Two years after we settled in Brownsville, after our father turned thirty-six and his sinus problems grew increasingly worse, we had made that fateful trip to a Harlingen clinic where the doctor announced that he was seriously ill. Our mom and dad had taken the news together, and though they said little, they understood that in too many cases cancer meant death. So much for taking care of my credit, Papi had muttered as they walked out glumly. When he saw his three daughters outside, though, he had tried to appear cheerful, and since fast food was a treat, he announced that he felt like eating a really big hamburger. In reality, he was devastated.
Our father received an immediate dose of radiation and then had to attend checkups in Houston every few months. In between, he drank himself to sleep and laughed in cancer’s face.
“El cancer me hace los mandados,”
he would brag. Once, on his way to the bar after some drinking, he lost control of his car and took the fence of our elementary school. The next day Celia and I said nothing when our classmates gawked at the open playground. He cursed and slammed doors and threw things when he felt like it, then tried desperately to make things up the next morning. It was his way of coping with his downfall, with the fact that, deep down, he understood life was cruelly slipping away.
Five years our mother bore it all stoically, calmly even. Cristina had always insisted that she take us to church, and just before they found my father’s cancer our mom had found God. It was like being in love all over again, only with someone else who was much more understanding. She didn’t want to fight our dad anymore. Where before he could drive her so mad she would pray that he might die, now she felt nothing but compassion. She made the long trips with him to the hospital, spending hours embroidering Mother Goose pillows for us while he slept. One day, when our father said he wanted some
caldo de pollo,
she rode the only bus she knew all the way to a Mexican neighborhood on the other side of Houston where she could find the chicken broth he was craving. “The patient prefers Spanish foods,” the doctor had noted in his file. By the time she returned four hours later, the patient had fallen asleep.
Before our father died, he wept regretfully and pled for forgiveness. Then he was gone. Our mother asked the mortician to dress him in the only suit he owned—the brown one he had bought for himself at the Salvation Army store he often rummaged to kill spare time on his trips to Houston. Though she wept a little, she was careful to greet the many people who came to the funeral home to pay their respects. Even when she closed the coffin as he had asked her to, she was surprisingly, almost embarrassingly, composed.
It was weeks later, when she had returned home and we were off at school, that she cried. She cried long and cried hard, letting her pain fill the walls of her empty brick house. Cried for the times the nurses had poked him blue in search of a vein, cried for the days his anxiety attacks had gotten so bad he had sworn his flesh was falling off his bones. In those tears went the long nights by his hospital bed, the hot trips to California, the day he had asked her to dance. Seventeen years later, it was just her, her and three daughters and an undetermined future. No husband. No job. No guarantees. She was so young to be left alone; so old to be initiating her life. She was thirty-eight.
But after all the sadness had been emptied and God had answered her prayers for peace, my mother’s uncertainty turned into resignation. Then, to exhilaration. For the first time in her life she began to feel like an independent adult, and the sensation was liberating. She knew immediately what would come next: She would work hard and take care of her daughters. That is what she already knew how to do, only now it would be on her own terms.
It did, however, take our mother several years to become happy and confident again. After our father’s death she was embittered for some time and was known to proclaim dramatically to my older sister: “I was a happy child and a happy teenager, but ever since I got married I’ve never known happiness.” She still became hysterical every now and then and would burst with the smallest provocation, like the many times Celia nagged from the back seat of the car because Cristina was blocking the stream of air conditioning with her arm. Mami would begin screaming and wailing unexpectedly, pulling over to the side of the road until her sobs gradually subsided and the silence grew so thick we were suffocating.
Slowly, she began to piece herself back together. She had applied for a job cooking in public schools; a year after our father died, she was hired. One day, she was driving by one of the school district’s buildings and noticed a line of people who were preparing to take a general equivalency diploma exam. Although our mom hadn’t sat in a classroom in thirty years, she took the test and received a high school diploma. I remember when she bought her own car for the first time and posed with us for a Polaroid shot that was tacked up on the dealer’s wall—four smiling women and an equally proud 1988 charcoal gray Plymouth Reliant.
