An American Family
It was 1914. The Mexican Revolution had turned their world upside down. They made a momentous decision, a decision millions had made before them. They would move to America, to begin a new life.
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Like many corrales near the tracks, on the eastern edge of the barrio, their building had been constructed by a railroad company—it was painted “Santa Fe yellow”—and sold on a contract-of-sale agreement, which meant that if the rent wasn’t paid, the home was lost. They had no equity, and often the company would refinance an $8000 home several times until the owner ended up paying three times the original price. Pedro Martínez vowed this would not happen to him—he would build his own home, and several for the rest of the family if he was lucky.
But first he had to work. He did not understand his new country, but he did understand hard work. Pedro worked everywhere: construction projects, yard work in affluent neighborhoods, odd jobs downtown. Cecilio found a job washing dishes at the Savoy Café for $10 a week. His sisters Petra and Guillerma worked first at a cigar factory, then as pecan shellers. Guadalupe, the most religious daughter, managed the household with Romula. She never missed a mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. When troubled, she would kiss the rosary and repeat prayers endlessly, sometimes until tears soaked her black lace mantilla.
The Great Migration
When the Martínez family boarded the train for Texas, they followed a tradition as old as Mexico itself. The country’s history had begun with migration: the Aztecs themselves originated as a tribe of wanderers who traveled south to establish a great nation on an island where they saw an eagle devouring a serpent—now the site of Mexico City. Subsequent upheavals—revolutions, wars with Texas, the U.S., and France—had caused an ebb and flow of Mexican migration. There were religious migrations, pilgrimages to the shrines of popular saints to give thanks for a prayer answered, a sickness overcome, the return of a loved one. The migration the Martínez family helped begin continues to this day, a movement of people comparable to the Anglo settlement of America.
At the turn of the century the flow north from Mexico that had long been a trickle (a yearly average of 335 Mexicans entered the U.S. from 1861 to 1900) became a torrent. From 1900 to 1930 more than one million Mexicans, 10 per cent of the country’s population, left for the United States. The economic boom of the Southwest had begun; the dirty, ill-paid, irregular work, always the province of the newest immigrants fell more and more to the Mexicans. Many of them followed the seasons and harvests from citrus groves in the Texas Rio Grande Valley to sugar-beet fields in Minnesota to apple orchards in Washington. Some migrated with the railroads—Mexicans made up 70 per cent of the rail gangs laying track across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Others followed in Coronado’s footsteps, mining gold and silver, moving on when the ore played out. To tell the story of Mexican immigration to the United States is to trace the rise of the great regional industries—railroading, mining, fruit and vegetable growing. Mexicans built, planted, mined, and harvested, bringing forth riches from the arid soil. But rarely for themselves. When times were good, the Mexicans were welcomed. When times were bad, they were always the losers in battles with Anglos for jobs, power, land, and recognition.
During the Depression the U.S. government deported more than 300,000 Mexican immigrants. In the forties, when labor was scarce, the government began the Bracero program, importing Mexicans for agricultural jobs only to send them home when the work was completed. Between 1953 and 1956 Operation Wetback sent two million legal and illegal immigrants back to Mexico. Today a million legal and illegal Mexicans per year still migrate to this country across the two-thousand-mile border, still working at the dirty jobs, and prompting such defense measures as a $3.5 million, eighteen-mile-long, ten-foot-high fence that the Immigration and Naturalization Service, two years ago, suggested building along the Mexican border.
Life in the Barrio
The San Antonio barrio where the Martínez family had settled was like an urban Mexican village, with familiar foods and markets, churches, Spanish-language newspapers, music, fiestas, a common language, and an overwhelming number of Mexicans. It was separated from the alien, non-Mexican world by both invisible and physical barriers. It was a spiritual as well as a geographic zone, with its own particular heroes and traditions, code of ethics, and aesthetics. But it also was literally cut off from the rest of San Antonio by creeks, railroad tracks, gullies without bridges, highways, and, later, freeways. These walls isolated and segregated the newly arrived Mexican family, allowing them to retain their cultural traditions but making it very difficult for them to enter the Anglo culture and learn the ways of their new country. The barrio was a refuge where a family felt at ease, close to friends, familiar surroundings, and values. It was a temporary stop on the way to a “better neighborhood.” For some who had no choice but to stay, it was a prison. It was like a small Latin American country, dependent on foreign markets—downtown—and forever subject to a dominant Anglo society that, like the moon, pulled the tides of the barrio this way and that.
