The Children of Gregoria: Dogme Ethnography of a Mexican Family

By Regnar Kristensen and Claudia Adeath Villamil

The Children of Gregoria portrays a struggling Mexico, told through the story of the Rosales family. The people entrenched in the violent communities that the Rosales belong to have been discussed, condemned, analyzed, joked about and cheered, but rarely have they been seriously listened to. This book highlights their voices and allows them to tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner without prejudice, persecution or judgment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789206548

Regnar Kristensen

Regnar Kristensen is currently externally associated with the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies of Copenhagen University. His fieldwork on the Santa Muerte cult has spanned many years, specializing in the interface between law enforcement, crime and religion in Mexico.

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THE CHILDREN OF GREGORIA

Ethnography, Theory, Experiment

Series Editors:

Martin Holbraad, Department of Anthropology, University College London

Morten Axel Pedersen, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Rane Willerslev, National Museum of Denmark

In recent years, ethnography has been increasingly recognized as a core method for generating qualitative data within the social sciences and humanities. This series explores a more radical, methodological potential of ethnography: its role as an arena of theoretical experimentation. It includes volumes that call for a rethinking of the relationship between ethnography and theory in order to question, and experimentally transform, existing understandings of the contemporary world.

Volume 8

THE CHILDREN OF GREGORIA

DOGME ETHNOGRAPHY OF A MEXICAN FAMILY

By Regnar Kristensen and Claudia Adeath Villamil

Volume 7

GOING TO PENTECOST

AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO STUDIES IN PENTECOSTALISM

By Annelin Eriksen, Ruy Llera Blanes, and Michelle MacCarthy

Volume 6

CUTTING COSMOS

MASCULINITY AND SPECTACULAR EVENTS AMONG THE BUGKALOT

By Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

Volume 5

VITAL DIPLOMACY

THE RITUAL EVERYDAY ON A DAMMED RIVER IN AMAZONIA

By Chloe Nahum-Claudel

Volume 4

VIOLENT BECOMINGS

STATE FORMATION, SOCIALITY, AND POWER IN MOZAMBIQUE

By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Volume 3

WATERWORLDS

ANTHROPOLOGY IN FLUID ENVIRONMENTS

Edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup

Volume 2

FIGURATIONS OF THE FUTURE

FORMS AND TEMPORALITIES OF LEFT RADICAL POLITICS IN NORTHERN EUROPE

By Stine Krøijer

Volume 1

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TROMPE L’OEIL FOR A COMMON WORLD

AN ESSAY ON THE ECONOMY OF KNOWLEDGE

By Alberto Corsín Jiménez

THE CHILDREN OF GREGORIA

Dogme Ethnography of a Mexican Family

Regnar Kristensen and Claudia Adeath Villamil

First published in 2020 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2020 Regnar Kristensen and Claudia Adeath Villamil

Translation of chapters 1–11 by Kimi Traube

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kristensen, Regnar, 1968– author. | Adeath Villamil, Claudia, 1969– author.

Title: The Children of Gregoria: Dogme Ethnography of a Mexican Family / By Regnar Kristensen and Claudia Adeath Villamil.

Description: First edition. | New York: Berghahn, 2020. | Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment; vol 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019050985 (print) | LCCN 2019050986 (ebook) |

   ISBN 9781789206531 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206548 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families—Mexico. | Rosales family. | Violence—Social aspects—Mexico. | Mexico—Social conditions—21st century.

Classification: LCC HQ562 .K75 2020 (print) | LCC HQ562 (ebook) |

   DDC 306.850972—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050985

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050986

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-653-1 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-654-8 ebook

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Cast of Characters

Chapter 1. The House in Ruins

Chapter 2. The Doña and the Dons

Chapter 3. Walking the Razor’s Edge

Chapter 4. Infidelity

Chapter 5. Earning Respect by Fucking Shit Up

Chapter 6. Jail

Chapter 7. Calling Down the Saints

Chapter 8. Extortion

Chapter 9. Cancer

Chapter 10. Flight

Chapter 11. The Future

Afterword

Appendix I. For Anthropologists: Editing Dogme Ethnography

Appendix II. Manifesto for a Dogme Ethnography

Glossary

References

Index

PREFACE

I am up to here with goddamn problems.

