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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The outward-directed violence of the gang warfare of the forties and fifties shifted in the next two decades to the inward-directed violence of drug use. Sniffing had changed. Hobby-glue manufacturers had introduced a mustard-seed additive to their product that nauseated anyone who sniffed it. But there was still spray paint. Sprayheads knew the product by color and catalog number—Krylon Spray Paint Interior-Exterior Enamel Rust Magic. The favorite was Bright Silver, number 1401. Metallic colors were popular—gold, bronze, copper, silver—all sweet-smelling depressants that produced a twenty- or thirty-minute high similar to inebriation. Earlier, sniffers had sprayed the vapor into a plastic bag, but now it was considered cooler to spray into a soft-drink can so you could walk down the street getting high without attracting attention. Some kids made a living selling spray paint, doling out handkerchief hits for a quarter each.
The social workers at the Mexican American Neighborhood Civic Organization (MANCO) tried hard to cut down the sniffing. They had some success, most notably with two kids, Eddie “Bo” Cerros and Jeffery Acosta, from the Cassiano and San Juan public housing projects. With MANCO’s assistance, these boys made an amateurish but effective movie, El Juanío, that dramatized the world of the sprayhead. They had all come from broken homes, had dropped out of school and had working mothers and many brothers and sisters. Like many ex-sprayheads, they had taken up the habit not only because of peer pressure but also because it temporarily obliterated their fear of not having a future or a job. For a while it wiped out memories of parental battles; it killed hunger for some, heightened sex drives and produced hallucinations for others; and it helped still others forget their anger, a cold winter day without a coat, a long-missing father, or a girlfriend’s betrayal. Bo and Jeffery belonged to the Cassiano gang, a group of about fifteen or twenty friends who would meet after dark at a park west of the projects to smoke weed and discuss the night’s plans. Sometimes they helped Juan and Steve, who were painting the murals that covered the sides of the Cassiano Homes buildings a series of scenes from Mexican history painted with beautiful earth colors in the tradition of Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros, Mexico’s great muralists. Murals brightened up many places in the barrio: MANCO headquarters, La Clínica Amistad, a small grocery on Kemper, and Los Arcos Café, among others.
Sometimes it seemed to social workers and others attempting to prevent trouble that crime felt at home in the barrio. There was something different to worry about every day. A new gang called the Whistling Warriors had vandalized and burned out some vacant houses on Martin Street and fired bullets through the bedroom windows of some older couples in the neighborhood. These boys modeled themselves after the gang in the movie The Warriors and used an old barrio gang tactic of stationing members in trees to whistle when police or members of other gangs approached. More gang graffiti had appeared on the walls recently: the Lords, the Night Sinners, the Midnight Rats. Burglaries had increased west of the Cassiano Homes—thefts of stereos, irons, toasters, televisions, and radios by junkies. There would always be lawlessness in the barrio, but parents like Cecilio and Rose Martínez, whose children did not join gangs or get to know the inside of the Bexar County jail, still relied on the traditional child-rearing methods of the Mexican village: providing discipline, showing love and concern, assigning chores at home, and treating their children with respect.
The Children of the Dream
In 1953 Cecilio was 54 years old, and for two years he and Mama Rose had been living in a house without children. After returning from the Navy, Cecil had married Delia Gonzales, his high school sweetheart, and now lived a block north across the creek in the Alazan-Apache Courts with his three children: Gloria, three, Walter, two, and the newborn Rosemary. Cecilio and Rose were content and comfortable. Cecilio had never wanted to make a lot of money, just enough to live decently and keep the family together. His health was good, even though his bones ached and warned him of approaching cold weather on late fall evenings.
Cecil had been studying at Saint Mary’s University for three years, working part-time at Pennington Channel Chromium Company and spending his off hours flying the small plane he kept at Lake Field, near Mitchell Lake. As always, he approached life full throttle, working at many jobs: helping run the family cantina, Snuffy’s Tavern (Cecil had been nicknamed Snuffy in elementary school after portraying a character in a school play who resembled the comic strips’ Snuffy Smith); welding; building; and crop spraying. But there was one thing Cecil felt he could not do: keep his marriage together.
