Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

Read a story

The Mexican Girls

They weren't girls but that is how their employers referred to them, regardless of their age or dignity. They came to the Valley from Mexico in all shapes and sizes to work as maids. Their hopes were to earn enough money to help support their families in Mexico and, if lucky, to find an employer to help them acquire legal working documents.

Most came illegally, but were eagerly welcomed because they worked cheaper than locals and they were easier to control. The general complaint against them was that they were lazy or dirty or were thieves. This was the explanation given for searching their belongings so thoroughly on the rare occasions they were allowed to visit Mexican relatives.

Men who swam across the border to work in farms and cultivated the crops in the Valley faced a different kind of danger. As soon as I could read a newspaper, I translated articles from Harlingen's Valley Morning Star for my Mexican-born mother. Stories about the headless bodies of Mexican laborers found in the fields they had cultivated for a local Valley farmer. He refused to pay the wages he owed them and killed them instead. And the unidentified bodies of Mexican men found floating in the Rio Grande, victims of patos who drowned them, after having promised a safe river crossing, in order to steal their meager belongings. In those days there also appeared to be an endless stream of unfortunates who lay down to sleep with the railroad tracks for a pillow.

When I was a student at Vernon Gay Junior High School, one of my mother's tenants acquired a Mexican maid named Irene. This tenant and her two children lived in a one-bedroom flat.This meant that the maid slept on the floor. Irene was Tarahumara from the interior of Mexico; jungle country. She had lived in a thatched hut with an abusive husband and their son. Her suffering increased after her husband became involved with another woman.

One day she sent her son to stay with relatives. She waited for her husband in that dark hut, nursing a full bottle of mezcal, with a machete in front of her on the table. When he arrived, she attacked him and then passed out, as she'd never touched alcohol before.

Daylight revealed a bloody trail leading into the jungle. He was never found, and she didn't know if he had lived or died. Fearing the worst, she escaped into Texas to work and sent every penny home to relatives to raise and educate her son.

When Irene received a letter from him, she went to Mother, who read it to her. Irene's face became radiant as the mysterious writing translated into a message to sustain her. HE could read. And write. Her son had written this letter! And she might never see him again....

Later Mother heard that Irene and her employer had argued when Irene discovered she was a married man's mistress. The employer retaliated by sending her on an errand, then informed the Border Patrol, who picked her up as she walked home from the shop. They held Irene and other illegal immigrants for three days in detention near Port Isabel before returning her to the Mexican border. Her only food during that period was the package of corn tortillas she'd been sent to buy for her employer.

Another woman who employed a series of Mexican maids used to complain that they never kept their promise to return, and she couldn't understand why. Wages promised could be altered at will. The girl/woman woke up at sunrise and worked until after the supper dishes were done. She might be expected to fill her spare time by ironing or baby-sitting for a friend or relation, for no pay. Even picking cotton was required, as this family leased a parcel of land in Bryan, Texas. I knew of one maid only fourteen years old, in charge of the household, cooking, cleaning, and minding a baby.

Mexican girls and women were expected to work hard and for so little that just about anyone who wanted one could afford to hire a Mexican maid. Otherwise, the Mexicans and Anglos didn't mix socially; not in the mid-1950s! In the 40s, when I was a child, we had separate theatres, churches, schools, and lived in separate parts of town, as did the black community. In fact, we never spoke English among ourselves until and unless we had to.

Maids and their male counterparts socialised during weekends, particularly after the harvest. The men were extremely respectful of us locals (or perhaps we shared a mutual fear of contact) and kept to themselves. Small groups gathered together for safety, comfort, or both, and stood at street corners watching people go by. Evening breezes carried the soft musical inflections of their voices.

These laborers crowded into the shops to spend part of their wages on clothes and blankets. They were easily identifiable in neat clothing, straw sombreros, and sometimes huaraches. The men filled the Mexican movie theatres like El Azteca, and romance blossomed on and off the screen with the Mexican girls they'd met. They danced at "El Mesquiton," which consisted of a platform of raised wooden planks in the middle of dusty fields between Valley towns, strings of coloured lights overhead, the decor a scattering of dry mesquite and thorny huisache. Singing accompanied guitars and accordions until all hours. Voyeuristic employers sitting in cars and pickup trucks laughed at their charges, as they watched and waited to take them home.

I grew up and left the Valley. Mexican women and girls continued to flow across the border seeking work. And those who reurned to Mexico were replaced in the next tide.

As for Irene? She returned a week after her deportation, picked up her belongings, and said goodbye to my mother. We never saw or heard from her again.

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: November 14, 2005