Time for a Rest
Russ López
Russ López is the author of six nonfiction books including The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. López is the editor of LatineLit, an online magazine that publishes fiction by and about Latinx people. His short stories are popular, nine were published in the last year alone with more on the way. His work has appeared in The Fictional Café, Somos en escrito, Northeast Atlantic, Discretionary Love, Night Picnic, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. He has also written numerous academic articles, book reviews, and works in other formats. Originally from California with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University, Russ lives in Boston and Provincetown.
She hadn’t meant to live so long, though she should have been prepared to reach an age well past the point where reasonable people perished because her mother had lived to be ninety-five and her grandmother nearly as long. But when Celia Mendoza found herself a couple of years past ninety, the idea of being a centenarian baffled and frightened her. She couldn’t figure out what she had done to deserve her longevity. Celia could never resist a sweet, and she loved second helpings and buffets. While she had never smoked and rarely drank much more than a glass of wine in an evening, with her heavy build and minimalist exercise habits, she could hardly boast of a healthy lifestyle. Plus, she had all the standard ailments of women her age: bursitis, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Her knees ached and her hands were nearly useless from decades of arthritis. She had to get up four or five times a night to urinate and her skin had thinned so much it was almost translucent despite her dark skin. Yet, for all that, she was still alive. She felt healthy and believed her mind was as sharp as it always had been.
Her biggest fear was that she might never die. Avoiding the sacrament of death had to be a sin, she figured, though she hesitated to ask a priest because she had become disillusioned with the church after the abuse scandals. But her faith was as strong as ever, and when she said her nightly prayers, she always emphasized the line, “Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death,” repeating it in both English and Spanish. She also regularly made the sign of the cross when she walked by the statues of the Virgin and the saints on her dresser, just in case it was her last opportunity to do so.
Celia had good reasons to die. She missed her husband, who had passed on twenty years ago. She wanted to reconnect with her mother and father, brothers and sisters, and everyone else she had buried. Most of all, she yearned to see her son Antonio who never made it to twenty-one. Her firstborn has been gone for over fifty years, but she still felt the pain as sharply as the night she was told of his death.
There were practical problems with her long life, and she worried that she was a burden to her daughter Clementina, who, at seventy-five, faced her own issues of old age. Clementina and her boyfriend Ernesto had moved into Celia’s house twenty years ago and they did everything for her: they made sure she ate and made it to her many doctor’s appointments. Every Wednesday, they dropped her off to play bingo at the senior center, and they never hesitated to drive her to family events from Novato to Fresno. But Clementina has health problems of her own. She had survived a nasty bout of breast cancer, and her heart wasn’t great. At some point, Celia believed, she needed to die in order to free her daughter from the burden of taking care of her.
On the other hand, Celia enjoyed being alive, delighting in the world around her. Despite her aches and her longing to see people now long gone, there was still a lot of joy in her life. She loved her telenovelas, for example, and wanted to find out if Kike, the handsome but clueless lead in Mi Tierra Azul, would ever realize that he should be with Anita, the poor but honest housekeeper of the Azul family estate, rather than that wicked Tomasina who only wants Kike’s fortune and is already cheating on him. Given the rate at which telenovelas unfold, Celia would need another two years to learn the fate of these characters. One of the great things about life today, Celia believed, was that she could watch her shows whenever she felt like it, in contrast to the old days when you had to be home at a certain hour to catch them. A great-grandson had patiently taught her how to use her TV remote to watch her shows on demand. Celia had been so excited by the ability to use her voice to summon a telenovela, she had taught several of her friends how to use this new technology. She believed it was a great time to be alive.
She needed on-demand streaming because of her active social life. Decades ago, she had vowed not to become one of those old people who retire from going out and thus fade away from the memories of the young long before they die. On the contrary, one of Celia’s favorite things was to go to parties where everyone danced until they were too tired to stand. Celia had been a fun-loving girl when she was young, dancing with her husband, brothers, and cousins at every opportunity. Even now, she felt no need to conform to the mirthless constraints put on the aged. She never missed a wedding, quinceañera, or backyard barbecue featuring a good band or a talented DJ, and though she couldn’t last more than a song or two, Celia would still go out on the dance floor, fantasizing she was scandalizing everyone by dancing with some hunky young seventy-year-old. She liked the food at these gatherings, too, even if it gave her indigestion, and enjoyed watching who was hitting on whom, who wasn’t talking to someone, and those poor souls who were unaware everyone was talking about them.
