Tapicero’s Daughter
I was commissioned to give this lecture by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and I delivered it in a hall fit for a king’s coronation on September 19, 1995, as part of their “Eye of the Beholder” series. The house was packed, which only added to my nerves. I was also trying to finish Caramelo, a novel exploring my father’s life, and thought writing the lecture would help give me clarity. Both my parents were still alive then. The original lecture included excerpts from my novel, which I’ve removed, but I’ve incorporated some of the ad-libbed comments from the performance and edited them here in a final written form.
The series concept was to invite contemporary artists to give an original lecture about an object within the collection. Because the ISG Museum was the personal collection of its namesake, an art collector/philanthropist/heiress, with a definitive request in her will that nothing be removed or altered, the lectures were an attempt to puncture insularity and let in fresh air.
And so, when I walked through the museum on my pre-visit, I paused among many fine and marvelous items, and with only an inkling of what I was doing, decided I would focus on upholstery. Jill Medvedow, the series curator, said, “We’ve never had anyone write about upholstery. Wonderful!” And that “wonderful” gave me permission to move forward. Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter inspired the title.
It was the pre-digital era, and my lecture included two car ousels of slides. The talk was the single most nerve-racking I’ve ever given in my life, bar none. I was still shifting slides around at the last minute. I felt sick and dizzy. Had I made this simple lecture too complicated? After all, unlike other artists in the series, I hadn’t selected one single item from the ISG collection, but several. To make sure I was even more frazzled, I included the work of six contemporary San Antonio artists, several autobiographical photos from family albums, and slides of my mother’s and my aunt’s possessions I had to ask my brother to document without arousing their ire. It was a lot of stress and terror, until I heard the public laugh, and from then on, loads of fun.
I. Cuando me muera, entonces te darás cuenta de cuánto te quiere tu padre.
(When I die, then you’ll realize how much your father loves you.)
—MY FATHER
Once there was a girl who was me.
I hope you don’t mind; this first image has a bit of nudity. And if you do mind, you can close your eyes. It’s a topless photo of me. This is my first photo ever; I give photographers that same squint even now.
Every week when I was still a girl, my family and I would spend Sunday afternoons at a museum. We were nine in all—two adults, seven children—and this has a lot to do with why we went to museums, because Sunday was the day museums were free.
Mother was our social director. Father was our chauffeur, but his feet hurt all the time. Sometimes he came home from work so tired he couldn’t untie his own shoes. He was by trade un tapicero, an upholsterer. On Sundays all he wanted was to lie down. But Mother couldn’t drive and refused to take public transportation (she preferred to walk when possible ever since childhood, and when she couldn’t, she reasoned that’s what Father’s car was for). So every weekend Father delivered us to the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Art Institute, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, where he would dutifully wait for us on a bench or outside under a tree.
First portrait
I was especially fond of the Field Museum, a lovely Greek temple of a building with giant mastodons in the foyer. In my head I pretended the Field Museum was my house and that Grant Park was my private garden. I pretended I was disguised as an ordinary citizen, and that all the visitors to my home walked right past me without recognizing me as me. And when it was time to leave and return to my real neighborhood of crowded buildings and crowded lives, to the little red bungalow on North Campbell Street that would later become the model for the house in The House on Mango Street, I pretended I was a girl in a fairy tale, disguised since birth as a tapicero’s daughter.
My museum house was just a fantasy, a tale I told myself before sleep to keep me quiet. It was a story I never told my parents or my six brothers. To tell, after all, would break the spell. How could I explain what it was I was hungry for?
At night Father soaked his blistered feet in a plastic tub while he watched TV and ate his dinner. What story, I wondered then, did Father tell himself to keep from crying? Once, when he was still a young man in Mexico City, Father had been un fanfarrón, a dandy. But then he ran away from home. It was the early ’40s. He was headed to his uncle Parrot’s house in Philadelphia. Somewhere in Memphis, Tennessee, the police picked Father up because, as he put it, there were no young men on the streets during those years of the war. Father was escorted to the nearest enlistment center. And by the time he got to the City of Brotherly Love, his draft papers were waiting for him.
Father in his fanfarrón days, posing in front of a stranger’s house, Mexico City
Father in the U.S. Army while stationed in Korea
That’s the story Father tells about how he became a U.S. citizen, even though he couldn’t speak English. That’s how he wound up in occupied Japan and Korea, with other non-English-speaking infantrymen fleeing their own histories. And that’s how Father got to be an upholsterer for the U.S. Army, practicing what little skills he’d learned from Uncle Parrot, the real upholsterer of the family, and making furniture for the officers’ club.
