Women So Divine

By Alicia Garza-Martinez

Women So Divine is a novel based on family memories. The first chapter, "La Nina," won first place in a contest organized by the newspaper El Norte in Monterrey, Mexico, which published it as a public interest story. In that initial episode, there is a meeting of seven women from two generations of the family. In that meeting, several family secrets are uncovered during a consultation session with a Ouija board. The curiosity to unravel these mysteries will be the common thread that leads the author to inquire into the past. To follow that thread, she delves into the lives of each of these women starting from episodes in their childhood all the way up to their maturity or death: her mother, her aunts, her cousins, and not least of all, herself. This book is the story of how the women of a Nuevo Leon family are united by loss and longing for restitution and how they use magic, superstition, and religion in unusual ways to somehow triumph and to adapt to a turbulent and sometimes dangerous world. Far from completely solving the unknowns, the biographical sketches and the stories of each subsequent chapter reveal the way in which certain events marked the character and destiny of each protagonist in unusual ways and how the lives and destinies of the seven women were intertwined. The novel has as a backdrop some episodes of the political history of Nuevo Leon and Mexico in the late 1930s, and it recreates the joys and miseries of the daily lives of these seven women of the Mexican middle class.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891574045

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Women So Divine

Alicia Garza-Martinez

Copyright © 2024 Alicia Garza-Martinez

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89157-411-3 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-404-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Epilogue

Pictures of the Martinez women

Family tree of the Martinez women

About the Author

To the members of the Martínez family for their love

and examples, even if they were sometimes difficult

to accept, and for their lives, which have shaped my

life story and this novel

Acknowledgments

Iwant to express my enormous gratitude to the people who contributed the most, with their various knowledge, readings, and suggestions, or with their affection and their testimonies about some of the events narrated here, and to the writing of this novel. I hope I don't forget anyone. I name them in first-name alphabetical order but not in order of importance: Alma Elisa Reyes, Catalina Rubio, Cristina María González, Cristina Villarreal Navarro, David Adrián García Garza, Fernando Garza Martínez, Ivonne Romero, Martha Belmonte, Mary Lou Cortes, and Rosalinda Quintanar.

Even though she has already passed to another life, I want to thank in a special way my dear teacher Rosaura Barahona, who in 2014 encouraged me to send the first chapter of this novel to a contest organized by the newspaper El Norte for the section Profiles and Histories. I did not let her down because I won first place. Wherever you are, Teacher, forever thank you.

I also want to give special thanks to Dr. Thomas Dydek for his excellent editorial and writing help in the English version and for writing the prologue to this novel but most of all for his support and encouragement from the beginning and all along to the end of this process.

Alicia Garza-Martínez

Disclaimer

Women So Divine is a novel. It is inspired by the characters and the personal, social, and political ties between different people in my family, but many events and situations, and even some of the characters, are entirely the product of my imagination. I have combined some of the anecdotes, attitudes, and ways of speaking of a social group, and I have exaggerated some aspects of the protagonists to better recreate their worlds. In almost all cases, I have changed the names of the protagonists to provide a measure of privacy and as befits their sometimes-fictitious characteristics. I have used my real name and those of a few historical figures in this book to provide points of reference and to give truth to the story. Errors in relation to historical places and events are unintentional and are my sole responsibility.

Prologue

This book tells the story of the women of one Mexican family. It outlines their lives, their loves, their feuds, their beliefs, their missteps, and their triumphs. Part of this recounting is a chronicling of places and events, but Ms. Garza has also mixed in her impressions of her mother's family members' feelings and motivations as they occurred down through the generations.

The story is based on and inspired by actual people and historical events and on known facts about the women Ms. Garza knew well and with whom she has talked extensively. She freely admits she has used some artistic license; she has enhanced personal anecdotes and has solved some continuity problems and voids in the narrative with fiction. In this way, this writing turned from a chronicle to a novel. Without a doubt, it will prove entertaining and resonate for anyone who has had a strong feminine influence in their upbringing and character building. This is especially true for anyone raised in Mexico in the Catholic tradition with a little bit of black magic and necromancy thrown in.