—Gregoria Rosales

In 1963, the teenage Gregoria Rosales moved from the historical center of Mexico City to a poor vecindad, or multifamily tenement, in the quarter she wanted us to call Esperanza, meaning Hope. Along with her aunts, mother, brothers, and her newborn baby, Gregoria began to build a home in this vecindad populated by abandoned women. Over the next two decades, she gave birth to six more children. Her youngest was just a baby when the 1985 earthquake devastated their small apartment and left Gregoria and her children with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Since then, they have received a few important helping hands but have also borne the brunt of iron fists, beatings from gangs, police, neighbors, teachers, or at home. And they return the beatings. Men and women. Thoughtfully and ruthlessly. This is Gregoria’s story, and her children’s, and her grandchildren’s. In their own voices, they tell of the world that has led them to walk the razor’s edge, selling drugs, robbing trucks, and running security rackets. In these pages, they give voice to their hopes and dreams, heartbreaks and devastation.

Their stories are not sob stories. They are not looking for mercy, nor do they want us to feel pity for them. Instead, the members of this family raise their voices with courage to speak out with brutal frankness about what parts of Mexico looks like from this place they asked us to call Hope, but which they also call Hell. The members of the violent communities that the Rosales belong to have been discussed, condemned, analyzed, joked about, and cheered, but rarely have they been seriously listened to. We have therefore chosen to highlight their voices and let them tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner. We recorded hundreds of conversations with them from 2005 to 2013 and followed an ethnographic dogme manifesto in the editing process to enforce the immediacy between you, the reader, and them, the storytellers (see appendix I and II). You might get the impression of reading a polyphonic novel or their intertwined storytelling may make you feel as if you are sitting in the cinema watching a film. Melodramatic their stories may be, and yet the Rosales are of flesh and blood, which gives these stories a second force. All words except those in the Preface, Afterword, and appendices are theirs. Gregoria’s only comment after reading the book was: I don’t like it, but it is the fucking truth, for real!

Thank you Gregoria, Mariana, Patricia, Mario, Lidia, Eduardo, Israel, and Luz for inviting us so generously inside your lives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, we are in deep debt to the Rosales family for telling us their stories so vividly and allowing us to record and publish their voices anonymously. Needless to say, without them this book would never have materialized, would never have been thought possible.

We would also like to thank Kimi Traube for her excellent American-English translation of the Rosales’ Mexican-Spanish slang (caló) and our Cuban collaborator Youdyne Torres Sánchez for her equally outstanding feel for the Mexican caló, her smooth editing, and her precise transcriptions. Yudy, your arduous work and good spirit have without a doubt had a huge influence on the quality of the book. You are the closest the book comes to having a third author. Likewise, thanks to Elaine Bolton for her sharp proofreading of the preface, afterword, and appendices, and also to Nedalina (Dina) Dineva for her excellent work with the index.

We are very grateful to all of those who have taken the time to read and comment on some, if not all, of the chapters. Claudio Lomnitz, Pablo Piccato, Benjamin Smith, Wil Pansters, Misael Medina Pineda, Hugo José Suárez, Edith Tamayo, Claudia Montero, Alfredo Moreleon, Annika Hvithamar, Michael Harbsmeier, Mary Smith, Lourdes Villagomez, Laura Adriana Hernández Martínez, Finn Stepputat, Hans Lucht, Inger Sjørslev, Esther Fihl, Lars Højer, Andreas Bandak, Christina Jerne, Martha Montero, and Jordan Adeath Lastra; you all have helped us to improve the book and encouraged us to keep going. Some of you have also shared your contacts with us, particularly Claudio Lomnitz, Benjamin Smith, and Pablo Piccato. Your kindhearted help and encouragement for more than a decade have been of vital importance to us. Moreover, thanks to those of you who, while the book may not have fit your list, nonetheless, generously gave us feedback and helped us with other contacts: Sarah Swong, Ilan Stavans, James McCoy, and Beth Itkin Kressel, among others. And thanks also to those who kindly helped us with contacts and recommendations: Philippe Bourgois, Michael Jackson, Paul Gillingham, Ioan Grillo, and Joshua Phillips, to mention a few.

