We had met before briefly, five years earlier, distant queer “cousin” poets and graduate students at San Francisco State. “Cousin” would be absolutely the wrong woman for me, but she was the right sex that night in my hotel room, to heal my fevered wounds. By morning I knew I had to get back home to California; not to her, but through her. An admission I made to no one, not even to myself.
TRAINING GROUND
We had a vision as women of color. What joined us was the Black in us, the Native and immigrant in us, the displaced, misplaced, lower caste, and castoff in us; the original bottom rung of a ladder that leads us up into transcendent meaning in the desire to converge across borders of once separation. This was the foundation of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981.
In 1980, in search of a publisher for Bridge, the feminist anthology I coedited with Gloria Anzaldúa, I traveled east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life. Within months of that journey, I would move from San Francisco—first to Boston and then to New York City—and become completely ensconced in those cities’ woman of color movements. Within a year, we were to grow a collective of women in the formation of Kitchen Table Women of Color Press. The mentorship I received from two of its founders, the bravest and most public Black lesbian writers of our time—Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith—will never be forgotten. They provided the training ground for the Chicana Feminism I brought back with me to California.
Living in New York in the early 1980s, three thousand miles away from my Chicano community, at a time when the city’s Chicano population was found in a small pocket of affirmative action students at Columbia, I often felt I was the only Chicana in the world to hold such a privileged position: to discover through political and cultural organizing what it meant to be a lesbian of color; to be uncompromised in every aspect of our identities; but also to learn to strategize politically about which foot to put forward first and when and where.
I loved that era of women of color feminism in New York: the late Sandra Camacho and I as co-coordinators/co-conspirators at New York Women Against Rape; working with those sisters at D.C.’s Rape Crisis Center to organize the first national conference of Violence Against Women of Color in 1982; dancing (lots of dancing), and drinking just enough to end up making out in the rain with that forbidden Nuyorican sister you wanted like a heartache, just before catching the subway back home to the girlfriend in Brooklyn.
I loved the Black Performance Poetry group—Gap Tooth Girlfriends—with Jewelle Gomez; and there was sister Alexis De Veaux’s literary salons in Brooklyn where dreads and beauty and brilliance were unsurpassed; the truth-teller poet Cheryl Clarke was there, too; and, my sweetest love, Vienna Carroll, who after her day job at the Reproductive Rights National Network would sing a fluid jazz backup to Sapphire reading poetry at that Village bar into the midnight hour.
It was a grand New York life … but it was not home. Mi Chicanidad remained a remote and foreign location, like Native América, residing somewhere in the backcountry of the political and literary map of New York and the entire Northeast. México had shown me that. The harder work was to go home. And it was impossible to explain this to anyone who asked, especially to those African American sisters who had been my teachers and lovers; to Vienna, one of the happiest periods of my life. And I was leaving her.
I left to go back to California to be Chicana. And I was not so well versed at it. Because you really do just have to, plain and simple, practice what you preach. And, for me, as a writer, the preaching was the practice. The truth was I was afraid to love a Mexican woman, to suffer her cruelties, as I had my own mother’s. I did not believe I would survive it. I went anyway.
OLD SCHOOL
The thick velvet stage curtain is slowly drawn open by the back of a hand, and a figure with an equally thick curtain of black hair emerges through it. She is someone with such a steady lightness of being, such contained and complex beauty, it will take me several years to find the resolve to press my mouth to hers in a kiss I know will mean a marriage vow.
I had been expecting her. We had spoken by phone a month earlier in San Francisco. It was 1992—a planned meeting of shared interests as artists, arranged by shared friends. Celia was originally from Sacramento, California, then working in Chicago, and I had come to Chicago to work on my play Shadow of a Man. The venue was an old retired firehouse, transformed into a theater space by Chicano ingenuity. Perhaps it was also Chicano ingenuity that had brought Celia and me together.
We have lunch. Celia’s gaze meets mine, unafraid, effortless. The attraction is mutual and evident. Her openness stuns me. Nothing is being “worked.” She is just simply present. She has a girlfriend, as do I, mine a feminist arts organizer, with whom I share a home in San Francisco. Celia and I spend the day together. Her girlfriend even joins us for a drink before taking off, her dignity intact. We go out with the gay boys, my hosts, to a blues club; and then she invites me back to her home.
Celia makes me a bed on the living room couch. Perfectly made, fresh sheets, home-sewn pillowcases. She tucks me in, kissing me sisterly but she is no sister. Before the couch moment, she had shared the two things that seemed to matter most to her, a painting and a plant. She tells me about the painting, Interrupted Fertility. Its earth-colored waters are brushed onto three panels of amate paper pressed against weathered wood. A Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl serpent lies across the panels, severed at its middle. Next to her painting, la pejuta grows in a small pot. I do not know what to look for in its flower shape, how each cactus huddles one against the other for protection. I only read its meaning to her—in the way she offers me to gaze upon it like a god.
She does not mention her children.
