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My Grandmother's Bones
My mother's mother's name was Juanita Lopez. She was Mexican.
Juanita was small, roundly shaped and of "aperlada" complexion. She was feisty and a great mimic.
"You're like her," Mother flung as an accusation. Her voice implied that she didn't like her mother very much, though she
never said so outright.
Juanita's "bad" nature was attributed to a black hair said to grow in her heart, which also lay sideways, not upright like
everyone else's.
Juanita was married to Ramon Castellanos. They lived next door to some of my grandfather's cousins, well-known assassins.
The cousins killed for pleasure or for pay; same difference to them.
One day when Juanita was complaining about Ramon's womanising, she mimicked the tremulous voice of his lover, who had been
passing by their home singing a song aimed for Ramon's ears: "Cuando te vas para Tejas--Cuando te vas y me dejas--Dejame tus chanclas viejas--pa' acordarme de ti…."
My taciturn grandfather responded with "Caya, Mujer," and went outdoors to call his cousin to the fence, where over a cigarette
he asked him for advice on how to handle this woman.
"Well, there are two things you can do, Primo," he drawled. "You can leave her or kill her, but if I were you, I'd kill her."
Juanita was terrified, and she confided to my mother that afterwards she always treated these relations with the utmost deference
and respect whenever they came into her home.
Mother was the oldest daughter in the family. Her brothers were Ramon, Refujio, Federico, and Salvador. A younger sister was
mistakenly named Delia by the godfather who forgot the correct name when she was baptised, but she was known as Licha, for
Alicia, her intended name.
My grandmother Juanita died before I was born.
When I was around six years old and Mother was pregnant again, she was frightened out of a troubled sleep. Later she explained
that she had felt and seen her mother's ghost seated over her heart.
My great-grandmother Ignacia Magallon, a traditional healer, had been at ease with the spirits, but my mother feared and rejected
this part of our culture. When she left Mexico and went to work in Texas, she consciously discarded any identification with
all things Mexican.
The longer she lived in Texas the more she cultivated Anglo prejudices against Mexicans to the extent that she divested her
home of any traditional Mexican artifacts, including a beautifully woven blanket from Oaxaca, a gift from her father. Mother
wanted to fit in, to become an American more than anything. When she had children, she wanted her children to identify only
with America.
All her life my mother kept a great emotional distance from most of her family and held bitter grudges against them. According
to her, they had been brutal and abusive towards her and towards their mother. She recognised only one brother, a successful
businessman who didn't fit the negative Mexican stereotype, towards the end of her life, but resisted intimacy with him even
then.
Mother proudly told me that once, while visiting her brother, she sat beside Aunt Licha, whom she hadn't seen in years, and
for the four hours she was there neither spoke to the other.
She didn't speak to or about my father, either, so I was left with little or no family to identify with or to help me find
my place on our family tree.
When I was a student at Gay Junior High, our speech teacher asked our class to make an impromptu speech about Thanksgiving
Day.
Easy, I thought. All school children had been brought up on this story and knew it by heart.
I began my speech about our Pilgrim forefathers, when my teacher interrupted, saying, "What do you mean, YOUR Pilgrim forefathers?
Don't you know who your forefathers were? Yours did not come over on the Mayflower!"
I was stunned and felt very foolish. Of course my forefathers had not come over from England; I knew that! What was missing
in my education was a cultural historical perspective I could own and relate to.
In spite of my mother's embrace of all things American, dressing and adopting American mannerisms and language didn't make
me feel as if I was an American. That never changed.
Maybe the ambience that permeates your birthplace--architecture, language, and music--provide an infusion inhaled in infancy
that imprints itself upon you in some way we can't logically explain.
Since I've left Texas and traveled overseas I can appreciate other races and enjoy living among people of diverse cultures,
but they are not my own and I don't desire to belong to any other. After all these years, I still seek out Mexican names at
the end of an American-made film. I look for compositions engraved in other memories. The planes and curves that frame a face,
that shape a head.
In the past, Mexicans kept the skulls of their dead in ossuaries. They took the skulls of their loved ones home to honour
the ancestors on the Day of the Dead; others displayed these skulls in their local churches with inscriptions requesting acknowledgement
of their dead, and prayers for them. They had a special place in the home. Some families sought guidance from their oracular
ancestral skulls.
The bones of our dead recorded each person's place and significance to the Tree of Life, to ancestral migrations, culture,
and history.
My mother was correct; I never was her daughter as much as I was Juanita's descendant. I am Mexican because my mother recognised
her mother, Juanita, in me, much to her dislike!
My grandmother's bones mingled with the earth in Mexico after her death, but her bones also live in me!
Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published:
July 03,
2006
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