Celia also found quiet satisfaction in simple things like opening her eyes each morning to welcome another day as the birds sang to her like King David himself must have sung. Sparrows, grackles, sea gulls, and other birds chirped in the lemon trees in her backyard beckoning her to rise out of bed. She savored the taste of hot coffee and the aroma of Clementina making tortillas. Celia even enjoyed the feel of her clothes after she had a hot shower because it made her skin tingle. Now that she thought about it, she was proud of her journey through life. From her birth in a labor camp in the middle of tomato fields to where she lived now in her little house near the center of Silicon Valley, there was much to be happy about despite the sorrows of her past ninety-three years.
Celia had watched people treating the elderly like they were delicate figurines: they’d sit them down in a chair at the side of the room, assuming all old people are oblivious to everything because they are blind and deaf. A few tried that nonsense on her. They didn’t know that though Celia’s eyesight and hearing had deteriorated a bit, she wasn’t helpless. Osteoporosis may have bent her back, but she was strong on the inside. Even so, folks often talked down to her like she was a child. But what was the use of complaining? She couldn’t change the world or people’s assumptions.
All this went through her mind as Celia got herself ready for the strenuous day ahead of her. As per family tradition, a group of women were coming together to make tamales on this first Saturday of December. Today’s goal was thirty dozen because they needed that many to get everyone through the holiday season and all the way to Candlemas on February 2. Tamales are needed for holiday parties, Christmas Eve dinners, La Posada celebrations, Kings Day gatherings, and all the other activities that light up the dark days of the year. Tamale-making was a serious obligation, one as important as visiting the sick or teaching children to respect their parents. They can be purchased; someone is always selling them, but the tamales made by family are the best. Tamales are easily frozen allowing the women to work just one day to provide their families with tamales over several months.
Clementina, who enjoyed this annual tamale fest as much as Celia, had been prepping for weeks. She always bought her hojas from Ozuna’s Market on Santa Clara Street, for example, and because they had run out of corn husks once in 1992, Clementina shopped early, giving her the luxury of checking each package for bugs or dirt. Only flawless hojas could grace her family’s tamales, a blemish might reflect a flaw in their spirit. Celia didn’t quite know what to do with such a picky daughter, and she couldn’t figure out where Clementina got these strange habits. Therefore, she decided to blame them on her husband’s family. The Mendozas had always had their quirks, Celia thought as she shook her head at the strange customs of those from southern Mexico. From the perch of her Northern Baja California family, the people of Oaxaca seemed a bit strange, though they had accepted her as one of their own from the beginning. But whatever caused Clementina’s compulsions, Celia didn’t feel responsible for fixing her eldest daughter. The time for that was long past.
Celia had worried about her daughter’s health ever since Clementina went to work in a wafer fabrication factory back in the 1970s. It was one of those big semiconductor plants that gave Silicon Valley its name and they were hiring Mexican and other women as fast as they could to meet the demand for computers. With her second child turning two and eager to get back to work, Clementina had been proud to have a job in one of those so-called clean rooms where squads donned special equipment to protect the chips from contamination. Though the companies were terrified that a stray speck of dust might ruin one of their fragile computer chips, none of them gave a thought to the workers who remained exposed to the fumes of the hazardous chemicals they handled. Clementina soon developed a cough, then asthma, and a decade later, breast cancer. Celia had been scared throughout her daughter’s next three pregnancies, but thankfully, all of her children were born healthy.
She might be getting old, but Clementina still enthusiastically plunged into the burdens of tamale making. Two days ago, she simmered large cuts of pork to get them ready to be shredded and mixed with her special tamale sauce. She was so protective of the sauce’s recipe that not even Celia knew what made it so tasty. This year, because there were now so many vegans and vegetarians in the family, they would also be making poblano pepper tamales, modified from the traditional recipe by excluding cheese. Celia made this change in the tamale filling at Christmas Eve when she realized that several family members were forgoing tamales because they contained meat. That demanded she do something and after consulting with Clementina and others, Celia declared that the family would be making vegan tamales come next December.
Everyone agreed to the change. Ernesto, who had wanted to cut meat out of his diet for some time, enthusiastically took to growing the peppers for the tamales in the back yard. Not trusting that poblanos would thrive in the long, hot summers of the Valley, Ernesto had spent an hour each morning inspecting his plants for bugs, vitamin deficiencies, and any other threat. When it was harvesting time, he carefully clipped each pepper with one hand while he held it with the other as tenderly as if it were a newborn. Then he rushed to the kitchen with his bounty to slice and freeze the peppers for today. “We are a modern family,” he posted online. “We can make modern tamales for modern tastes. This is Silicon Valley for God’s sake.”
