(Re)constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston: A Memoir on Family and Being Mexican American in Space City USA

By Dr Louis Mendoza PhD

What does it mean to be Mexican American in Houston, TX?

For the Mendoza-Martinez family, the answer to this question is complicated and evolving. In this fascinating memoir, author Dr Louis Mendoza tells his family’s story over three generations, exploring the ongoing efforts to negotiate intense racialization in Texas. Examining questions of community, belonging and home, migrancy, and social strata, the book considers the interconnectedness of ethnic identity and place through the lens of lived experience.

Explicitly addressing the challenges of constructing—or reconstructing—a multi-generational family narrative when the traditional resources of family archives are limited, this memoir will enhance and illuminate courses in Latinx or Latin American studies, migrant studies, American studies, sociology, oral history, and cultural anthropology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lived Places Publishing
• Release date: Jul 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915271556

Book preview

Learning objectives

Introduction learning objectives: on historical perspective, genealogy, and historical methods

In this section of the book, students will learn the guiding principles, purposes, and methods for the exploration of familial and community history they are reading. These objectives will provide a road map for the book but also for any research they may wish to conduct.

Historical perspective: Students will be able to understand how factors in a person’s background, context, or experiences can shape the way they think and feel about a historicalevent.

Genealogy: Students will gain an understanding of how their genealogy can provide them with a deeper understanding of their identity—​where they came from, who they were, what they did, the challenges they overcame, the accomplishments they achieved, and the dreams theyhad.

Historical methods: Students will gain insight into techniques, guidelines, and challenges associated with research and writing about thepast.

Chapter 1 learning objectives: on causes of migration from Mexico in the early twentieth century

Students will be provided with an insight into the push-​pull factors of Mexican migration to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. This period led to a large Mexican diaspora to the north and an expansion of what came to be known as Greater Mexico.

Upon completion of this chapter, students will have an insight into the complex array of causes of migration, exile, and displacement of Mexicans from Mexico to the United States in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 2 learning objectives: on challenges faced by first-​generation immigrants

This chapter will provide students with context for understanding a variety of social and cultural challenges faced by first-​generation immigrants in school and in the workplace.

Upon completion of this chapter, students will have a stronger understanding of Americanization programs and processes, personal and communal resilience, and the impact of microaggressions in the workplace.

Chapter 3 learning objectives: the situated memoir as a form of bottom-​up history

This learning objective asks the reader to consider how their own lives are part of a larger narrative, be it in the context of their familial, communal, regional, or national history. The questions below are intended to facilitate an exploration of your story. They are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather ask that you place your life story in relation to the world in which youlive.

• How has your relationship to various social institutions shaped or contributed to your worldview?

• How have particular places impacted informed your identity?

• In what ways do neighborhoods either insulate or isolate its residents?

• Do you believe that personal memory is a reliable resource for constructing astory?

• Thinking though your life experience or that of a family member, identify epiphanic moments where one’s place in society becomes clear and has led to social or political resistance or conformity. An epiphany is a visionary moment when someone has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of theworld.

Conclusion learning objectives: on applying learned knowledge about constructing family histories

Through activities and reflection, students will learn to identify the strengths and limitations of various methods for recuperating family history and how they might proceed to use this model to recreate their own family’sstory.

Prologue

Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.

I was born in 1960 and raised in Houston, Texas. I thought of myself as Mexican American when growing up; only later did I realize that I was also a second-​generation Mexican immigrant and that ethnic identifiers, what people call themselves, routinely change over time to reflect people’s identity, politics, and their social and economic circumstances.i It was later when I came to understand that as a twentieth-​century industrial city, the history of people of Mexican descent in Houston is uniquely modern when compared to other large cities of the southwest, especially those with a colonialpast.

Like most people, my earliest childhood memories are kaleidoscopic in nature—​fragmented and jumbled. Can they be made whole? To what end? To what extent does my perspective on my family’s history resonate with others?

