©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
in the shadow of ever-expanding freeway interchanges. The dream
of Suburban America required its residents to believe that posted
city limits, railroad tracks, and tree-lined boulevards protected
them from the color of violence in the inner city. Throughout the
fifties, however, as Baby Boomers were being born and then
coming of age into the sixties, post-war hopes of social equality for
people of color had been dashed by the ever-vigilance of Jim Crow
laws in the South, rising urban poverty, the residual trauma of
Japanese American internment, and the ever heartless working and
living conditions of farm workers in California, Tejas and Arizona.
In the case of San Gabriel, “color” had always been there in the
Uto-Aztecan descendants, now carrying Spanish surnames on the
south side of the tracks. By the 1960s, those same Indians and their
Mexican relations from the south had evolved from filero-toting
“pachucos” of the forties to become khaki-clad “cholos” and
poured over the hills from East Los into the valle de San Gabriel.
Soon after, they—along with the working class catholic
schoolboys—started coming home in Army corps body bags and a
President and a Would-be President and a Baptist Freedom
Preacher and a Freedom Fighter and a Freedom Fighter and
another Freedom Fighter got shot dead and the suburbs, I came to
learn, would not protect us. But I learned that later.
In 1961, the anglicization of San Gabriel was still in full swing
when our family was the first of the Moraga clan to move there
(although we were not the first to bear that name in the region).
Landing on the other side of the tracks, but south of Las Tunas
Drive—the dividing line between us and the more affluent Anglo
homes to the north -- 205 Junipero Serra Drive sat in a kind of
holding zone between gringolandia and Mexican-Indian herencia
of San Gabriel. The main drag through town, Las Tunas Drive, in
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
many ways reflected the fiction of the American dream, that the
culture of Anyplace America could be imposed upon a city without
regard to the history or culture of the majority of its inhabitants. In
the heyday of my childhood, Las Tunas Drive featured the
Edward’s Theater, where for a 25 cent admission ticket, I could cast
my pre-adolescent eyes upon Latina-esque Suzanne Pleshette’s
bold cleavage magnified on the big screen. Just down the block
from there was the Las Tunas Market, a three block three-times-aday
walk from our house, which my sister and I obligingly trekked
in errand for my mother or grandmother. There, would-be
boyfriends lingered on ten-speed or stingray bikes, straddled
across banana seats like wanna-be hells angels. The market was
eventually replaced by Julie’s bakery, which had come to replace
the Helmsman who had each afternoon delivered to the front of
our house chocolate dipped donuts and éclairs drawn from six foot
long drawers opening from the back of the Helms Bakery van.
I remember a Liquor Store on the same street, which survived
the closing of the market during my college years. There underage
boyfriends sauntered in without i.d. for a bottle of Annie
Greensprings, a cheap soda-pop wine that tasted like Kool Aid and
perfectly suited the taste and thin wallets of just-last-week Bubble-
Up drinkers. There was also the fast-food Tastee Freeze that was
not tasty, but provided for my brother the one job he had briefly
during high school. Then he gave up summer jobs altogether for
August football training and college scholarship aspirations. Just
down the street from the Freeze was the Ranch Steak House, which
we frequented on the very rare occasion of extra cash in the house,
and a Hardware Store where some forty years later I would buy a
galvanized metal tub in which to give my eighty-eight-year old
mother a bath. There was a local library, the size and prefabricated
look of a jumpstrip market, which provided my sister
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
and me with infinite distraction during endless summer smogladen
months, coloring a new section of the mimeographed
bookworm for every book read. A block down from there stood a
pharmacist-owned corner drug store where I worked as a teen for
one dollar and fifty cents an hour when the minimum wage was
$1.65 (This is also where I snagged my first and only can of
spermicide foam, just in case the condom didn’t work).
Crossing city limits a few miles to the west, Las Tunas Drive
became Main Street, Alhambra. With a Woolworth’s five-and-dime
and Lerner’s dress shop, the twenty-five cent bus drive soon
replaced our trips to Main Street Downtown Los Angeles, where I
had, until the age of seven, held onto my mother’s straight-lined
skirt as we rode at a near ninety degree angle the famous “Angel’s
Flight.” A vernicular railway on Bunker Hill, it was leveled in
1969, as were most of the Victorian mansions in the area, to make
room for fifty-story glass high rises.
In short, as a burgeoning suburb of Los Angeles, life along Las
Tunas Drive and its environs was in many ways what it was
intended to be: ordinary, a kind of Anywhere USA. What was not
ordinary to me was that San Gabriel was to provide the final
stomping ground for that band of Mexicans—once espanoles, once
indios—that our familia would never be again.