That car was her little mobile home for the next six years, the place where she spent many hours in a school parking lot waiting for us to emerge from a late choir rehearsal or student council meeting. When we had concerts or an awards assembly, she always sat near the front, making every effort to appear interested despite the ungraceful sounds of our awkward sixth-grade band. She made only $9,000 a year working full time, so when I cried to her that I was the only clarinet player who was going to attend the all-state band tryouts with an old horn, she made mental calculations for days. Finally, she charged my top-of-the-line Buffet clarinet to a credit card.
What could a Mexican mother possibly teach her three daughters about American feminism? I was in college and still didn’t know what it meant to be a feminist. I mean, I figured it had something to do with advocating for women’s rights generally, so I was tempted to count myself in. But I didn’t know what it
felt
like to be a feminist—how to perceive myself, what to say I believed in, how to treat men. For the past seven years I had watched my mother be both a man and a woman. She was the person who always made sure there was hot food on the table and asked how we were doing in school, who mowed the lawn on cloudy mornings and patched up the plumbing when it was leaking.
So I took a class. It was about the welfare system, and all of the students in it were women. Most of them were white except for a few other Mexican Americans who lived with me in Casa Zapata, the Chicano theme dorm at Stanford University. We talked about poverty and its effect on women. We talked about single moms and why the odds are stacked high against them. There was a feeling of urgency and self-righteousness that excited me. But a sort of ritual also seemed to emerge. When somebody offered a bold statement, the rest of the women nodded fiercely in agreement. There was a strange, implicit consensus I hadn’t experienced in my other classes. As a final assignment, our professor had us debate two sides of an issue; that was a tough one for everyone. We all believed that women have the right to work, that they shouldn’t have to take care of the babies
and
do everything around the house, that in fact they should be
paid
for that labor, that their office salaries should, at the
least,
be equal to those of men.
Then we talked about abortion. Of course, women should have the right to choose. I shrunk in my chair. Having been raised a Catholic, I felt passionately at the time that no baby should be killed. But then I wasn’t really a feminist, was I? I was disheartened. I took my B
+
—feminism can be graded, after all—and abandoned feminist activities at Stanford. I did come to understand later that gender, race and class are inextricably linked, and that I was being a feminist in other ways and through other associations. My best learning, though, occurred outside of school, with my two sisters and our mother. In our family, the future was always a fuzzy cloud the four of us poked together, discussing different approaches, testing boundaries, negotiating philosophical commitments. We learned what it meant to be feminists side by side, not hierarchically.
And we learned something else, something about sacrifice. For American feminists, feminism and sacrifice don’t quite fit together. Since we have long presumed that when a sacrifice must be made—such as leaving a job to raise children—it is the woman’s duty to make it, feminists often claim that we should not have to give up ourselves for others. Yet many women writers of color have reminded us that sacrifice and motherhood go hand in hand. From the moment a woman conceives her child, she offers up part of her body for something bigger. So, if feminists should not sacrifice, but mothers must, does it follow that mothers cannot be feminists? What my mother showed me is that sometimes, we improve our lot as women together and through each other. Suggesting that women are only fully realized when they have an important job, a wholesome family and spiritual well-being assumes that they have access to a decent education, to daycare, to money. to pay somebody else to clean the house, to a few extra hours to spend on fulfilling pastimes. It denies the many achievements of all those other women—working—class women, immigrant women, women of color, single mothers—who work wonders with the little they have.
Because one of those women raised me, I now claim two feminisms as my own. There is the feminism that serves as my ideology, the one that is sharp as a knife and that I can bring out at dinner or in the coffee shop when I have serious discussions with friends and colleagues. It is the feminism that argues that women make special contributions to the way we educate children, the way we understand our communities, the way we organize our government and manage our relations with other nations. It is a set of intellectual understandings that is fundamental to my life, to the goals I set for myself professionally. It is the reason I look at the institutions around me, the culture that produced them and decide that our job freeing women from the tentacles of gender is far from complete.
