Category Archives: Family

Yarning (and yearning) for Grandma

Hello world! The Daily Chicana is back after a short break due to a minor illness, followed by having to host some out-of-town guests. I’ve missed posting here and am ready to get back to writing!

Today I want to reflect on language and culture, and I’m going to do this by way of a family story. About a month ago, when I started this blog, my mom was back in the town where I grew up in order to help my grandma move into a nursing home. It was an emotional time all around, especially since my mom took on the additional task of sorting through and packing up my grandma’s entire apartment, which was filled with all manner of bric-a-brac collected over the twenty years Grandma had lived there.

One of the things my grandma is known best for is her beautiful crochet work. She can crank out everything from small, intricate lace doilies to large, cozy blankets to snuggle under while watching a movie. In fact, she had just started  one of these larger creations when she had the nasty fall that led her to be hospitalized and now have to be moved into the nursing home. Knowing that I’m the only one in the family besides my grandma who knows anything about the fiber arts, my mom asked if I wanted the remaining materials. “I think it would be nice for you to finish it,” she explained. “This way it’s something special that you and Grandma worked on together.” I loved the idea and asked her to please send me the yarn.

In the ensuing weeks, I’d forgotten all about this project until the day I found a package on my doorstep. Inside the box were two Rubbermaid containers filled with Grandma’s crocheted squares and the rest of the yarn for the blanket (pictured above). I lifted off the lid from the first container, and a faint trace of Grandma’s perfume wafted up to my nose. I suddenly found myself choked up. It finally hit me: We have such little time  left with Grandma. I mean, I knew intellectually how frail she has become, but because I live so far and don’t get to see her more than once a year, I obviously wasn’t experiencing her decline first-hand. Holding her yarn in my hands and being reminded of her smell made it all so real for me. For a long time, I sat with the yarn, sniffling and thinking about her.

I was also wondering how on earth I’m going to complete the blanket. From what my mom described, Grandma had completed most of the squares and I just had to sew them together. I figured that, as a knitter, I’d be able to handle it. In reality, though, there is only about two feet of completed material, consisting of (a) little squares; (b) squares that have been woven into rectangles; and (c) large multicolored triangles. I have no idea how it’s all supposed to fit together or what the color scheme is. It’s a much bigger task than I realized, as I don’t know what Grandma had envisioned.

In any case, a few days ago I was on the phone with my sister, telling her the story of how emotional I felt when I saw and smelled the yarn. “Grandma’s not gonna be around much longer,” I sadly observed.

“I know,” she said. “I feel weird, though, because I don’t feel emotional about it. I mean, I love Grandma and I don’t want her to be in pain or to have to suffer, but I don’t feel sad like I’m supposed to. I kinda don’t feel anything about it. Is that weird?”

“No, it’s not weird,” I assured her. My sister and I have both lived far apart from our extended family for all of our adult lives and in the intervening years have become very emotionally distanced from them and any family dramas that come up.

She went on to explain, “I think it’s because I don’t really have a relationship with Grandma independent of Mom. Grandma never learned English, and I don’t know Spanish, so Mom always had to be there to translate. I couldn’t ever communicate with Grandma on my own or open up to her without Mom around. And now Grandma and I don’t really know each other.”

Before I could comment on her insight, she continued on to a surprising rant. “And you know, Grandma came here when she was in her thirties. You’d think that she would have made an effort to learn English sometime in the last sixty years! She even became a citizen, but she speaks so little English! And now she’s in the nursing home and scared a lot of the time because she doesn’t understand what the doctors and nurses are saying. But it’s her own fault. I mean, if I ever had to live in another country for some reason, I would do everything I could to learn the language there. Like, if I ever had to live in Mexico, god forbid–”

My sister didn’t get much further than that because right then I burst out laughing so hard that I had tears coming out of my eyes. “What?!” she kept giggling defensively, and when I calmed down enough to talk, I explained, “You are so dramatic! ‘God forbid’ you ever have to live in Mexico? I mean, god forbid there’s a nuclear bomb or an apocalypse. You do realize that there are worse things than having to live in Mexico?”

“Not for me,” she huffed. “That’s how much I hate it!”

