A house decides its own name. Once I thought of baptizing my home “Rancho Ahí Te Wacho,” but no matter how hard I imagine it, she’s no rancho. Community and local scandal have dubbed her “the Purple House.” “The Purple House” is fine by me, though she’s more lavender than purple, a morning glory in the morning glory, a faded workshirt blue in the hard Texas midday light, a throbbing ultraviolet when day dissolves into dusk.
I think of the Purple House, and it makes me think of that other house, la Casa Azul, the Blue House of Frida and Diego. And though I admire Frida’s house, and Frida’s paintings, and Frida’s clothes and furniture and toys, though not Frida the martyr, the Blue House is too serious a comparison. My house is more Pee-wee’s Playhouse than Frida’s Blue House. I love the Playhouse’s craziness; say the secret word and everyone jumps up and down yelling—yayyy! I like its joy, its whimsy and inventiveness. I don’t realize how much it’s inspired me until after I take a good look at my house with its niches and cupboards peopled with plaster saints and clay putas, its shelves of Mexican toys, its sense of humor juxtaposing high and low art, its operatic over-the-top drama and tongue-in-cheek camp.
I say my style of home decorating is inspired by the intense still lifes of Terry Ybáñez, who in turn says she is inspired by my altars. Virgen de Guadalupes huddled with Buddhas. A pre-Columbian Coatlicue next to a Cantinflas toy. Mango walls next to a Veracruz pink.
“Let’s imagine a literary salon, in Mexico, in the thirties,” Franco Mondini-Ruiz says. “Let’s imagine this is the house of someone who was once rich during the Porfiriato, but lost it all in the revolution and has survived with only a few family heirlooms. Let’s imagine the living room of artist Chucho Reyes, the bedroom of Dolores del Río, the dining room chairs of Emiliano Zapata’s cuartel.” We laugh and have a good time inventing vignettes, arranging furniture to tell a story, reminding each other how the cluttered houses of our mothers both inspire and haunt us. “My mother saves everything!” “No, my mother saves everything; did I ever tell you about my mother and the thousand Cool Whip containers?”
Something of my mother and my father seeps into my way of seeing a house. My mother’s excellent thrift-store finds that she hid from my snobby Mexico City father. My father’s designer fabrics he brought home from his upholstery shop, elegant leftovers from his fancy North Shore clients. With these we redid our thrift-store furniture, we reinvented our lives, though sometimes there wasn’t enough fabric to go around. Father fixed it; covered the front in one fabric, the back in a coordinating other; he was ahead of his times.
You can tell I’ve been poor; I over-glamorize my body, my house. I take my house personally. I take my art collection personally, too. Overcompensation perhaps. I recognize it in some houses, in some people who are like me. A house for me is a space to reinvent oneself, like putting on a new dress.
Once there really was a nun who passed by the Chicago brownstone we lived in and couldn’t believe I lived in the ugly three-flat I was playing in front of. The place was a dump. A faded “Drink Fox Head Beer” advertisement was flaking off one side. You could tell the building had once been grand, grand enough to warrant renovation, but that would require so much money, and we lived in neighborhoods destined for the urban expansion of the University of Illinois. It made me realize forever after that people would mistake the landlord’s neglect for our own sense of self-worth, and would allow me to see, forever after, how even the poorest of houses, the most beat up and scruffy and fregadas, the ones families rent but don’t own, are sometimes the ones with the most pride. A tin of flowers in a lard can. A window full of cheerful Halloween decorations. A ton of Christmas lights even if the screen door is hanging like a broken jaw. “We may be poor, but you can bet we’re proud.”
I have lived such exaggerated pride. Been forced to mop stairwells with Pine-Sol, and can understand why the hole-in-the-wall taco joints also reek of Pine-Sol. “We may be poor, but you can bet at least we’re clean.”
