“Le puedo preguntar, ¿cómo termino aquí en California, Señora?”
“May I ask how you came to be here in California, Señora?”
It takes a second but even the girls pick up on the rising tension around the table. I watch my grandmother regard Ellie cautiously and I’m on the verge of interjecting with who knows what, when she answers.
“You may.”
Except my grandmother doesn’t add more, only bends her head back over her bowl to blow calmly on her dinner. Desiree shoots me a look that includes an arched eyebrow, telling me if I don’t smooth this over, she will.
“I grew up in a small village near Acapulco.”
My mouth falls slack with surprise, along with Desiree’s and Mari’s. My grandmother never talks about her past.
“My prospects there were . . . limited,” she goes on. “I was eighteen when my mother died and she took my only reason for remaining in the village with her. My cousin, Jaime and I decided to strike out on our own.”
Jaime? Abuela has a cousin named Jaime?
“What did your family think of the decision?” Ellie asks, while the rest of us swing our heads back and forth between them in frank astonishment.
“I didn’t have much family to speak of. My mother had migrated north from Guatemala in her twenties and then married my father who had only one brother.”
Audible gasps sound around the table, including mine.
“My great grandmother was from Guatemala?” Desiree squeaks. “Why don’t I know this?”
“You never asked,” my grandmother says with a casual wave of her hand. “Anyway, that is ancient history. I was telling you about when I left home.” She gathers her thoughts, then continues. “Jaime and I heard that there was work to be had in the maquiladoras along the border with the United States.”
“Papá?” Rosa whispers from beside me. “What’s a maquiladora?”
“It’s a factory, I think,” I whisper back.
“What year was this?” Ellie asks, while my siblings and I listen all agog.
“1965.”
“So very early in the program.”
Program? Which program?
My grandmother nods, giving Ellie a pleased look, like she enjoys speaking with someone who knows shit. “Yes, the American factories were just beginning to pop up. It was not a . . . safe environment. Neither the living nor the working conditions, particularly for an unmarried woman.”
“So you decided to cross the border,” Ellie states.
“Yes, just so. I’m not sure my eighteen-year-old self quite understood the implications of starting a new life in a new country. But there was nothing for me to go back to, and I could not stay where I was.”
“Did you pay a coyote to take you across?” Ellie asks.
“Coyote?” Daniela asks, struggling to follow the conversation. “Like a wolf?”
“No, it’s like a nickname.” Mari tells her in English. “A coyote is a person who takes people across the border illegally.”
“But what’s illegally?” Daniela then asks, making me wince. I’m sure this is part of the reason why my grandmother never talks about anything before she got married here in California.
“It means,” Abuela explains evenly, “that I wasn’t allowed to come to the United States, but I did it anyway.”
“Like Rocio’s dad?” Daniela asks with alarm and I frown, wondering who Rocio is.
“Yes, mi amor. Like Rocio’s dad.”
“But Abuela, Rocio’s dad was sent away,” Daniela says, her concern growing. “Are they going to send you away too?”
“No, don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. Not now.”
The conversation ends up on a tangent about Rocio, who turns out to be a girl at school, and her dad, who was deported back to Honduras, and how his situation is different from Abuela’s. Which is to say it’s not; the only difference is the era in which they crossed the border and that my grandmother found a way to legalize her status and Rocio’s dad didn’t.
When Daniela is satisfied, I turn the talk back to what I really want to know. “So, did you pay a coyote, Abuela?”
“No. Not exactly. A group of us paid a patero to take us across the Río Bravo into Texas.”
Mari is shocked. “You swam the Rio Grande?!”
“I did not, in fact, swim,” my grandmother says without humor, probably because people lose their lives every year doing just that. “A patero is a boatman.”
“But how did you know where to go when you got to the other side of the river?” Desiree asks, sounding almost stricken.
“One of the young women in our group had heard from a friend of a friend of a kind of safe house. We followed her blindly.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what we were thinking. But there’s something about youth that makes risk acceptable. In short, I was a fool.”
“But you made it?” I ask, pretty much astounded, listening to this story for the first time in my life.
She did make it, and as we all listen, I can barely imagine my seventy-two year old grandmother as an eighteen year old girl traipsing across the country with her cousin, lying low, working illegally and living in paranoia of being deported for more than ten years before she met and then married my grandfather. It just seems so far-fetched. My sweet, loving grandmother, the illegal alien.
But it makes me realize how easy it is for Chicano kids like me and my sisters, especially because we’re second generation, to forget that life wasn’t always so simple for those who came before us.
Ellie
Was I being nosy? Yes. But it’s not like I was going to hound Scott’s grandmother to share her experiences if she was reluctant. I admit that the appalled expression on Scott’s face when I asked the question made my chest tighten with dread. I thought, for a second, that I’d seriously screwed up. But then she started talking and everyone around the table hung on her every word. Even cousin Jaime, who died in a car crash in 1974, was news. Apparently, family history isn’t something they ever discuss . . . which holds a certain logic. I imagine that, however common, there’s a stigma attached to being an illegal resident, not to mention the habit of secrecy when your very existence is a crime. That can’t be easy to shake no matter how many years have passed.
It’s late by the time everyone’s curiosity is sated. Scott sends the girls, who are drooping off to sleep in their seats, to get their pajamas on and I’m admonished for trying to help clear the table. The matriarch assures me her grandchildren, including Scott, can handle it. I watch with more than a little interest as Scott and his sisters get the leftovers put away, load the dishwasher, and scrub the enormous pot like they’ve done it a million times, all while chatting and gently teasing each other. It’s almost intimate, and it fills me with what I think is envy. I don’t have this kind of relationship with my family.
Feeling content and full, I almost miss how the casual atmosphere in the kitchen changes.
“What do you mean she can’t do it?” Scott says, aghast. “She’s cancelling now?”
“Yes,” his grandmother says with her usual composure. “And I can’t cancel this appointment with the doctor. So one of you will have to do it.”