In 1993, Celia would return to Northern California to re-collect the splintered lives of her adult children, some with several children of their own. In that same year, I would give birth to Rafael Ángel, in what had become a long-term relationship with my partner and in friendship with my son’s father, a younger queer Chicano writer. Those are the large facts. The stories of those breakups and reunions among lovers and children are written elsewhere, if only as scarred etchings along the banks of my memory. But the truest story is this: I almost lost my son at birth. And that changed everything.
At the age of forty, I became pregnant upon my first attempt at a home-based insemination. I had never been pregnant before and the ease with which my pregnancy occurred bespoke a spirit eagerly awaiting its time on this planet. As did my son’s premature birth.
In late June, while I was visiting my parents in San Gabriel, my water broke, a full three months before my due date. I was rushed to Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, where, one week later, Rafael Ángel emerged in natural childbirth, weighing just two and a half pounds. Although born so small, my baby was relatively healthy, with strong lungs and a fierce will. Once stabilized, and after ten days at Hollywood Kaiser, Rafaelito was transported back to San Francisco and to its Kaiser Neonatal nursery.
Within a matter of days, however, he contracted a life-threatening intestinal infection fairly common among preemies. As was the case with Rafaelito, it can overwhelm a small infant at an alarmingly rapid pace. In the three and a half months that my newborn son would remain in the hospital, he would undergo two surgeries, both of which put his life in question.
As they did mine.
For I would never be the same after that … after watching my child in his Isolette being pushed through the surgery doors, my heart in a vise of panic and dread. Suddenly, Rafaelito lifts his palm-sized head up and around to look back at me.
Mamá, are you still there? his eyes ask.
My eyes meet his.
Sí. Siempre.
And the doors close after him.
The endless two hours in the surgery waiting room felt strangely familiar. The helplessness with which I entreated my diosas—obsessively running through my mind promises and prayers, stacking up useless bargaining chips prompted by pure fear—was
no different than my childhood scratching scratching scratching to ward off my mother’s death. But as this new terror arose, thrashing against the wall of my chest, so close to bursting, I suddenly realized I was no longer a child, but the mother of a child, who desperately needed me to be wholly present at that moment. There was no “god” in such fear.
And so … somehow … finally … I just let go …
I hear myself echoing my mother’s words aloud, words she would repeat each time she entreated her santos, lighting la veladora on her altar. If it is God’s will … con el favor de Dios. We can control very little in this life, she knew, much better than I. And ultimately, we are in “god’s” hands.
Waiting outside that surgery, twenty-three years ago, I finally understood: my son was in those same godly hands, and I only prayed that the surgeon’s hands would be guided by them, by my god—the benevolent wisdom of the universe; a spirit calling, a reason for us to be here for the long and short of our lives. Then, within minutes of my surrender, the nurse from surgery comes into the waiting room. “Your baby is going to be fine,” she says.
How do we come to know the meaning of our impermanence if not through the (almost) loss of those dearest to us? I thank my son for this lesson, as I will thank my mother, twelve years down the road.
I would walk alone or I would walk with she who could walk fearlessly in the face of death.
* * *
In the fall following Rafaelito’s fourth birthday and just as I began to release myself from the profound susto of the near loss of him, I invited Celia on our first official date after five years of friendship. Sitting at what would become our favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant in Oakland, I suddenly recognized that all I needed in a woman sat across that tea-candle-lit table. And Celia talked on and on and I was not listening, only finally allowing my return to the love of a Mexican woman in my life.
There had been other Chicanas before Celia—other Latinas, women who taught me brutal, naked, and luminous lessons about the measure of my own desires. There was the woman nearly twenty years older, una puertorriqueña whom I made love with briefly and have loved eternally, who left me hungrier for the brevity of the taste of her. “Brevity” could also be said of the life of la mestiza indígena with the leather hands of a sculptor touching mine. The last of her was a gray ash dust, pressed palm into palm, into woman-palm. There was “the hungry woman,” whose young son first schooled me in the freedom of loving not as a dutiful daughter, but as an almost-mother, where one’s own needs came so spontaneously second.
The footpath I walked leading up to Celia’s open heart was paved with the cruelties of women, including my own unsparing acts. Mexican women could break me, my history told me, because they mattered to me that much. Gazing across the restaurant table, upon Celia’s animated face, I think—Maybe with this one, it will be different.
From the early loss of her mother, through teen pregnancy, to the rough red road of raising children as a single lesbian mother, Celia’s aspirations for a restored familia mirrored my own longing. Celia’s values had been garnered from la palabra y práctica of the Ódami Mexican grandmother who raised her. Domitila and Elvira, as mexicanas of the same generation, unwittingly provided us with common ethics upon which to construct our queer familia.
With Celia’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Camerina, and my Rafael Ángel in tow, we landed upon that first rise of foothill overlooking the Fruitvale barrio and made Oakland, California, our home. Together, at the age of forty-five, she and I began to walk a road of contested mothering wherein the only guidepost was the steadfast example of the two old-school Mexican mothers who had preceded us.