We went on to talk about other things, but after we hung up, I found myself thinking about Grandma, the yarn, language and our cultural heritage. I explained last week about the vastly different connection my sister and I feel towards and in how we embody Chican@ culture (and if you thought in that post I was exaggerating about how much she despises Mexico, now you know I’m not making it up).

My sister has long yearned for a stronger relationship with Grandma, but she couldn’t ever speak directly to her because of the language barrier. Now, I’m certainly not one of those people who argues that one must speak Spanish to be a “true” Chican@, but it sure does help to know the language, because speaking Spanish is one way to keep those cultural ties strong. It amazes me that I’m the only one of eleven grandchildren on that side of the family who bothered to learn it (similarly, on my dad’s side, only six of thirty-two grandkids speak Spanish).

For me, working on this crocheted blanket acts as a metaphor for keeping up Mexican culture. My Grandma began the project based on her own knowledge and envisioning a particular pattern. Now I’m continuing that work. And even though I might change it up by knitting instead of crocheting and I’ll certainly end up with a different pattern than what Grandma may have intended, it’s still a colorful blanket created by women from different generations. There’s no right or wrong way to proceed; it will just unfold and change over time, just as Mexican American culture develops in this country. I’m just proud to keep up a tradition that my lovely grandmother started.

One family, two different Chicanas

An issue that is very important to me–and one that I hope to address directly, where relevant, here in my blog–is how wary I am of pointing to “the” Chicana experience, written in the singular. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again (and again and again): There is no one or correct way to be Chican@ (or Latin@ or any other ethnicity, as far as I’m concerned).

I constantly aim to disabuse my students of this idea, as they often come to my classes feeling that there is in fact some sort of “checklist” for what it means to be Chican@. Usually, the checklist includes things such as:

  • Speaking Spanish as your first language
  • Having one or both parents who immigrated from Mexico
  • Listening to Mexican music, either norteñas and such or rock en español
  • Growing up in a neighborhood that is predominantly Mexican or Latino
  • Being able to unleash a fierce mariachi grito when necessary

These checklist items are necessarily born out of their primary experiences, as most of my students do relate to these sorts of things.

Most students…but not all. I am always interested to hear from those who come to my office hours and gingerly “confess” that they are biracial, don’t speak Spanish well and/or are not at all familiar with Mexican pop culture. They are always relieved to hear me admit the same things and that I don’t think they should let anyone else dictate how “Mexican” they are by such measures.

Morever, even those of us who grow up in the same family can end up identifying very differently from each other. I’ll share my own family as an example. I’ve written in the past about the fact that my parents were both born in the US to Mexican parents. However, my mom is much more bi-cultural than my dad, is fully bilingual and at every opportunity instilled in my older sister and me a pride in our cultural heritage. Nevertheless, even growing up with the same parents, we turned out quite differently.

My sister is someone who would never deny being Mexican American. That being said, though, her ethnicity is just not a part of her day-to-day self-conception. She learned Spanish in middle school and high school, but has forgotten all of it today. She has never once watched a tv show on Univision or Telemundo. She’s generally uninterested in anything that has to do with Mexico. We took family trips to Mexico when we were young, but for her these mainly evoke painful memories of her skin breaking out–which she claims happened as soon as she crossed the border–and nearly peeing in her pants because our relatives didn’t understand her English-language pleas for a bathroom break during one especially long road-trip.

I always say that I would pay good money to be able to go back in time to 1979 and see the look on her face when my mom explained that we would have to use the previous day’s underwear as a washcloth throughout our stay with our Mexican relatives. My mom did her best to sell my sister on the idea–”Just think: this way, you and your panties turn out clean!”–but my sister was absolutely disgusted. And for those of you who know my beauty-queen sister, who is a professional make-up artist and skin care expert and who wears false eyelashes just to run to the grocery store, you can imagine why I find this story so hilarious.

In short: for my sister, the only meaningful part of being Mexican is the delicious food. The other day, I posted something on facebook about trying a “Mexican vanilla” ice cream and she cheerfully commented, “Mexican vanilla? Kind of like me” (meaning, of course, a “whitewashed” Mexican).

By contrast, I am often thinking about what it means to be Mexican American. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I started this blog–to explore these issues and talk out my ideas on the subject. My teaching and research focus on the history and culture of Mexican American people. I teach students who are predominantly Mexican American. Race and ethnicity is one of the primary lenses through which I view the world.

