#18 -- My Other Family

In loving memory of Paula Sánchez Vda. de Muñoz and her children

I’ve been remembering my house in Mexico, where once my sister Irma and I lived with four kind souls that supported my parents’ efforts of working in the United States while we went to school in Guadalajara.

Some time before I was to start sixth grade, the family that rented our house while we were in California, later would become family to us. The renters were three siblings, gray-haired and single, who lived with their mother Paula, an elderly woman who everybody called Ita, a contraction of Abuelita (Grandmother). For some years, Lupita, the eldest of the three siblings, would be responsible for my sister and me. Lupita, along with her siblings Esther and David and Ita, were our Mexico family during the school year.

Lupita was a solid woman, tall and white, with silvery short hair who wore glasses. Without making any distinction, she would call anyone younger than her Prieta or Prieto (Dark Skinned One). It was her endearment. She was the one that enrolled us in the parochial school in our neighborhood, and through which my sister and I first became familiar with the educational system in Mexico.

The family was Catholic, devoutly so and Cristera (sympathetic to a political religious movement of Mexico from the 1920s). It was Lupita who instilled in me our faith and the Catholic practices in a disciplined way. In one of those old wooden wardrobes of which you don’t see much anymore she kept a generous collection of magazines called Vidas Ejemplares (Exemplary Lives) about saints. Already a voracious reader, I remember I would sit on the floor by the wardrobe and devour each story, promising myself that I would be like those saints and virgins that gave up the world to dedicate their life to God. My favorite saint was an Italian 12-year-old girl, Maria Goretti, who was murdered by the man who tried to rape her. So saintly was this Maria that she protected her virtue to the very end, and if I remember well, she then forgave her attacker before dying.

Lupita taught us manners and corrected our peasant speech. She was very patient and now I think that through us she lived a dull, borrowed motherhood. Day in, day out, Lupita would dress all in black. She introduced us to the traditional Mexican comida corrida (a three course meal) of soup, entrée and dessert instead of just one dish with meat and rice and beans. The three course meal consisted of a soup made of spaghetti-like pasta in a tasty tomato sauce (sopita de fideos), the main dish and then dessert. Lupita also instilled in us the duty of going to confession on a regular basis, of the communion every Sunday at mass and also helped me when I was chosen to read one of the two readings before the priest read the Gospel at mass. And with Lupita I first was exposed to the incomparable music of poetry.

On Sundays, on our way to church, I became my Ita’s cane who always wore a long dark skirt that billowed around her ankles, a black sweater that clung taut and tight around her back because of her pronounced hump. My Ita’s face was made of parchment paper, creased and pale. Time had erased any definition her eyes ever had. Her child-like eyes and toothless mouth were a magnificent expression of sweetness and tenderness. She would use my arm to support herself and with the small and tentative slow steps of her eighty plus years we would walk the four blocks to the Holy Spirit Church.

When I would have one of my She’s Still a Little Girl tantrums, it was my Ita the only one who could calm me down with her kind and sibilant words about anger and sin. I also remember that after my bath I would sit in front of her on the floor and she would untangle my long hair with her old stiff fingers and then, while my hair was still damp, she’d grab it in handfuls and scrunch it, as she would tell me, to reinforce whatever natural curl it had.

By the time I was well in my teenage years, the family moved to their own house, the one Esther bought and we lost contact with them, something that still saddens me. The two families just stopped talking as if we’d had some sort of disagreement. I’ve always felt like an ingrate. They’ve passed a long time ago, but I still beg their spirits to forgive my coldness and abandonment.

In one of my photo albums, in the center of a white page I have a solitary black and white small square picture: it’s my Ita sitting in a chair in the center of my home’s courtyard; her face is a study in age, light and peace; her bony hands rest in her lap and in them she holds the lost innocence of these years of my childhood.

(My translation into English of one of my articles for my column “Cotidianas,” published in 2006 in Fort Worth’s La Estrella newspaper.)