As for the masa, Clementina always bought her dough premixed from Josefa’s Groceries on Auzerais Avenue. There was no need to shop at that little store; Celia had only first gone there because she was doing a favor for Josefa, a widow who she knew from church. Dozens of other markets across the East Side also sold premade masa, but a visit to Josefa’s had long been incorporated into the family’s holiday traditions. Over the last seventy years, the ownership had changed a dozen times, but there was something about Josefa’s that drew them back despite the long lines at this time of the year. It smelled of Mexico, immigrants, and family. Its floor-to- ceiling shelves were loaded with candies that reminded everyone of their childhood before they immigrated, vegetables that were impossible to find in US stores, and spices that made food taste the way long-dead abuelas cooked it.
Josefa’s had modernized with the times. In the old days, they used lard in their masa, and it needed only a few minutes of mixing before it was ready for spreading. But after generations of doctors yelling at Mexicans from Corpus Christi to Seattle about the depravity of their traditional diet, the store now also sold masa made with vegetable shortening. Unlike tamales made with peppers, which were not a big deal in terms of taste or texture, this modification had taken a lot to get used to. “It’s for the best, mija,” Celia had tried to console her daughter after they eliminated the lard and the results became clear. “Our ancestors will forgive us. Think of all the Mendozas who died of heart attacks.” Publicly, the biggest complaint was that it was now necessary to spend an hour mixing additional shortening, broth, and spices into the premade masa to bring it up to the right consistency. A dollop of masa had to float in a glass of water for it to be ready to use, and shortening-based masa had difficulty passing that mandatory test. Privately, everyone agreed that tamales made with lard tasted better, but they all felt their hands were tied. To cheat and lie about the ingredients would be a sin against God as well a violation of trust.
Because she had ordered sixty pounds, Clementina had her beefy grandson Trevor pick up her masa on Thursday. Another change to accommodate modern life was that masa now came in plastic sacks weighing ten pounds each. Celia spent twenty minutes studying the label from one of them, marveling that this most ancient ingredient had been tamed by a bar code.
Waking up early because she was too excited to sleep, Celia dressed, crossed herself in front of her saints, and went into the kitchen to watch Clementina and Ernesto complete the final pre-assembly tasks. First, Ernesto soaked the hojas in giant bowls of water to soften them, then he went up to his elbows in sticky corn mush as he performed the strenuous final mixing of the masa. It took him four tries to get the masa to float, the third accompanied by curses and threats, the fourth by cheers and hugs all around. Meanwhile Clementina combined poblanos and shredded pork with sauce to make the fillings. Done with his responsibilities, Ernesto kissed Clementina and drove to his brother’s as he was banished from the final stages of tamale-making.
All this preparation was preliminary to the women arriving to make the tamales. Clementina, whose organization skills in the kitchen could have fed Napoleon’s army, decreed there would be two production lines, one pork, one vegan, along a large banquet-style folding table that was supposed to only be used for when family visited but had permanently taken up residence in the entryway between the kitchen and living room because there was always an occasion when it was needed. These lines reminded Celia of the days when she had worked in the tomato canneries that once dominated San Jose, only now there were no floor ladies ready to shush the women when they talked too much.
Each tamale line would have a masa spreader, a filler, and a folder. The spreader took a presoaked hoja, shook off the excess water, and smeared an even layer of masa on the corn husk before passing it on. The filler took a generous amount of the pork or poblano mixtures and arranged it in a thick line in the center of the tamale before sliding it over. The folder added an olive, said to represent the Virgin though Celia could never figure out the connection, rolled the tamale’s sides in, and folded up the bottom. The vegan tamales were secured with a strip of hoja by Berta, one of the fastest workers around though she was well past seventy herself, the regular ones were simply folded tight. Then the finished tamales were passed on to Clementina, who inspected them for flaws and carefully placed them into segregated tamaleros--giant pots that are used exclusively for steaming tamales. These were stored in the attic. Bringing them down and then hoisting them up on the stove took more muscle than any of the women had. Ernesto was no help because of his bad back.
Fortunately, there were always a few strong boys in the family to do the heavy lifting. One great-great grandson, Ramón, had come by last weekend to bring down the tamaleros. He rinsed them out in the driveway with a hose and then washed Clementina’s car, just to be nice. Today, his brother Sean, a surly fifteen-year-old, was tasked with moving the full, heavy tamaleros to the stove to be steamed. He also was responsible for refilling the bowls of ingredients and doing anything that required clean hands. In between helping, he mostly sat in the living room playing a game on his phone. Whenever someone called for him, he would put it down with a huff and come in to help. Then he’d go back to his phone. The women found him incomprehensible, and they marveled at his blond streaked hair, exchanging glances when he left the room. They’d have gossiped about him in Spanish because that had once been the way to hide things from the children. But the newer generations had rediscovered their heritage, and now no one knew who in the family understood Spanish. At one point, Clementina put her hands on her head and pantomimed pulling her hair making them all laugh. Even Celia chuckled despite herself. She admired Sean’s spirit and didn’t like anyone saying anything bad about any of her family. Sean reminded her of her long-gone son when he had been a teenager. Antonio had also spent a lot of time on his appearance, combing his hair for hours before going out. Celia had to fight the urge to cry when she thought how much Sean and Antonio looked like each other. She hoped it was just poor eyesight and not a sign that Antonio’s spirit had returned to earth. Her son needed to rest his soul.