Thanks to Regnar’s students at the department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies in Copenhagen, whom he forced to read and comment on the very first draft of the book in English. Your engagement was very important at that stage. And at an even earlier stage thanks to those who discussed the power of Oscar Lewis’s ethnography at the University Iberoamericano in Mexico City in May 2013. Your comments on the power and the problems of The Children of Sánchez inspired Regnar to explore an alternative narrative structure to the cutting and pasting of the voices, in what was to become The Children of Gregoria.

A very special thank you to Monique Nuijten, who, probably unintentionally, pushed Regnar to reconsider his academic approach and ethnographic writing in a crucial moment of his life.

Appreciation also to The Danish Council for Independent Research: Culture and Communication for funding the research of this family. We are grateful for this research grant, which gave us ample room to follow our more explorative paths.

And, last but not least, thanks to all the saints for protecting us. We know that the Rosales have implored you to do so.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Family Rosales

All names and places have been changed to safeguard the family’s identity. The principal narrators are those emphasized with bold.

GREGORIA (DOÑA GOYA), the main character. Mother to Mariana, Alfredo, Mario, Lidia, Eduardo, Israel, and Luz. The seven children have four different fathers. Grandmother to thirty-three, and great-grandmother to more than twenty. Lives with her partner Don Robert.

DON JORGE, Gregoria’s brother. Single and with no children. Lives next to Gregoria with his and Gregoria’s mother Alicia.

MARIANA (MAR), Gregoria’s oldest daughter. Mother to Inés, Yolis, Ernesto, and Alicia. Grandmother to ten children. Separated from her children’s father Ernesto. Lives with El Troll and two of her adopted grandchildren (Boris and Jorgito).

PATRICIA, Gregoria’s daughter-in-law. Mother to Pelos and Desiré. Grandmother to four. Sister to Montze. Lives with Alfredo (Alfi), Gregoria’s oldest son, and father to her children.

MARIO, Gregoria’s son. Father to Gustavo, Victor, Jocelyn, and Jesica (with Cristina), Alfonso and Ximena (with Alba), and five more children with four different mothers. Grandfather to a number of children. Lives with Alba.

LIDIA, Gregoria’s daughter. Mother to Roxana, Diana, Lidia chica, and Carlitos, with two different fathers (Israel and Carlos). Grandmother to six. Lives on and off with her boyfriend Adán.

EDUARDO (LALO), Gregoria’s son. Father to Aaron and Johan with two different mothers (Esther and Lula). Adopted for some years Kaira, Aaron’s sister, who has a child. Lives with Lula.

ISRAEL (SIX PACK), Gregoria’s youngest son. Father to Samanta and Brian (with Elizabeth), and five more children with five different mothers. Lives with Azucena and her child.

LUZ, Gregoria’s youngest daughter. Mother to Karla and Quique. Lives with them and their father Enrique.

CHECO, Gregoria’s adopted son. Lives with Lupe and their two children.

1

The House in Ruins

LIDIA

The crash woke me up. I felt somebody yanking me by my feet, I remember I even yanked the covers up. It was my mama. When she pulled me off the bed, the loft came down with the roof and everything. We just huddled in a little corner. Everything had collapsed. All that was left was one stick poking through. There we were, in a tiny little corner, and everything was dark. You could hear little bits of dirt falling all around, and the voices were getting further and further away. My little sister Luz was bawling. She wouldn’t let go of me, shaking, just a baby. She was scared by all the shouting, by hearing the wood splintering and the rocks falling. I cried a little too, but Mama hushed me, Shut up now. Don’t cry. Let me open a way out. Let me see. She was like she always is, looking for a solution to what was happening then and trying to calm us down with a shout or a curse, so we wouldn’t lose it. And so we wouldn’t make her lose it too, I imagine.

