Black Dove. Ana Castillo

worked as a live-in domestic. She could not receive company, of course, but was allowed to visit with us outside for a bit. We dropped in on her older brother, too. He had an honest-to-goodness apartment—three whole rooms and its own kitchen. All grown, he worked in a factory and had a young family of his own.

      One evening, my tía Flora and I ran into Leonel on the street, not far from where the cousin with the apartment lived. He was now a yellowish wire of a man and appeared quite drunk, his pants held up by a rope. He glanced at me, and then asked my tía Flora, “Is this Raquel’s daughter?” My tía, in her usual happy-sounding way, said, “Yes, yes, of course she is the hija of Raquel.” And then Tía, who is more veracruzana than chilanga—that is, more palm than granite—laughed a summer-rainstorm laugh.

      Of course I was and am the daughter of Raquel. But I was the one born so far north that not only my tío but all my relatives in México found it hard to think me real. The United States was Atlantis—and there was no Atlantis—and therefore having been born there, I could not exist. He nodded at my aunt, who was real, but not at me, who was a hologram, and went on his way.

      “My poor brother,” my tía said, “he looks like Cantinflas,” comparing him to the renowned comedic actor, famous for his derelict appearance and street ways. That was the last time we saw him, and by the end of summer, he was dead.

      If the double “rock” in Mamá’s name (and the “castle” at the end through marriage) had dubbed her the stoic sister, the flower in Flora’s name perfumed her urban life and warded off the sadness of trying times. And those had been many in my tía’s life, multiplied with the years as her children grew up far from México in Chicago’s poverty.

      So it was that night that my tía and I, riding a city bus, jumped off suddenly in a plaza where trios and duos of musicians gathered for hire, and we brought a late-night serenade to Mamá and family at our hotel. That was when my tía Flora and I bonded as big-time dreamers. After the serenade and after Dad (who came on this trip) had brought out a bottle of mezcal and we had all shared a drink with the musicians, Mamá told me some of the stories I share here now.

      By migrating, Mamá saved me from the life of a live-in domestic and perhaps from inescapable poverty in Mexico City. But it was the perseverance of Raquel the Rock and the irrepressible sensuality of Flora the thick-stemmed calla lily that saved me, too. “Ana del Aire,” my mother called me (after the popular telenovela of the 1970s). Woman of the air, not earthbound, not rooted to one place—not to México where Mamá’s mother died, not to Chicago where I was born and where my mother passed away on a dialysis machine, not to New Mexico where I made a home for my son and later, alone for myself—but to everywhere at once.

      And when the world so big becomes a small windowless room for me, I draw from the vision of María de Jesús. I read and write poems. I listen to music, I sing—with the voice of my ancestors from Guanajuato who had birds in their throats. I paint with my heart, with acrylics and oils on linen and cotton. On the phone, I talk to my son, to a lover, and with my comadres. I tell a story. I make a sound and leave a mark—as palatable as a prickly pear, more solid than stone.

       Mamá, age 17, New Year’s (Laredo, TX; 1944).

       Remembering Las Cartoneras

      At the turn of the century, people everywhere were making plans to travel to a place that was meaningful to them, a place that would make them feel ever so glad to be alive, witnessing the ushering in of the third millennium. Throughout the 1990s, the United States was deep in the embrace of the American Dream, and it seemed the nation had nothing but more of the same to look forward to in the new century. My tía Flora, the mother of five, grandmother of eighteen, and great-grandma to nine, who had not taken a vacation in over twenty years and had not even so much as flown on a plane before, was no exception.

      In 2000, without discussing her plan with anyone (except with her late husband and my mother and father, who were her confidants in heaven now, she said), Flora booked a couple of tickets, grabbed a young grandson, and, using the stocky seven-year-old in lieu of a walker, forced her arthritic legs to board a direct flight to Mexico City—El De Efe—place of her birth.

      At seventeen, my tía Flora left México. She started the march north, the same route as my mother before her, stopping for a short time in Nuevo Laredo where their grandparents had relocated. It was a strategic move to be close to the Border where their grandchildren might cross over to work. As a new bride with a Tex-Mex husband and small children in tow, Flora next traveled to Chicago and stayed for life. The city was idyllic to my aunt. It became her “Paris,” she came to say as the years passed, with its pristine parks, Magnificent Mile (where a woman with little means could still window shop even if she couldn’t go in to buy), its lively summer street fairs and snowy winters.

      Her new husband took a job in a factory, and once all the children started school, she applied for work as a seamstress in a small upholstery company. “I’d never used a sewing machine before in my life,” she told me back then, “but when the owner asked if I could handle it, I said, ‘Yes, of course I could’ and did. He never regretted hiring me and I never let him down. I loved all the years I worked there. I loved my fellow seamstresses, even the cheap-minded owner!”

      My aunt did not use the word “love.” She said “encantada,” which in English means “enchanted” and which could not have been what she felt eight hours a day, the same foot pushing an industrial Singer pedal, developing arthritis, fingers pricked to the point of numbness, getting carpal tunnel syndrome as the years wore on, earnestly working toward each hour’s quota. It was my tía Flora who was enchanted.

      True, her whole life was devoid of privilege. She had scarcely known her mother, who died when she was but a small child. Her father eked out a living selling used books on the street, and providing for his children was impossible. She spent her adolescence as a live-in servant in Mexico City. Yet there was something about Flora that, as perfume commercials suggest about a woman with an alluring scent, emitted a touch of class, style, a dash of crimson across an otherwise gray palette. Not glamour, fancy jewelry, or extravagant parties, but a taste for life, the joie de vivre that eludes so many.

      It was in the details, as I noticed even as a child when I spent a few New Year’s Eves with her and my five cousins. (Where her husband was, I never knew. My own parents were out for the night—although not together). My mother, who never went out, made New Year’s Eve the exception. My tía Flora, perhaps by default, was our sitter and, without a word of complaint, set a formal table for us children with the silverware in place as if we were adults and important. She served us each small portions of luxurious steak. We drank Tang or milk from her best glasses. Twelve purple grapes waited in small bowls for the striking of midnight, when each one devoured represented a wish for each month of the coming year. We couldn’t afford new red underwear for good luck, but she’d given us red and yellow balloons to blow up and pins to pop them with after midnight. We each took a turn stepping out to the apartment hall and coming back in with an empty valise—to ensure a fun trip in the coming year (to children of people without automobiles and who never took vacations).

      These Mexican rituals were “the way a year should start,” Tía Flora thought, with the best of everything laid out and sending out all your hopes and desires. Pop, pop, pop, kiss, kiss, and kiss. What we children wished for, I don’t recall. A reasonable guess would be for a bike or something along those lines. What my lovely young aunt wished for, however, I can only speculate.

      Throughout the years on special occasions there were embroidered napkins at the dining-room table where Tía Flora served up exquisite meals in her tiny flat in a one-hundred-or-so-year-old brick tenement that she and her husband eventually mortgaged. The bedroom was tiny-tiny, and the back hallway ended up serving as a clothes closet and storage space. Yet, there was the wearing of a hat and gloves to church in the days of Jackie Kennedy, the elegant sling-back low heels, the margaritas Tía Flora made and served in martini glasses. When she let you hear it, her