It would take almost four hours to assemble the tamales, but the work was made easy by the women’s long experience of making them. Four of the seven were regulars, having worked together to make tamales for decades. The other three were newcomers, but they had been making tamales since they were children as well. What the women were doing today was part of a ancient tradition. On this day, tens of millions of women in Mexico, Central America, and the US would be gathering to assemble tamales for the season. This was a ritual they all had inherited from their Indian ancestors who had made tamales before the Spanish conquest, a great grandniece had once told Celia. In turn, Celia told her great grandniece that gossip made the tamale-making a not-to-be-missed event.
Celia settled in on the far end of the table, no longer able to be of much help given the condition of her hands and her increasing frailty. But she loved being there because hearing the chisme of who was doing what made her feel part of life. The women used the time to catch up on scandals, victories, and setbacks. In a community as density threaded with connections and relations as San Jose’s East Side, everyone vigorously tried to cover up their transgressions. But secrets had short lifespans, and sooner or later detailed descriptions of the most private actions would be passed around kitchen tables to be shared by all.
Five years ago, Celia’s granddaughter Janeta, a headstrong woman who did not suffer fools or sexism, decided that men should help with the tamale making. “They have the strength to eat our tamales, don’t they?” she asked in a tone that no one dared answer. “So, they must have the muscle power to make them, too.” Everyone initially supported her feminist critique of traditional holiday gender roles and welcomed men into the kitchen that year. “Down with Latino machismo!” she had declared.
This commitment to changing social norms was not limited to Janeta, Celia had scandalized many of the Mendozas when she declared herself to be a feminist back in 1970 though she had stopped short of burning a bra because she thought that was wasteful of money. The rhetoric of the times made her assess the complicated bonds between her and her husband. If Ignacio had ordered Celia to do something, to take an extreme example, she would have obeyed him. Wives had that obligation under the rules of holy matrimony. But then Ignacio would never issue such an order. In fact, he never made a big decision without consulting Celia and carefully considering her recommendations. Maybe that made their marriage modern, thought Celia. Her mother considered her a hopelessly bad wife, but Ignacio never complained about her behavior.
Despite Janeta’s logic, the reality of men in the kitchen was disastrous. It took nearly twice as long to make the tamales because they proved to be incompetent when it came to such basic tasks as folding a tamale without it flipping over and falling to the floor, and the men were incapable of spreading the masa correctly, making the tamales either too thin or too thick. Worst of all, their presence made it impossible to gossip. The women were silenced while the men dominated the conversation with their unending complaints about the fate of the Mexican national soccer team, and their long-winded discussions of the merits of different brands of tequila made everyone drowsy. The women grew frustrated that they couldn’t debate how sexy a grand niece’s husband was in front of her father. Nor did anyone feel comfortable talking about fibroids, menstrual problems, and the failings of boyfriends in bed when there were men present. Janeta apologized and the next year they reverted to their all-woman tradition, making everyone happier. “Viva las mujeres!” Janeta had cheered. Celia thought the tamales tasted better the traditional all-female way as well.
Free to talk this year, the gossip started as soon as the women began working. “I had told Manuela a hundred times that Pedro was cheating on her, but you know my daughter, she never listens to me.” Daniela, who was married to Clementina’s son, sighed. “She looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘There is no way my husband is having an affair; he can’t even find the time to fix the lock on our gate to the back yard.’ I wanted to throw a chancla at her to get her to wake up about that no-good man, but in today’s world, you can’t whack your daughter with a flip flop without a police SWAT team coming after you.” Her daughter had married Pedro nearly thirty years ago, and Daniela had found something unique to fault her son-in-law every day since the wedding. Daniella enjoyed pointing out his faults to anyone who would listen.
Berta, knowing where this story was going, tried to head off its inevitable end. “How is Pedro’s mother doing? Is she still in rehab after her stroke?” Berta smiled sweetly. “I remember years ago when she first came over from Mexico. She couldn’t speak a word of English. Here’s the funny thing. Now she claims she doesn’t like to get together with the family because everyone speaks Spanish, and she feels left out.” Berta tried to get someone to help change the topic, but no came to her rescue.