This project is motivated by my interest in recovering my familial history, which was rarely communicated in any coherent manner to my generation of siblings. While I knew that my paternal and maternal grandparents were immigrants from northern Mexico who came to the USA in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their progeny, little was ever conveyed to me about their pre-​immigrant past or our familial ties in Mexico. According to a 2013 report from the Pew Foundation, my experience is not unusual for many second-​generation immigrants.ii While many immigrants relocate to seek refuge from a difficult situation in their homeland, many do so with the idea that they will return home when the conditions that spurred their departure improve. This is especially true when their new destination is a neighboring country, and their country of origin is undergoing a difficult period that is expected to eventually pass. That expectation nurtures a hope that returning home is not only possible, but likely. México de afuera as an expatriate ideology emerged with particular force in the first quarter of the twentieth century, an intense era of displacement, exile, and migration from Mexico during which many migrants anticipated an imminent return home and strove to nurture their patriotism for the homeland. In this context, new immigrants often viewed their goal as recreating Mexican life in the United States. In this respect, according to Daniel Morales, a community of Mexican-​descent people was but an extension of Mexico.iii But once an immigrant realizes that there will be no return home, either because of prolonged difficulties in the homeland or an unexpected acclimation to their new environment, their orientation becomes forward-​looking and grounded in their current geo-​location. They settle into jobs, begin raising a family, and develop familial and communal ties in the host country. In pre-​high-​tech eras without internet and international phone plans, when one lived a modest, working-​class life, a return to one’s nation of origin for a vacation or to maintain familial ties was rare and costly so maintaining a connection between family in the ancestral homeland and the new homeland was difficult. Thus, while certainly not literally, or even practically true, it often seemed to me that our history began and ended with the border. As a child, our extended family consisted of my grandparents, my parents, my seven siblings and myself, plus our huge extended family of 12 aunts and uncles and more than 70 first cousins. In the Prologue to Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History, a book on the relationship between literary and historical writing, I wrote the following paragraphs in memory of my grandparents and to acknowledge the limits of our relationship to them and their Mexican past. Additionally, I share other excerpts of life-​writing, or creative non-​fiction, that have informed my scholarship for more than three decades. Creative non-​fiction imagines what life may have looked like for people in the context of their place and time. Historical fiction imagines what likely happened to real people without supporting documentation but accounting for the confirmed arc of historical events. The details and the events in the vignettes of creative non-​fiction that follow directly below and in later chapters are a mix of actual events and imagined conversations designed to fill in gaps and provide emotional depth to our family’sstory.

***

When I was a child our large family’s Sunday visits to our maternal and paternal grandparents were as regular as church. We tumbled out of the station wagon and paid homage to our grandparents, whose small houses smelled like the inside of a cedar chest and were as neat and clean as they were dark and cool. The visits always started off formally with a ritual hug, kiss, and pinch of the cheek followed by a survey of our appearance. Were we clean? Groomed? Eating well? Well-​behaved?

We kids marveled at how these small two-​bedroom wood-​frame houses had managed to hold our parents’ larger families of six and nine children respectively. Invariably, after our grandparents asked us how school was going in their halting English, the conversation between grandma and grandpa and mom and dad would take place almost exclusively in Spanish. Sometimes we stayed listening in amazement at how they could understand each other when it seemed everyone was talking as fast as they could all at the sametime.

Grandma and grandpa on both sides of the family spoke little English despite having lived in Texas the vast majority of their lives. Driven from their home country of Mexico by the quest for a better life and a civil war that lasted much of the first three decades of the twentieth century, the USA seemed to promise economic opportunity and safety. My grandparents arrived in Texas sometime between 1903 and 1924. Fifty and sixty years later they could look back without regret upon their lives of work, of survival, of hardship, of tenacity, and, yes, of dignity and progress despite an often unwelcome social and political climate. Though I know they loved us, their children’s children, dearly, our relationship was mitigated by our mutual language limits. Separated from them by only a generation, our first language was English. So, it was that we moved among them with respect, a respect not unlike our Catholicism, borne of fear and love—​undergirded by these qualities, our relationship was also limited by our ignorance of the particulars of theirlives.

Years later I would wonder how they felt about this generational shift, this language gap that existed between us. Did they think us sell-​outs, cultural misfits, as a tragic consequence of assimilation, or did they foresee that cultural characteristics like language would be the price we paid for Americanization, for progress? From my perspective as a child, I saw them as a link to an archaic past, one that I did not fully understand yet nevertheless knew I should revere. And despite not being able to share the details of our lives with them, I sensed that we pleased them, and that they loved us unconditionally despite our language differences. (Mendoza,2003).

***

My parents, Mary Martinez (1927) and Joe Mendoza (1928), experienced not only the economic hardship of the Depression, but the 1930s era of Mexican deportation and the suspicion of being un-​American that everyone, but especially those who were foreign-​looking, faced when they participated in labor strikes or stood in line for government assistance. The Catholic schools my parents attended in East Houston forbade them to speak Spanish under the threat of corporal punishment or some other form of humiliation. Intimidated, they often suffered in silence. My mom tells the story of how even in high school, despite the fact that she was one of the few graduates in her family, she was so shy about speaking in public that she would ask the teacher if her friend, Mary Escalante, could read her work for her rather than suffer the embarrassment of having her accent corrected in front of theclass.

