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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There are still street vendors—knife sharpeners; egg sellers; men who pick popular street corners to sell corn on the cob, tamales, fruit, and snow cones (raspas) out of the backs of their trucks. Not all the vendors are men. Every afternoon Mama Tía parks her station wagon behind the Cassiano Homes project and opens a small grocery store in the back of her car, selling sausages, fruits, vegetables, cigarettes, and soft drinks.
Aside from the new homes being built in the colonias and the greater number of paved streets, the West Side barrio has altered little in forty years. The huge produce market moved from downtown to Zarzamora and Laredo streets in the late fifties. Although a few Anglo fast-food businesses now dot the area, virtually no other new industry has moved into the barrio to provide needed jobs. But this situation may change. SADA and some city officials are currently pushing for an urban renewal project, called Vista Verde, to redevelop the east end of the barrio and bring in new industries.
Home at Last
By the mid-seventies Walter Martínez’s life had kicked into high gear. While working for Joe Hernández he was attending San Antonio College and serving in several political organizations. In 1979, after a six-year courtship, he married Martha De La Cruz, a beautiful girl who had grown up in the Alazon-Apache Courts, where her mother, grandmother, and four sisters and brothers still lived. Walter had known her brothers, Joe and Romaldo, in high school and had noticed Martha at their house. Her father had been a laborer and twice had driven all nine of them to Wisconsin and Minnesota to pick sugar beets and potatoes. Walter was a careful young man, responsible and cautious. He and Martha had meticulously planned their wedding so it would not conflict with school, career, campaigns, or legislative sessions.
In Walter, four generations of the Martínez family had produced a man who knew the American way of life well enough to become a seasoned politician, just as Irish families had done in Boston. He was developing sophisticated political skills to use in dealing with Anglos and Mexican Americans; he was neither a radical nor a pawn for the Anglo powers downtown (known as a “Tío Taco,” Uncle Taco, or a “coconut,” white on the inside, brown on the outside). He had learned from another Mexican American politician, city councilman Henry Cisneros, who had been born and still lived on the West Side and was one of the best Latin politicians in the country. Cisneros successfully worked for the betterment of El West Side yet coexisted with conservative Anglos who cared little for his barrio or the people who lived there.
Walter and Martha will lead lives far different from those of Pedro or Cecilio. They are committed to the American ideals of independence, competition, efficiency, success, the pursuit of excellence. They feel, like most Americans, that life is to be enjoyed rather than endured. They have many Anglo friends. The Church does not assume for them the importance it did for previous generations; they have carefully planned the size of their future family. Yet much of the traditional culture and heritage brought by their forebears from Mexico remains and will always be a part of their lives. Martha and Walter’s road runs through both worlds, a blending of the two cultures, a twining together of the American and Mexican styles of life.
When Walter was nine he had traveled with his family to Jalisco to visit the hacienda where Cecilio had been born. Walter had been excited, for he had heard stories of the Hacienda de Languillo all his life. But the reality of the village was something different. The village seemed drugged and somnolent in the dense heat. Chickens clucked softly and strutted in and out of the houses with strange jerks of their heads and bodies. Men in soiled white sackcloth jackets and pants, machetes hanging loosely, straw hats dangling from their necks on strings, watched silently. There were the smells of beans and tortillas cooking, of wood smoke and manure. Clutching the noon heat, the adobe hovel of his grandfather was still there: a dirt floor, fat roaches running up the wall, an unstrung necklace of dead flies caught in a corner cobweb. As he tried to eat his lunch in the hot room with a halo of gnats humming above his head, Walter offered a silent blessing to Zapata, Pancho Villa, a number of saints, and whoever else was responsible for bringing the Martínez family to San Antonio. He had never felt more American. The thatched village, stoic as the clay it was made of, was part of his heritage and would endure forever, but he knew his heart and home and destiny belonged to America.
The Lost Treasure
In the fall of his eightieth year the face of Cecilio Martínez is leathered, lean, and strong, and his health is good. Recently he passed his driving test without glasses. Most days he arises early and goes outside for the jar of cinnamon coffee his friend Ernesto Reyes, who lives in the projects, leaves on the hood of a car. Cecilio has been fixing Ernesto’s car for many years. Harvey, the Irish setter watchdog, jumps and barks and strains on his leash until the old man feeds him and rubs his head. He has coffee and pan dulce in his living room, which is tidy but smells of the old dust that rises when the door of a seldom-used closet is opened. On the mantel, the pale saints look down on him from behind flickering candles.