Daniela shot Berta the kind of look you give someone when you are going to win a big hand of poker. They had been playing this game for decades. Daniela would tell a dirty story or joke, and Berta would blush. Daniela was so accomplished that she made Berta turn red even when it was about her daughter getting pregnant. Others picked up on this, and during the decades Berta was a hairdresser, not a day passed by without a client saying something that caused the blood to rush to her cheeks.
“Anyway. Last week my daughter was supposed to be at my youngest grandson’s lacrosse game. You know Kane is really talented, and we hope that this will lead to a college scholarship.” No one came close to the perfection of Daniela’s dozen grandchildren. Listening to her go on about them, you had to wonder why none had yet walked on the moon. “Did I tell you how handsome he is? My, is he good looking.” She pantomimed/feigned? fanning herself. “Since he came out as bisexual last year, both girls and boys are always texting him to go out on dates.” She clutched her heart. “And Kane’s smart, though he is scatterbrained. He had forgotten his cleats and so Manuela drove home to pick them up. And there, right in the living room next to Kane’s shoes on the floor and the television remote on the end table, was her no-good husband screwing his floozy girlfriend like it was his last fuck before dying and going to hell. My daughter should have sent Pedro and that whore to their graves, but all she could do was scream at him in some ungodly high-pitched roar.” The women laughed so hard that Sean looked up from his phone.
Daniela’s grandmother was one of the first people Celia had met when her family moved to San Jose in 1938. She lived in a small house next door. Before settling here, Celia’s family had always been on the move: San Luis Obispo for sugar beets, Salinas for lettuce, and Watsonville for strawberries. While picking apricots in Santa Clara, someone got Daniela’s mother a job in the big fruit cannery in Sunnyvale, and the husband of a woman there referred her father to a job in a tomato cannery in San Jose where the thirty-seven and a half cents an hour pay seemed like a fortune.
For the first time since they came from Mexico, the family had a permanent place to live. Celia liked having a proper house with a bathroom. She had hated how it was impossible to get clean in the camps they had lived in, and she disliked having to constantly meet new children, and the way the camp managers yelled at everyone for the slightest transgression against the many rules. But Celia especially liked being able to go to school even though she was hopelessly behind the other students. She made it through the eighth grade because the fun of being with other kids outpaced the pain of being lost in the lessons. But after a summer spent picking cherries and prunes, Celia never went to high school. At the time, she didn’t care. Her family needed the money because they discovered that what they thought were high wages earned in the canneries, covered only a fraction of the even higher rents demanded by landlords who took advantage of the way Mexicans were hemmed in by segregation. It was only later that Celia felt shame for her lack of education, and she still regretted that decision.
Berta, who had a delicate disposition, blushed a deep red at the graphic descriptions of sex, while Daniela delighted at her reaction. “Screwing. Fucking. Rutting. Tell me, Berta. What name do you prefer for the sex act?” Daniela suggestively thrusted a folded tamale at her. Berta, who had four children by three different men, put her hands to her face to hide her embarrassment, smearing masa on her cheek. “Making love,” she said at last. “What ever happened to making love?”
“Love had nothing to do with it,” Daniela said triumphantly as she moved on to another topic. “Who wants to go to the flea market with me tomorrow if it doesn’t rain?”
The oldest of these women were a generation younger than Celia with many approaching the age when they would be too frail to help anymore. Yet, they all liked being there. The youngest was her great granddaughter Madison, a husky twenty-four-year-old who looked forward to fifty years or more of this work. At first, Celia had a hard time remembering who Madison’s parents were and she feared this was the first sign of dementia. Then her son Alberto, who also kept misplacing children, grandchildren, and others, commissioned a big wall chart with everyone on it. There were now twelve of these charts in houses from the Valley to Phoenix. Celia consulted it daily. She was always adding newborns and marriages and crossing out those who had passed on.
Madison was a social worker, cheerfully blaming the Mendozas for her career choice. “Haven’t the women in this family been taking care of people for generations? I’m just getting paid for it.” Even as a teenager, Madison had been known for throwing herself into one cause or another, and now she saw herself as the eventual matriarch of her very extended clan. As such, she knew everyone’s issues. “Did you hear that Frankie Gutierrez is out on parole?” she asked. Celia’s great-grandson had served five years for distributing drugs. “They got him a job working in a warehouse in Salinas, but he is having a hard time.” Several women nodded in sympathy. “It’s not easy adjusting to life on the outside.”
In a family as large as Celia’s, it was inevitable some had ended up trapped on the dark side of life. Frankie had his drug problems, great-grandson Charles was serving a life sentence for killing two men in a gang shooting, and then there was Celia’s grandniece Gracia, who disappeared without a trace one rainy January night. Once they found out her boyfriend was a drug dealer, the police stopped investigating. Gracia had now been gone over thirty years and was one more person(one of a long list of relatives?) Celia included in her nightly prayers.