I don’t know why exactly things turned out so differently for us. I think part of the answer may lie in the fact that my sister didn’t attend college, while I did. For me, those were very critical years when I became active in the Latin@ student group on campus and, through my coursework, I began learning to think more critically about race and ethnicity and acquiring a specific vocabulary to talk about these issues.

At the same time, maybe the college experience isn’t everything…because there are plenty of Latin@s who go to college and who also, like my sister, don’t really make ethnicity a centerpiece of their lives. So perhaps another explanation is that it boils down to the careers we’ve chosen: ethnicity and race are topics I have to think and talk about on a daily basis, whereas my sister is involved in beauty culture, and her success to some extent is predicated on down-playing ethnicity and racial differences (i.e. being able to sell beauty products to women across race).

When I tell my sister about race-related things that happen to me–those pesky microagressions, for example–she often will say, “God, that’s so weird–stuff like that never happens to me!” And I always think, “I’m sure it does, you’re just not aware of it.”

I guess when it comes down to it, our different experiences serve to demonstrate that the more you think about ethnicity (and/or race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), the more likely you are to identify it everywhere, analyze how it is expressed and regulated in our society and understand how it impacts our interactions with others. It takes a lot of work, though, and of course it’s not always pleasant. But it’s work that has to be done and I’m proud to be in a position to play this particular role within my family. Because it’s my choice.

Mother’s Day 2012

When Mother’s Day comes around every year, I have mixed emotions. On the one hand, I love my mom more than she will ever know. On the other hand, the lady sometimes drives me nuts, and in the past there have been times when I have had to limit my contact with her for the sake of my sanity. There are no Hallmark cards that capture the complexity of our relationship. When I see an aisle full of those flowery, “Mom, you’re my best friend” cards, I envy the people who might truly feel that way (and I know they do exist: for example, my cousins have a genuinely great, loving, best-friendy relationship with my aunt/godmother).

But today I want to focus not on the tough times my mom and I have had, and instead focus on the positive. Here, in no particular order, are some random things I love about my Daily Chicana Mama:

1. My mom is gloriously goofy. She has the silliest sense of humor of anyone I ever met. She will burst into opera at the drop of a hat; start a game of tag and run away; suddenly speak in a crazy accent or in a little kid’s voice, just to make you laugh. I used to be embarrassed of this when I was younger, but now it’s something I love about her.

2. She owns her opinions. Intensely. It doesn’t matter who you are, how long she has known you, or what the subject matter is—she will make her views known. Do you like Julia Roberts? “Ew, I can’t STAND Julia Roberts!” Did you see the Lifetime Drew Peterson movie? “That was so STUPID!” Can you believe what my colleague said to me? “She’s an ASS-WIPE!” Did you watch the royal wedding? “Kate Middleton looked so BEAUTIFUL!” And on and on.

3. My mom defends us ferociously. Although she personally never hesitates to gossip about and criticize my sister and me when she’s talking to either one of us, god protect anyone else who dares to say or do anything remotely bad to us in her presence. When we were in school and felt that a teacher had been unfair, my mom went straight to the principal to demand an apology. When I was twenty-three years old and experienced an episode of sexual harassment at work, my mom wanted to accompany me to talk with my manager about the situation and confront the harasser herself, even though I told her I could handle it on my own. She always protects us.

4. She never was afraid to be unique or to follow her gut instinct. My mom has never been one to feel obliged to go along with any crowd. She had the courage to get divorced, for example, even though her immediate family frowned upon the decision. And when I was little, she applied for and got her first part-time job because she wanted some money of her own and greater personal freedom, despite the fact that she was told that being a stay-at-home mom was supposed to be her dream in life. I respect her strong will.

5. My mom wanted my sister and me to enjoy even the smallest of opportunities that had been denied to her. For instance, when she was growing up, my grandmother did not allow her to go to attend sleepovers, because in Mexican culture, the only reason you would stay the night at someone else’s home is because you are related to them by blood. My mom tried to explain that in the US, it was a social thing that kids did all the time, but my grandma could never see it that way. So when my sister and I were young, we could have friends stay over all the time and take up any invitations we had to do the same. Likewise, my mom never had really her own bedroom when she was growing up; she often had to share her room with relatives who visited from Mexico and stayed for months at a time. So again, no matter where we lived, she made sure that my sister and I had each our own personal space, which we never had to share unless we wanted to.

