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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Certainly no help came from the city or county. San Antonio stood almost alone among 94 principal U.S. cities in denying relief to its starving poor. The city refused to pay storage costs for government-surplus food, and so it was shipped elsewhere. The federal government provided over 98 per cent of the welfare funds for San Antonians, both through direct relief and through employment on public works projects. The city was among the poorest in the nation, and the statistics reveal its ugly secret of poverty and neglect. In the mid-thirties, San Antonio had one of the highest tuberculosis and infant death rates in the U.S. Only 9 per cent of the houses on the West Side had inside toilets; only 12 per cent had inside running water. Eight per cent of the population over ten years of age could not read or write. In 1938, the city ranked the lowest among large Southern cities in average weekly earnings per person ($20.18).
During these terrible years the poorest of the working poor were the city’s pecan shellers. Over half the nation’s native pecans were shelled by workers—like Cecilio’s two sisters—who were willing to accept wages of $1 to $2 a week. The workers most hated Julius Seligmann’s Southern Pecan Shelling Company, where wages were the lowest and working conditions the worst. Often as many as a hundred shellers sat at big tables working long hours with their picking knives in rooms thick with the brown pecan dust that was thought to contribute to the high tuberculosis rate among the workers.
When the company’s representatives announced in 1938 that they were rescinding an earlier raise, thus lowering wages back to 5 to 6 cents an hour, the workers, among them Petra and Guillerma Martínez, walked out. There was no other local industry to absorb the largely unskilled workers. So, at the peak of winter, with no savings and no way to pay for food, winter clothes, or medicines, for winter illnesses, the pecan shellers were out of work. City officials blamed the strike on communism. The workers were tear-gassed, thrown into cattle trucks, and jailed. Finally Governor James Allred persuaded Julius Seligmann and the union to arbitrate, and the pecan shellers returned to work after the company agreed to pay a compromise wage of 5.5 to 6.5 cents after the first of June.
A Tale of Two Brothers
Throughout the thirties the Martínez family lived side by side in their three houses. Pedro remained in the original house after his wife’s death in 1930. Guillerma, Petra, and Petra’s husband lived on one side, and Cecilio and Rosa and their two children lived in the newest home, just to the west of Pedro’s. The two young boys, Richard and Cecil, had been born a year apart. Another son; Robert, had died at a young age. As in the village, it was comforting to have relatives nearby. They acted as common council in times of decision or crisis. They furnished aid, and if sometimes they limited freedom or interfered, helping hands were always near and no one ever felt alone. Without his relatives, Cecilio would have felt exposed and vulnerable.
Watching the boys grow up, Cecilio and “Mama Rose” saw they were as different as the bark of a tree from the bark of a dog. Richard, the elder one, was quiet, and preferred being by himself. He would go to the Saturday movies late in the afternoon, whereas Cecil would be the first in line to buy his ticket, cutting up with a throng of amigos. Richard spent hours alone, making animal shapes out of wood, drawing, and, most of all, building model airplanes. Airplanes fascinated him from earliest childhood, probably because the family lived in the flight pattern of Kelly Air Force Base, one of four air bases in San Antonio, and aircraft seemed to be as much a part of the sky as the sun.
Richard did well in school, but like other barrio children, he found it baffling at first. “I always loved books, their clean smell, the glossy pages,” Richard said one morning at his home, “but it wasn’t until the fourth grade that the words made sense to me. I could read the questions but not answer them. I had no idea what the words meant. We learned the Lord’s Prayer and recited it every morning like parrots. None of us had any idea what we were saying. Our family, like others, prayed in Spanish, not English. At school we were punished for speaking Spanish. We spoke it in the bathrooms.” After learning English, Richard proved the better student of the two boys. He was also conscientious in other ways. Several days a week Cecilio ordered both of his sons to help him at the garage after school. Richard never missed. Cecil rarely showed up.
Gregarious, undaunted, cocky, streetwise playground and sandlot king, Cecil woke up each morning convinced it would be his best day, with no doubt he could conquer or con whatever the world threw his way. The first time Cecilio took them to the public swimming pool known throughout the barrio as El Caldo, the soup, because of its warm water, he asked his sons if they could swim. “No,” Richard answered, “but I will learn.” “Of course I can,” said Cecil, jumping in over his head without hesitation, coming up sputtering, and dog-paddling to the side. Later in his life Cecil wanted to fly, so he went up a few times with a friend. Then one day he just did it himself—took the Vultee Valiant trainer up, flew around San Antonio, and landed.
