The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child’s uneven scrawl
Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom
Impaled on my wall
My eyes candimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.
(Patterns: Paul Simon, 1965)
Memories are tricky things to write about. It’s funny how two people can experience the same event and have two completely different ideas of what happened or how they felt. Since starting this blog in 2005, I’ve had many disagreements with siblings and friends over details of commonly shared occurrences. My two friends from high school, Jim and Greg, stubbornly denied ever attending my college graduation ceremony at UCLA in 1970. Jim could recall attending our friend Wayne’s commencement ceremony from Loyola University (before it merged with Marymount University in 1973), but not mine. They only recanted when I finally presented a photograph showing them standing next to me by Pauley Pavilion, dressed in my cap and gown. Disagreements with my siblings were never over events, because, sharing common access to the family archive of photographic evidence, we tended to remember scenes – but we differed on the emotional undercurrents of the back-stories that accompanied them. A pastoral black and white photo of Stela, Gracie, Arthur and me sitting on a sloping, grassy knoll, seemed an idyllic picture of Easter Sunday in 1958. However, I clearly recalled it as a tempestuous morning in which I was angrily thwarted in my desire of going directly to our grandmother’s house for breakfast. Arthur stoked my fury further by successfully taunting me about not being able to help my uncle and aunts color and hide the Easter eggs for the afternoon hunt. The wistful and pensive look on my face disguised my frigid indifference to the people around me, while a cauldron of boiling anger raged inside.
Perhaps because of these conflicting and sometimes contradictory remembrances of past events, I’ve always been reluctant to recount them in a narrative fashion. Instead, I’ve described memories of my childhood, adolescence, adulthood, marriage, and career, as flashbacks to events that were occurring at the time. Christmas of 2006 sparked childhood scenes of the annual construction of our grandparent’s nativity crèche in the show window of their Workman Street home (see Nacimiento Stories). A drive along Venice Boulevard to a principal’s meeting at Mark Twain Middle School in 2008 ignited adolescent images of playing football in Pop Warner and high school (see Rolling Home and Forever, Not For Better). Valentine’s Day from 2007 to 2010 (see tag: valentine day) were excuses to recount the events of meeting, wooing, and marrying Kathleen Mavourneen, and an email from my Mexican cousin Nena prompted a long historical narrative of the times I visited and lived with my mother’s family in Mexico City (see Mexican Connections). In all those years I never wrote a strict memoir – an account of the early events of my life as I remembered them. My wife Kathy had often encouraged me to do so, saying that it was important to record these family stories for our children, and their children, before they faded from memory and were lost. But I managed to avoid doing so, excusing myself with the promise that I’d get around to it someday. After having written two consecutive jail stories, and with no compelling current events on my mind, I suddenly decided to write of my earliest memories in Mexico City and Los Angeles, and the difficulties of adjusting to a new language and culture.
The first image I have of myself is as a chubby, moon-faced, 4-year old boy, riding a red tricycle and playing in the vast stone courtyard of my grandmother’s home on Calle Chopo in Mexico City. It was located across the street from a massive glass-faced museum, with two towering, metal steeples. Mima-mari, or simply Mima, as she was called, lived in a large, two-story townhouse-like apartment with my great-grandmother, Mima-rosi, my aunt Totis, and uncles, Beto, Pepe and Lalo. The residence was part of a long, continuous, rectangular complex built around a central plaza made of granite blocks. This was the playground for all the children who lived in the other apartments, and they blanketed it with games of soccer, hopscotch, and jump rope, and where they rode their bikes and roller-skated. I was too small to join in the team sports, which I observed from Mima-mari’s second-story window or on the front door steps, but I roamed that vast tract during school hours. When the older boys and girls marched off to school, I, and the younger children between 3 and 5 years old, could wander throughout the enclosed courtyard, riding tricycles, playing with toys, and running around. For the most part I avoided group games and settled on more solitary pursuits, like playing with my uncles’ lead soldiers. This was a collection of painted metal figures of marching and fighting Mexican and French soldiers on foot and horseback. I spent hours arranging them in opposing lines on the even ground in a shady corner of the courtyard. Most of the charging and fighting occurred in my mind, reenactments of stories told by my uncle Lalo about Cinco de Mayo, when the Mexican army at Puebla, withstood a siege by the French troops of Napoleon II, and drove them back to Vera Cruz. Later, on trips to El Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Park) he showed me the French colonial castle of the Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Carlota, and told me how President Benito Juarez and the Mexican army finally drove the French from their lands. Mexico City was the first place I remembered living in, and Spanish was the first language I spoke, even though I was born in Los Angeles.
