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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If his father exercised power through respect, Cecilio’s mother and the other women in the family had power because they were loved. In the Martínez family the most honored members were the oldest and the youngest, especially the babies. Not yet touched by human error and sin, little children, los reyes de la casa (kings of the home), were extravagantly cared for and loved. With the Mexican emphasis on continuity of marriage and on children, and with the purity of daughters and mothers strongly protected, the women, entrenched in the home with the children, had great, if subtle, power. When Cecilio wanted a quarter for the movies, he went to his father, who would usually say with a wry smile, “Ah, hijo, they only get close to the cactus when it has fruit,” before handing the money over. But to discuss his personal life and ask intimate questions he went to his mother.
The Courtship of Cecilio
In 1918 Cecilio quit his job at the Savoy Café and went to work unloading gravel and sand from hopper cars at a temporary Army post on the other side of town. He was nineteen. After the first two days his hands were blistered and bloody. “You can’t quit or they will fire you,” an old man on the work crew told him. “Urinate on your hands and they will heal.” Cecilio knew of folk remedies. His family used cobwebs and mud packs to stop bleeding, wet ashes for cuts and rashes, hot asphalt tar applied with a match on warts, and soup made from tender white pigeons to restore strength after an illness. Everyone used yerbabuena, mint leaves that often grew around hydrants, for tea; mixed with salt for toothpaste; or added to Vaseline and coal oil as a liniment. But this was a new one. He discovered that the old man was right. Because he didn’t miss a day, Cecilio soon got an easier job, cutting wooden stakes for surveyors who were adding on to a military post called Fort Sam Houston.
One night after supper, when the room was as quiet as before daybreak, Pedro told his family that he had bought a lot a few blocks south on Wall Street, the same name as the famous street in Nueva York, and a block north of Apache Creek. It cost $125. He had made a down payment and would pay $1 a week until his debt was ended. It was time to build a house. Cecilio brought used lumber from the military post and soon the house was finished, one big room under a slanting roof, with no electricity or plumbing. They would get water from the public well down the street where you filled your barrel for a nickel.
Cecilio best remembers the winter mornings in that first house, waking up in the blue-black cold, catching the smell of coffee and kerosene, seeing his mother in a coat huddled over the stove as she cooked tortillas and sliced papas (potatoes), the others in the family gathering close to the stove’s heat. Finally the morning sunlight lengthened into spears across the linoleum floor, and the rest of the house warmed. After breakfast, no matter what day it was, his sisters went to mass. If it was Saturday, Cecilio would finish his chores and ask permission to go to the Azteca Theater for the Saturday afternoon movies, not so much to watch the singing cowboys and bandits as to see a girl he had noticed in the neighborhood but never spoken to.
Rosa was not only a city girl but she also attended J. T. Brackenridge School and had learned English. Cecilio, quiet and shy and still feeling like a bumpkin, was afraid she would laugh at his overtures. One Saturday in 1921 he went to the Azteca and saw only one seat near the front. He sat down and looked to the right. There, next to him, was Rosa with her friends. She was a beautiful girl with straight, long, Indian-black hair that always smelled fresh from the coconut-oil shampoo barrio girls used; her small, round, expressive face always seemed wreathed in a smile. Somehow he kept his courage from unraveling and said hello. Thus began a five-year courtship.
Courtship and marriage in the barrio of San Antonio had quite different implications than they had back on Cecilio’s hacienda in central Mexico. In the small village, all families prayed the firstborn would be a boy, to work and, eventually, to lead the family. A girl was another matter. Her honor had to be defended; her marriage brought a strange male into the family circle; if she didn’t marry, she was likely to be labeled a cotorra, an old parrot. Young men in the village demanded the “ideal” woman: chaste, delicate, homey, maternal, religious, and beautiful (especially her eyes). A woman who fell short, as most did, had to consider that her husband had done her a great favor in marrying her. While these traits were still prized in the barrio, Mexican courtship and marriage had subtly changed to reflect the Anglo way of life. Cecilio and Rosa went to movies, met after school, and spent Sunday afternoons walking in the neighborhood—all without chaperones—until in 1926 they decided to marry.
Meanwhile, the family had built two more houses, one for Cecilio’s sister and her husband and one as yet unoccupied, for Cecilio and his bride. Cecilio again changed jobs and began working at the Texas Steam Laundry on Crockett Street near the Alamo. For $2 a day, nine hours a day, six days a week, he loaded wet wash into carts and wheeled them over to huge dryers near the “pressing ladies,” who worked in the warm fog produced by their labor, the steam rising from their damp skin. It reminded him of the vapors lifting up from Apache Creek in early winter and of how he had explained to a child once that the early morning dew didn’t mean the grass had been weeping.