Poverty has always had the stigma of dirtiness. That’s why I couldn’t wait to move into my own home, where the walls didn’t shimmer at night with the lacquered bodies of cockroaches, shadows didn’t scuttle along the floorboards. Imagine my surprise when I inherited cockroaches in my new house! And rats in the attic. Nobody told me. I didn’t know. I associated cockroaches and rats with poverty. Just goes to show the democracy of cucarachas y ratones. Isn’t the world amazing?
Across a table of sopa de conchitas at Torres Taco Haven, this question: “What is the Mexican American aesthetic?” A San Antonio architect is asking. He’s trying to translate the private Mexican housescape to the public building. What is the Mexican American aesthetic? I think and then respond: “More is more.”
My friend the late Danny López Lozano, once owner of Tienda Guadalupe, inspired an entire community of artists with this “more is more” aesthetic. Talk about style. More is more was not only Danny’s way of decorating, but his way of living, of someone who had grown up poor and had to reinvent himself in a high-glam way. But it wasn’t only about excess, it was about the juxtaposition of this excess. Like our mothers’ china cabinets that house both prize English teacups and a porcelain Dumbo the elephant. A house like a layer cake, like the nine excavations of Troy. All the things one had gotten and been given in a lifetime.
I sometimes am overwhelmed at how much I’ve collected, and only can see the clutter when I’ve gone on a trip and come back after a long absence. Immediately, I vow to not buy more, to start selling things or store them away. I pull back only to replace the things I’ve stored with more cositas. More is more. Más es más. “¡Qué bonito! Regálamelo.” Yours.
I did not plan to become an art collector. I have more art than I have walls. But how can one stop from acquiring happiness, especially when happiness is so within reach? In San Antonio art is very cheap, several times cheaper than a framed poster, especially if one has the eye, as Danny López Lozano did, for seeing art where most people don’t—a bouquet of aluminum foil roses, a grandmother’s antique rosary, a little aluminum airplane made out of a Bud Lite beer can.
Art exists in the houses of the very poor, in the essence of their sense of color and life in creating with what they have, in the tire flower planters, and the chipped San Martín de Porres statue blurred from the kisses of the devout. We don’t need to be a Rockefeller to see it. Or maybe we do need a Rockefeller, a mighty white man to hold it up, for all of us to wondrously look up from the dust of our lives and say, “¡Qué bonito! Regálamelo.” Yours.
For a long time I couldn’t afford to collect anything, not even unemployment. But in 1982 I won a fellowship, and with this I was able to travel. I lived in Provincetown for a summer working on The House on Mango Street. There were exhibits of art all summer in every shop, it seemed. One featured a series of striking woodcuts. I kept looking and looking at them. They reminded me of something familiar. The artist’s biographical note stated she had studied with the Mexican artists, and here is where I found that point of connection. I was especially moved by a print called Woman in the Moon. It was seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars! I had seventy-five dollars. “Should I buy it?” I remember asking my roommate and best buddy Dennis Mathis. “Buy it,” Dennis said. It was my first art purchase, and I still love that Woman in the Moon as much as I did the first time I saw her, and as she is small, she has traveled with me to most of the cities I’ve lived in.
Credit 21.2
Woman in the Moon, woodcut by Tina Dickey
Not all my purchases have been good matches. I once went to a gallery here in San Antonio with a poet friend. She talked me into buying something I later gave away. I’ve since learned to trust my own instincts when it comes to love, whether it’s a painting or a person. You can’t fall in love because someone tells you to. If you love to look at something, and it keeps drawing you back, then follow that hunch. That’s how it was when Terry Ybáñez sold me her first still life. She wasn’t trying to
sell it; I remember asking how much she was intending to ask for it. She thought for a little while, her paintbrush held in midair, and then said, “Two hundred and fifty,” not realizing I was making mental calculations. “Two hundred and fifty! Do you have layaway?” Lucky for me, she did.
