In 1598 over fourteen hundred soldiers and settlers set out from Todos Los Santos, a pueblo near Durango, Mexico for an unknown land north of the Rio Grande. Under the authority of the king and queen of Spain these European and Mexican families established the province of New Mexico with Santa Fe as its capital. Diego Blandín Gonzales was a soldier, a captain and a father in this expedition. I am one of his descendants.
In 1917 thousands of people fleeing the violent and bloody Mexican revolution sought safety in the country's northern most city, Ciudad Juarez. As battles raged between the armies of Pancho Villa and federal troops, they waded through the shallow, muddy waters of the Rio Grande to reach the safety of the American border city of El Paso. José and Remedios Sanchez y Cabrera were among them. They were my mother's parents.
In 1949 a family of four set out on Route 66 from Los Angeles, California for New Mexico. Benerito Gonzales served in Europe during World War II. With the war over he looked forward to returning to New Mexico, his homeland. His wife Angelita, on the other hand, was filled with anxiety about going back. She had survived growing up poor and an outsider in New Mexico. On her own she had created a happy life for herself in Los Angeles but marriage reversed her direction. It was her fate and not her choice to return. Benerito and Angelita are my parents.
I was born in Los Angeles, California in August, 1947. We left for New Mexico when I was just two years old but I still remember a lot about our L.A. neighborhood: tall palm trees, wonderful weather, our apartment in Boyle Heights and the Chinese family who were our next door neighbors in the same complex. My brother Phillip, who is fourteen months older than me played with their children daily and sometimes the family would baby sit him. Phillip was a precocious and outgoing child who absorbed everything around him. He started talking at a very early age but to his mystified parents the words made no sense. When those words developed into sentences they realized Phillip was speaking Chinese.
The day Mom and Dad brought me home from the hospital they decided to name me Edward and call me Eddy for short. Dad held me up so Phillip could get a good look. He eyed me curiously as I was bobbled up and down for his inspection.
"This is your little brother. Say hi to Eh-dee," Dad said in a singsong voice.
Perhaps his head was too full of Chinese words to pronounce Eddy; instead, my brother called me eh…LI. Mom and Dad were so amused by his mispronunciation that from then on my family called me Lee.
We might have grown up in Los Angeles since Mom loved California and never wanted to leave. She'd been raised in Belen, a small railroad town in central New Mexico where her mother Remedios Sanchez still lived. The family was extremely poor. The small adobe home they lived in lacked electricity and indoor plumbing while Angelita was growing up. In elementary school she learned to speak English, often attending in ill health, wearing hand me down clothes. In spite of many obstacles Angelita remained optimistic about her future. She took all the typing and office skills courses offered in high school, knowing a better life meant getting a good education and living someplace else.
Following in the footsteps of one of her older sisters, Angelita left Belen right after high school and moved to El Paso. The next year her younger sister Margaret moved to Los Angeles where she and a cousin shared an apartment and worked as stockers in a large warehouse. It was the eve of World War II and California's economy was booming. Jobs were plentiful so Margaret wrote to her sister. 'Angie, you can get a good job in the warehouse where we're working. Come right away!'
Angie left for L.A. When the employer discovered she was a fast, accurate typist with a high school diploma, she was immediately hired as a secretary, working in the office where the pay was higher and the work easier.
The two sisters enjoyed active social lives. From time to time Remedios took the train to visit which added to their happiness. For Angie, Los Angeles was a wonderful and progressive environment. Photos from that time show a smartly dressed young woman with movie star looks smiling back at the camera. Margarita started dating a soldier from New Mexico, Alfredo Martinez. He and his best friend, Benerito Gonzales enjoyed visiting Los Angeles when they were on leave from their army base in Riverside. Naturally, Alfredo and Margarita arranged a blind date between Angie and Benerito. From then on the two couples double dated, often going to El Club New Mexico.
After the friends were discharged from the army, Margarita and Fred married and moved to his home town of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Angie and Bennie got married, too. In Los Angeles Bennie quickly found work as an apprentice carpenter, a job that paid well and carried with it the promise of a stable career. They moved into a nice apartment in Boyle Heights and started a family. They could've easily merged into L.A.'s vast, upwardly mobile Mexican American working class but Benerito did not share Angie's intense desire to achieve the American dream in California. He wanted to return to New Mexico. He missed his family and friends and longed to hear his own language again, the distinctive Hispano dialect of the state. His people had lived there for hundreds of years and their legacy was ingrained in him. Angie did not want to return to poverty so whatever Bennie had to say on the subject didn't interest her. Bennie was certain there was one point they could agree on however, the loss of family ties.
"What good is it to have a job here if the boys grow up not knowing their grandparents and relatives?" he asked. Angie didn't know how to counter her husband's heartfelt argument for returning to his homeland; all she knew was that Los Angeles, with its wonderful weather, decent housing, better schools and good jobs offered them a standard of living they could never achieve in New Mexico. She was willing to sacrifice seeing her relatives often, even her own mother whom she loved dearly, for those advantages. When Bennie insisted, Angie began suffering from anger and resentment. She felt she'd been hurried into marriage, now she was being forced back to New Mexico. Dad won the argument but he also started an unending war. My parents' contentious, unhappy marriage developed in large part as a result of that move.
While both sides of my family are Hispanic, the experience of the newly arrived Sanchez family in the United States was far different than the Gonzales family. My mother’s people were refugees from the Mexican Revolution. Their ways, beliefs and strengths are part of who I am. Angelita was a daughter of immigrants. Her drive to seek a better life became my dream, too.
Generations of Gonzaleses had been farmers in northern New Mexico. Their traditions, isolation and language were part of that unique culture of Hispano villagers. Benerito's homeland became mine, too.