After work and on weekends Cecilio often helped his friend Tony Guerrero work on cars at Tony’s filling station. He discovered he had a talent for mechanical work and could often fix what others could not. Once he repaired a big new Buick whose malady had stumped an Anglo mechanic brought from downtown. Rosa enrolled him in a correspondence course on auto repair and read the manuals to him every night. He would take the lesson down to Tony’s garage and carefully study what would become his lifelong trade. He would need it, for soon the Depression arrived, bringing ten years of deprivation and want.
During the Depression, when poverty and hunger twisted and broke the spirit of many of his barrio neighbors, Cecilio’s years of lifting wet laundry and working long hours at night to learn auto mechanics paid off. Not that he had money—no one did—but he had his own business. He opened a service station at the corner of Brazos and Chihuahua (formerly Wall Street) in 1930, the year of his mother’s death. He and Pedro had saved their money to buy the land and had built the small building and carport themselves. Becoming a businessman had been his goal since his days on the hacienda, when he and a friend would take chile peppers to markets where there were none and barter or sell them for a small profit.
If anyone had told him then that he would someday have his own business repairing American automobiles, he would have thought that the moon was more likely to rise in place of the sun. But that was the lesson of America. However, there was a darker side to this American coin: the broken barrio families, the growing number of juvenile delinquents and forgotten old people left like abandoned cars on the street to fall apart, and the deterioration of the social institutions so important to Mexican life on the West Side. Often a bewildered neighbor would say to Cecilio, “I live better here in the barrio, I have more things, but I am not at home in this world.”
The Old Ways Die
After a few years in San Antonio, Cecilio began to see how life was changing in fundamental ways for many of his neighbors. While life in the old village had been hard and mean, it had been stable. There was comfort in knowing that the traditions and culture and fixed habits would not change, that everyone in the family was needed. Living near one’s grandparents, cousins, and other relatives meant security. So did knowing that one’s child had trustworthy padrinos, baptismal godparents who could assume parental duties. A falta de padres, padrinos—in the absence of parents, godparents—meant something in the village. It rarely did in the urban barrio of El West Side.
Now Cecilio noticed families falling apart under the pressures of living with two cultures. How could a man give guidance to his children when he knew less than they did about their new life? In the village the elder’s word was never questioned because the children could see the practical and workable aspects of his wisdom. Now parents often seemed confused, bumbling, disorganized. It was not their fault. Where were the people to tell them about Anglo ways? Where were the programs on Spanish radio explaining laws and public schools and how to become a citizen? Why didn’t the churches help fill out forms along with saving souls? Thrown up against the larger urban world of San Antonio—despite the insulation of the barrio—the village folk culture fell apart. To make matters worse, the change was compressed into a few months or years instead of being drawn out over decades.
The Great Depression wrapped the West Side in the tough grip of circumstance. Men with eyes dead as a gray sky walked the streets looking for work. The pain and terror of hunger turned the faces of beautiful young women into ancient, creased bas-reliefs, wrinkled like old pieces of fruit. Bowed by weariness and trouble, many envied the dead who had eaten dirt and grass at San Fernando Cemetery. It seemed that all 65,000 Mexican Americans living in the four-mile-square West Side barrio were searching for food or jobs.
There were places to find food if you had friends. West of the barrio were the Belgian Gardens, the vegetable farms of the Belgians who had come to San Antonio because of its wealth of land and brown-skinned labor. They could coax two crops a year from the Bexar County soil. No one mixed better with the Mexican Americans than the Belgians. They learned the language, were solidly Catholic, and proved to be humane employers. For years the barrio’s only swimming hole was at Octave Van de Walle’s eight-hundred-acre farm—a muddy pond where the laborers washed the carrots and potatoes. Other Belgians opened bakeries like Camille De Winne’s Daylight Bakery and Ed Welten’s Prospect Hill Bakery, where day-old bread was handed out when the bigger companies like the Fehr Baking Company (later Rainbo) had nothing more to give.
Particularly fortunate were those who worked at the packinghouses—Roegelein, Apache, Auge, and later Swift—and brought home bones to flavor frijoles and soups. The poorest learned to cook with animal blood, to which they added cactus tips and eggs. The blood was ladled out almost every day, but on Wednesdays the companies gave away brains, entrails—tripe for menudo—hearts, and kidneys, which smelled the worst. The Terminal Produce Market, on the western edge of downtown, sometimes gave away bruised produce unfit to be sold. Only a few agencies helped the poor: Associated Charities, the largest private group; the Salvation Army with its breadline; and—the only one on the West Side—Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, which, thanks to Father Carmelo Tranchese, opened a relief depot to distribute clothes and food.
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