Cecilio was aware of his son’s marital troubles. Long ago Pedro had advised him to watch his children’s eyes to know their feelings; therefore Cecilio was not surprised when his son told him Delia was leaving for California. “I have searched my soul and worked to save this marriage, but it is not to be,” Cecil told his father. He said he could work in Central America with the airplane—crop spraying and servicing aircraft engines—and Delia had a good job waiting for her in Los Angeles. The question, however, was what about the children? Everyone agreed they could not go with either parent, and placing them in a foster home or with strangers was unthinkable. Cecilio and Rose were the obvious choice. But as much as they felt their responsibility in this matter, they had doubts.
“Can we at this age raise another family? Where is the room, the money to raise three babies and send them to school?” asked Mama Rose. Cecilio didn’t argue with his wife. They had been married 27 years, and he knew that she could always best him with words. He merely said, “All right, we will turn them out on the street or give them up to strangers,” knowing that Mama Rose would see they had no choice. And so Cecilio and Rose began raising a new family, the fourth generation of Martínezes in America, in their small house behind the cantina and garage on Brazos Street, across the creek from the old homestead where they had started on their own during World War I. Change would come, but the family would survive. Pedro, the great-grandfather of Walter, Gloria, and Rosemary, had the last word: “Todos hijos de Dios o todos hijos del diablo”—whether we are all children of God or of the devil—“we will stay together.”
The arrival of the three children meant that everyone worked harder. Cecilio worked longer hours in the garage and cantina. Pedro served the customers. Mama Rose ran the house and made the clothes. The old dicho describing the lazy ones in the barrio—“He sleeps until his belly button swells”—applied to no one in the Martínez family. The long hours and hard work took their toll. In 1955, when his great-grandson Walter was four, Pedro had a heart attack at the garage and died soon after. He was 84. The family grieved. The old patriarch had not only brought them to the new land so many years ago but had also brought the traditions and customs, the heritage of their ancestors, and the wisdom that the family was the basis of society. He had believed that life was a gift and, because it came from the Creator, a mystery. He had accepted the totality of life, both joy and suffering, for to live is to know conflict and experience pain.
Walter Martínez grew up a responsible boy, looking after his two sisters, helping Mama Rose with the cleaning and tortilla making, and, on wash day, working the old machine that sat out back, with its rollers and swish-swish innards. Cecilio never went downtown, so Walter accompanied his grandmother, with her lists and newspapers and shopping specials, to Solo Serve to buy household goods and clothes and fabric for her sewing. On his ninth birthday he got his first toolbox and started helping Cecilio with tune-ups, brake jobs, and minor tinkering. When his grandfather was running the cantina, Walter would often poke his head into the room and ask Cecilio if he needed a sandwich. The workers would always laugh and say, “Mira el ratoncito. Look at the little mouse,” referring to Walter’s prominent ears.
Few friends came to visit. The Martínez property was isolated between the creek and packinghouses. Walter played games with his cousins and sisters: making kites with Sunday comics and homemade glue; tossing washers into buried tin cans, a barrio version of horseshoes; making slingshots from Y-shaped branches and innertube rubber, with shoe leather for the pouch. And like the past three generations of Martínezes, he went to the Saturday afternoon movies.
Cecilio taught him to live for the present, one day at a time. It was a good way to live when you didn’t have much, since it meant taking great pleasure in the awareness of small things, such as supper time, when the long afternoon of chores and school was done and his grandfather would sit at the head of the table and say, “A ver si pasa. See if it passes.” No one, not even the oldest aunt or cousin, could remember anything not passing down Cecilio’s throat: the guisados, beans, peppers, caldos, tortillas, tacos, even the guisado called morcilla, made from blood, that is still served in tacos at the Piedras Negras Restaurant on Laredo Street. Walter’s older sister, Gloria, sat closest to Cecilio. She had a speech impediment and received special attention from her grandparents. Rosemary, the younger sister, the feisty one, was self-reliant, spoke her mind, and had been a rebel since her youngest days. She sat at the other end, usually wrangling with Mama Rose.
Birthdays were always observed with a cake, special Mexican hot chocolate stirred with a molino, a gathering of cousins and aunts, and a few gifts, usually something useful—a new shirt made by Mama Rose, some tools. There would also be a piñata. The religious aunts explained that the piñata custom was begun in Guanajuato by the Franciscans, that the papier-mâché figure was the devil within you that is not seen—hence the blindfold—and you must strike him with the rod of virtue. If you persevered in this battle against evil, you would be showered with the glory of God (as well as with candies, in which the children seemed to show more interest).
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