I was born in Los Angeles in 1947, one year after my parents were married. I was named after my father, Antonio, or Tony, who was a distant cousin of my mother, Maria del Rosario, or Güera. My father was born in El Paso, Texas in 1921 to Jesus Delgado and Maria Villela, a couple who were fleeing the revolutionary disorder of Mexico of that time. These first immigrants to America, along with the entire Villela clan, migrated to California and settled into Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. There, my father and his 13 brothers and sisters lived, went to school, worked, and grew up. He graduated from Roosevelt High School before the outbreak of World War II, and then enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942, followed by his three younger brothers Alberto, Manuel, and Victor. As lonely servicemen are wont to do during the endlessly long and boring stretches that dominate their time in camps and aboard ships, my father wrote letters to establish or continue contact with distant family members in Mexico. One such letter found its way into the hands of Maria Nava-Villalpando, or Mima-mari, his mother’s cousin. Mima-mari was a widowed schoolteacher and principal living and working in Mexico City, and she offered the letter to her four daughters, Helen, Chita, Totis, and Güera, urging them to write to a lonely second cousin. Each one said they were too busy and couldn’t be bothered with this task, except the youngest, my mother. She believed that fighting fascism and facing possible death in battle were heroic actions, and merited a response. She felt that writing to a brave Mexican-American soldier was the noble thing to do. Güera was a young, idealistic girl of 18, who loved reading romantic and classical literature and dreamed of becoming a writer or a poet. She had just completed the preparatoria stage of her studies at la Normal Superior, a college designed to instruct and train elementary and secondary school teachers, and was beginning her final 4-year program. So in lieu of her daily journal entries, Güera wrote daily letters to the lonely Marine in the Pacific.
I don’t really understand how a man and a woman could fall in love through letters without ever meeting, even in a time of war. The notion was certainly romantic, and it sometimes reminded me of the poetic correspondence that Robert Browning maintained with Elizabeth Barrett. I could understand a physical attraction for one another, after seeing pictures of my mom and dad of that time. They were unquestionably sexy and good-looking. My father had thick, curly, black hair and a long, handsome face. He wore a captivating smile, and his big, brown eyes seemed to twinkle when he laughed. He looked confident and bold in uniform, and he wore his cap at a cocky, debonair angle. My mother was simply beautiful at eighteen. She had angelic, arching eyebrows on a regal face, with long, sun-streaked hair with blonde highlights that earned her the nickname güera, or “blondie”. She sat and moved in a cool, graceful manner, always keeping her backbone and slender neck straight and erect. Still, one doesn’t fall in love with a photograph, no matter how lovely the face, or regal the pose. My only hints are through the few letters my dad wrote me while I was in the Air Force, shortly before he dying of a heart attack in 1971. His words to me were warm and comforting, but mostly they were truthful and straightforward. He wrote about his memories of basic training and military life, and how he suffered through the loneliness and isolation. His letters were honest, funny, and encouraging. I loved reading them because they made me feel safe, as if I were home. I think it was his humor, self-confidence, and penetrating insight into people that attracted and intrigued my mother.
On old photographs and in notes to my mom, my dad called her princesita, or “little princess”. He continued this romantic endearment long into the marriage, using it in tender moments with my mom, or when she was upset and needed reassuring. In my youth, I thought the nickname betrayed my dad’s crazy infatuation with this slender, elegant, and regal beauty. Only later did I realize that it also pinpointed some aspects of my mom’s proud character. My mom had been the pampered, toe-headed, baby girl born into a wealthy family in Aguascalientes, which fell upon harsh economic times after the revolution. With the death of her husband, Adalberto Villalpando, a state representative of Aguascalientes, Mima-mari struggled to establish a career as a principal and teacher in Mexico City, while raising a family of 8 children. Fierce bonds of pride, loyalty, and self-reliance held this well educated and professional Mexican family together, even when separated for long periods of time, as when my mom was sent to a private, boarding school in Coyoacán. My mom had never encountered a man, outside of her brothers, who was not intimidated by her intelligence and independence. My father seemed to recognize and appreciate these traits. Until la Güera encountered my dad through his letters, she had never met anyone suitable for dating or commitment. I think my dad’s letters made her smile, laugh, and cry, with his candid reflections about her, himself, the war, and what he hoped to accomplish in the future. When they finally met after the war, it didn’t take long for their love to mature, and my father quickly proposed, and my mother accepted. It was a daring and impulsive act on both their parts, and one fully dependent on their faith that Love would find a way.