Then there is the feminism that I can’t keep in a box, that I can’t fully articulate. It is the feminism that is more disposition than discourse and that doesn’t even call itself feminism. It is the stubborn self-instruction that despite the setbacks, I have to keep trudging forward; the quiet assurance that even if things went terribly wrong, I would survive. This feminism measures achievement in everyday victories: a sister’s new job, a redecorated room, a clean credit report. It celebrates the company of cousins and aunts around the kitchen table and cherishes our opportunity, finally, to complain, to laugh, to sing.
I spotted other women like my mother at Stanford, women who had spent most of their lives in silence. When the mothers of some of my middle-class friends came to visit, they treated all of us to an elegant dinner or brunch and suggested how we might deal with professors, what classes we should consider taking and which kind of jobs would pay us more. When my Chicana friends’ moms came, they usually hid out in their daughters’ dorm rooms and smiled shyly when strangers walked by. Yet, far away from home, we found comfort in each others’ mothers, women who had been role models not because of the words they spoke or the rights they claimed, but because of what they had surmounted and what they had given up for their daughters. In their survival we discovered strength; in their sacrifices, boldness. Their accomplishments as women had been colossal when measured across generations. Through their individual silences they gave us a collective voice.
“When you three began to learn is when I began to learn,” my mother once told me, oblivious of the fact that the same had been true the other way around. What people who think my sisters and I are too independent don’t understand is that almost everything in our family is a group project, that one person’s accomplishment belongs to everyone else. Our mother didn’t get to be a chemist after all—didn’t even get to middle school—but she has three college degrees hanging on her wall with a few more graduate degrees coming. And they are all hers as much as they are ours. Our mom is a social worker, a journalist, a soon-to-be lawyer. Even as young adults, we continue to seek her help and her company. It is not just that her experiences help us put our own challenges into perspective; it is that they reside deep inside of us. It is that a little ounce of her is with us always, making us the women we want to be.
My mother had to swallow the consequences that came with choosing a different life for her daughters. When Cristina insisted that she had to leave Brownsville to get a social work degree, our mother was hesitant but she half-heartedly packed up the Reliant and drove her first-born to San Antonio. Walking into the dorm where my sister would be spending the next several years, my mom’s heart wilted when she saw the other students sitting around the lobby. The scene was painfully familiar: they reminded her of sad relatives waiting in a hospital waiting room. Three years later, our mom forced a smile and waved goodbye from the tiny Brownsville airport as her twins flew away to New York and California. She later told me that she had wept the night before as, for the last time, she ironed my long-sleeve cotton shirts just the way I liked them. Like my father had liked them, too.
But a new kind of life, one that she had longed to know as a child, opened up to our mother when we left. Over endless late-night phone conversations, she sympathized with our bureaucratic dilemmas, asked about our new friends and reminded us to eat well and sleep plenty. She came to visit me in California, where we climbed the sloped streets of San Francisco and revisited the migrant camp in Davis that had served as her first home in the United States. When I spent a semester in Puebla with a Mexican exchange program, she made the eighteen-hour bus trip with me, exploring places she’d never explored in her own country. She took lots of pictures of places only her imagination had toured, later carrying them in her purse to show her co-workers. In 1996, Celia took her to New York. Our mom was horrified by the crazy driving and the subways where people stared, so she insisted instead on walking dozens of blocks at a time to see the city. Then, on a sticky July morning, they decided to visit the Statue of Liberty. My mother knew very little about the scores of immigrants who had passed before that same spot for generations. But as a child the monument, which she had seen in books and on television, had represented the glitzy life of New York—a cosmopolitanism this little girl from the ranch had always wished for herself.