By the time my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the close of 2003, another grandchild of Celia’s is gestating her way into our home and hearts. Cetanzi would be the first to call me Abuelita.
A ROLLING STONE
There were times in which I did not know whether my mother was truly demented or just Mexican in a white world. I knew she was ill, that she suffered enormously; but I often doubted if the medicine for that illness (psychotropic drugs and the culture of care for elders in this country) was adequately designed for the woman whose emotional memory defied the limits and logic of occidental plotlines. Was it designed for an eighty-six-year-old woman who, even in her so-called dementia, could not forget the past, who believed in the dead and knew they came to visit with messages truer than the dreary sound bites of consumer culture?
* * *
What I remember is the fall from the curb in the shopping mall. Nothing major, only a slip of the foot. My mother had been looking elsewhere, her eyes scanning the parking lot through the hazy Valley smog for my father’s navy-blue sedan. The doctors concurred: “a slight concussion, nothing major.” Yes, there was the scarring in the brain and some shrinkage had begun. “Perfectly normal for her age.” But something in my mother began to shift that day, something so subtle, so certain.
On that day my mother began to leave us.
* * *
Everything about our upbringing as MexicanAmerican children revered our elders. With elders, we learned to offer a glass of water, a cup of coffee, the last empty chair in a room. We extended our arm for them to hold as they crossed a street, got out of a car, stepped into a bathtub. With elders, we learned to refrain from comment when we disagreed, endured long hours of visita without asking to eat, and never refused what was offered to us, no matter how stale the saltines. With elders, we also learned that if we made ourselves invisible enough, they might forget we were there and reveal all: stories with the power to conjure a past as stained and gray with intrigue as the aging photographs that held them.
As the century turned and my mother entered her mid-eighties, my sister and I began to warily approach the subject of my mother’s failing memory—to each other, to our father, and to her surviving younger sister and brother. “It’s normal,” everyone kept telling us. For a year or so prior, this had been my refrain as well, against my sister’s entreaties for “getting our mom some real help.” For it was JoAnn who lived within a half hour’s drive of our childhood home in San Gabriel. It was also my sister who endured my mother’s virulent denial about missed appointments, burned pots, forgotten phone conversations, lost keys and twenty-dollar bills, and seemingly delusional suspicions about our family’s treatment of her.
“Your sister hasn’t called me in weeks,” she’d complain to me over the phone in Oakland. “I don’t think I’ve even seen her in a month or more.”
I would call JoAnn to urge her to visit.
“I just saw her on Monday, brought them hamburgers. She’s forgotten.” What wrenched my heart the most was the futility of my sister’s actions. My mother suffered from “not-seeing” her because she could not remember. What she did remember was the nameless feeling of missing someone or something. Was it her unremembered self?
She was waning. Her world was becoming more insular. True, up to the last days of her life, Elvira would continue to exhibit great shows of affection when inspired, but slowly she began to pull away from us and into the world of her own preoccupations. This is not uncommon for elders where the physical requirements of aging often mandate their full attention. But in my mother’s case, that seemingly benign fall in the Montebello Mall initiated an entrenched self-absorption, thrusting her and her family into years of increasing agitation and dis-ease. My mother had never been an easygoing person, but gradually as her attention to what had been the normal routines of her life began to fade—cooking, cleaning, conducting familial relations—Elvira fell into great bouts of depression and fury.
Elders were to be honored at all costs; but when was the cost too high? We had given wide berth to the pure will and visceral knowing that defined my mother for most of our lives; this is, after all, what saved us. So how could we suddenly require her to surrender her will to us?
* * *
My mother’s eighty-sixth birthday marked a turning point for me when
I began to loosen the hold on my conviction that my mother’s fuerza was enduring. On the night of her celebration at a nearby old-style Bavarian restaurant, which catered to elders of all kinds, my mother had opened a full table of gifts and responded to each present with perhaps a bit too much exuberance; this, no doubt, the result of the amount of wine she had drunk that evening. But the following morning, suspecting Elvira hadn’t been all there the previous night, I asked her if she would like to see her presents. What? She didn’t remember getting presents. I brought out the pile of opened boxes, the tongues of white tissue hanging out from their mouths. She was elated at the sight of so many gifts. And so Elvira celebrated her birthday all over again for the first time. That was a good day, a day I could pretend not remembering was really due to the wine and normal for an eighty-six-year-old and it isn’t called Alzheimer’s and it won’t get worse, because that day of not remembering made Elvira happy. In my heart, I knew differently.
* * *
Three months later, I arrive back home again in San Gabriel for a visit. It is not yet spring, but still a warming midafternoon. I expect to find my mother in her daily routine: scrubbing a pot here, folding a sweater there; walking from room to room, opening and shutting drawers and cupboards; transporting handfuls of clothing from one spot to another and back again. My father would have already spent a good part of the day in his office, a kind of makeshift construction of swelling fake wood panels, pressed against the crumbling stucco walls of the garage.
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