We were there for a good while. They say the neighbors were already all running outside, some of them hurt, with their heads split open, everybody covered with dust. That’s when one of my uncles showed up, the one who works around the corner from here, and they say that he started shouting, My sister-in-law, my nieces, my sister-in-law! He started looking for us, Gregoria’s missing, Goya’s missing! and everyone went back to where we were. My brother Alfredo was there too, and he was screaming, real awful, Mama, Mama! He was losing it because there was no house left. Finally he heard us. We’re ok, Mama said to him. And they started to pull off the rocks. In the vecindad there was a man named Alejandro, everyone called him El Perro. He started to scrape, to dig. First, he got my sister Luz out, and then me, but when they went to get my mama out, she wouldn’t fit. Well, El Perro goes and grabs her and pulls her out by her clothes. That’s how they got her out. When Mama came out, the part of the roof that was covering us collapsed, everything caved in. It was like bombs had gone off. One roof fell in, and then they all did. There were people with their heads cracked open, but nobody was dead. When we got out into the street, the vecindad was flooded, because all the pipes had broken. Awful, awful. It was bad, although it didn’t seem so bad at the time because you were so scared.

When Mama got out and saw the accesoría, without a single plate left, she started to cry, What are we going to do? And then she kept crying because we found out that my brother Lalo had been taken to the Cincuenta Clinic over in Santa Cruz. We ran all the way there, barefoot, her and me. On the way, we saw lots of things: kids impaled on sticks, all bloody. Women and men lying in the street, others helping. When we got to the hospital, it was worse. There were people covered with blood, dirt and blood dripping off them, babies, pregnant women, old ladies, dead people already covered up in sheets, people who came in with their skulls cracked open, people with no arms. Horrible, horrible.

ISRAEL

I was six years old when the earthquake fucked everything up. Mario and I lived with my Grandma Alicia and my uncle Jorge, right at the front of the vecindad. There was a loft in my grandma’s house, with two beds. That’s where we were sleeping. Back then, we would get up early. My uncle Jorge would go to work, and he always left us money for some empanadas from Don Poncho’s, around the corner from here. That day, we woke up and my uncle was in the loft. I don’t remember if he was putting on his shirt or his sweater or what when my brother Mario said to me, "Güey, ask him to leave us something for the empanadas. So I asked him, Uncle, how about it? You gonna leave us something for an empanada? Yeah, gimme a second." But suddenly there was shaking and boom! the shitshow started. My uncle threw himself over us and pow! the roof falls in, and the steel rods from the loft and everything fall onto his back. Look at his back now, it’s all full of holes and scars. After that, I remember some relative from around here pulled us out. We were out! And when you turned around to look, you realized it was an utter disaster. I was stunned. The whole damn city fell in, like in those movies of Germany when everything’s destroyed by the bombs. It was just rubble, buildings fallen down, people crying, people running.

They moved us to Cinco de Mayo colonia with Patricia’s folks. My Ma stayed in the house to wait and see what would happen to our place. A few days later, we came back to live in camps, houses made from cardboard and wood. We had nothing. We didn’t have any clothes, we didn’t even have anything to eat. Real bad shit. Me and my brothers were little. Back then, only my oldest sister Mariana had moved out to live with her husband and my oldest brother Alfredo with his wife Patricia. My mama was the only one working to support the rest of us. She always knew when the aid trucks were coming with sugar, beans. She was always running with buckets and bags so that they would give us drinking water.

GREGORIA

We all lived right in the street, and that’s the damn truth. When I made it out, I was naked. Well, I was wearing what I was wearing, but with no shoes on. Everything got left inside. What were you going to get out? My children went to Patricia’s house. She’s Alfredo’s wife. They were there with her parents at the Cinco de Mayo colonia, but then we heard that they were going to fix everything for us and I had to bring them back with me real quick so they could be seen, otherwise they wouldn’t have given me anything. They put us in an empty lot that must have been about thirty years old. It was full of garbage, animals, rats. That’s where the drunks were living, though nobody realized it until an ambulance came and took them away. Later, they even said the rats crawled up into their rectums. Well, they brought some machines in to clean out the trash. They made us little rooms with some beams and some rubber they brought, and we moved in there. There were five hundred rats at the very least. And scorpions, too. None of them stung any of the children because we bought bags of powdered lime and threw it everywhere. They brought us coffee, rice, a few barrels of water, clothes, kotex pads, diapers, money, spoons, plates, canned food. They supported us, because nobody had anything. We lived in the empty lot for a year.