After he was discharged, Father remained in the United States and married Mother. Unlike his fellow Chicanos, Mexicans born in the United States, Father thought he was better than everybody. I think this was because he was un chilango—that is, a citizen from Mexico City. People from Mexico City always think they’re better than everybody else, because in their eyes Mexico City is the center of the universe. To him Mexico was civilized compared to the United States, where some of his fellow soldiers didn’t even know how to hold a pencil and write their own name. Because Father couldn’t speak English, he’d been put in a class with the illiterates, and this was an indelible experience for him since he’d studied to be an accountant, as he liked to remind us, at the Universidad de México. (Father dropped out after one semester because he was too busy socializing instead of studying, and his poor grades made him afraid to face his strict father. Instead, he ran away from home and wandered north. He would regret not finishing his studies the rest of his life.)
“¡Qué país tan bárbaro!” Father would say. What a barbarous country!
It was this overdose of pride that saved Father from the daily blows life dealt him. Father was proud even as un tapicero. He didn’t work with a staple gun and strips of cardboard. No, sir. He was a craftsman. Eventually Father would work for an interior decorating firm on the North Shore, where the houses of Lake Forest, Winnetka, Kenilworth were as big as museums.
I grew up listening to Father muttering nervously each night about the leather wing chair he needed to finish for la Señora Carson’s party. The chaise for la Señora Lassiter. The davenport he had promised la Señora Hudson in time for Thanksgiving. His señoras were fussy. But, thankfully, so was Father.
What Mother and I looked forward to was the expensive upholstery remnants Father brought home; leftovers from some inexperienced interior decorator might mean we could cover a flea-market footstool or a cushion for a love seat, if we were lucky, from the same bolt of fabric of a Senator Percy or even a Señora Stewart Gardner. It didn’t stop there. Mother transformed fabric scraps into an elegant wardrobe for my Barbie dolls. An ivory brocade stole with matching turban. A silver metallic miniskirt. A sumptuous velvet opera cape.
By the time I stopped playing with dolls, Father’s work was of such high quality he’d even been selected to upholster a White House antique. We bragged about that the way our ancestors bragged about the grandfather who played the piano for the president/dictator Porfirio Díaz.
I am thinking all this as I
step into Isabella Stewart Gardner’s house. I know I should be impressed by the Botticellis and Vermeers, but I’m looking at the furniture the same rude way my father checks out a chair before sitting down. Scrutinizing the seams, examining the fabric to see if the upholsterer knew enough to match the patterns, paying attention to the details that mean custom, quality work, work done with pride. Not something that looked “como si lo hicieran con los pies,” as if someone made it with their feet.
I remember Father bringing home things he found in between the couch cushions—foreign coins among the dog hairs, a beautiful gray pearl he made into a tiepin. (Don’t ask why he didn’t give it back. Would you?) And I can’t help but wonder what was found in between Isabella Stewart Gardner’s couch cushions after a lifetime of dinner parties.
I’m also hauling all of my life with me as I go through these rooms. All my relatives and friends. What strikes me is the similarities between the house of the wealthy art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and my mother’s, that supreme collector of anything found in thrift stores, garage sales, and liquidations, who planted the collector’s seed in me. These cabinets filled with precious items remind me of my mother’s china cabinets filled with tiliches, trinkets, the precious next to the not-so-precious.
I mean no disrespect to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s exceptional collection, but considering her means, my mother too traveled far and wide ransacking flea markets and antique fairs, Goodwills and Salvation Armies, alleys and attics, and Chicago’s Maxwell Street for her treasures. And they are no less dear to her, and she is no less adamant about anybody touching or altering their arrangement.
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My mother’s first-floor kitchen, Keeler Street house
Three plaster Graces stand above my mother’s kitchen sink and are a family joke. They’re not exactly a precise reproduction of Antonio Canova’s original. If you turn them around you’ll notice the forger took liberties: they all have droopy butts. My father bought them outside the Vatican on my parents’ first and only trip to Europe. And they weigh a ton! Father dragged these three around six countries like a personal penance. Someday I’ll have to put them in a story to make his labor worthwhile.
I’m also struck by another similarity between Isabella Stewart Gardner’s taste in furnishings and that of the community where I was raised. Which leads me to my next point.
II. No es desgracia ser pobre, pero es muy inconveniente.
(It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it’s very inconvenient.)
—A Mexican saying attributed to my uncle Fat-face, but no doubt picked up from some other clever mexicano, who remains, like most clever mexicanos, anonymous
The poor don’t want to be poor. In Brazil they work all year just so that at carnival they can dress like kings. In my neighborhood, the ideal was to live like a king, preferably in a palace like Versailles. Or like Empress Carlota’s castle in Chapultepec. When you don’t have access to Venetian antique dealers, where do you shop to live like a king? Rossi’s, West 26th Street in Chicago. This is what I thought when I saw Isabella Stewart Gardner’s home.
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Rossi’s Furniture showroom
Furniture from the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
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Aunt Margaret’s painting
La Gitana, Louis Kronberg, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
(We were able to get these photos thanks to my brother Keeks, who told them we were shopping for a gift for our parents’ upcoming anniversary. Not true, but it was a good story.)
