Chucha – Maria de Jesus – Anzalda was a wiry, middle-sized woman of about 60 when I first met her in the 1960s. She was easy to remember because of her inventive ways of making a living. She seldom seemed to struggle in doing that, yet was always roughly inventive about it.
Chucha spent much of the day sitting under an arbol formed by rough-barked, python-sized copa de oro vines, and smoking cheap puros (as they were then called) and El Faro cigarettes, keeping watch over the rocky burro trail skirting the thinly populated eastern edge of Lake Chapala.
Uphill and some distance from her ancient adobe-walled, teja-roofed house, Chucha worked a raw, dry-season road in the town of Chapala. It was a narrow dirt road, frequently blocked in both the dry and wet seasons by derrumbes, minor landslides. This pleased Chucha considerably. The buses, lurching and snarling to and from Chapala, would pause as bus drivers and assistants would get out to move mountainside debris. This gave Chucha the opportunity to hobble with near child-like nimbleness uphill with containers of the vegetables and fruits she raised, and sweets she’d made to sell to waiting bus riders. Some said she climbed uphill at night to loosen rocks and other debris to block day-time traffic. Something she surely considered. But the mountainside was too steep, the rocks too loose.
But she did go out early, her head cocked for an encouraging sound. At any sound that said a bus might be stoping or merely slowing down, Chucha would put out her smoking and head for the road. “A bus must be stopped, no? Poor people jailed and hungry.”
She would snatch up her filled charola – made of a glistening gallon-sized gas can – and troop up the unpaved road, waving her cane, calling, “Oye, oye, my friends, so hungry on this early morning. I have fresh mangos, platanos, guayabas, pitayas for you. There‘s been no time for your almuerzo yet, neighbor. This driver has gotten you up so early, and you’ve got a long way to go. Look at that boulder. Best to have a few delicious charales to brighten your morning, good friends. You won’t get free of this mess soon.”
Once, I mentioned how patient the passengers were, waiting so quietly for the driver and his assistant to clear such an early morning mess. “What are our friends going to do over there in Chapala?”
Chucha made sympathetic sounds. “Those city-like people will just make fools of them before they are even awake yet. They are honest country folks. They don’t belong to be locked up in a bus like chilies in a can.” She spat out a piece of tobacco. “Poor things.”
Chucha’s husband, a fisherman, had left several years before, and was living with another woman and a brood of children in La Barca. Her only living son was working in Northern California’s Joaquin Valley, picking fruit and vegetables. Two other sons died at birth and one at two years. She had grandsons. Each of those had children.
“Yes, it’s nice to have nietos,” she once told me, and allowed the subject to drop.
A friend of hers had told me that two daughters had died of influenza when quite young.
Chucha could write her name and then some, and also read unsteadily –and did so often.
About an hour after a day’s last bus, she’d make her determined way up the road to spread out the morning’s fruit and vegetables to sell to farmers and laborers returning home from a day’s work. “Hay dulcitas, fresquecitas,” she would call into the lavender dusk. “Refresh yourselves. sons of the dark virgin. Rest here a bit for just five centavos. You’ll sail home with eased limbs.”
Whenever I showed up, she’d question me sharply, though I was usually there to question her. “What did you do all day, joven?” She’d squint at me through tobacco smoke. “You look as if you were working! But what work did you do?” She’d squint at my faded Levis and worn huaraches.
She didn’t believe I spent time writing. That was because she didn’t consider anything but the Bible and Catholic handouts suitable reading materials. And since she often found those to be laborious reading, she doubted what I said. “You don’t plant maiz, frijol. Surely, you’re not cunning enough be much of a thief.”
She would frown at me, disbelieving everything I told her. Such things simply made her scowl and exclaim in a disgusted voice: “Periodicos? No one believes in them! You should become a fisherman! Fish are something people would believe in.
Why lie like that? It’s hard to believe government tangled periodicos.”