Armando Vazquez
Editor’s note: Amigos805 welcomes guest columns, letters to the editor and other submissions from our readers. All opinions expressed in submitted material are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of Amigos805.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
My saintly mother never knew her father. Her mother, my beloved abuelita Isabel Aguila, named her Santos, as in; May all the saints in heaven protect and care for you, you are going to need it little girl! As a child she was a slave to the uncontrollable rage of utter futility and mad predilections of her drunken brothers and abusive old sister. My mother had no formal education. At the age of 14 years of age she became a child bride to an equally young boy who at the time of their marriage was just 17 years of age, it was the customs of the time to take a young bride, and it still is in much of Mexico and many part of the world. They started out their married lives by living together in my father’s mother house, also full of soulless emaciated men that had lost themselves in alcohol. Wedded children, sanctified by a cruel and unforgiving wayward God, that was lost yet revered by my parents, just like his flock in that hell of desolate and rural Mexican. Our God was cruel but even handed all us in that part of Mexico were punished equally for having been born poor. We would be condemned to a life of crushing poverty, hunger and hopelessness.
And then came the children, one after another, my grandmother acting as the midwife; we were eight in all, four girls and four boys.
“A gift from God!” is what my father would say.
“Asi lo manda Dios” my mother would fatalistically counter. “Pero Dios lo no les va a quitar la hambre, te toca a ti!”
So my father before sunrise would make his daily trek to those desolate, barren rock strewn fields outside of our pueblito of Ahualulco, and along with his brothers and my uncles, and they would chip until night fall into the rock hard soil and plant their magical maiz. The maiz never took due to lack of rain year after miserable year; in fact the campo never yielded enough to keep the pangs of hunger and desperation out of our bellies. But in the fields my mother told us years later that is was out there in the campo where my father and his brothers hear the alluring voice of the siren from the north.
My mother is the bravest and most courage person that I have ever known, she delivered us at home on the adobe ground of my abuelita’s home with only a coarse woven straw tapete to ease the delivery of her first eight children. When my father announced that he would be going to “El Norte” with his brother my mother remained silent. She could not show fear to her children. Now came the hard part; raising all eight of her children, single handily while my father was in California. I was the baby still clutching and suckling at my mother’s breasts. With me on her hip, and only one hand free most of the day she prepared all of the food did all the chores that needed to be done around the home. My mother would toil hour after hour, day in day out always with a sense of devotion, complete and total sense of purpose, a saintly peaceful fulfillment of a daily job well done in love of her children. My mother loved and coddled us like nothing else matter in the entire universe. For her the world revolved around children, nothing else matter. What else could matter?
After many years of hard work in El Norte, and my mother saving every dollar that he sent back to her, she announce that we would be joining (my father). ”Su padre en California has called for us.” We ended up in an abandon trash dump outside of Tijuana, a gathering of all the wretched souls and families from all over Mexico waiting to get into “El Norte. If there is a hell on earth than this was surely the place, we were Los Paracidas, the wretched par shooter squads, worse than lepers. We rented a shanty of aluminum sidings that blew off almost every night due to the gale like wind blew in from the nearby Pacific Ocean. The aluminum shift roof was so full of holes that every night I welcomed the stars, praying for the safety of my family and the wish to reunite with my father. My mother never ever panicked; there was no fear in that woman! She just worked hard; all eight of us kids had jobs to do, everything from selling tamales to shining shoes to hauling water for our neighbors. She walked around the camp making sure we were doing our job and with body language warning our neighbors that her children were not to be bother. It took more than three years to get off that piece of rotting deadly hell, but what my father and mother taught us all early on was that anything was possible if we worked super hard and stayed together as a family. In 1958 through the incredible work ethic my father had was able to get a wealthy employer to sponsor the entire Vazquez family and we were legally admitted into California.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.
Editor’s note: Amigos805 welcome comments on stories appearing in Amigos805 and on issues impacting the community. Comments must relate directly to stories published in Amigos805, no spam please. We reserve the right to remove or edit comments. Full name, city required. Contact information (telephone, email) will not be published. Please send your comments directly to fmoraga@amigos805.com