My mother dropped out of the Normal Superior in her final year to marry my dad and moved to Los Angeles. There, because of the chronic housing shortage in Los Angeles after the war, my parents lived with my grandfather’s family in Lincoln Heights for a short period. This was one of two homes my grandparents purchased from the military insurance benefits of Alberto and Manuel, who died in 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. I was born in 1947, while living in that Workman Street house, but I have no memories of those early years. I learned later that I was the first grandchild in the Delgado household of 5 uncles and 6 aunts, and that my feet never touched the floor because I was carried, hugged, and spoiled from morning to night. My mother had to fight for carrying time, and she treasured the privacy that feeding opportunities gave us. Eventually we moved into my grandparent’s second home on Amethyst Street, and my father enrolled in the Fred Archer School of Photography, under the G.I. Bill, hoping to pursue a career in that artistic craft. We lived in Los Angeles except for a brief return to Mexico City during her second pregnancy with the twins. Early blood work had revealed that my mom’s Rh-negative factor placed the delivery in serious jeopardy. After conversations with her brother Beto, a hematologist specialist at the Hospital Español in Mexico City, it was decided that it would be best if she traveled there so he could supervise a new procedure that would nullify the Rh factor and safeguard the birth of the twins. My brother and sister, Arturo and Estela were born in Mexico City in 1948, but we returned to Los Angeles as soon as they were able to travel.
In 1949, with no photography prospects on the horizon, and my mother, yearning for Mexico and her family, my parents hoped to move permanently to Mexico City. There my mom could finish her degree at the Normal Superior and my dad would seek a work visa and permanent residency. A position was being arranged for him at Celanese Mexicana, one of Mexico’s major producers of chemicals, developing and selling the basic and specialized chemicals used in industrial, construction, and pharmaceutical products. Unfortunately, neither the visa nor job materialized, so my father used the remainder of his G.I. Bill benefits in attending Mexico City College for a year, while my mother finished her degree. In Mexico City, in the crowded two-story, townhouse-apartment on Calle Chopo, our household of 5 moved in with my great-grandmother Maria (Mima-rosi) Serrano-Nava, (the sister of Jovita Serrano-Villela, my father’s grandmother), my grandmother, Mima-mari, my aunt, Totis, and my three uncles Beto, el doctor, Pepe, el profesor, and Lalo, el licenciado. This was the period when I first became aware of my surroundings and myself.
Riding my tricycle is the clearest image I have of Calle Chopo, but I recall a few more scenes from that time in Mexico. I remember waking up to the lilting humming of criadas (servants), sweeping the front steps and courtyard of the rectangular, apartment-complex every day. Coarse straw whisked the stones rhythmically, as I detected the familiar, soft voice of Crisanta, or Chrysanthemum, our india house servant, singing the provincial songs of her village. She was our criada de casa, a dark-skinned, teenage girl of 16 or 17, with tightly braided, black hair, who had moved to the Capitol in search of work, and lived in a small room next to the kitchen. She was a combination nanny, maid, and housekeeper, who assisted Mima-mari and Mima-rosi with the children, errands, and meal preparation. I accompanied her on the short walks around the corner to the neighborhood tortilleria, and proudly carried back the quilted basket, filled with hot and blanketed, freshly made tortillas for our mid-day cena. Occasionally I would also go shopping with Mima-mari to the large open-air markets of the Ribera de San Cosme. This was a magical world of fluorescent stalls and booths, decorated with colorful and exotic fruits, vegetables, meats, and poultry. Vendors would sing or call out lyrical catch phrases, or slogans, hoping to attract customers or admirers of their boasts. Festive piñatas, banners, and helium-filled globos (balloons) floated overhead, and, despite my mother’s admonition to never ask for anything while accompanying Mima-mari, I longed to beg for one and bring it home. Finally I remember eating family meals in the large dining room, whose walls were covered with old and dark paintings of the Last Supper and various family portraits. One picture showed the full face of a white-haired, old man, in a coat and tie, whose ancient eyes seemed to follow you anywhere you moved or sat in the room. It was eerie, and Lalo made it worse by claiming that the portrait was a haunting ancestor who came alive at night.