He works in the early and late parts of the day, avoiding the heat. Long ago a small portion of his back yard was planted with a few bushes and cacti and the rest given over to hundreds of junkyard objects. Two big oaks and two chinaberry trees stand between the house and a white wood garage topped with a furrowed metal roof. Scattered about are three or four oil drums, worktables, tools, wires, hubcaps, jars filled with bolts and screws, an old radiator grille, a green Plymouth hood. The hood came from the ancient auto whose two front tires rest on blocks. Underneath is a bath mat used as a tarp. The yard is like a museum of discarded Americana: Model A and Model T tire jacks, pop bottles, stacked windshields, a flapping telephone book, a hoist on wheels that Cecilio calls el caballo (the horse) and two mangy road dogs. West of the garage are five or six old cars that haven’t moved in so long they seem to have grown out of the earth like the oaks. On the street a tiny woman with a short cane taps her way across the Apache Creek bridge.
Cecil, Walter, and Richard gather on most Saturdays to visit with Cecilio and to plan future development of the family homestead: another garage, reopening the cantina, perhaps adding a barbershop, refurbishing Cecilio’s rock house. Most are Cecil’s ideas. His wife has returned from California and lives south of the barrio, but they seldom see each other. His daughter Gloria’s marriage with a Chicago steelworker broke up, and she and her three-year-old son, Fernando, live with her mother. Cecil moved his mobile home behind the rock house to look after his father and still greets each day as if it were a gift. He collects lumber one day, builds a bar the next, repairs cars, plays golf on Thursdays, and, the first two Saturdays of each month, drives a school bus full of parents and loved ones to the Texas State Prison in Huntsville, 220 miles, a fifteen-hour round trip. He ran for city council in 1977 and lost. It is possible he has not known a depressed moment in all his fifty years.
Richard retired from the Air Force in 1970 and completed a master’s degree in educational psychology at Our Lady of the Lake University. He now teaches two nights a week at San Antonio College. He lives with his wife, Sylvia, and five children on five acres in far north Bexar County near Leon Valley, but Wednesday nights after class he returns to drink a beer with his old barrio friends at Packers Inn, a block south of his father’s home in the slaughterhouse district. Richard misses the West Side. Out north he doesn’t know his neighbors or talk to them. His kids love to visit Grandpa Cecilio’s, where they hear the bellowing and squealing of the animals going to slaughter across the road. They tell their friends at school that their grandpa has a ranch. Richard acknowledges the pull of the barrio. It will always be alive, not like the anonymous suburbs—a place that has no memory, where if anyone leaves, he is forgotten, and if he returns, he has to begin again.
In khaki cap and pants and blue sweater over a white shirt, Cecilio sits in his favorite metal yard chair facing the sun, his face set with an impassive gaze. A fine silt, washed down by sweat, has settled into the lines on his wrists and palms. When Mama Rose gave him the chair it was cream-colored. Now it is metallic gray. A stiffish breeze sends chinaberries rattling down the tin roof’s furrows as grackles—black and shiny through the trees—lift off and glide down to take over the dogs’ water bowl. Cecilio’s fingers, wrinkled like yellow-brown raisins, wrap around his slingshot made of brake-line cable, inner-tube rubber, and shoe leather. He uses it only when the big black birds perch directly overhead.
Sitting in the pale autumn sun, he thinks of his favorite U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and pulls from his pocket number 31 of 40 presidential trading cards distributed by Rainbo Bread in the Bicentennial year of 1976. “I admire him because he cared for the poor and rescued the country during terrible times,” says Cecilio in Spanish. “He forced bosses to pay a decent wage. I have never voted because I am not a U.S. citizen and I haven’t learned to speak or read much English. I never wanted to return to Mexico, for life was good here and I know people still suffer where I come from.
“My life has been a success. The family has stayed together and there was always enough to go around for everyone, even strangers that came by. Somehow there was always enough, so I think life has been good. I am not afraid of death. It will come some day and I am ready for it. I don’t want someone to come and take my life and I don’t want to have a long illness that causes others hardship. When I am called by God, I will go. He has always opened the doors and allowed us to provide for ourselves, and someday He will call me. I have no regrets, no laments.” The old man thinks a minute. Although Cecilio always considers his years in America to be the real treasures of his life, there is something else, another treasure he cannot forget. “Well, I would have liked to have found the coins. I know they are still there.”
Just before he left Mexico as a boy, Cecilio heard of two barrels full of gold coins that had been hijacked and buried by the revolutionaries not far from his home. A lieutenant of Villa’s told his father the location. Once Cecilio went back with the old Villista and tried to find the gold. Many others tried too, but they all failed. So on warm days, surrounded by his family, the old man sits in Mama Rose’s yard chair and dreams of gold coins he knows are buried deep in Mexico’s earth. Overhead, above the bare oak and chinaberry branches that point toward passing clouds, a wedge of birds moves south toward Mexico and the treasure of Cecilio Martínez.
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