So that’s a little tribute to my mom on this special day. She’s going to be visiting me next week and I hereby publicly promise that, keeping in mind this list of some things I adore about her, I will make ever effort to be patient with her and get along with her the best I can.

Grandma’s Unlikely Feminist Intervention

My maternal grandmother Claudia has been on my mind a lot these past few weeks. She will be ninety-four years old this coming July. Until recently, she was in good health and still living on her own in a little apartment at a senior residence. She has had weak knees for years, but they have worsened to the point where she has fallen multiple times. In addition, a slow-growing cancer has been interfering with her blood circulation. It’s not a pretty picture and after her most recent and lengthiest hospital stay, my mom and her brothers had to move Grandma into a nursing home. (Grandma was not thrilled with the move, of course, but she has managed to reconcile herself to this reality because she likes the food served at the nursing home and it’s Catholic, so she gets to attend Mass every day.)

Our matriarch was a phenomenal cook. She always made the best tamales, chiles, caldos, you name it. And of course awesome flour tortillas. One day, many years ago now, either before I was married or shortly after my wedding, I decided I wanted to learn to make flour tortillas from scratch. Like the refried beans I mentioned in my first post, store-bought tortillas just don’t compare when you want something that tastes authentic and homemade.

What better person to teach me, I figured, than Grandma? I wanted to learn from the best. I envisioned not only a lovely bonding moment, but more importantly a chance to become her favorite grandchild, leaping to the top of her list through my desire to single-handedly keep our family recipes/traditions alive. (As a side note, I am the only one of her eleven grandkids who even bothered to learn Spanish, and apparently that alone was not enough to make me #1. I’m not bitter, but I wish I could point out to her, “Look, lady, I’m the only one who can speak to you in your mother tongue!”)

Excited to talk to her and learn one of her magical recipes, I called her on the phone, paper and pen at the ready. After we exchanged greetings, I announced, “I want to learn to make flour tortillas.”

My declaration was met by a long pause. “Why?”

I was taken aback; this was not the delight and enthusiasm I anticipated would greet my statement. I stammered, “Well, no reason, really. I just want them to taste homemade.”

“Oh, just buy them at the store,” she sighed. “It’s so much easier.”

“Won’t you please just tell me? I really do want to learn.”

“No.”

“Grandma! You’re really not gonna tell me?”

She suddenly became very serious.”Tell me the truth: Does [my ex-husband] expect you to make fresh tortillas for him at dinner every day?”

I burst out laughing. Did she really imagine I would choose to be with someone so stereotypically macho? Did such men (or at least, Chicanos born post-1970) even exist anymore? I managed to assure her, through my amusement, “Um, no, Grandma, he does not expect me to make tortillas every day! I just want to learn. For fun!”

However, no amount of cajoling made her give up the recipe. To her mind, making flour tortillas from scratch was an old-timey chore that for decades had kept her chained to the stove at both breakfast and dinner, rolling out each tortilla, heating it on the comal and adding it to the pile that was instantly attacked by a large, hungry family (for my grandmother had to care for not only her own four children, but also the youngest children from my grandfather’s first marriage and several extended family members who were visiting from Mexico at any given time). I don’t think she could envision the prospect of making tortillas some sort of leisure activity, hip and retro precisely because you can now buy them at the store. Now that she had been liberated from this task, Grandma had no intention of seeing me enslaved.

[This incident reminds me, too, of my mother's reaction upon learning that I had taken up knitting. "WHY?" she asked, with the same incredulity as if I'd told her I was giving up my academic career to instead spend my days swinging around the ol' stripper pole.]

Now that I look back, though, I realize that a tortilla recipe is not something that Grandma could have shared over the phone in the first place. Her recipes and talents are the result of a lifetime of experience, and originally were taught to her without written measurements and the like. So if  you were to ask her how to make something, she certainly could tell you the ingredients and walk you though the process; however, by now she just knows how much seasoning to add. There’s no way to really put a measure to it: It’s a pinch of this, or about “that” much in the palm of your hand. That’s what made it magical and uniquely hers. And its what makes watching my poor little gram get physically weaker that much more difficult.

