suddenly appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of Lucia's car, waving his arms.

She stopped the car and he informed her that she had inadvertently driven into the forbidden area. He pointed out the danger in being caught driving around there. She panicked and offered him money to lead us out of there, which he did. We wide-eyed girls were impressed by his manners and exquisite Spanish, but Lucia was trembling and saying that we three young girls could have wound up in jail and heaven then knows what could have happened to us. Although Lucia playfully exploited our youth and femininity by sending us to pick up the meat from the butcher's and fresh sweet bread from the bakery, and to pay her numerous traffic fines, she was equally as protective and concerned about our welfare.

But she was a terrible driver.

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: January 26, 2006