The owner of the vecindad was around forty, fifty years old. All the vecindades on Ferrocarril Avenue belonged to him. When they collapsed, the government expropriated all of them but this one. We went to see the old man, and it turned out he wanted to sell us the empty lot for fifteen thousand pesos. But we didn’t have the money, so he said we should move out so he could make it a parking lot. One night, the people from the Baptist Church came and they asked us, How many people live here? There are fifteen families, I said. Keep quiet, they said, because the government closed off all the highways to keep us from helping you. Solomon came over, a short little guy with a beard and dark skin. He was the number one pastor for the Baptists, the heavy hitter, the chingón de los chingones. He says hello to me and he tells us they’re going to help us and everything, and I tell him, Ay! If you don’t really help us, I’ll cut your balls off. They went and they bought the lot, and they built the vecindad that we have today. No, forget about it, the Baptist Church’s real chingón.

I was the one running around up and down. I went around with all the engineers. We were all women, ’cause few of us had husbands. All us whores were alone; we were all widows, dumped and abandoned. Señora Yola was alone, Señora María Eugenia was alone, Berta, my mama, Doña Fía were alone. I was always alone. I had my stand and I sold my tacos and beer all night. The only one who had a husband was Rocío. He was a construction worker who worked at the Tolteca cement plant. Before the earthquake, they had a house and an accesoría in the vecindad. I remember one day there was a meeting. We sat on upside-down buckets. It was with the Licenciada Marisela, a Japanese-type woman. She was from the Baptist Church, but she also worked at the Oriente prison. She talked nice, she was good people, but at the same time, she was a real hard-ass. So she started to say, Rocío, you get a house. And then she looks at me and she says, "Gregoria, tell me: what do you want, a house or an accesoría? And I say, Ay, give me my accesoría. How many children do you have? Well, I have seven of them. And where are they going to sleep? Don’t you worry, I’ll find a place for them to sleep. But this is what I live off. You know, Licenciada, that I sell tacos." I’d never had a house, before I lived in a little room. I had my loft, I had my kitchen, and I had my bathroom. My mind couldn’t even think about a house, I just wanted the accesoría. And she turns around and says, "You know what, Gregoria Rosales? A house and an accesoría. You should have seen Rocío, No fucking way, Licenciada, how is that possible? My husband works at such and such a place. And look at his salary, we can pay for it, but her, she’s alone and she has lots of kids and she can’t pay for it. Right there in front of everybody. And Marisela goes, Well guess what, Señora, if I say that Señora Gregoria gets a house and an accesoría, then she does, because I said so. The thing is, I had both, answers Rocio. The thing is, I told her that she gets both, and I have my reasons, says the Licenciada. Rocío was pissed. That’s fucking bullshit! You wanna talk like that? I can talk like that too. I’m from Santa Julia, and I’m a bad bitch too. How do you like that? And she throws the papers at her, If you don’t like it, if you don’t want a house, sign and say you renounce it. Sign it! No miss, I . . . There you go, then. Like I said, I’m only giving you one." She gave her only one, and me, she gave me my two houses.

After a while they put up the houses. We had to pay for them because the goddamn government wouldn’t give us the green light for them to be donated. It wasn’t much, but the point was you had to pay something so they would stop their bullshit. The day they gave us the keys, they brought in some mariachis and we had a barbacoa. The Baptists paid for all of it. When they gave us the keys, Solomon said to me, See, I gave you your house, so now you don’t have to cut anything off me! He laughed real hard; he hadn’t forgotten what I said to him.

Things changed when they gave us the houses. Everyone got a stick up their ass, Ay, my apartment. And they didn’t want the kids to play in the courtyard anymore because they made too much noise. The damn bricks have changed but you’re still the same. The Baptists had also bought the lot next to here to make a kindergarten, so that we Esperanza mamas could put our kids in there. They asked a lady to have her son watch the place for them in the meantime they were building the vecindad. Well, those bastards agreed to watch it and all of a sudden they put in the papers; they started paying the land taxes and for the water. They put everything in their name, and they ended up with everything. Also, there wasn’t enough money. Apparently the engineers were stealing it, and the architects, and everyone who was part of building the houses, because later the cops came looking for them to put them in jail. That’s why the people from the Baptist Church left. They got bored because they realized that everyone was stealing from them. I never saw them again.