Celia had never figured out the right mix of compassion and discipline to raise children and her mistakes were legion. She and her husband had tried bribing Antonio to behave, taking him to Disneyland to reward him for good grades in the sixth grade, buying him a car when he made starter on the Mayfair High football team, and showering him with small gifts they never bestowed on his brother and sisters. They also were constantly punishing him for not doing his chores, grounding him for skipping class, and making him work in the canneries after he taunted them that the jobs there were for the poor and the stupid, not for smart kids like him. “Yes,” Ignacio had told him. “It’s hot, dirty, backbreaking work, and you’ll smell like tomatoes all season long. But if it was good enough for us, then its good enough for you.” They made him go to church even after he dismissed the priests as perverts, scaring his parents with his blasphemy. Celia wanted to tell Frankie to hold on to life, that she and everyone else valued him, and not to leave them for another world as Antonio had, but who listens to little old ladies? She looked over at Sean, wondering if she should say something to him.
Christine, Celia’s niece chimed in. “Once they get caught up in gang culture, the drug using and selling, ‘the whole we don’t want to work a regular job for regular wages thing,’ it’s hard to change.” They knew lots of men and some women who were either in the criminal justice system or doing things that would land them in it sooner or later, or were in that post- incarceration purgatory where every action was second guessed by their parole officer. Celia had never had the optimism to think she could change the world. Now she knew she couldn’t even save people she loved.
The group went silent out of sadness and frustration until Berta broke the mood with more optimistic news. “Have you heard about Xiomara? She is going to graduate at the top of her class and is applying to a dozen colleges.” A great-great-granddaughter, Xiomara’s family lived out in Almaden Valley on San Jose’s tony suburban south side. Her mother was a librarian, her father a radiation tech, and she and her two sisters were Celia’s smartest descendants, Daniela’s grandchildren included, though Celia would never tell her that. Celia loved to go to Xiomara’s plays and soccer games, admiring the squeaky-clean neighborhood and the big houses out in that part of town.
Even finishing high school had been a stretch for Celia’s generation. Citizen or undocumented, male or female, smart or not, the schools just didn’t want people of her kind. Fortunately, the postwar boom in the Valley provided lots of opportunities. Ignacio switched to construction and worked as a roofer until his back went out for good just after his sixty-seventh birthday. Celia worked in the canneries until they began to shut down in the 1970s, and then found a job as a receptionist at a credit union where for the first time, being bilingual was a plus.
Though Celia and Ignacio valued education, the schools considered their family to be worthless, and only four of Celia’s six children graduated from high school. Clementina had been suspended for three days for “moral violations” while the boy they caught kissing her wasn’t even reprimanded. Angry with how the school treated his daughter, Ignacio hadn’t even bothered to punish her himself. That marked the point where the Mendozas became Americanized, thought Celia. They were no longer raising their children the old ways, and Celia and Ignacio would struggle to adjust. But they felt they had no choice.
Fortunately, Clementina graduated just to spite her teachers and never displayed any further behavior problems. Nor did they have an issue with their second daughter, though Ignacio and Celia pulled Kelly out of school after the first day of her sophomore year because her biology teacher declared that “teaching Mexican girls science was a waste of everyone’s time.” They sent her to a Catholic high school though they didn’t have the money. Kelly was the first in the family to go to college and then had a wonderful career as a bookkeeper at Lockheed. She was now retired and living in San Luis Obispo with her husband, a wonderful boy she met in the third grade.
Kelly’s success only made Celia more frustrated with her failure with Antonio. He had been a happy boy until he was ten, and then a light went out in him. Once talkative, he became morose, which made him stick out among the Mendozas, a family known for their loud dinners. As a teen, he withdrew even more as the world seemed to press down on him. For all his issues, for example, Anthony never joined a gang. Yet, the school suspended him for two weeks for wearing a gang symbol, a Los Angeles Dodgers hat. He never returned to school.
They were on the verge of expelling Alberto because he had been arrested for armed robbery until a pro bono lawyer submitted sworn testimony that it was a different Alberto Mendoza, not their son. Lupe only graduated because her teachers and administrators ignored her, keeping her head down was at the root of her academic success. Her youngest, Fernanda, would probably have graduated if she hadn’t gotten pregnant and thus banished from high school forever.
“Xiomara’s parents must be proud,” Esther Andujar said. This was her first year making tamales with the group. She was a salesclerk at an outlet store in Milpitas and because she spent five days a week folding and refolding clothes, Clementina assigned her the pork tamale folding spot. She was a modest woman, everyone wondered how she could keep from bragging that her grandson was in medical school at Stanford.
