When I was still a kid I lived apart from my parents. My father was out of the picture. My mother worked as a hostess of the women’s hushed “dining room” in an upscale big-city department store.
I lived and worked at a series of ranches and farms. What my “divorceé” mother had in mind for me was clean air and fresh food. I learned a lot. But there were times when I was without work. Money was often scarce in rural areas then. I was often stashed with strangers — parents, or other relatives, of young female friends of my mother, who had moved to the city for well-paying city jobs.
The employment drop created by precursors of the coming United States “bracero” program was at first caused by Mexican workers coming north on their own to work in gringolandia. It was an ironic switch. Sometimes the only work I could get for a short, tough time, would be digging ditches, cleaning out hog pens, toting water. Then irony was emphasized by the fact that I got work at a small “store” named “La Perla de Chihuahua.” My boss’s name was Chela (Isabel) Ramirez, who had been born in the border town of Ciudad Juarez — a place no one I knew could pronounce or imagine. There was a lot of prejudice spread across America’s Great Plains at that time. And Chela had to be tough to endure the bigotry thrown her way. She finally changed her business’ — and her own name. (She became Sara Lopez.) Some of her relatives had come up to harvest sugar beets in northern Nebraska and the Dakotas. A good many of the ranchers and farmers I knew didn’t have a clear idea of where U.S. sugar-beat country was. And a town called Ciudad Juarez — an unpronounceable, and dubious-seeming name — was beyond prairie imagination
But Chela/Sara and I got along, once she realized I didn’t think she was a being just arrived from Mars. Many of the rural families with whom I had been living and working with had recently acquired a very noisy gadget, cheap static-prone radios. And seldom-used words such as Mars often echoed through the broadcast crackle.
Unsurprisingly local rural folks tended to shun Catholics. Everybody I knew went to the only church close by — a Lutheran church in our case. And told crazy rumors about Catholics, who were ruled by a strange person called a pope who wore a long dress and lived far away in a place called Italy.
Foreigners were not to be trusted. Even though many of the people who gathered on Sundays at the Lutheran church were European — very often German, often at the most only second-generation Americans and very often speaking pure German.
Chela — as I always called her — was trying to master not German, but the right gringo flavor for apple pie. And depending on my taste buds to help her perfect the right local taste.
But the most successful item she created was a totally Mexican dish. And it depended on her own south-of-the-border skills. It was aimed at treating Great Plains hangovers. The quality of the tripe which she placed in her steaming menudo, a quality stew well-known along and below the border, was Mexico’s ancient sure-cure for hangovers.
Several local women tried to imitate this mixture of curative perfection and habit-grasping flavor of Chela’s Saturday-night, Sunday-morning sure-cure. That much-applauded Sunday a.m. flavor came close to jarring many other-wise happy marriages. And this from a brown-colored foreigner who could hardly speak English — and probably an illegal one at that! I never asked about that. She said she was legal. I agreed.
The most interesting thing about her was her front door. There she hung a handsome picture of Juventino Rosas, Mexican composer of the world-famous “Sobre las Olas” “Over the Waves,“ ornamented with words claiming him as a tapatio, a son of Jalisco. That composition was made famous far beyond Mexico by opera singer Enrico Caruso. It became increasingly popular in the United Stares, even at outdoor fairs, and widely available at Wurlitzer’s popular fairground organs. Its popularity grew during World War II.
This popularity reached into rural villages, ranches and farms as electricity invaded those areas. “The Pearl of Jalisco” took its name back, it’s popularity spread — under a number of titles — by a widening number of films. Another new form of entertainment. The films were shown in the evening on the sides of large storage barns. People drove up and parked in polite rows of hay wagons, rattling pick-ups, clanky trucks.
This popularity embraced one very parochial center. That turned out to be the smooth back wooden wall of Chela Ramirez’s “Pearl of Jalisco.” The “Pearl” made overalled men and their long-aproned women — both mothers and wives — secretly proud of having a neighbor so worldly informed. Some said it was just incidental. Many said that Chela — reactivating her birth name — was more worldly-informed than they had formerly realized. Simultaneously — but not surprisingly — my first experiment at living with my mother and her new husband didn’t work out.
Chela had secretly vowed to me that she was going to make tamale eaters of these non-believers in her tales of the brave Maderistas who fought against the dictator, Porfirio Diaz, in the Mexican Revolution.
The popularity of things Mexican — once loathed by those who distrusted all things foreign — prepared this slice of the U.S, for the coming bracero invasion. Thanks to Chela Ramirez.