2

The Doña and the Dons

PATRICIA

My mother-in-law Gregoria is a wonderful person. Her children, however, are a mess. She sets a good example by working, but none of her kids follow it. There’s something really wrong with them. They have four different fathers. Mariana has one father, Alfredo another, and Mario, Lidia, Lalo, and Israel have a third father. Luz has another, different father. Don Mario, the father of the four in the middle, raised Mariana and Alfredo. That’s why they call him Dad.

Don Mario was a tinsmith. He used to fix dents in cars and paint them over. When they started to build the Esperanza market, he had a lot of stands. Truth is, Don Mario was a better man than his sons. He was a great guy, except that he died. When he died, there were just two stands left and they went to my mother-in-law, but nobody was using them. Go sell, she told me. We sold knickknacks, paintings, things like that. When his son Mario grew up, he asked for the stands and sold them real cheap. The stands belonged to all of his brothers and sisters, but they didn’t see a dime. Don Mario was better than Don Robert, too—my mother-in-law’s current husband. That old man always thinks we’re going to steal from him. Watch out whenever you come in: he stares at your hands and gives you the stink-eye. But what am I going to steal? A candle? I don’t need to do that. That’s why I work. His children are the ones stealing from him. Not to gossip, but you see how his son, the fat one, has a taxi? Well, Don Robert bought it for him. My mother-in-law wears out her shoes walking, and there goes his son with a car and a half.

We all have our good stories in this family, some of them more screwed up than others. The children that’ve given my mother-in-law the least amount of trouble are Mariana, Alfredo, and Luz. Mario was in jail, and so was Israel and he’s in a bad way now. Lalo was neck-deep in drugs, and Lidia has always been good-for-nothing. She’d go out partying and never take care of her kids. Sometimes you teach your children one way to live, but they live a different way when they’re grown. It’s not like they’re taking a different road to be president, right? More like they’re such jackasses that they’re on the road to no fucking good. It must be horrible to have your sons in jail, honestly, because you didn’t give birth to them for them to grow up to be such ungrateful jackasses.

Life is real funny, if you think about it. Her adopted son, Checo, was a low-down thief. He’d spent years in jail. He was stealing from people on the metro, he and his wife Lupe. Then they met my mother-in-law and she started to push them and push them until they stopped stealing. He’d never thought about learning to perform rosaries, but little by little, thanks to my mother-in-law, he started to do rosaries at different altars, and Lupe started to make robes for statues of La Santa Muerte. That went well for them. Later, they got into the Santería stuff and El Palo Monte, and it went even better. My mother-in-law was able to rehabilitate those two who aren’t even her children, and with her real children, she can’t do a damn thing.

GREGORIA

I’m a human being, just like anybody else: no more, no less. The only thing different about my life is I have a lot of faith in God and in La Santa Muerte, my beautiful Bony Lady. I love her a lot, and I know she’s always watching out for me. But other than that, we’re all the same. We’re made from the same material. Some of us are bigger fools than others, but that’s how we human beings are: good and bad. I believe I’m a noble woman, I feel for people who suffer, and I’d like to have everything so I could help people who have nothing, but it’s not really possible. There are times I get so angry, really angry, I can’t stand it. And then I go back to being just as much of a fool as I was before. You can’t always be angry, even if the situation is screwed up. The only thing we can do in this life is to keep trying as hard as we can.