Esther had her quirks. Big and robust, she was the slowest driver in Silicon Valley. “I swear she’s been banned from Interstate 280 because she backs up traffic,” Clementina had told Celia. “It takes her twenty minutes to drive a mile.” Celia watched Esther to see if she was similarly slow at tamale making but the woman’s hands were fast and accurate.
“Her mom and dad have mixed feelings,” Berta let on. “Xiomara’s first choice is UC Riverside, but her parents aren’t sure they want her to go that far away.” Berta’s son was a lawyer for the County, but her daughters hadn’t finished high school and were now living in Reno, working in casinos. Given how expensive Silicon Valley was, a lot of people had moved to the Central Valley or even out of state. But for every ten people who left, it seemed to Celia that another twenty arrived to take their place, ensuring the Valley would never run out of Mexicans. Celia had thought they would stop coming when the fields were bulldozed and the canneries closed, for those were the places where her people worked. But they needed thousands more to staff the semiconductor plants and computer factories that dominated the Valley in the eighties and nineties. When those all closed after 2000, Celia was again certain that would end the demand for Mexican workers, but to her surprise the need for low-wage employees increased for the growing warehouse, construction, maintenance and similar jobs.
“It’s not easy letting go of our babies,” replied Esther. She feared her grandson might want to go to some far-off city to practice medicine. “Riverside is a good school. Everyone has a child going there these days.” Celia had visited the campus two years ago to watch a great grandson graduate.
“In the old days, the parents would say no, and their children would obey,” proclaimed Berta.
“In the old days, we weren’t allowed to go to college,” countered Esther. Her memories tore Celia’s heart apart. Why couldn’t she have done something to lift Antonio’s morbid moods and make him engage in the good life around him? Why had she been a bad mother? She wondered to this day if she shouldn’t have intervened to keep Antonio from leaving home. There must have been some space between her husband’s anger and Antonio’s self-dignity that she should have worked towards.
Celia faded out as she thought about Antonio. He had come home drunk one night and Ignacio didn’t like people who couldn’t control their alcohol, especially if they were one of his children. “God damned, borracho,” he snarled at Antonio loud enough to wake up Celia from a deep sleep. “Get cleaned up and go to bed. I don’t want to be near you when you stink of beer and tequila.” What should she have said and done at that moment? Celia hated Antonio’s binge drinking as much as her husband. But if she defended him, it might only end up encouraging him to drink more. And scolding him would have just made him lash out at her. She knew there was something going on inside her son’s head she couldn’t fix. She had failed her baby.
As a mother, she should have been the peacekeeper. But before she could do anything, Antonio crossed the line that placed him beyond hope. “I don’t want to be near you when I’m sober,” Antonio slurred. Celia gasped wide eyed at his sin. No child should talk that way to his father. Afterwards, she worried that her son, once an altar boy who had adored the parish priest, had doomed himself for turning his back on God.
“That’s easy to arrange. Get the fuck out of my house,” Ignacio yelled. Celia screamed as Ignacio slapped Antonio’s face. Her son stared at him, thinking about striking his father, maybe even considering worse violence. Then he ran into his room, came out with a bag, and stormed out of the house. Despite doing everything they could to reach out to him, they didn’t hear from him for two weeks.
Celia slowly came back to the conversation in her kitchen. “Did you hear about Zoe Garcia?”, asked Inez Baca. Celia’s goddaughter, Inez, was another newcomer. She had buried her husband last year and was just beginning to rejoin the world after being in the fog of widowhood. Celia empathized with her because when Ignacio died, she had felt lost. She had married at sixteen when both were not much more than innocent children, and for over fifty years she had taken care of him, washed his clothes, and made him dinner as she lived in the wondrous connection of sex with him. Then that man of strong hands and booming voice was gone, taking the oxygen in her house with him. She had to learn to breathe without her dear Ignacio.
“Who is she?” asked Esther. No one could keep track of everyone. Celia couldn’t recall a Zoe either.
“She is married to Luis, Kelly and Armando’s grandson. They live in Modesto because they can’t afford the Valley anymore. Pobrecito Luis has to commute two hours each day to his job in Palo Alto.”
“What about her?” Celia’s first concern was that Zoe was ill.
“She showed up at her mother’s funeral in Santa Rosa in a black dress so short you could see that most precious gift God gave her.” Inez did a little shimmy making even Berta laugh, though she still blushed, just to make everyone know she was paying attention.
“Did she look good?” asked Janeta, always trying to find something on the nice side of people. She had dyed her hair for a decade. Most Mexican women, with their dark brown skin, look ridiculous as platinum blonds, but Janeta, combining her outlandish hair color with her great fashion sense, looked glamorous. Empowered by her appearance, she would boast about her way with men in the most graphic words, making Berta turn red, of course. Janeta never married but always had a robust man at her side even when she was well into her sixties.
