Reports on the tragic struggles of migrants all around the world fill the international news media.
Here, Alberto García Ruvalcaba reminds us that many Mexicans who now call themselves Tapatíos are the children of brave souls who took upon themselves unspeakable hardships simply to migrate from the countryside to the city, within their own country - and some, braver still, to more distant and more dangerous destinations.
García is a columnist at Guadalajara’s daily newspaper, Mural and Director of Tedium Vitae, a publishing house specializing in literature, poetry and cultural trivia. - John Pint
In 1948, my mother’s family migrated from Yahualica to Guadalajara because my grandparents did not want their children to end up as “adobe-brick carriers.” The pueblo gave them no opportunity to escape from poverty.
The city received them on the day of the annual parade honoring St. Peter and St. Paul. My Aunt Mary, then five years old, thought Guadalajara was a city in which “even burros were given a regal escort as they danced down the street festooned with flowery garlands.” My grandfather tried to support us here as a shoemaker, which was his trade, but he didn’t succeed and soon they hit bottom.
My aunts recall that year Santa brought them only one present, a yo-yo which was so heavy that it could go in one direction only – down. Even today, when they see one of these solipsistic toys climb back up the string, they figure it must be broken. For the poor, the sense of wonder vanishes in the vertigo of descent.
In distress and living first in a garage and later in a backyard room, my grandfather was rescued by his sister, who lived in California. She invited him to try his luck north of the border. There began the second alliance of my maternal family with the uncertainties of migrant life. My grandfather worked carting stones in wheelbarrows in a Utah mine, and watering orange trees in California orchards. He did it without papers. His employers protected him from the authorities by moving him from orchard to orchard. He spent more than two decades in the furtive adventures of the migrant worker: sleeping in the attic of his sister Tiburcia in Westminster, Orange County, California, improving irrigation methods, always fearful of being deported, supporting his family by long-distance mail. When he came to visit, which happened every two or three years, he brought with him seeds of the exotic white dahlia. I do not know if he ever realized that the dahlia is the national flower of Mexico.
My grandfather, J. Jesus Ruvalcaba Rubalcaba, was born in Yahualica, Jalisco in 1899 and died in Guadalajara in 1995. His story, in a way, is the history of ‘Mexico Overwhelmed.’ He migrated, as did many, from the countryside to the city, and then, as fewer have done, from our country to the United States. He hid in ravines during the Mexican Revolution and in the open during the Cristero War. The paroxysms of national history denied him an education. His studies ended at second grade but he had “beautiful handwriting,” my aunt says to defend him. Like many Mexicans, he had a sister who chased away his girlfriends with knives. That’s why he married, at age 42, hiding from Pachita, who, in revenge and with admirable savvy, adopted her dolls as daughters and took for a pet a pig which, having grown up in her tiny house, could not leave it but in pieces.
My grandfather spent his life hiding: from the revolutionaries, from the killers of Cristeros, from sisterly love and from La Migra. That’s why, when he returned to his home in Guadalajara as a widower and a retiree, he chose to sleep in the utility room, behind the patio of the laundry, as buried as he had been when he hid in ravines or in attics. A house, he felt, is first and foremost a refuge, the place that gives us protection from the atrocious machinations of the world. For my grandfather it was also the place from which one can escape stealthily, something every prudent migrant requires. He died at 96 years of age in his lair, the man who left home one day and never returned – the withered life of a migrant. We, his grateful descendants, seek to live up to his expectations.
My family’s ties with the United States are many, but those forged by my grandfather’s are the deepest. Gratitude is perhaps the word that best describes that relationship, but the word decency is not far away. American people treated my grandfather with justice. They gave him a job and rewarded him afterward, sending him every month, right up to his death, his retirement check.
My tiny Aunt Pachita used to walk around Yahualica with a rooster on her shoulder. Donald Trump emulates that empty boasting. His fighting cock is quarrelsome and, contrary to the exemplary decency of most Americans, unjust.