I don’t know where I was born. I never knew that. I don’t know if it was in a hospital or in the apartment downtown where I lived with my mama, my two brothers, and my aunts. I know I came to Esperanza when I was just sixteen. Mariana had already been born. I was about fifteen when I gave birth to her and I was getting up near forty when I had Luz. I don’t even remember exactly, that’s how many I’ve had. My children have been headache after goddamn headache, to tell the truth. Why so many kids? Honestly, it’s good for nothing. You must walk so much and fight so much with so many kids. The rule to life is to keep battling on. God gives you your children, he teaches you to love them, and there you are with them. You have one kid, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and when you wake up, you say, Ahhh, what am I going to do now, all by myself? And fuck it! The earthquake comes and you don’t even have a house anymore, no, no, no. Why are you going to remember that? It’s better to live in the moment. Life goes on. If you’re sitting around remembering what was good and what was bad, then we’re all fucked. I don’t like to think about the past. For me, memory’s in another world. Really, it’s not something that interests me. What happened, happened. The only one I have in my memory is my Don Juanito, that’s it. I tell him to take care of me, to watch over me, not to leave me. Him, I remember. He was a wonderful person. He’s always on my mind. God be with him! I have his voter’s ID. I got a hold of it when he died, and I’ve never let it go. Wherever I go, I take his ID with his photo. I say, Ay, Don Juanito, you’ll always be with me until I die. Let’s go, my Juanito. And he goes with me, to San Juan de los Lagos, to Oaxaca, to Acapulco. Lots of places.

I spent my whole life with him. He was one hundred years old when he died. My grandma washed and ironed his clothes, and ever since I was little, I’d go with her to drop them off. When I was eight, nine years old, he would take me and my cousin Marcela to Xochimilco every Sunday to ride horses. He bought us our spurs, boots, lassos, chaps, everything. Then he’d take us over to Ajusco or Tres Marías for strawberries and cream. After my grandma, my mama ended up doing his laundry, and then I went to take care of him. I cleaned the house for him and everything. In the beginning, it was my cousins and me doing the laundry, but I was the only one that stayed with him until the end. He was always a very independent man. But when he got old, he didn’t feel safe, and I started to go around with him. That was when Luz was born.

I don’t know what he studied, but he spoke a lot of languages the old fart. He would import merchandise from different countries. In January, he’d order from Japan, China, England, and the shipments would come six, seven months later, because they had to come by boat. Then he’d deliver the merchandise to the stores downtown, and that was the end of his contract. I remember we would go to the Niko Hotel, or the Majestic, and make reservations for the people coming from China, or from Japan. He would go make the reservations, and he’d talk to the Chinese and the Japanese in their languages. Then the señores would come, and he’d pick them up. They were very important people from factories, representatives of foreign houses. We would go with them to the stationary stores, to the tlalpalerías where they sell all the tools and things, to where they sell fabric, for suits and all of that. I would go with him to the Chinese Embassy, the Japanese Embassy, the British Embassy, and then he would say to the representatives, This lady is my companion, but she doesn’t have anything to do with the business. In other words, I was always with him seeing about his business, but I never got wrapped up in anything. We’d also go to expositions from all around the world. They’d give him a pass from some Embassy or another, and when we got there, he would use his pass to get me in and then ask for another for himself. We’d also go to the doctor together, because he had to see a cardiologist his whole life. He never missed a single appointment.

I don’t think there’s any man as refined as him. I never saw him unshaven. When I arrived, he would come down all clean, nice and showered. He never stopped using a handkerchief. Once, when he was starting to get kind of bad, I brought him food, and I was waiting for him to unlock the door. He came down, opened the door, and said, Ay no, forgive me Goya, please. Forgive you for what, Juanito? thinking that the bastard was already off his rocker. And he told me, Because it’s disrespectful to come down and open the door for a lady without a tie on. It’s just not done. He had come down in his blue pants and his white shirt without a tie on. He was such a man that up to that day he had come down dressed in his suit and tie. I say to him, Damn, Juanito, and he answers, Ay Goya, why do you swear so much? You should write a book of swear words, you’d make a lot of money. I’m telling you, that señor was something else. He was full of manners, of lots of life values. He was always very respectful. He wouldn’t let me talk to anybody. He’d say, Goya, you don’t know what kind of people you’re surrounded by. There are bad people. We can’t talk to anybody. And he’d talk even less in taxis. He’d just say, Take me to Niko Hotel. Go down Insurgentes Avenue, turn onto Reforma, take 23rd St., then 32nd, then 35th, and that was it. If I said something to the driver, he’d turn around and tell me silently that I couldn’t chat. He was afraid of everything.