I’ve since met many artists, most of them are my friends, and all of them have layaway. Sometimes they have trouble paying the rent, and I buy a piece of art before they even make it. Sometimes buying a piece of art is preferable to lending them money, because if you lend them money, you may never see it again. But a piece of art is something wonderful that they can give you in exchange for helping them out. A lot of times this has been how I’ve been able to share some of my success. I win an award and I spend it here locally with local artists, and this enables them to continue living in San Antonio, to buy more art supplies and make more art, to buy a breakfast taco and keep on living. And so it goes and goes. It’s simple.
And I’m grateful for having the artists around. They improve the quality of my life. Danny López Lozano used to say, “We live like millionaires.” And he was right. We do live like millionaires, even when we don’t have five bucks in our pockets. The artists realize it’s as important to feed one’s spirit as to feed one’s belly. That’s why sometimes Danny would dress the table with the finest china, with the Lalique crystal, with the linen tablecloth and napkins, with branches filched from the flowering tree in the empty lot across the street, even if we were just eating Church’s fried chicken. We live like millionaires!
And I find it curious to see here in this gallery an art installation of a messy living room juxtaposed with the installation of my living room, which attempts to be very froufrou. The rich like to live like they’re poor. The poor wish to live like kings.
The used furniture I’ve bought at Franco’s Infinito Botánica store and reupholstered in French fabrics reminds me of the furniture showrooms in the barrio with the imitation Marie Antoinette couches, the couches of my tías, reupholstered with leftover fabric and covered with plastic covers against the exuberance of kids.
That sense of having been poor allows me to understand the artists who are poor too, poor but educated, and therefore with tastes better, in my opinion, than the rich, who often only have their wealth, but are poor when it comes to imagination.
My artist friends are poor but talented, and therefore blessed or doomed to live like millionaires, with a joie de vivre and a grief that is a passion. They live hand to mouth, most without health insurance, most without a regular paycheck, doing what they do after having made great personal sacrifices, serving on committees and boards, volunteering at the community fairs, donating their art for good causes, generous to the point of foolishness.
The other night at the Purple House victory party, listening to Janis De Lara singing a cappella at the Acapulco Drive Inn, I realized our lives are very rich indeed. A life blessed with beauty and things of the spirit. “We live like millionaires!” Danny would say. No, Danny, we live mejor. We live like artists.
Thanksgiving at Danny López Lozano’s high-glam apartment, 309 Madison Street, San Antonio
An Ofrenda for My Father on Day of the Dead
My personal altar for my father
This story came of its own accord, uncommissioned, though I was to first publish it in the Los Angeles Times, on October 26, 1997, and the San Antonio Express-News, on November 2, 1997. At the same time I created an altar for my father in my home since it was the first Day of the Dead after his death. Later I would write an ofrenda and install an altar for my mother when her time came. Both story and altar served the same purpose: nourishment, clarity, and transformation at a time when my spirit was dying.
Mi’ja, it’s me, call me when you wake up.” It was a message left on my phone machine from my friend José De Lara. But when I heard that word “mi’ja,” a pain squeezed my heart. My father was the only one who ever called me this. Because my father’s death is so recent, the word overwhelmed me and filled me with grief.
“Mi’ja” (MEE-ha) from “mi hija” (me EE-ha). The words translate as “my daughter.” “Daughter,” “my daughter,” “daughter of mine,” they’re all stiff and clumsy, and have nothing of the intimacy and warmth of the word “mi’ja.” “Daughter of my heart,” maybe. Perhaps a more accurate translation of “mi’ja” is “I love you.”
With my father’s death the thread that links me to my other self, to my other language, was severed. Spanish binds me to my ancestors, but especially to my father, a Mexican national by birth who became a U.S. citizen by serving in World War II. My mother, who is Mexican American, learned her Spanish through this man, as I did. Forever after, every word spoken in that language is linked indelibly to him. Can a personal language exist for each human being? Perhaps all languages are like that. Perhaps none are.
