Black Dove. Ana Castillo

I was twelve, I saw Mamá’s Mexico City for the first time. My mother and I traveled from Chicago to Nuevo Laredo by car. It was possibly the hottest place on earth in the month of July. Mamá didn’t have much choice about when to travel, since the first two weeks of July were when the factory where she worked closed down and workers were given vacation time. Mamá paid a young Mexican who was looking for riders to take us to the border. The car broke down, we slept in it at night, we were refused service at gas stations and in restaurants in the South. Finally, we got to my great-grandmother’s two-room wooden house with an outhouse and a shower outside.

      I had made friends with the little girl next door, Rosita, on a previous visit to Nuevo Laredo. At that time, we climbed trees and fed the chickens and took sides with each other against her older brother. That’s how and why I learned to write Spanish, to write to my friend. My mother said it was also to exchange letters with Mamá Grande, my mother’s grandmother, but I wanted to keep up with Rosita. My mother, after long days at the factory, would come home to make dinner, and after the dishes and just before bed, she, with her sixth-grade education and admirable penmanship, would sit me down at the kitchen table and teach me how to write in Spanish, phonetically, with soft vowels, with humor, with a pencil, and with no book.

      On the next visit, Rosita was fourteen. She had crossed over to that place of no return—breasts and boys. Her dark cheeks were flushed all the time, and in place of the two thick plaits with red ribbons she once wore, she now left her hair loose down her back. She didn’t want to climb trees anymore. I remember a quiet, tentative conversation in the bedroom she shared with her grandmother who had raised her. Not long after that, Rosita ran off—with whom, where, or what became of her life, I was never to know.

      In Nuevo Laredo we were met by my tía Flora—who had also traveled from Chicago—with her five children, ranging from ages fourteen to four. The husbands of these two sisters did not come along on this pilgrimage because they were men who, despite having families, were not family men. They passed up their traditional right to accompany their wives and children on the temporary repatriation.

      There were too many children to sleep in the house, so we were sent up to the flat roof to sleep under the stars. My mother had not known that she needed permission from my father to take me into México, so with my cousin’s birth certificate to pass me off as Mexican-born, we all got on a train one day, and I illegally entered Mexico City.

      Our life in Chicago was not suburban backyards with swings and grassy lawns. It was not what I saw on TV. And yet it was not the degree of poverty in which we all found ourselves immersed overnight, through inheritance, birth, bad luck, or destiny. It was the destiny that my mother and her sister had dodged by doing as their mother, María de Jesús, had done decades before (for a period of her life at least) by getting the hell out of México, however they could. It was destiny in México that my mother’s little brother refused to reject because of his hatred for capitalism, which he felt was embodied by the United States. Leonel came out of the México of Diego and Frida and was a proud communist. Dark and handsome in his youth, with thin lips that curled up, giving him the permanent expression of a cynic, the brother left behind came to get us at the little hotel in Mexico City where my mother’s stepfather, who was still selling books on a street corner, had installed us the night before. He’d met us at the train station, feeding us all bowls of atole for our late meal at the restaurant where his credit was good.

      My cousin Sandra and I opened the door for Tío Leonel. We didn’t know who he was. We told him our mothers had gone on an errand, taking the younger children with them. My tío Leonel did not step all the way into the room. We were young females alone, and for him to do so would have been improper. He looked me up and down with black eyes as black as my mother’s, as black as mine, and knitted eyebrows as serious as Mamá’s and as serious as mine were to become.

      “You are Raquel’s daughter?” he asked. I nodded. And then he left.

      He returned for us later, Mamá and me and my tía Flora and her five children, eight of us all together, plus big suitcases, and took us to his home. Home for Tío Leonel was a dark room in a vecindad. Vecindades are communal living quarters. Families stay in single rooms. They share toilet and water facilities. The women have a tiny closet for a kitchen just outside their family’s room, and they cook on a griddle on the floor. I don’t remember my uncle’s common-law wife’s name. I am almost certain that it was María, but that would be a lucky guess. I remember my cousins who were all younger than me and their cuh-razy chilango accents. But I don’t remember their names or how many there were then. There were nearly ten—but not ten yet—because that would be the total number my uncle and his woman would eventually have. Still, it felt like ten. So now there were four adults and at least thirteen children, age fourteen and under, staying in one room.

      We didn’t have to worry about crowding the bathroom because the toilets were already shared by the entire vecindad. There were no lights and no plumbing. At night sometimes my uncle cleverly brought in an electrical line from outside and connected a bulb. This was not always possible or safe. The sinks used for every kind of washing were unsanitary. Sandra and I went to wash our hands and faces one morning and both stepped back at the sight of a very ugly black fish that had burst out of the drainpipe and was swimming around in the large plugged-up basin.

      For entertainment, we played balero with our cousins who were experts. Balero was a handheld toy where the object of the game was to flip a wooden ball on a string onto a peg. My little cousins could not afford a real balero, even the cheap kind you find in abundance in colorful mercados, and made their own using cans, found string, and stones or cork.

      A neighbor in the vecindad who owned the local candy stand had a black-and-white portable TV. At a certain hour every evening, she charged the children who could afford it to sit in the store to watch their favorite cartoon show.

      I was twelve years old, Sandra was thirteen, and her older brother was fourteen. We were beyond cartoon shows and taking balero contests seriously, and we were talking our early teen talk to each other in English. It was 1965 and the Rolling Stones were singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in English over Spanish radio on my cousin’s made-in-Japan transistor, and we insolent US-born adolescents wanted no part of México. Not the México of the amusement park, La Montaña Rusa, where we went one day and had great fun on the roller coaster. Not the México of sleeping under the stars on the roof of my tío Aurelio’s home in Nuevo Laredo. Not the México of the splendid gardens of Chapultepec Park, of the cadet heroes, Los Niños Héroes, who valiantly but fatally fought off the invasion of US troops. We wanted no part of this México, where we all slept on the mattress our mothers had purchased for us on the first night in my tío Leonel’s home. It was laid out in the middle of the room, and six children and two grown women slept on it crossways, lined up neatly like Chinese soldiers on the front line at night in the trenches, head-to-toe, head-to-toe. My tío and his wife and children all slept around us on piles of rags.

      We had, with one train ride, stepped right into our mothers’ México, unchanged in the nearly two decades since their departure.

      Years later, when I was living on my own in California, I met my family at the appointed meeting place—my tío Aurelio’s in Nuevo Laredo—and traveled south by van with everybody to Mexico City. My tía Flora, this time without any of her children, came along, too. It was 1976, the birthday of the United States, but in México my elders were all dying. The great-grandmother, Apolinar, had died earlier that same year and we had only recently received word of it. The great-uncle and border official, Tío Aurelio, had a heart condition and also died before this visit. My tía Flora’s veracruzano bookselling father had died that year, too. We had only the little brother Leonel to visit. The young anticapitalista—once so proud of his sole possession (a new bicycle, which eventually was stolen), devoted to his family in his own way (although the older children had gone off on their own, while the youngest sold Chiclets on the streets)—was on his deathbed at forty.

      Leonel was suffering from a corroded liver, cirrhosis ridden. By then, his lot had improved so that he had two rooms, a real bed, and electricity, but not much more. We stood around his bed and visited awhile so he could meet his brother-in-law and some other members of my mother’s family whom he