Even now I cringe when I think of how 25 years later the nuns at Resurrection Elementary where Mary and Joe (the Spanish language versions of their names had long ago been anglicized) sent their children, practiced the same pedagogy. I recall classmates being forced to stand in front of class every afternoon and practice saying chair, church, chicken,‘ children,‘ shutters,‘ shine your shoes,’ and so on, so they could improve their enunciation of English and eradicate their Spanish accent. (Mendoza,2005)

***

Interstate 10 slices through Denver Harbor like a swollen scar of an improperly cared for wound. Railroad tracks surround it-​—​they are the sutures holding our wounds together. The healing process is never-​ending. People are contained within by the less visible barriers of poverty and comunidad. In our house on Zoe Street, I used to lie awake at night in one of the upstairs bedrooms my father and his compadres had added on to better house our large family. There, the painful squeaks and moans of rusty freight cars passing in the night would sing me to sleep. Those eerie sounds both haunted and tempted me. They seemed to call, to dare me to hop on and take off to new, unknown places. Their motion was persistent—​-​shhh, shhh, shhh, all roads lead out shh, shh, shh, they whispered. In the dark, in my bed, I let them take me away to happier, unreal places. During the day these cumbersome caterpillars crawled rudely through our world. Doug, Larry, and I used to wait for them on Wallisville or Old Clinton Road—​out of defiance we jumped on them, only to hop off after a few blocks. The ride was always disappointing, falling far short of our expectations. (Mendoza,2003

Knowledge of my family’s history was also kaleidoscopic in nature—​not known with any certainty beyond that facts that both sets of grandparents had come in the first quarter of the twentieth century from northern Mexico. (Re)Constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston is premised on the idea that neither my experiences nor my limited knowledge about my past is unique, that this dissonance with my past is a result of twin pressures: my family’s need to look forward and educational policies that sought to provide a master narrative of the state and nation that homogenized our experiences, flattened, or eradicated our differences, and built a consensus narrative that elided conflict or injustice, rather than reflect a past that was, in reality, complex, and often conflicted.

This book seeks to explore the interconnectedness of place and ethnic identity in the emergence of Houston’s Mexican American community through the lens of one family’s experience. Thus, it is at once communal, familial, and personal. The book also addresses the challenges associated with piecing together one family’s narrative over three generations as a representative framework for understanding change, social transformation over time, and the role of memory, as well as its limitations, in crafting one’s story. Using a combination of archival resources, oral histories, and secondary sources, I intend to convey the story of the Mendoza and Martinez families over three generations as they navigated migration from northern Mexico, social and economic challenges, and searched for and built a new home and a sense of belonging in eastTexas.

Every time one writes (his)stories based on truth, one (re)creates a representation of a memory, dream, wish, or desire of an actual event as one remembers or interprets it. I don’t believe there is a singular absolute truth that suits everyone’s reality or experience. Nor do I believe that what we call history is necessarily truer than what we call fiction even if the former proposes to be grounded in truth, reality, or facts. The perspective of the writer matters. Memory is never pure, unbiased, or even neutral.

This is one family’s story over time. Mine. That does not mean that all of my family members would claim this to be their story in the same way I do. I respect that. Even though my siblings’ memories inform this story, ultimately the book is the perspective of one family member who seeks to create a concise and coherent narrative to represent three generations of his family’s experiences. I am not a historian, a sociologist, or an anthropologist. As a literary and cultural critic, I am an analyzer and crafter of words. I admire the power of language, the skill it takes to tell a good story, the power of story to inform, motivate, and inspire us, to soothe and arouse us, to give us cause to reflect, dream, or rouse us to action. Each of the above academic disciplinary practitioners also believe in and practice storytelling using methodologies that gather data to tell a story. Each in their own way has a different relationship to facts, data, memory, and truth. In many respects, (Re)Constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston borrows, utilizes, and blends those methods while also adding an element of creative non-​fiction to fill in gaps and convey a slightly more comprehensive picture as possible of what my family’s life, past and present, may have looked and felt like. And yet, even as I acknowledge the limited perspective I offer, I hope that this story resonates with others.

A transborder backstory

In this section, I explore my family history in Mexico and seek to establish a context for their migration al norte. The Mendoza and Martinez family stories that precede our immediate grandparents are ones that I have recovered only while working on this book. I have often wondered about these unknown ancestors, where they lived, what their lives were like, and what motivated them to leave their ancestral homes. I have often felt that one’s sense of self is deeply