A Mexican Dream: and Other Compositions

By Barbara Gonzalez Cigarroa

A Mexican Dream and Other Compositions presents a rare collection of interwoven essays chronicling the fascinating history of the Cigarroa family and their influence on the Texas-Mexico border landscape. 

Barbara González Cigarroa brings to life stories of her ancestors and other family members, including: Rebecca Iriarte, who raised her five children during the Mexican Revolution of 1910; Judge Manuel J. Raymond, one of the last of the border patrones who expertly navigated contrasting cultures across border lines; Henry B. González, US Congressman and the first Mexican American elected to the Texas Senate during a time of blatant racial discrimination; Dr. Joaquin González Cigarroa Jr., a revered physician and education activist; Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, pediatric transplant surgeon and former chancellor of the University of Texas system; Barbara Flores Cigarroa, a mother of ten whose values and resolve inspired her children and many grandchildren to excel in the finest universities and beyond.

In presenting richly detailed vignettes with keen observation and grace, Cigarroa offers captivating and original insights not only into her family’s remarkable story, but also into the beauty of the extraordinary traits and enduring spirit of the people of our Texas borderlands.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: TCU Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780875656427

Book preview

A MEXICAN DREAM

A MEXICAN DREAM

and Other Compositions

Barbara Gonzalez Cigarroa

Fort Worth, Texas

Copyright © 2016 by Barbara Gonzalez Cigarroa

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cigarroa, Barbara Gonzalez, author. | Cigarroa (Family : 1931– Cigarroa, Joaquin González, 1895-1964)

Title: A Mexican dream and other compositions / Barbara Gonzalez Cigarroa.

Description: Fort Worth, Texas : TCU Press, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012855 | ISBN 9780875656335 | ISBN 9780875656427 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—Texas—Laredo—Biography. | Mexican Americans—Texas—Laredo—Genealogy. | Cigarroa, Barbara Gonzalez—Family. | Cigarroa, Joaquin González, 1895-1964—Family. | Physicians—Texas—Laredo—Genealogy. | Cigarroa family. | Laredo (Tex.)—Genealogy. | Laredo (Tex.)—Biography.

Classification: LCC E184.M5 C54 2016 | DDC 929.20973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012855

TCU Press

TCU Box 298300

Fort Worth, Texas 76129

817.257.7822

www.prs.tcu.edu

To order books: 1.800.826.8911

Designed by Barbara Mathews Whitehead

Dedicated to my family

and to all the families of the world

who dream of a better future for their children

through the grace of vision.

DISCLAIMER

The views expressed in this book are my own,

and do not reflect the position of the

Department of Homeland Security,

the Department of Justice,

or the US government in any manner.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prelude

Partita

A Mexican Dream

On the Importance of Good Manners

Trackings

Sunday’s Comida

Rondo

Border Lines

Crossing Over

Études

Jewels

Life Lessons

A Prescription

Bridges

Coda

New Year’s Eve

Postlude

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the invaluable assistance of others. I am deeply indebted to my sister, Marisa Heymach, who had the perspicacity to record interviews of our family elders for future generations. I am equally grateful for the exquisite photographs that my mother, Mrs. Joaquin Cigarroa Jr., archived over her lifetime along with letters, videos, and newspaper articles related to family gatherings and achievements. Whenever I asked her for a specific photo or article, she did not rest until she located it, whether upstairs in a long-forgotten chest, or in one of her many albums. My father provided me with rich details of his parents’ lives in Mexico City, Mapimí, and in South Texas; he shared his memories with such joy, and I shall always be thankful for the happy experience of being transported back in time with him.

My children, Dŏgan, Noelle, and Francisco, inspired me not only through their collective confidence that one day I would realize my calling in completing this work, but also with their appreciation for what they learned from family elders, which they have demonstrated through the principled and noble manner in which they live their lives. I thank the readers and staff at TCU Press for working with me to develop this collection of compositions, especially Rebecca Allen and Kathy Walton. They are so gifted! Much gratitude to my beloved lifelong friend Amy Paris, who alongside my son Dŏgan, applied fine-tuned skills to their reading, lending their elegance to each piece. A dear cousin, Annie Turner, also carefully edited the manuscript in its early stages, as did my daughter Noelle, who encouraged me to continue regardless of the challenges I was facing at work. I am especially blessed with my daughter-in-law Laura Noble Perese’s creative and graceful interpretations of the compositions against the backdrop of current affairs. Finally, I feel privileged to have received Sara Carlin’s intercessory prayers on behalf of the manuscript from inception to completion.

PRELUDE

If you will allow me, I will show you my earliest memories. It is possible for you to actually see them if your vision is clear. You can even hear distinct voices if you listen intently past the stillness of this page.

See how my grandmother holds me comfortably, as she gently sings ¿Por qué lloras, Bayita? Bayita, why are you crying? The rocking chair cradling us is in my parents’ light blue bedroom. Mane rocks me back and forth, back and forth, as if she has all the time in the world to console me.