Don Juanito was very particular about eating. He always ordered fish or chicken breast, not breaded or anything, just grilled. He ate a lot of vegetables. Grapes, melon, coffee with cream. One time I asked him, Hey Juanito, why don’t you order milanesa fried chicken? And he told me, No, because that’s not for eating. You eat it because you want to eat it, but it’s harmful. Ay, it doesn’t do me any harm, and he says, But it does. And I ask him, Alright then, how many times have you eaten red meat? Only once, and that’s because they served it to me in an Embassy. Can you believe it? He ate red meat only once in his life. Every day we would go to the Danubio for his two eggs sunny-side-up with potatoes à la . . . fuck if I know! After the potatoes, came his toast with butter and jam, and then his coffee. When he left, he’d eaten a pound of grapes, the big ones, and two of those little cups of plain yogurt. That kind of bullshit.

He was real methodical, real specific about everything. We went systematically to the Danubio, to the Crown Plaza Hotel that changed its name, on the corner of Atenas and Reforma, and to La Casa de los Azulejos, to Sanborns. I would get to his place around ten and we would go to Sanborns. He’d eat breakfast there and then we’d go to the office he had on Lopez St. He’d leave the office at two p.m. and we’d go downtown for lunch. He’d go back to the office, and real quick he’d tell his secretary what they were going to do, and then we’d go back to his house around four, five, six, seven; really, there was no set time. I just dropped him off downstairs. He’d go in, and I’d leave. He always paid me a lot more than what you usually get. He paid me three hundred pesos a day, from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon. If I stayed until three, four, five, six, he’d pay me by the hour. It was him, too, who bought and paid for the accesoría and the apartment that I have. He was always giving me money.

He never knew I had children. Because he wouldn’t let you bring a kid around. When I was a kid, he wouldn’t even let me in. My grandma would do his shirts and I would bring them to him. He’d open the door and I’d give him a slip of paper my grandma had given me that said, Three shirts, three briefs. He’d grab the clothes real quick and close the door. And I’d stand there waiting until he opened again to give me the money. It wasn’t really that he didn’t like children, just that he was afraid, because he’d say something could happen to them, something could fall on them or whatever, and he’d get blamed since they were in his house. That’s why I never brought a kid there. Plus, I never got too big. The way I look right now is how I looked when I was pregnant. My kids were born itty-bitty, weighing four pounds, five pounds, but they were all healthy. I delivered them all at nine months exactly. Luz was the biggest one. Now there’s all this medicine they give you when you’re pregnant, but back then there wasn’t any of that. Not even an ultrasound to see if it’s a boy or a girl. Nothing. I got pregnant, and I just went and fixed up my bed and delivered them right there in the house.

Don Juanito didn’t say anything to me, but I know he suspected I had kids after he ran into me and Alfredo downtown at the Independence Day celebrations one September 16th. Back then, Alfredo was still little. He asked me, Whose boy is that? And I said, He’s my brother’s son. Ah. And that was the last of it. But as the years went on, my cousin had to go and act the fool and tell him I had children and grandchildren. He almost died when he heard it. Listen Goya, I want to tell you something, but don’t get mad at your cousin. No, Johan, what is it? He says, Once I ran into you on Independence Day. Oh right, with Alfredo. That was your son, wasn’t it? Yes, Don Johan. And he says, I always wondered, because the boy looked like you. Yes, I have a lot of kids, but since you don’t like children, what did you want me to tell you for? And he never brought it up again.

He didn’t believe in anything, because I never saw even one little saint statue in his house. Truth is, his house was pretty austere. All he had was a little television to watch the Channel 11 news. He had a phone in his office, but he never had a cell phone. He was always there at his desk, writing. He didn’t have any family to bother him, or any girlfriends as far as I know. He never knew what Christmas Eve was like, or a New Year’s like we celebrate them here. I went by Juanito’s place on those days, and we’d go to his office, or if we didn’t, I’d go and order the food he told me to and bring it up to him. He’d come down to let me in, and he’d take his food up and say, I’ll see you tomorrow, Goya. Alright, Juanito, and I’d go back home. But I never wished him a Merry Christmas or anything, because he wasn’t used to those sorts of things. The next day I’d ask him, Juanito, what time did you go to sleep? Around nine, Goya, but there were a lot of fireworks. That’s good, Don Johan. And you? he