When Lena Curiel’s kidnapped young mother, Chela, was found, it was said she refused to come home. Several members of the extended Curiel family, plus three armed family friends, were sent to bring the stolen young mother home. They were led by the family doctor and a bruja. (In the 1960s, brujos, male and female, rural and city, were popular.)
Lena’s father had been killed just before her mother disappeared. Chela was eventually found hiding in the southern state of Colima, outside a small pueblo located on the side of the Colima Volcano.
The family’s doctor and bruja took the first available public — home-made — bus. Toño Curiel and his wife, who adopted Lena when her parents disappeared, chose the clan’s most resourceful leaders — an aunt and uncle — to go help Chela. They took the family’s rickety camion.
It was obvious that ten-year-old Lena was trying persuade her adoptive parents to go also — and take her with them. True, Lena had put the image of her lost mother in a faded corner of her mind. Now she was trying to revive that feathery image. She was sure she could overcome her mother’s reluctance to come home. But no one else thought the ten-year-old would be of any help.
Lena got into an argument about this with several of her older kin. One, Jose, was strong, forward, yet likable. A cousin who thought young females should help their mothers in the cocina and at sharecropping. Lena, determined to destroy misconceptions regarding her ability to help her mother, challenged 15-year-old Jose to a machete-throwing, tree-hacking competition to prove her resourcefulness.
Clearly even close relatives believed the ten-year-old lacked the strength and skill necessary to wield the campo’s basic tool — a machete. It was considered too heavy for a ten-year-old boy or girl to wield nimbly, accurately. This accepted weakness irritated Lena. No one noticed her mix of exercises, copied from siblings, all male and all older. Lena knew she was too light for the usual machete manipulations performed by more mature youngsters. No one noted her daily trial-and-error efforts tailored to strengthen her body, the steady machete filing firming her shoulder-arm-and-hand muscles. These strengthened her ability with this basic country tool. Lena’s gradually increased hand-arm-torso dexterity pleased her, but not those around her.
Unnoticeably she found a way to narrow the ever-familiar machete into a slightly-lighter, subtly re-designed blade. She worked to change that rough field tool, the weight of which made it a convenient chopping implement. It was this weight that Lena worked to carefully modify. She gradually did this by re-designing the tool’s body thicknesses. Her machete’s briefly leather-covered handle became the normal raw iron that then began thinning faintly as it reached forward before it slightly regained a bit of weight far from the handle. Its design gave the extended blade a slim whip-like action, enhancing its slashing effect. This clever, hard-to-note design offered careful aim to its hook, curving less than normal machetes. The result: a savage, well-targeted effect.
And it resulted in a surprising victory for Lena when she competed with her 15-year-old cousin, Jose, in slashing, while on horseback, marks into the bark of hefty pasture trees, harvesting, at a gallop, firewood from the far corner of the potril, the horse pasture.
“When are you going after Chela’s ‘molesters’?” a frustrated Jose asked later.
“Soon, I think,” Lena said, making Toño shake his head.
“Girl wants a pistol for the trip,” said Toño. “Not ready for a pistol yet.”
“A while back, I heard she was practicing a lot with a pistol,” said another cousin.
“Shooting old paint cans. Not enough for this Colima thing,” Toño said. At the same time, he reluctantly noticed a spurt in Lena’s growth. His wife was enlarging the girl’s clothes again; lengthening Lena’s favorite stiff pantalones and the used denim shirts merchandise-minded Mexicans brought back from visits to the United States.
Then word came that Lena’s mother, Chela, had taken a relative’s handgun and gone looking for her kidnappers. It took two days to find her again.
That news enforced Lena’s “We-need-to-go,” discussions with her adoptive parents. “Maybe the three of us can get her to come home with us.“
Toño, while agreeing, recognized it as one of those moments that stirred his now familiar concern that Lena was growing up too fast. Her determination to bring her birth mother home, her attraction to handguns, certainly her ingenious re-design of her machete — none were the familiar play-time interests of a ten-year-old. They were all adult-tinged inclinations aimed at adult-tinged goals. She was not playing with hand-me-down dolls like the family’s other female children. A child without a childhood. That worried Toño and his wife.
Lena soon got her way. She, Toño, his wife, and another close uncle went by fractured bus to the Curiel clan’s Colima tent-city. Two nights after they got there, before Lena had even talked with her birth mother, a man named Alejandro Rangel, a local volunteer “helper,” cut a slit in Chela’s supposedly well-guarded tent. He almost had a good-sized slit well cut when Chela shot at him twice. Wrapped in a sarape nearby, Lena woke, alarmed, and ran toward the echoing gunfire. As her birth mother, armed and swearing, pushed through the slit into the dark, she found Lena emerging from the shadow of a nearby tent, calling, “Mama, mama!”
The two stared at one another, then embraced, wept, and kissed for the first time in their lives.