“Yes. I saw some pictures online. She is a very attractive woman. But that is beside the point. She only wore that outfit to get back at her mother for always criticizing how she dressed.” Inez clucked. “Young people today. They are all sinvergüenzas.”
Berta was confused. “In our family we only used that word to describe women who got pregnant while single.”
Janeta was ready to explode at that sexist judgement, but Inez headed her off. “Really? In our family it meant anyone without shame.” Now that she had everyone’s attention, she paused for a moment as she passed along another tamale. “No one feels guilt these days. Remember how when we were young the teachers would send us home if our dresses were too short? “Don’t you know it’s not fair to the boys to show so much skin?’ they’d tell us. Now girls wear anything.”
Janeta was about to explode, but Clementina interrupted as she put a finished vegan tamale in its proper pot and then twirled. “I want to be buried in a black miniskirt.” The women laughed. “I’m not going to make it past Saint Peter anyway, so I might as well look good in the church.” Celia crossed herself.
Celia lost track of the conversation as she thought about the next time they saw Antonio. He came home to tell them he was enlisting in the army. “There is nothing here for me, and I’m going to be drafted anyway. So why not go into the service on my own terms?” Even Ignacio had been proud of him. Back in those days, being in the military meant a boy was going somewhere. Parents were always bragging that a son was in the service. He’d learn a trade, or maybe even get to go to college when he got out. Parents were always bragging that a son was in the service. Celia, aware of the growing fight in Vietnam even if Ignacio wasn’t, worried about her precious son’s safety but held her tongue. She added additional prayers and let him go.
With her son in the army, Celia closely followed the news on the war. They had his picture in his uniform on the living room mantel with a rosary hanging from the frame, and the priest said a monthly special mass for the many mothers of boys in Southeast Asia. Celia met many women during those masses, not just Mexican mothers like herself but also Anglo, Japanese, and Black women from neighborhoods across the city. One even invited her to her house for a “support group,” and Celia needed a minute to understand it was just an opportunity to sit with other mothers scared out of their wits for the safety of their sons. She went a few times but stopped going because she felt guilty for leaving Ignacio by himself. Celia second guesses herself to this day, wondering if more prayers might have saved her son. She paused to say a blessing for Frankie, Sean, and all her other family members.
Along with everyone else she knew, Celia had a growing sense of unease with the war. No matter how many enemy soldiers the news reported had been killed, there seemed to be many more keeping up the fight. In the meantime, American boys kept dying, too. But there was nothing Celia could do but pray. She lost count of the number of rosaries where she begged God and the Virgin to keep her son safe.
One cool April evening just after Ignacio came back in from taking the garbage out and Celia was about to begin her prayers, there was a knock at the door. A tall man in uniform who had a surprisingly warm expression on his face despite his steel blue eyes came in to tell them of their son’s fate. Unlike many of the women she knew, Celia had never lost a baby. None of her children had been killed by gun violence or in a traffic accident. At that time, her mother and grandmother were still alive and even her father was still strong despite his cancer. Celia had not had to pay attention every El Dia de los Muertos because she hadn’t any dead ancestors to visit. But just looking at that man in his crisp clean uniform Celia collapsed. Now she knew grief, and she smelled its stench with every breath since. They buried their son in Oak Hill Cemetery in a plot where he was eventually joined by Ignacio. Celia would be laid there to rest when it was her time as well.
“Are you okay, mama?” Clementina asked, drawing her back to the table conversation.
“I’m fine,” Celia answered.
The women kept up the pace, their energy never flagging as Clementina tallied the dozens as she placed the tamales into the pots. The spreaders finished first and then began to clean up. The fillers followed and also went about wiping things down. Finally, the last tamale was folded and placed in its proper tamelero and Sean dutifully placed the giant pot, which must have weighed sixty pounds, on the stove. The women retired to the living room to wait the ninety minutes or so for the tamales to steam while Clementina would get up from time to time to check on them. She had placed coins in the bottom of the pots so that they would rattle if the water boiled off. Once the tamales were cooked, the women would divide them up and each would take their share home to freeze.
Well before the women finished, an exhausted Celia slowly got up from her perch at the far end of the table and went to her big chair in the living room to nap. “Want anything abuela?” Sean asked in textbook correct Spanish, charming her.
“No, thank you.” Celia smiled and then added, “You are a good boy. Stay alive for me.” Sean came over and kissed Celia on the forehead.
Celia went to sleep happy, dreaming of Antonio and others she longed to see. She never woke up.