History Lesson 
All About My Mother
All about my mother Three daughters, two countries, one life, no regrets.
SHE WAS AS THEY SAY in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, del rancho, from one of the scrappy ranches on the outskirts of town, which should have meant she was so shy she wouldn't even eat in front of strangers. But the boys she met at the dances in the city were always surprised to learn that she had been raised on a ranch, because she wore the most fashionably daring clothes and liked to converse and go to the movies.
He was 23. He didn't know too much about her, only that he wanted to dance with her that night. You see, he was from a ranch too, but from a real one farther down the same road, where agriculture had paid off in big wads of cash that were traded for gaudy furniture. Although they had attended the same elementary school, their backgrounds had set them worlds apart. It wasn't until he was a young man with a trim mustache that he would watch her across the aisle of the bus from town. He was so smitten with her that when she got off, he would take the spot where she had sat, just to feel what was left of her. Sometimes, when he drove by Rancho San Pedro on his way home, he would honk in case she was sitting by the window or wandering about outside and might turn to look.
But she was oblivious. She had promised herself that she would not date any of the young men from the ranches, whose small-town ideas about the world frustrated her. She had grown up admiring the city lights. From her family's property, she could see them winking in the distance if she walked far enough into the fields, and they stood for all the things that couldn't be hers on that little patch of dirt. There, for six years of schooling, she had squeezed an old rag late at night through the top of a petroleum can and lit it, devouring the facts and numbers she had printed as her teacher dictated them aloud, because too many of the schoolchildren couldn't pay for textbooks. She rose to the top of her class and even got to carry the Mexican flag once during an end-of-year assembly, decked out in her cousin's pink quinceañera dress since she couldn't afford a school uniform like everyone else.
Then it was over: no free education after the sixth grade in her country, and the young women—especially las del rancho—had to get a job or help watch their younger brothers and sisters. But she kept on daydreaming, thrilled when she sat by the radio and listened to it murmur of all the great things man did, like walk on the moon. On infrequent trips to the hospital in Matamoros, she would idolize the nurses in their crisp white uniforms. One day, she believed, she too would live in the city and wear a white uniform—maybe a chemist's lab coat. All she knew about her future was that she wanted to discover new things.
So naturally, when this young man offered her a goofy, hopeful grin from across the dance floor that night in 1969, she didn't understand. And she didn't really care for it either, despite his good looks and his reputation as a charming guy. What could he want? she wondered. To dance, he confessed. She hesitated. But then—who knows why—she said yes.
"I LIKE THE WORD ŒWI-DOW,'" my mother told me recently. She was speaking in Spanish, the only language she knows well, but she allowed the precariously pronounced English word to teeter on the tip of her tongue. Then, aware of the stigma of being a woman alone, she added, almost defiantly, " I'm not ashamed. It gives you personality."
She had slipped on her black-rimmed glasses to inspect the naturalization certificate she had just received. At the age of 53, she had finally become a citizen of the United States. Always on the fringe—that had been her biography. I had thought about this as a solemn woman opened the ceremony with a dramatic rendition of "America the Beautiful" and the robed judge thanked the inductees for representing the very best of this country. Even though I, an American citizen by birth, have in some ways become jaded about the meaning of U.S. citizenship, that morning I found myself swelling with pride for my mother. She herself had been a little distracted during the ceremony, flustered by the way everyone raced through the Pledge of Allegiance. But when the vocalist took the microphone one last time and filled the auditorium with glass-shattering strains of "God Bless America," she blinked rapidly and began to fan herself.
It wasn't until we were outside, walking toward her silver pickup under the warm South Texas sun, that she began dabbing sloppily at her red eyes. For the first time, she told me that when she was about eight, she had briefly attended an elementary school in Brownsville, just across the Rio Grande from her Mexican hometown. She wasn't supposed to be there, of course, a child whose family had tiptoed across the border sin papeles, "without papers." She and her parents and her little brother, Raul, had squeezed into a one-room, rat-infested shack. At the American school the students had sung "Ten Little Indians" and "God Bless America." She was crying now because the song had brought back bittersweet memories of how tough things had been then for that bony, dark-skinned girl who didn't belong.