Richard was a little resentful toward his irrepressible brother when he had to do all the work at the garage, but Cecilio never got too upset over Cecil’s absence. However, he always tried to be fair. “Richard got the car last time,” Mama Rose would say when Cecil’s request for the car was vetoed by his father. “Who helped me do the work, who took care of it yesterday?” Cecilio would reply, handing the keys to Richard. When Cecil did use the old Studebaker, it would more than likely come back with a dented fender or coast in out of gas. “The boys are different,” Cecilio would tell Mama Rose. “They can’t be the same. Let Cecil be himself. No matter what, he will always survive.”
The disciplinary measures Cecilio had learned from his father he and Rose now used with their sons. There were three stages, and they never varied. First, Mama Rose gave a scolding, sometimes accompanied by a coscorrón, a sharp rap on the head with her knuckles. If the mischief persisted, she issued a warning that Cecilio would be told: “Ahora lo verás. You will see.” Usually that was enough for even the feisty Cecil. If not, finally there would be a reprimand from Cecilio: “¡Ya basta! Enough!” But that was rarely needed. Both boys hated to anger their father—not because they feared him, for he spanked them only once, with a battery cable, but because of their feeling of respect toward him. Even when they were small children, their father had treated them like adults, with consideration and dignity. And always there were rules. “To eat and to bed one should be invited only once,” Cecilio would say. And only once would he have to order his sons to the dinner table or to the bedroom. Words of rebuke were rare. Cecilio, like his father before him, disciplined with his eyes.
Cecilio, Rose, and the children worked hard to keep hunger away and to stay together during the Depression and the early years of World War II. Both boys learned to cook, clean, wash, and sew. Rose taught them kitchen secrets: Starch not only made collars stiff but could be used as paste for kites and papier-mâché piñatas and masks, or to soothe sore feet, diaper rash, heat rash, and poison-ivy itch. Nutmeg, ground pecans, sugar, and shortening, rolled into marble-size balls, loosened the bowels and cured stomachache. Salt was a mouthwash, toothpaste, and sore-throat gargle, and relieved tired feet. Pork lard gave refried beans and flour tortillas a special flavor and also removed chewing gum from hair. Coal oil was used not only for heating and cooking but also as an insecticide. Cecilio taught them to have pride in themselves, never to scavenge in garbage cans or at the city dump for food as many children did, and never to forget their culture. It was unheard-of for a Mexican to deny his heritage or to change his last name—as so many immigrants from other countries had done.
Richard and Cecil did not think of themselves as poor. Everyone on the West Side lived as they did or worse. Only when Cecilio and Rose took the family downtown for Fiesta or north through Alamo Heights to visit a friend who worked at the Longhorn Cement Plant did they see wide, grass-covered yards, shiny cars, curbed and paved streets, tennis courts, and, more than anything, hordes of white faces. Both boys had encountered Anglos mostly as teachers. Of course, there was the oil salesman who always came around to the garage in a very clean blue suit and white shirt, meticulously cleaning his nails while Cecilio, covered with grease, made polite conversation. Many whites lived in the Prospect Hill neighborhood just north of the barrio, but Richard and Cecil were not allowed to wander that far from home.
In the forties Cecilio decided to move his family and business to a strip of property one block south of the family homestead. More than once burglars had broken into the station and taken tools and auto parts, and he wanted to be closer to it. Pedro and Rose agreed, so Cecilio put down $200 on a tapered 90-foot-by-330-foot piece of land overlooking Apache Creek. He would pay the remaining $1000 of the cost in monthly installments. His sisters and father remained across the creek in the old houses near their familiar neighbors: Don López, who barbecued sheep heads in an outside concrete oven and peddled them downtown, coming home slightly drunk most nights and roaring like a lion to keep his many children and his wife away so he could sleep; two former “chili queens” who had sold chili on Military Plaza a few years before; a strange, quiet man who sat in front of his home all day in his taxi and later died of tuberculosis; and a family of migrant workers who left each spring and returned in the late fall with their truck radiator full of butterflies, usually poorer and looking as ragged as their front yard.
Richard and Cecil visited their aunts and Pedro across the creek every day. Cecilio worked on cars, and Pedro dispensed gas and sold beer-to-go in a part of the garage that had been remodeled as a small cantina. Workers from the nearby packinghouses and stockyards would snap down their quarters for three beers, stretching in their white coats streaked with animal blood and relaxing under the trees before returning to work. They would surround Cecilio and watch him solve auto malfunctions, murmuring, “Aquí tenemos un misterio. We have a mystery here,” as he listened and tinkered and tightened.
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