My father’s Spanish, particular to a time and place, is gone, and the men of that time are gone or going—Don Quixote with a hammer or pick. When I speak Spanish, it’s as if I’m hearing my father again. It’s as if he lives in the language, and I become him. I say out-of-date phrases that were part of his world. Te echo un telefonazo. Quiúbole. Cómprate tus chuchulucos. ¿Ya llenaste el costalito? Que duermas con los angelitos panzones.
There is stored in my father’s Spanish, the way a spider might be sealed in amber, a time and place frozen just out of reach, but that I can hold up to my eye to make the world more golden. Intrinsic in Mexican Spanish is a way of looking at all things in the cosmos, little or large, as if they are sacred and alive. The original indigenous languages may have disappeared, but not the indigenous worldview. This native sensibility transposes itself into the English I write.
As a writer, I continue to analyze and reflect on the power words have over me. As always I’m fascinated with how those of us who live in multiple cultures and the regions in between are held under the spell of words spoken in the language of our childhood. After a loved one dies, your senses become oversensitized. Maybe that’s why I sometimes smell my father’s cologne in a room when no one else does. And why words once taken for granted suddenly take on new meanings.
When I wish to address a child, a lover, or one of my many small pets, I use Spanish, a language filled with affection and familiarity. I can liken it only to the fried-tortilla smell of my mother’s house or the way my brothers’ hair smells like Alberto VO5 when I hug them. It just about makes me want to break down and cry.
The language of our antepasados, those who came before us, connects us to our center, to who we are, and directs us to our life-work. Some of us have been lost, cut off from this essential wisdom and power. Sometimes our parents or grandparents were so harmed by a society that treated them ill for speaking their native language, they thought they could save us from that hate by teaching us to speak only English. Those of us, then, live like captives, lost from our culture, ungrounded, forever wandering like ghosts with a thorn in the heart.
When my father was sick, I watched him dissolve before my eyes. Each day the cancer that was eating him changed his face, as if he were crumbling from within and turning into a sugar skull, the kind placed on altars for Day of the Dead. Because I’m a light sleeper, my job was to be the night watch. Father always woke several times in the night choking on his own bile. I would rush to hold a kidney-shaped bowl under his lips, wait for him to finish throwing up, the body exhausted beyond belief. When he was through, I rinsed a towel with cold water and washed his face. “Ya estoy cansado de vivir,” my father would gasp. “Sí, yo sé,” I know. But the body takes its time dying. I have reasoned since then that the purpose of illness is to let go. For the living to let the dying go, and for the dying to let go of this life and travel to where they must.
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Father at the hospital, October 1996
Whenever anyone discusses death they talk about the inevitable loss, but no one ever mentions the inevitable gain. How when you lose a loved one, you suddenly have a spirit ally
, an energy on the other side that is with you always, that is with you just by calling their name. I know my father watches over me in a much more thorough way than he ever could when he was alive. When he was living, I had to telephone long distance to check up on how he was doing, and if he wasn’t watching one of his endless telenovelas, he’d talk to me. Now I simply summon him in my thoughts. Papá. Instantly I feel his presence surround and calm me.
I know this sounds like a lot of hokey new-age stuff, but really it’s old age, so ancient and wonderful and filled with such wisdom that we have had to relearn it because our miseducation has taught us to name it “superstition.” I have had to rediscover the spirituality of my ancestors, because my own mother was a cynic. And so it came back to me a generation later, learned but not forgotten in some memory in my cells, in my DNA, in the palm of my hand that is made up of the same blood of my ancestors, in the transcripts I read from the great Mazatec visionary María Sabina García of Oaxaca.
Sometimes a word can be translated into more than a meaning; in it is a way of looking at the world, and, yes, even a way of accepting what others might not perceive as beautiful. “Urraca,” for example, instead of “grackle.” Two ways of looking at a black bird. One sings, the other cackles. Or “tocayo/a,” your name twin, and, therefore, your friend. Or the beautiful “estrenar,” which means to wear something for the first time. There is no word in English for the thrill and pride of wearing something new.
A House of My Own: Stories From My Life Page 15