Memories Of An Old World Mom

By Alejandra Garza de Gutrierrez

Growing up, I never understood my mother. She was old school and old world.

I would cringe whenever people told me I look just like her, which I do. I rolled my eyes whenever she scolded me for going against her Mexican traditions. It’s something most children of immigrants can relate to. You’re torn between your reality as a kid growing up in the United States while your parents are clinging to the ideas and values they brought from their homeland.

Maria Estela De Luna Aguilar was born in 1947 on a ranch just outside Allende, Coahuila, Mexico. It’s a small town near the Texas border that nobody’s heard of unless you’re from there. But Allende was my mother’s world and she was happy there. She grew up on those dusty, unpaved streets and knew everyone and everyone knew her. For her it was enough – until she met my father at a wedding.

The way my father tells it is the stuff of fairy tales. She was the only girl at the party who ignored him. She was 25 and unmarried, which in those days meant she was doomed to become a “solterona” – a spinster. He was an unmarried man from out of town – with a shiny new Gran Torino, no less – and she didn’t even look at him. My father said it was her feistiness that made it impossible to forget her. Even in a roomful of women.

Just two months after that wedding, they celebrated their own. But like so many Mexican men from small towns, my father had already looked north for a better life. He had a steady job in Waukegan, Illinois. For my mother, that meant leaving behind her family, her friends and Allende. Loving an immigrant meant becoming one herself.

She followed her new husband to Illinois. The year was 1973 and Waukegan was a gray and gritty industrial town north of Chicago. But my mother made a home out of the dark, windowless basement that my father rented for his family. My father tells stories of my mother, pregnant with me at the time, selling homemade chorizo on the sidewalk outside the grocery store to help make ends meet. Of how when he came home from his job as a laborer, the driveway was always shoveled clean of snow. Of my mother waking up at 4 a.m. to prepare his lunchbox and kiss him goodbye as he headed out the door. This happened every day for 35 years.

In 1978, we moved to Houston. It was tough moving to a new city and starting over. But my mother always made it clear that while Allende was once her world, now my father was. And that meant following him wherever he went.

As many of us can remember, it was tough being the child of Mexican immigrants back in the 70‘s and 80‘s. It hasn’t gotten any easier, I’m sure, but at least now you have the option of “Press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish”. Very few services were bilingual when I was growing up. For years, my mother carried a cheat sheet in her checkbook to help her spell out numbers in English while writing a check. By the third grade, I already knew how to forge my mother’s signature in order to avoid having her fill out paperwork in English.

My father’s job as a piperfitter in the Texas City oil fields meant that there were plenty of bust times when he was out of a job. So my mother went to work. She was a cook at a hot wings restaurant, a residential cleaning lady, a cleaning lady at a very seedy motel, a cleaning lady at a bingo hall, a cook at Taco Cabana, a cleaning lady at a dental office building, and a shopping mall janitor. Unfortunately, she never got her dream job – cafeteria lunch lady. God knows she tried.

My father says he fell even more in love with her one day when he went to visit her at her job as a mall janitor. The mall was full of shoppers and in the middle of it all was my mother – smiling while pushing her cleaning cart in her green uniform and comfortable shoes. By this time, my mother was well into her 50’s. But to my father, she was radiant.

My sister and I would often go with my mother on her jobs. To this day, the smell of a dental office brings makes me nostalgic. It reminds me of late nights taking out bags of dental trash with my mother when I was in high school. To be honest, some nights I would just fall asleep on the couch in the waiting room while my mother cleaned the offices by herself. I now feel guilty about that. I also feel guilty about all the dental floss I swiped.

Thanks to my mother’s jobs, I know what it’s like to clean a rich white lady’s house and have her look at you like you’re invisible. My family also spent more than one Christmas Eve eating at Taco Cabana because my mother couldn’t get the night off. But we were happy. What we always lacked in money we made up for in family unity.

It was about 25 years ago that my mother finally gave up the dream of returning to Allende. She became an American citizen in 1996. It was one of the proudest days of her life. And now she likes to vote. In 2008, she stood in line for three hours to cast her vote for Hillary Clinton in the Texas primary. That was one of the proudest days of my life.

These days, diabetes and epilepsy have taken their toll on my mother. Some days she’s in a foul mood. Some days she and my father squabble for hours. I remind him that her feistiness was what drew him to her in the first place. He’s not amused. But she continues to be the glue that holds my family together.

Of course payback is a witch. I now have my own daughter who will one day roll her eyes at me. It’s going to hurt, I’m sure. I’ll know how my mother felt all those years. And that’s what kills me. I pray that God gives me enough time to make it up to my mother. I only wish that my daughter looked more like me, which she doesn’t. If she did then we’d both be the spitting image of my mother.

Felicidades to all of our mothers on this Diez de mayo.