Indeed, for most of her life my mother has been only a partial member of her own world. She was taught how to be a woman in rural Mexico during the fifties and sixties. As a daughter, she was expected to shoulder responsibility without questioning. As a wife, she was expected to serve without resenting. As a mother, she was expected to sacrifice without looking back. Soon it was difficult for her to remember the days when she had indulged in making plans, in thinking about what might make her happy. Only in recent years has my mother begun to make sense of how life changed her and then brought her old self back. Only in recent years has she begun talking to my two sisters and me about herself—not about who she is in relation to anybody else, but about who she is, plain and simple.
I'M NOT SURE WHEN Mami's dreams vanished, but they must have fluttered out the window on one of those 45-hour drives on Interstate 10 to California. Maybe it was the time she rode a Greyhound alone because she was utterly pregnant with twins and didn't fit on the passenger seat of our uncle's pickup yet would have been equally uncomfortable in the back camper. She still cries when she remembers how—three days into the trip and not far from the city where my father and five-year-old sister, Cristina, were waiting to meet her—the bus stopped for a two-hour layover in Oakland and she walked around aimlessly on swollen feet under miserable skyscrapers.
Antonia Hinojosa and Cristóbal Ballíhad begun dating after he asked her to dance that night in Matamoros. He and his first wife had ended their marriage some time before, so he ran off with this improbable ranch girl and married her. His father, a Mexican American who had chosen to make a life on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, had planned to leave his ranch to him, but my dad was irreverent and reckless and lost his inheritance to an older brother who worked harder. Now that he was ready to settle down, he was forced to begin from scratch. He filed for American citizenship, rented a small house in Matamoros, and was driving city buses in Brownsville when my mother bore a beautiful baby girl.
Once Cristina turned one, he and my mother decided to cast their lot with the migrant workers who made seasonal pilgrimages to California, where there were fields of ripe tomatoes to pick and few labor laws. In fact, when César Chávez and his people came by urging the workers to demand an eight-hour day, my mother wouldn't hear of it. Every extra hour under the sun was an additional brick on the house she and my dad would build when they settled back in Texas. In Davis they tracked down some cousins and rented a tiny two-bedroom in the same migrant camp. It had no living room or air conditioner, but it cost just $60 a month. They figured the sacrifice would pay off in a few years.
She did not fully know yet how to be a woman in Mexico, much less in the United States. But my mother was determined to do her part to make her family's life better. Antonia Hinojosa de Ballí became Antonia H. Ballí, and she tried not to think much about the ranch back home, instead putting blind faith in the idea that raising a good family and working hard in a strange country would get us all somewhere. For the most part, it did. Papi was soon hired to drive a big truck that hauled tomatoes to other cities, which paid far better than hoeing and picking them. And our mom eventually became a cook at the migrant camp's preschool, where she could keep an eye on Celia and me, her toddler twins. They saved every penny they could and watched their three daughters grow.
IN 1981, WHEN I WAS five, the trips to California finally ceased. Back in Brownsville, we moved into a small wood-frame house in the Las Prietas subdivision while our mother and father built our brick one. There was no contractor involved. Don Lencho, an old carpenter friend from Matamoros, put up the towering frame, and a couple of hired hands helped lay the beige-colored brick. Soon we were living on Clover Drive, across the street from Perez Elementary School, where Celia and I would begin kindergarten and where Cristina, who was ten years old by then, would finally be able to sit in one classroom all year long. Mami took a job cooking for a nursing home, and Papi bought a used 1973 Crown Victoria and painted it egg-yolk yellow, proudly stenciling his cab number—a bold, black "15"—on the front fenders of his new business.
For my sisters and me, household chores consisted mainly of doing homework. Though our mom could not help us with it, every evening after dinner she would wipe off the dining room table that doubled as a desk and often slip us a favorite snack as we worked out long math problems. When the local grocery store offered a cheap encyclopedia in installments, she carefully timed each trip so that she wouldn't miss a single volume, bringing home some eggs and milk and another $2 book full of knowledge. After 31 weeks of patient shopping, the full set stood in our living room bookcase, looking rather dignified. And she never missed the school's open-house nights. She might have barely understood some of our teachers, but she made sure to smile and nod her head as we translated how we were doing in school: "Dice que soy muy buena estudiante."
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