©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
several children of their own), and Camie and Rafa in tow, Linda
and I met and made home. At the age of forty-four, we began to
walk a road of contested mothering wherein the only guidepost
was the example of the abiding resolve of those two “old-school”
Mexican women who had preceded us.
Valores mexicanos.
Every thing about our upbringing as Mexican American
children reveres its elders. With elders, we learn to offer a glass of
water, a cup of coffee, the last empty chair in a room. We extend
our arm for them to hold as they cross a street, get out of a car, step
into a bathtub. With elders, we learn to refrain from comment
when we disagree, endure long hours of visita without asking to
eat, and never refuse what is offered to eat, no matter how stale the
saltines. With elders, we also learn that if we made ourselves
invisible enough, they may forget we are there and reveal all:
stories with the power to conjure a past as stained and shady grey
as the aging photographs that held them.
Elders were to be honored at all costs; so when was the cost too
high?
The San Gabriel of my childhood (and my parents’ forties and
fifties) was a typical of most suburban Los Angeles towns of the
1960s, constructed from the American optimism resultant from the
trauma of World War II and re-invigorated faith in democracy that
succeeded it. The Native origins of the region had long been
absorbed (close to extinction) into the culture of landless Mexicans,
who now resided on the other side of the tracks of Anglo-America,