At the end of that year my parents gave up their dream of residing permanently in Mexico and dad returned to Los Angeles looking for work and a house. We stayed with Mima-mari just long enough for mom to receive her degree and then made arrangements to leave. Our final goodbyes at the airport were sorrowful, with my mother, already pregnant with Gracie, crying, while hugging and kissing her mother, brothers and sisters. I was quickly distracted from this forlorn mood by the exciting prospect of an airplane flight and seeing my father at our arrival in Los Angeles. I couldn’t wait to catch a glimpse of the huge, multi-propeller aircraft, climb aboard the spacious cabin, and then stare out the window as we flew across Mexico to California. Unfortunately, I slept through most of the eight-hour flight, and only remember waking up in a vast, glassed-in room, filled with crowded benches of people waiting to clear Customs. Impatiently, I crawled down from the bench and began inspecting the towering beveled glass walls, wondering where my father might be. I pushed open a glass-paneled, wooden door and peeked down a long hallway toward a wide concourse at the other end. There he was! My father had his arms filled with flowers and stuffed animals, and was lined up in a row with other men and women awaiting the passengers of our flight. I released the heavy door to tell my mother whom I’d found, when the metal edge of the lock closed on my finger. Between a mixture of joyful and painful sobs and tears, I told my mother that papi was here, waiting for us on the other side of the door. The excitement of the flight, followed by the painful discovery of my father, eventually wore off in the monotony of the long drive to Lincoln Heights. Listening to the soft murmurings of my father and mother in the front seat of the car, I fell asleep and did not awaken until the next day in my grandparent’s home on Workman Street.
Forgotten names and faces of aunts and uncles I no longer recognized greeted me that first morning, and they soon became my guides to this strange and technologically modern land that was so different from Mexico. The first surprising things I noticed were that this American family had their own television set, and everyone traveled by car. In Mexico City, one still saw horses pulling creaking, wooden wagons on side streets, with the drivers buying and hauling old clothing and used items made of metal to recycle. Mexico of the early 1950’s was a land where everyone walked or rode bicycles. Private automobiles were an extravagance that only the wealthy could afford. If one needed to travel beyond their local vecindad, or neighborhood, buses provided the most common form of transportation to school, work, markets, and downtown. If speed and convenience was needed to get to a particular destination, then taxis, or peseros (taxis who followed a fixed route and only charged one peso) were hailed. Private autos were unknown in my mom’s family, and no one knew how to drive. In Los Angeles, cars were everywhere, and everyone drove - my grandfather, my father, and my older aunts and uncles. It was wonderful to be packed into my father’s car, or my grandfather’s truck and go anywhere we wanted, at any time of the day. It was exhilarating and exciting, but I occasionally missed never seeing a horse, or a mule drawing a battered old wagon along the streets, and I rarely saw a taxi.
The first time I saw my grandparent’s television sitting in the family room of the house, I froze in awe, and stared at its glowing, black and white screen for a long, long time. I couldn’t believe that such a luxury existed in their home. There had been one televisor, in the entire Chopo apartment complex. The wealthiest tenants, who lived in the largest of the two-story residences, owned it. A huge, polished wooden console, with a tiny, gleaming, square screen, was strategically placed in the middle of their living room, facing the courtyard window. On warm nights, when the drapes were open, the television monitor would broadcast an eerie, pulsing light through the window. Children playing outside would silently gather together and inch closer and closer to the window to identify source. Then someone would whisper in a hushed and reverent tone, “¡Es un televisor!” That such a device existed in my grandparent’s home was amazing. I remember the twins and I sitting mutely on the floor of the family room as we stared at that tiny screen, mounted on the large wooden console. Commercials with exaggerating car salesmen, wrestling matches, and cartoons were the easiest to understand and enjoy, but I was happy just watching the figures move across the screen. Shortly after our return to Los Angeles, we moved back into the small, single-family house on Amethyst Street, where Graciela, or Gracie, was born in 1951.
While house-sitting for my grandparents at Workman Street in 1952, my parents enrolled me in the Kindergarten program at Griffith Avenue Elementary School. I dreaded the notion of school. I’d spent 5 years in the comfortable safety of families in Mexico and Los Angeles, and had never been separated from my mother or siblings. Now I was being deposited in an alien place, surrounded by strangers. My mom and dad accompanied me to school on the first day, and presented me to a grim-faced, middle-aged teacher. I only released my tight grip on their hands when they promised to sit outside the classroom and wait for me until the end of the day. The first two times I escaped the classroom activities to peek through the glass window of the door, I saw my mother and father sitting quietly on a bench in the hallway. I realize now, that they assumed I would eventually tire of this checking, become engaged with the teacher and students, and forget their promise – but I didn’t. On my third trip to the door window, the hallway bench was empty. My parents had abandoned me, and I began wailing for their return. I cried so long and hard that the teacher summoned the principal, who, failing to stop my weeping, escorted me to her office and telephoned my parents. I didn’t stop crying until they entered the office door to take me home. Somehow, my parents talked me into an uneasy truce with my kindergarten class and teacher, because I went back the next day and stayed. On good days I remember learning games, like musical chairs, and playing with over-sized, wooden, building blocks. On bad days I felt depressed and deserted, and would start crying. I would cry until my father was contacted at work and he’d come to pick me up and take me home. This scene must have been repeated many, many times, because my refusal to stay in school one day was the cause for my one and only spanking.