On the significance of blogging (to me)

There are a number of reasons why I was inspired to start this blog. It’s not the first one I’ve begun. For many years, I was the proud owner of a photoblog. And last spring, I set out on WordPress with the intention of sharing my experiences with research and writing–somewhat similar to what I hope to do here. (Unfortunately that last attempt only lasted for two posts…which was rather embarrassing because I’d sent out a big, showy email announcing it to my friends.)

I don’t know who will ever stumble across these posts here on the Daily Chicana. Perhaps–and this is quite likely–no one at all will ever read them. But that’s okay, because I have to learn to derive a certain amount of satisfaction just from the act of producing writing: Pulling the thoughts out of my brain, making them coherent, push them through my fingertips and over the keys and finally watching them pop up onto this screen. For me, this has to be about the process, not the end product. In fact, I am struggling to emerge from a long bout of writer’s block, a struggle that could potentially be career-ending, as I must publish my work in order to earn tenure. I am hopeful that this forum will get me back into a daily writing habit.

All that being said, there is a larger significance for me in writing the Daily Chicana: I’m the first woman in my family to be in a position to record my musings in this way. I come from a long line of smart, passionate, opinionated and amazing women…none of whom had the opportunities to pursue their educations in the way that I have had the fortune to do. I’m the first in my family to attend college straight out of high school, and the first to attend graduate school and earn a doctoral degree. I have had the honor of seeing my name in print (on obscure topics in academic journals that only other specialists will ever read), a thrill that never gets old. It’s something that I do not take for granted.

My paternal grandmother, Esperanza, actually had to walk to the US from central Mexico with her parents when she was only eight years old (in the 1910s). Once the family was established in Midwest, her father refused to allow her to attend school, although he encouraged her two younger brothers to do so. In his eyes, education was only for men. However, Esperanza was very close to her brothers, and so every day when they came home from school, they eagerly taught her what they had learned that day. So in this way, she managed to learn the basics of speaking, reading and writing in English.

Meanwhile, one of my great-grandmothers on my maternal side, Manuela, aspired to become a nun, a goal that for the time represented the highest educational goal for a young woman in Mexico. A the age of fifteen, and with the support of her parents, she was able to begin the process at a convent near her hometown. However, due to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution and increasing anti-Christian sentiment at the time, the nuns informed her family that they could not guarantee her safety, and Manuela was sent back home. Upon her return, she married my great-grandfather and they began their family…and thus her life took her down a very different path from what she had imagined just a few years before.

One of her daughters, my grandmother Claudia, attended school up to the fourth grade, which was more or less typical for urban Mexican girls of the late 1920s. Manuela had died when my grandmother was only twelve, and as one of the oldest children of the family, Claudia was then responsible for raising the younger siblings. Therefore, continuing her education would not have been an option for her, even if she had wanted to do so.

My own mother, born in the late 1940s and raised in the US, was a voracious reader who loved going to school and was an excellent student. Although my grandmother Claudia– who had a well-meaning but incredibly strict, old-fashioned view of women’s roles–pushed my mom to drop the books and pick up a spatula and broom, my mom always retained her passion for learning; it was her only means of escape and a way to travel around the world. In the mid-1960s, she graduated as the salutatorian of her high school class. However, not a single person in her family, nor any teachers or administrators, once encouraged her to consider attending college. The assumption was that with a high school degree, her education was complete, and the next step would be to get married, which she did at the age of nineteen.

My mother always lamented not being able to attend college, and it was her biggest dream for my sister and me to earn a bachelor’s degree. After my sister decided not to go (in favor of pursuing her passion for beauty and skin care, in which she enjoys a successful career today), my mother’s hopes were all pinned on me. Fortunately, I had inherited her love of learning and reading, and success in school came very easily to me. I am thankful that she pushed me so hard to take my classes seriously and enabled me to focus exclusively on school; for example, I was never required to have an after-school job in high school, even though my mom struggled as a single parent after the divorce. Some of my earliest memories center on weekly trips to the library with my mom, from which we both would return with a stack of books so high and heavy that we could barely carry it. And though she always refused to buy an Atari or Nintendo system for me, she never denied me a new book from the local bookstore.

So will the Daily Chicana represent at times a bit of navel-gazing? Perhaps…but I do it in honor of all the women of my family who came before me and who did not have the luxury of doing so. Through my area of research and now through my musings here, I hope to share their stories and legacies for other people to see.