I also thought about the artwork I grew up with as I wandered the museum. I paused in front of a portrait of a Gypsy lady, La Gitana, by Louis Kronberg; I didn’t realize why until later when I got home. It reminded me of my aunt Margaret’s house and the kind of paintings I grew up with. Aunt Margaret, by the way, did not buy this painting. It came with her second husband. She has two daughters, and she did not want that woman with her big chichis in their living room. But Uncle Richard refused to give her up. I remember as a child the painting spooked us, because no matter where you walked, the woman kept following you with her eyes. Later on, Aunt Margaret told me she found out some rich people who live in Water Tower Place had this very same painting, and that made her feel better about keeping it.
III. We live like millionaires.
—FRANCO MONDINI-RUIZ after Danny López Lozano, folk art seller and mentor
My friend Franco Mondini-Ruiz is an artist who sees elegance in the rascuache, the gaudy, kitsch, funky. Franco’s shop, Infinito Botánica, is a place filled with the extraordinary and the divine, as he puts it. He is a painter, art curator, sculptor, businessman, and lots of fun at parties.
For my fortieth birthday he gave me a plate of chocolate-chip cookies wrapped in plastic wrap. But the chips were fourth-century Etruscan coins.
Once he removed all his furnishings from his house, borrowed interesting items from his friends, and created an installation in every room of objects lined up on the floor in a grid pattern, including the bathroom. It was beautiful, even though some of our things were never returned.
When Franco went to Mexico City, he was inspired to do the same grid design in a public space. He was staying in the old colonial center of downtown, in an apartment that looked out into a plaza. One night he got the idea to collect the garbage in the square and rearrange it like a chessboard. “Ay, qué bonito,” people on the street said, how beautiful. They didn’t want anyone to touch it, not even the street sweepers the next morning.
Shortly after this installation, Franco was taken ill and hospitalized. Friends said it was from picking up corncobs from Mexico City streets. But knowing Franco, I think it was from picking up worse things than corncobs, if you know what I mean.
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Naturaleza Muerta, by Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Plaza Santa Catarina, Mexico City
When I was looking at the ironwork in the museum, I thought of my friend Rolando Briseño. Rolando was commissioned by the City of San Antonio to create a memorial on the San Antonio River commemorating the 300th anniversary of the conception of the city, on the site where a Spanish expedition celebrated their first Mass in 1691.
Rolando also paints canvases that usually involve food and fighting. Sometimes his paintings are painted on tablecloths. He’s a food purist, a man who doesn’t even like to mix his rice with his beans. The last time I had dinner with him, there was a big fight over mole, Mexican chocolate sauce, but that’s another story.
The artist Anne Wallace is originally from Galveston, but now makes her home in San Antonio. Influenced by classical Greek sculpture, Anne likes fragmentation in her sculptures and the gestures they might suggest. She works with regional Texas wood, like mesquite, and many of her pieces reflect her political involvement with Amnesty International and a refugee-assistance council on the U.S.-Mexico border. I include sculptures of Anne’s influenced by fragments of classical statues, like ones found in the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection.
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Lunch tablescape, by Rolando Briseño
Amando en tiempo de guerra, by Anne Wallace
When I first visited the museum, I paused at a display of religious vestments, the kind Catholic priests wear when they celebrate Mass. And I couldn’t help but think of my friend David Zamora Casas, a San Antonio painter, sculptor, and performance artist. Some of the outfits he wears are actual priest’s vestments. It often gets confusing when people mistake him for a priest and ask for his blessing. This wouldn’t be so scandalous, except he goes right ahead and blesses them. I thought if David were here he might want to borrow these vestments and wear them at his next opening. I include a slide of David modeling a stunning Chiapas skirt in front of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House in Coyoacán. He told me the guard kept shouting, “Hey, you can’t do that here. Don’t put on that skirt.” But he did anyway.
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David Zamora Casas dressed to be noticed
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bsp; Here is David Zamora Casas, who not only decorates himself, but his entire house; the Anti-Oppression Church of Folk Art is a building swathed in cloth and statues and original art. It’s something to look at. I especially like his sculptures. I have one of his Virgen de Guadalupes made of found objects, bones and barbed wire and ironwork, in my backyard.
Here’s my friend Ito Romo. Not only is he an artist, he is a writer as well. And he’s a great cook. Lately he’s become influenced by Mexican funeral wreaths. Now he’s creating spiritual pieces influenced by his recent interest in Buddhism and issues on the border.
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Ito and me, Torres Taco Heaven
I paused in front of these green ceramic pots during my museum tour. They’re not valuable, I’m told, but they’re certainly beautiful. They say something about Isabella Stewart Gardner and her love of beauty. And I thought my friend Terry Ybáñez would love them too. She’d love to break them! She uses shards of pottery and antique plates and anything you give her to frame her paintings. We’ve worked together on book covers and a children’s book. But her work lately has been influenced by Mexican pottery decorated with mirrors, as well as by the roofs of Mexican buildings studded with broken glass to keep out thieves. It’s a lucky thing Terry recycles items, because I break a lot of dishes.
A House of My Own: Stories From My Life Page 12