Now look at my father in this black-and-white photo. The snapshot powerfully comes into view as a moving image just as I lived it, as vivid now as it was so many years ago when it was taken. When he greets me after a long day of seeing patients at his clinic, watch how Papi lights up. Mijita! he calls. My little daughter! My heart flutters like a butterfly’s wings before I glide toward his embrace.

One of my favorite memories is captured in this next Polaroid from the sixties. My five brothers, three sisters, and I are surrounding my mother, who has just come home from the hospital after giving birth to her tenth and last child. We each want to get a good first view of our newest sister. Mami is wearing a navy-colored dress with a white daisy pattern. She looks like a model in a magazine, don’t you agree? Watch how she is gracefully giving me a chance to touch a tiny star of a hand as she leans down close to me. Isn’t Marisa exquisite? Mami asks. Her familiar perfume lingers and blends with the scent of honeysuckle outside our kitchen door.

I have a treasure trove of images I can resurrect not only from photographs and recordings, but also from a place out of ordinary time deep within me. It constitutes a rare collection gathered in this place along the Rio Grande we call the border, during an extraordinary period when the values instilled by families on both sides of the river were strong and deep like a rich sediment layered over time. The priceless lessons that the images continue to reveal provide the Cigarroa family with our greatest wealth as we dedicate our lives to serve our families, our communities, and our country, ever respectful of our legacy.

Generations of physicians, attorneys, businessmen and women, education activists, nurses, and nationally recognized politicians number in our ranks. Armed with academic degrees from the most rigorous universities in our nation, many in our family have healed the sick, established gateways to higher education in underserved areas, sought justice in courts of law, and ministered to those in need. These are tangible results of using border lessons from South Texas as our family’s lodestar through generations of achievement.

What cannot be measured by diploma, deed, or accomplishment is abstract and more difficult to grasp. How has our family’s and community’s ethos of striving for excellence lasted, while the culture along the US-Mexico border that once sustained us has been decimated? Will its extraordinary blueprint, binding love of family with love of an education, endure now that not only our border culture but also the very fabric of traditional family life is radically changing the world over? Such questions are what motivated me to search for answers with the same zeal I imagine a treasure hunter possesses, knowing the worth of what is sought.

I look for images and anecdotes attesting to resilience in vignettes from the past—resilience being the key to both any border’s and any family’s ability to withstand the assault of rapid global transformation no boundary can contain. They appear to me one by one in the early morning, shimmering in their elegant simplicity, before the sun overtakes the Chihuahuan Desert with its relentless rays: listening to Abuelita’s dulcet voice as she shared her memories of Mexico with me; crossing over to the other side of the Rio Grande to spend nights at my grandmother Mane’s house in Nuevo Laredo; climbing trees with my favorite cousins on sun-drenched afternoons when we gathered for a Sunday meal at my grandparents’ home not far from the Rio Grande.

Photographic images carefully chosen inspired the following compositions that developed as if of their own accord, revealing the extraordinary traits and enduring spirit of the people of our Texas borderlands.

PARTITA

Josefina González de la Vega standing before La Iglesia del Santo Niño de la Enseñanza, The Holy Infant of Education Church, Mexico City, circa 1920. Family collection.

Josefina González de la Vega was born in Durango, Mexico, in 1903. When she was a young girl, her family moved from Durango to Mexico City and remained there during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Unlike her siblings, who never left their birthplace, Josefina eventually emigrated from Mexico to the United States, where her husband’s family lived in political exile. She established their home first in San Antonio and then in Laredo, Texas, where she lived until her death in 1996.

This first composition illuminates how difficult it must have been for Josefina to live in an alien land separated from her beloved culture. Like so many mothers along the US-Mexico border, she endured her displacement by cultivating her dreams, inspiring her children and grandchildren, especially her daughter and sixteen granddaughters, to apply ourselves to our studies regardless of place, regardless of circumstance, regardless of gender discrimination, day after day after day. Abuelita did this all the while praying that her native country of Mexico would one day be a place where women might freely live out their greatest aspirations without having to leave their homeland.

A MEXICAN DREAM

While in our hemisphere a skein of golden Sunlight shines again, and with its fair judicious light distributes equally and shares with all things visible their hues, and with this restoration makes the exterior senses operate more certainly, as daylight breaks in the illumined World and I–awake.

—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Primero sueño

How can I best describe you that others might see you as I do, Abuelita? To do so requires cultured words akin to the pearls our ancestors brought from Spain to Mexico in the sixteenth century or the jade our Aztec forefathers gave them in exchange.

I shall start with your eyes, more valuable than the most precious of stones.

Tranquil. Bright. Steadfast. Resurrecting hope even in longing, the expression in your gaze is of one who has many aspirations. And the light in your eyes is fluid and can change from disquietude to creative rootedness in a flash. With perfect clarity, I recall when I first glimpsed this expression in you when I was a young girl.

You were seated in your elegant living room one afternoon in your home in downtown Laredo, Texas, where you always received me for my Saturday visits.