I remember the morning as wet and dreary. It had rained through the night and the early hours of the day, and the hazy, overcast morning looked dark and threatening. My mother had bundled me up in layers of sweater, coat, raincoat, and cap, and I felt thick and ungainly. When my father accompanied me into the class’ cloakroom and began unbuttoning my raincoat, I realized he would again be leaving me in this gloomy place.
No me dejes, papi, I begged him. No me quiero quedar.
He listened impatiently, and told me everything was okay and I would be fine. But I knew it was getting late for him, and he was dismissing my discomfort as temporary. As he stood to hang up my coat and leave, I began wailing. I cried and cried, and wouldn’t stop. The teacher tried interceding, but she had played this part before, and knew there was no way to stop my determined tears. My father looked angry and frustrated as he nodded his assent and took me away. He had failed in convincing me to stay, and he fumed in the car as we drove home. As we approached Workman Street, my whimpering turned to sniffles, and my tears dried.
¿Que paso? My mother exclaimed as I ran into her arms when she opened the front door.
¡Esto no puede continuar! My father thundered, “this cannot continue”. Merece un castigo. Toñito tiene que aprender que la escuela es necessario y se tiene que quedar. “Toñito needs to learn that school is important and he must stay there. He deserves a punishment”. With that he yanked me by the arm and led me into the master bedroom. Closing the door, with my mom outside, he sat at the edge of the bed. Stoically, he bent me over his knees, and spanked me with three sharp and painful slaps. I wept anew and fled into my mother’s waiting arms when he released me.
The spanking must have left an impact on me, because I never cried again in kindergarten, but I hated Griffith Ave School. I sullenly attended that school for three or four more months, and then we moved to Duane Street, off of Glendale Boulevard, in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. This was our first real home, one that was free of any family ties or obligations, and it had a special feature for me. Directly across the street, my father pointed out, was Clifford Street Elementary School. My mother and siblings would be a stones throw from my new school. I could see the house from the playground, and I would be allowed to leave school at lunchtime to eat that meal at home. It sounded like a major concession to me – a school right at our doorstep, with my mother close at hand. For the first time since being taken to school in Los Angeles, I relaxed. Kindergarten never again seemed as frightening as it did at Griffith, and except for one misunderstanding, everything went fine. On the first day of school, I confused recess for lunchtime and walked home, setting off a minor panic in the school until the principal called home and found I was there. To this day I wonder if my casually strolling off campus was truly accidental, or if it was a way of testing my control over this new school environment.
My new kindergarten teacher seemed younger and friendlier, and the room was more cheerful and engaging, with lots of colorful posters and bulletins boards, and world globes, aquariums, and plants on the windowsills. The children sat on thick floor mats that could be rolled up to create more space for play or learning activities, and each morning the teacher took alphabetical roll. Children were expected to raise their hands, saying “here,” in a loud, clear fashion, when their names were announced. Every morning, as the teacher finished with the “C” names, I would purposefully stare at some object in the room, as if daydreaming over it, and pretend not to hear her call.
“Anthony Delgado, is Anthony here?”
Usually my rug partner would look at me strangely and then shout out, “He’s right here, teacher!” The children would laugh as the teacher checked off my American name. It wasn’t until 1963, when I was in high school, and my mother was preparing to walk my brother Eduardo to his first day of kindergarten, that I mentioned those early days at Griffith Avenue Elementary School.
“Mom,” I asked, seeing how nervous Eddie was about going to school. “Why did I have such a hard time with kindergarten? All I remember was crying.”
“Ayy, pobrecito, Toñito,” she sighed. “Your father and I really expected to live and raise you in Mexico. When we returned to Los Angeles, you only spoke Spanish and didn’t understand very much English. That year was very difficult for you.”
“Yeah,” I replied, ruefully. “It was.”
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