Authors: Reyna Grande
B0061QB04W EBOK
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Contents
Book Two: The Man Behind The Glass
To my father, Natalio Grande
1947–2011
And to all DREAMers
“Nothing happens unless first we dream.”
—C
ARL
S
ANDBURG
MI MAMÁ ME AMA
Reyna, at age two
M
Y FATHER’S MOTHER,
Abuela Evila, liked to scare us with stories of La Llorona, the weeping woman who roams the canal and steals children away. She would say that if we didn’t behave, La Llorona would take us far away where we would never see our parents again.
My other grandmother, Abuelita Chinta, would tell us not to be afraid of La Llorona; that if we prayed, God, La Virgen, and the saints would protect us from her.
Neither of my grandmothers told us that there is something more powerful than La Llorona—a power that takes away parents, not children.
It is called The United States.
In 1980, when I was four years old, I didn’t know yet where the
United States was or why everyone in my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero, referred to it as El Otro Lado, the Other Side.
What I knew back then was that El Otro Lado had already taken my father away.
What I knew was that prayers didn’t work, because if they did, El Otro Lado wouldn’t be taking my mother away, too.
Carlos, Reyna, and Mago with Mami
I
T WAS
J
ANUARY
1980. The following month, my mother would be turning thirty. But she wouldn’t be celebrating her birthday with us. I clutched at my mother’s dress and asked, “How long will you be gone?”
“Not too long,” was her response. She closed the latch on the small suitcase she had bought secondhand for her trip to El Otro Lado, and I knew the hour had come for her to leave.
Sometimes, if I promised to be good, my mother would take me along with her as she went out into the neighborhood to sell Avon
products. Other times she would leave me at Abuelita Chinta’s house. “I won’t be gone for long,” she would promise as she pried my fingers from hers. But this time, when my mother said she wouldn’t be gone long, I knew it would be different. Yet I never imagined that “not too long” would turn out to be never, because, if truth be told, I never really got my mother back.
“It’s time to go,” Mami said as she picked up her suitcase.
My sister Mago, my brother Carlos, and I grabbed the plastic bags filled with our clothes. We stood at the threshold of the little house we had been renting from a man named Don Rubén and looked around us one last time. Mami’s brothers were packing our belongings to be stored at Abuelita Chinta’s house: a refrigerator that didn’t work but that Mami hoped to fix one day, the bed Mago and I had shared with Mami ever since Papi left, the wardrobe we’d decorated with
El Chavo del Ocho
stickers to hide the places where the paint had peeled off. The house was almost empty now. Later that day, Mami would be handing the key back to Don Rubén, and this would no longer be our home, but someone else’s.
As we were about to step into the sunlight, I caught a glimpse of Papi. Tío Gary was putting a photo of him into a box. I ran to take the photo from my uncle.
“Why are you taking that?” Mami said as we headed down the dirt road to Papi’s mother’s house, where we would be living from then on.
“He’s my papi,” I said, and I clutched the frame tight against my chest.
“I know that,” Mami said. “Your grandmother has pictures of your father at her house. You don’t need to take it with you.”
“But
this
is my papi,” I told her again. She didn’t understand that this paper face behind a wall of glass was the only father I’d ever known.
I was two years old when my father left. The year before, the peso was devalued 45 percent to the US dollar. It was the beginning of the worst recession Mexico had seen in fifty years. My father left to pursue a dream—to build us a house. Although he was a bricklayer and had built many houses, with Mexico’s unstable economy he would never earn the money he needed to make his dream a reality.
Like most immigrants, my father had left his native country with high expectations of what life in El Otro Lado would be like. Once reality set in, and he realized that dollars weren’t as easy to make as the stories people told made it seem, he had been faced with two choices: return to Mexico empty-handed and with his head held low, or send for my mother. He decided on the latter, hoping that between the two of them, they could earn the money needed to build the house he dreamed of. Then he would finally be able to return to the country of his birth with his head held high, proud of what he had accomplished.
In the meantime, he was leaving us without a mother.
Mago, whose real name is Magloria, though no one called her that, took my bag of clothes from me so that I could hold Papi’s photo with both hands. It was hard to keep my balance on a dirt road littered with rocks just waiting to trip me and make me fall, but that January morning I was extra careful because I carried my papi in my arms, and he could break easily, like the bottle of Coca-Cola Mago was carrying the day she tripped. The bottle broke into pieces, the sweet brown liquid washing away the blood oozing from the cut on her wrist. She had to have three stitches. But that wasn’t her first scar, and it wouldn’t be her last.
“¿Juana, ya te vas?” Doña María said. She was one of Mami’s Avon clients. She ran down the dirt road with an empty shopping bag on her way to el mercado. Her lips were painted hot pink with the Avon lipstick she had bought on credit from Mami.
“Ya me voy, amiga,” Mami said. “My husband needs me at his side.” I’d lost track of how many times Mami had said that since my father’s telephone call three weeks before. It hadn’t taken long for the whole colonia of La Guadalupe to learn that Mami was going to El Otro Lado. It made me angry to hear her say those words:
My husband needs me.
As if my father were not a grown man. As if her children didn’t need her as well.
“My mother will be collecting the money you owe me,” Mami told Doña María. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Doña María didn’t look at her. She nodded and wished my mother a safe trip. “I’ll pray for a successful crossing for you, Juana,” she said.
“Don’t worry, Doña María, I won’t be running across the border. My husband has paid someone to drive me across with borrowed papers. It was expensive, but he didn’t want to put me in any danger.”
“Of course, how could he do otherwise?” Doña María murmured as she walked away.
Back then, I was too young to realize that unlike me, Mami didn’t walk with her eyes to the ground because she was afraid of the rocks tripping her. I was too young to know about the men who leave for El Otro Lado and never return. Some of them find new wives, start a new family. Others disappear completely, reinventing themselves as soon as they arrive, forgetting about those they’ve left behind.
It was a worry that kept my mother up at night, although I didn’t know it back then. But in the weeks since my father’s phone call, she walked differently. She didn’t look down at the ground anymore.
My husband has sent for me. He needs me,
she said to everyone, and the women, like Doña María, whose husband left long ago, would lower their eyes.