©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

1

The Other Side of the Tracks

On Indigenous People’s Day 2003, my Mexican mother

announced to my sister that the Anglo man who had occupied the

other side of her bed for the last fifty-five years was not her

husband. She refused to sleep with him again. She did not know

who he was, she confessed, but she knew that she wasn’t “his

woman,” and he had no business in her bed.

My sister was stunned.

“Do you know who I am, Mom?” she asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re my daughter. I have three children.”

“But Mom, that man is our father.”

To which my mother replied, “He may be your father, but he’s

not my husband.” Then she added, not hiding her distaste, “How

could I have had children with that man.”

I write this remembering the fresh opening that was the wound

of my mother’s life at eighty-nine-years old: a worker-woman life

from California agricultural fields to Tijuana casinos to urban

assembly lines to suburban family kitchen and back to assembly

work again. It was so fresh an opening that I had no way to predict

how long this “delusion” might last or if the next day she would

wake up and suddenly recognize my father as her life companion.

That day, she did not and for many many days and weeks to

follow. That day she had exposed the benign emperor in all his

nakedness. This man was never her husband, she announced with

indignation to everyone – her daughters, her last surviving sister,

her doctor. She was done with the pretense.

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

True to her conviction, my mother moved to the guest bed in

the back of their small bungalow home. “It’s the dementia talking,”

my father insisted. And, of course, it was. Still my sister and I

could not help but respond to the deeper message relayed in my

mother’s so-called “locura.” She was our mother, after all, flesh of

our flesh, our soon-to-be ancestor, our tribal leader, our once fierce

matriarch reduced to about six dozen pounds of bone hard fury.

As her Mexican female offspring, we saw in her the map of choices

that were drawn out for us, too. We saw in her the locations of

bitter regret we refused to inhabit and the places of the same that

we have inadvertently occupied in our own lives. She was our

mirror; that day, the carnival magic house kind—distorted and

exaggerated, and fundamentally marvelous. She offered hope for

change: that the human spirit really wants truth; that the human

spirit really wants freedom; that the human spirit speaks even

through a thick wall of dementia to remember the heart’s history

more profoundly than any chronology of facts of who married

whom and who begot what children. Maybe dementia really was

the gift of old age.

We began as a mixed-raced family of five, my parents and their

children; we three siblings born within a span of three years during

that boom of babies following World War II. For the next fifty

years, my mother who was eight years older than my father, would

serve as the planet around which all us and our near-hundred

relations, would hover like orbiting moons. What kept us all

gravitating to that sphere of my mother’s kitchen (aside from her

incomparable chile colorado) was the shared sense of Elvira’s

indefatigable capaz.