From 1962 and for twenty-two years thereafter, México lived
next door to us in the body of my forever-aged grandmother. By
that time, Dolores Rodríguez de Moraga had already spawned a
full tribe of more than one hundred descendants, the majority of
which had moved to the San Gabriel Valley. Following her
daughter, Elvira, whose younger siblings had followed her in
pursuit of a more prosperous life, Dolores left a South Central Los
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
Angeles already plagued by the inter-racial conflict – Black against
Mexican against newly arrived Asian immigrant – that still afflicts
it today. Grama had hesitated to make the move until that fateful
afternoon when poor eyesight reconfigured the light-skinned Black
man who entered her bedroom as her son, Roberto. Holding a
knife to her throat, he demanded that she not make a move, while
he ran off to the rest of the house to scavenge for cash and anything
of worth he could carry inside the deep pockets of his trousers. In
the meantime, my grandmother who was already in her seventies,
crawled through the open window of her bedroom and dropped a
full ten feet to the crabgrass beneath her, running to her youngest
daughter’s house for refuge.
Before San Gabriel there had been one more L.A. apartment
move to a courtyard of one bedrooms, surrounded by Chinese
immigrants who sang to their children from their one-step stoops
to call them in for evening supper. It was my first encounter with a
tonal language, the significance of which I did not understand until
some twenty-five years later when I would step off a bus into the
Yucatan and encounter the same in its very Asian looking Yucatec
Maya-speaking inhabitants. But the Chinese court was a
temporary stay until the Moraga-clan in one huge migratory wave
landed in the San Gabriel Valley.
Our San Gabriel Valley – Montebello, Alhambra, Monterey
Park, and of course, San Gabriel with the Mission and its Catholic
schools – became our own familial cosmos of first and second
cousins, aunties and uncles, ninas and ninos. To live in proximity to
my grandmother was to daily remember an América before Anglo
intrusion. Born in 1888 in Sonora, México, but baptized in Florence,
Arizona—the document of which she used as proof of U.S.
citizenship -- my grandmother remained faithful to her position as
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
surviving matriarch of the family and to her Mexicanism until she
passed in 1984.
The México my grandmother brought to my daily life was one
of a Sonora Desert of covered wagon entrepreneurship and the
high dusty drama of an untelevised West. She riding shotgun
(without shotgun) at my Grandfather’s side, as they pull up into a
Yaqui pueblo, pots and pans and kitchen utensils clanking their
arrival. The Yaqui families sit silently in a circle around the
mestizo vendors. My abuelita grows impatient. “Vámonos, no
quieren nada,” she snaps impatient at my twenty-year old
grandfather. He urges her to wait and watch. Many long minutes
pass until at last one man stands and approaches the wagon.
Moments later, the whole community follows. Business was good
that day for the newly wed Moragas.
The México my grandmother brought to my daily life was the
length of her fingers threaded into the mouth of my anti-war folk
guitar. She sang songs I do not remember the words to now, her
voice a Chavela Vargas gravel as she plucked at the strings with
arthritic fingers having long lost the finesse of her girlhood
musicianship. Her family were músicos, she told me in her broken
English. And yes, once, I remember seeing such a family portrait:
the brass instruments resting across high-water woolen trousers,
violins pressed against proud chests.
The México my grandmother brought was of familial memory,
sleeping beneath the blond furniture headboard that held the small
retrato of her long-dead mother. At night with our evening
prayers, we kissed the pursed mouth of the small sprig of a
woman, clad in a black high-collared dress, a chonguito atop her
head. Bisabuela had died in her nineties as my grandmother would
in the decades ahead. My abuelita’s mourning of her mother had
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
never lessened as I watched her become the same purse-mouthed
figure in the photo. The same figure my mother would assume in
the last months of her life. Me, too. I imagine. Me, too, one day.
In this world of extended familia – primos, abuelita, and tíos—I
remember the world of play. I remember “pertend games” and
smog and chlorine-filled lungs that ached with each full-chested
breath on the walk home from the city plunge. I remember peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches and concentrated lemonade from cans
and my mom at work in the electronics plant and long hours of
trying to find something to do. I remember the evercompanionship
of my sister and prima-hermana, Cynthia; Nino’s
small-sized Pizza for a $1.50 and RC Cola pints; going to Nam’s
Cantonese Restaurant, after collecting my Tía Tencha and mom
from a hour’s worth of Friday night paycheck beers at the Skip Inn.
Our heads pyramid style at the back alley screen door, my sister,
Cindy and I would peer into the smoky dusk of the afternoon bar,
trying to distinguish the silhouettes of our mothers. I always
checked the feet first. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, my Tía
Tencha’s iridescent feet would gradually come into view, propped
up upon the leg of a barstool, covered in her coveted aqua-colored
chanclas. She suffered from merciless bunions and after eight
hours of assembly line work, the fluffy pastel slippers became their
own kind of podiatric sanctuary.
They were hard working women who would wave us off with
“We’re just gonna finish this one last beer, mijitas.” And true to
their word, even when the beer extended itself into another, they
would finally emerge in good humor, smelling of hops and Salem
cigarettes and electronic wire.
©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009
I remember working, too, hard with my hands, even back then
(as I do now) hammering and fixing, taping moldy tiles back up
onto the crumbling bathtub wall and kitchen sink. I remember
trying to please my mother. But mostly I remember feeling like we
were always just one step ahead of disappearance.
( . . .)