Cecilio got to know the barrio, its customs, the street characters, the neighbors, and the people recognized for their special skills: Don Jesus, the musician, who hung a dozen or so whisky bottles in his garage, filled them to different levels with colored water, and played them like a marimba; the rag collector, Don Pedro Guerrero, who drove his bobtailed truck through the neighborhood, collecting trash and giving Cecilio and his friends rides on the tailgate; Don Chanito, the barrio firewood provider, whose neighborhood route could be charted by the noise of the saw mounted on the back of his truck with which he cut oak into stove length chunks. Doña Chole made the best tortillas, flattening the dough into a perfect pancake shape with one hand, turning over the ones cooking on the hot plates of the wood-burning stove with the other. Every so often she would pick a tortilla off the stove top, coat it with bacon grease, roll it into a tight cigar shape, and hand it to a child who had wandered in.
There were businessmen on the West Side, men who were highly regarded because they had no boss; Don Jesus Hurtado, the first Mexican American to own a service station on Guadalupe Street, who was later murdered by a junkie for a pack of cigarettes only a month before his retirement and first vacation; El Maestro Barbero, who always asked each customer, “Natural, thin, or light around the ears?” El Maestro had penny gum for the kids, offered special discounts for large hairy families, and was famous for giving babies their first haircuts without damaging the baby locks prized by mothers. And everyone knew Don Pancho, a self-made man who had taken two old trucks and built up a small moving business that was successful despite its mixed-up name, Vasquez Transfer and Sons Company.
Cecilio often saw the three deaf-mutes around. One was known for his loud whistling; another could say two bad words in a loud, distinct voice; and the oldest boy was known for swimming like a fish in the dead of winter in the pond near the Belgian Garden truck farms. The whistler became a janitor at Our Lady of the Lake University; the profane one walked around the barrio immaculately dressed for the rest of his days; and the swimmer aimlessly rode his old bicycle through the neighborhoods, stopping for a swim on the coldest days of the year, entering the water like a knife and effortlessly gliding to the other side. People in the barrio tolerated the eccentricities, the fools, the troubled. Individuality had long been a basic tenet of Mexican values.
Drunks were a great part of barrio life too. Cecilio watched shoe-shine boys polish the same drunk’s shoes twice in a day; saw the hapless topers wrestle telephone poles and fight each other without landing a blow; watched the younger boys earn a dime by guiding them home; watched them do strange things like swallow carpet tacks on a bet. Pedro Martínez warned his son that the barrio produced all kinds of men, sometimes hard characters who “ate iron rails and deposited iron nails,” whose arms wore bracelets of scars and wounds from years of hatred and anger. They wielded their knives with an intensity matched only by their curiously poetic insults: “You are afraid, carbon. Your nostrils flare like those of a frightened colt. You insulted me with breath of sulfur, with vampire teeth. Your eyes are bloody and they lie. I will make sure you foam red at the mouth.”
“If you don’t wish to discover fleas, don’t comb the dog,” said Cecilio’s father when his son asked him about such men. Pedro was fond of dichos, sayings that had been handed down for generations in the oral tradition of his culture: proverbs and aphorisms that helped teach a child about life. When Cecilio or his sisters would compare unequal things or mix up their reasoning, Pedro, sitting as always at the head of the table, would tell them, “You cannot plant a squash seed and get a melon.” When his children would try to bend the rules to get their way, they would hear from their father, “The book reads the same even when read upside down.” Whatever the circumstances, the rules did not change, nor did the consequences if the rules were broken.
As in most first-generation Mexican American families, Pedro Martínez was policeman, jury, and judge in his house. His word was law, whether the issue was making a grocery list or planning a funeral. American families usually encouraged a sense of equality, a striving for individual recognition. In the Martínez family there was a hierarchical ordering of members founded on the unquestioned and absolute supremacy of the father. Firm but just, neither capricious nor tyrannical, he ruled by silence and respect, not fear. Cecilio learned his role so early that he cannot remember how it was taught or not knowing it. He obeyed because he never thought to do otherwise.
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