Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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Our Women, Our Mothers

It was a time of promises. The world was going to be changed for the better, according to popular songs and media in the 1960s. Anti-war, civil rights, feminists, and other activists demonstrated fervently and enthusiastically on the TV screen while we bathed our babies, mended, and ironed. Dropping out in the runny acid colours of Flower Power was as foreign to most of us in the Valley as the customs of outer Mongolia.

As for feminism, Mexican culture has a matriarchal history. There IS a difference. My female role models were traditional, as seen by Mexican culture, not the feminine ideal constructed by Anglo movies and magazines. That culture was a thin veneer over a brown-skinned identity.

I grew up mainly on Mexican films. These portrayed Anglos as foolish, and therefore dangerous. Our films bled with images of high-caste landlords who robbed, tricked, and killed starving peasants over land ownership. More inspiring were the stories about the women who led and fought for land reform in the Mexican revolution. Lupe la chinaca's name resists oblivion. Her story, however, is lost to us because most women appear only as postscripts in historical texts.

We had victim movies too, like the beautiful Rosita Alvirez, murdered by Hipolito for behaving like a pispireta. Dolores del Rio portrayed a scar-faced beggar in Un Gran Hombre. Widowed and without family, she became a prostitute in order to support her son. He grew up and became a fine lawyer, never knowing his mother or anything about her. Beauty, wealth, and opportunity had vanished, but feminine resilience gave her worth.

One film that shines significantly because my mother loved it was No Basta Ser Madre. I saw the old grainy black-and-white film for myself when I was in my teens. The story revolved around a young upper-class girl who became inconveniently pregnant. Her family hid the fact, and gave the baby to a peasant couple. The rich socialite got on with her life. Years later, married and barren, she wanted the child back. The old peasants were intimidated by the wealthy family reclaiming the child who'd grown into a lovely young woman. The rich family had so much more to offer her, and she was of their blood, after all. In the final scene, the girl explained to her biological mother that her real parents were those who raised her and loved her and whom she loved.

"No basta ser madre," she said. The process of giving birth, by itself, did not make you a mother. This film told me that not all parents loved their children or deserved their love, and that "dropping out" from your responsibilities was not an option.

As a tertiary student, I read one of Octavio Paz's books in which he referred to the modern Mexican's use of profanity. He placed one word in historical context. In his analysis, La Malinche is the archetype of all Mexicans today; the raped. By extension, he implies, all Mexican men consider themselves raped because Malinche betrayed all males when she became Cortez's consort. One woman substitutes for a conquered Mexico.

According to history, Malinche was not Aztec. She belonged to a subjugated tribe, which might suggest that she already had grievances and questionable loyalties towards her Aztec overlords prior to the Spaniard's arrival. The Aztec empire had accumulated the deities of conquered nations within its own male-dominant cosmology. The feminine deities of conquered tribes were eliminated or given inferior status. The Aztecs, unlike more cultured tribes they'd conquered, were ruthless and militaristic, and would fit in easily alongside world leaders today. Blaming the symbolic emasculation of all males on one indigenous woman doesn't make sense.

After the Spanish invasion, language, ideology, race, and class differences were superimposed upon the survivors, and a concentrated effort was made to destroy all indigenous feminine symbolism. Anthropologists point out that the indigenous goddesses were not beautiful by European standards, but they were strong, comparable to Indian mother goddesses and the Roman Demeter. Male gods were not as multidimensional.

These cultural expressions couldn't translate into European aesthetics because they represented abstract concepts foreign and frightening to the invaders.

Growing up in small towns strung along the Mexican-Texas border, we were exposed from early childhood to pictures, carvings, and masks; the symbols of ancient deities, sold in mercados. Their stories and adornments were as familiar to us as the faces and lives of our friends.

Feminist arguments appeared to centre on sex and sexual equality, but we knew that in our ancestry feminine deities surpassed sexual roles. It was condescending and annoying to be told, by women who had little in common with us culturally or economically, that we needed to be equal to men, leave our homes and children, and have a career in order to be fulfilled! Mothers are and have been doing backbreaking work in fields, side by side with men and their children, raising crops for the wealthy, for longer than we can recall!

During the 1960s Mexican women were conspicuously rare in the nursing profession in the Valley. Up to then, they'd filled only the roles of housemaids or cleaners. Movies, particularly Westerns, portrayed Mexican women only as barflies. As teenagers we knew that Anglos thought all Mexican girls were easy.

The media today has been slow to catch up in this regard. TV serials shown overseas still portray Mexican-American women only in menial roles or as sexpots. And where are the Mexican-American movie heroes?

I entered nursing school. One day an instructor from Brownsville's Mercy Hospital addressed us, urging us to form a union. Afterwards our instructor at the Valley Baptist School of Nursing advised us against this, reminding us that "Texans are mavericks." Coincidentally, the union-oriented instructor was replaced.

I became a nurse to support my children.

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