Black Dove. Ana Castillo

mother’s México was the brutal urban reality of Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Children scamming and hustling, fire-eaters, hubcap stealers, Chiclet sellers, miniature accordion players with small, dirty hands stretched out before passersby for a coin, a piece of bread: “Please, señor, for my mother who is very sick.” This was the Mexico City of my family. This was the México from which my mother spared me.

      In that Mexico City in the 1930s, Mamá was a street urchin with one ragged dress—but not an orphan, not yet. Because of an unnamed skin disease that covered her whole tiny body with scabs, her head was shaved. At seven years old, or maybe eight, she scurried, quick and invisible as a Mayan messenger, through the throngs of that ancient metropolis in the area known as “La Villita,” where the goddess Guadalupe Tonantzin had made her four divine appearances and ordered el indio Juan Diego four times to tell the Catholic officials to build her a church. “Yes!” and off he went, sure-footed and trembling. Mamá, who was not Mamá but little then, bustled on her own mission toward the corner where her stepfather sold used paperbacks on the curb. At midday he ordered his main meal from a nearby restaurant and ate it out of stainless-steel carryout containers without leaving his place of business. The little girl would take the leftovers and dash them off to her mother, who was lying on a petate—in the one room the whole family shared in a vecindad overflowing with families like their own with all manner of maladies that accompany destitution. Her mother was dying.

      María de Jesús Rocha de Castro spent her days and nights in the dark, windowless room reading novels, used paperbacks provided by her new husband from Veracruz, seconds like the food he shared with her. She copied favorite passages and verses into a notebook, which I have inherited, not through the pages of a will but by my mother’s will: she carried the notebook, preserved in its faded newsprint cover, over decades of migration until, one day, it was handed over to me, the daughter who also liked to read, to write, to save things.

      María de Jesús named her second daughter after a fictional character, Florinda, but my mother was the eldest daughter. She was not named for romance like my tía Flora—aromatic and evocative—but from the Old Testament, Raquel, a name as impenetrable as the rock in her parents’ shared Guanajuatan family name, Rocha: Raquel Rocha Rocha. And quite a rock my mother was all the days of her life, Moses and Mount Sinai and God striking lightning all over the place, Raquel the Rock.

      One day, María de Jesús—the maternal grandmother whom I never knew but was told I am so much like—asked her eldest daughter to purchase a harmonica for her. Of course, it would be a cheap one that could be obtained from a street vendor not unlike her bookselling husband. This the child did, and brought it to her mother’s deathbed, a straw mat on a stone floor. And when the mother felt well enough, she produced music out of the little instrument, in the dark of that one room in Mexico City, the city where she had gone with her parents and two eldest children with the hope of getting good medical care that could rarely be found in those days outside the capital.

      Instead, María stood in line outside a dispensary. Dispensaries were medical clinic substitutes, equipped to offer little more than drugs, certain common injections, and lightweight medical advice. In a rosary chain of women like herself—black rebozos, babies at the breast—she waited for hours in the sun or rain, on the ground. So many lives and that woman at the end, there, yes, that one, my mother’s young mother waited, dying.

      In the 1970s while I was living alone in Mexico City, I had a medical student friend who took me to such a dispensary where he worked most evenings. The place, located in a poor colonia, consisted of two dark rooms—one for the receptionist and the other for consultation. The dispensary was crammed to the ceiling with boxes of drugs, mostly from the United States, administered freely to patients. I knew almost nothing about medication, but I knew that in the United States we did not have a once-a-month birth control pill, and that belladonna could not be taken without a doctor’s prescription. And yet, drugs such as these were abundant in the dispensary, and my young friend was not a doctor but, in fact, was a failing medical school student, permitted to prescribe at his own discretion.

      María de Jesús was newly widowed during her dispensary days, and why she married again so soon (the bookseller) I cannot say, except that she was so sick—and with two children—that shelter and leftovers may have been reason enough. She bore two children quickly from this second marriage, unlike the first, in which, among other differences, it took seven years before the couple had their first child, a son born in Kansas, and two years later a daughter, my mother, born in Nebraska.

      My mother often told me my grandfather worked on the railroads as a signalman. This is what brought the Guanajuatan couple to the United States. From this period—the 1920s—I can construct a biography of the couple myself because María de Jesús was very fond of being photographed. She wore fine silks and chiffons and wide-brimmed hats. Her mustached husband with the heavy-lidded eyes telling of his Indian ancestry sported a gold pocket watch. They drove a Studebaker.

      After the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Mexican workers in the United States, suddenly jobless, were quickly returned to the other side of the border. My grandparents returned not with severance pay, not with silk dresses nor wool suits, not with the Studebaker—but with tuberculosis. My grandfather died soon after.

      When María de Jesús died (not surprisingly, she was not saved by the rudimentary medical treatment she received at dispensaries), her children—two sons, two daughters—were sent out to work to earn their own keep. Where the sons went, I don’t know as much. But I know about the daughters—Raquel and her younger sister, Flora—because when they grew up and became women, they told me in kitchens, over meals, and into late evenings, that by the time they were ten years old, they worked as live-in domestics.

      My mother was a little servant. Perhaps that is why later, when she became a wife and mother, she kept a neat home. My tía Flora was sent to the kitchen of an Arab family. And in adulthood, her tiny flat was always crowded, filled with crazy chaos, as she became the best Mexican cook on both sides of the border. It was a veritable Tenochtitlán feast at Flora’s table in her humble casita at the outpost of Mesoamerica—that is to say, the mero corazón of the Mexican barrio of Chicago: spices and sauces of cumin and sesame seeds, chocolate, ground peanuts, and all varieties of chiles; cuisines far from shy or hesitant, but bold and audacious, of fish, fowl, and meats. Feasts fit for a queen.

      When my mother was about seventeen, her guardian grandparents decided to take their US-born grandchildren closer to the border. The strategy of the migrating abuelos was that the US-born grandchildren could get better work or, at least, perhaps better pay on the US side. They settled in Nuevo Laredo. One year later, my mother was raped—or at a minimum clearly taken advantage of—by the owner of the restaurant on the US side of the border where she had found work as a waitress. (She never said which it was, or at least, she never told me.) He was married with a family and considerably older than the teenager who bore his son. The best my great-grandfather could do at that point on behalf of my mother’s honor was to get the man to provide for her. He paid the rent on a little one-room wooden house, which, of course, gave him further claims on my mother. Two years later, a daughter was born.

      Three years more and Mamá’s México ended as a daily construct of her reality when, with machete in hand, she went out to make her own path. She left her five-year-old son with her sister Flora, who was newlywed (and soon to be widowed), and, with her three-year-old girl, followed some cousins who had gone up north. A year later, she would move to Chicago alone with both children. Mamá remembers all this as the longest year of her life.

      In Chicago, my mother went to work in factories. Doña Jovita, the curandera who took care of Mamá’s two children while she worked, convinced the young mother to marry her teenage son. The next summer, I was born. Mamá stayed in factories until the last one closed up and packed off to Southeast Asia, leaving its union workers without work and some without pensions, and sending my mother into early retirement.

      Mamá, a dark mestiza, inherited the complexes and fears of the colonized and the strange sense of national pride that permeates the new society of the conquered. Although she lived in Chicago for over forty years, she spoke only Spanish. She threw out English words—zas, zas, zas—like stray bullets