The surnames Garza and Martínez are strongly rooted in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. The Garzas arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth century and settled around what was to become the city of Monterrey. Blas de la Garza, one of the author's early ancestors, was the owner of the Hacienda de San Francisco, which today is the municipality of Apodaca, in the metropolitan area of Monterrey. In his time, he was one of the most prosperous men in that region. The Martínez family lived a little farther north beginning in 1684, when José Martínez Flores founded the Hacienda de San Antonio on part of the large land grants he received. Today, that land is in the area surrounding Marín in Nuevo León.

Ms. Garza's family has Jewish ancestry on the Garza side of her family and perhaps on the Martínez side as well. There is evidence both families at one time lived in the border region between Portugal and Spain. Following their expulsion from those countries after the Inquisition, they traveled to the northern part of New Spain, where they began their lives anew in this rugged region of what is now Mexico.

The offspring of these first landowners mixed with one another and the native peoples living there. After several generations, they formed a family group which, although mestizo, was proud to be fair-skinned and to own land. Property inheritance and consanguinity ties have always been the cause of tensions, alliances, betrayals, and a deep sense of identity for them. In some ways, this legacy of values and its dramas and intrigues have survived until today in the privacy of families.

With that heritage as a backdrop, this novel begins with a meeting in which four Martínez women, guardians of family unity and continuity, consult the spirits of their ancestors. Their dead seem to be present to open the door to various mysteries, which the author has tried to solve throughout her life. The information she collects begins with what happened in her maternal family, the branch of Don Andrés Martínez Caballero, from the time of the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. The narrative details the political aspirations of Andrés, the author's grandfather, and the journeys and accidents of him, his wife, and their children, some of whom did not reach maturity. The story is full of political intrigues and life or death events and how these occurrences had repercussions on the Martínez family.

This book describes the lives and times of seven women: four from the generation before that of Ms. Garza's, her mother and her mother's three sisters, and the three daughters of those women, first cousins of very different ages. Ms. Garza has dedicated separate chapters to each of these seven women, with vivid descriptions and anecdotes showing their temperaments and their destinies, throughout their lives.

What is remarkable about this family history is the recurrence of unusual events, mysterious deaths, the gain and loss of power and wealth, as well as loving benevolence or abject cruelty. All this takes place against a backdrop of spirituality and superstition. As you can imagine, there is quite a bit of turbulence and drama in their lives and in those of their ancestors. Some of what happened in this family can be explained by religious teachings and beliefs. Other experiences are clearly outside good Christian customs; they are mysteries founded on superstitions, psychological conflicts, people's ambitions, and individual desires.

This is Ms. Garza's first novel. She wrote it in part to understand how the women in her family shaped and modeled her own personality. She has also written it as a form of therapy, especially the chapters that describe her relationship with her mother. It is to be hoped that the cathartic experience writing it represented for her is at least in part something readers will also experience. It is very easy to recognize yourself in the lives of the characters in this book. Whoever reads it may feel the uneasiness of searching within the ways in which their own nature and temperament have developed from what they know or what they have chosen to ignore about their parents and grandparents, on what those people believed, and on what happened to them along the way.

As Shakespeare wrote in the play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Surely some of the women in the author's family achieved much and can be considered to have been great individuals. It is worthy of note that the words from that play were also meant as a pun. In Shakespeare's time, becoming great was slang for getting pregnant, as in being great with child. The Bard's words were either literally or figuratively true for the women in this family, as you will see when you read their stories in this book.

—Thomas Dydek

Chapter 1

La Niña

We went to the city of Puebla, in the Mexican state of Puebla, to visit Tía (Aunt) Leticia, the youngest of the four Martínez sisters to celebrate her beautiful daughter Sofía's quinceañera (a Mexican girl's fifteenth birthday party, something like a debutante's coming out). The encounters of the four sisters were always quite an event because of the uneven temperaments of three of them and the disruption and rumpus they always managed to cause in the hours prior to any celebration. This was true for Christmas, Mother's Day, birthdays, or any other family festivities. They always found a way and took pains to spoil the party for anyone else who was around during those events.

The four Martínez sisters were all born and raised in Monterrey, but only one of them, my mother, continued to live there when they grew up. For that meeting in Puebla, all the sisters and their three daughters traveled great distances from different parts of Mexico and the United States.

The quietest of the Martínez women was Tía Hortensia, who was the eldest. We called her Tía Tenchis. I continually noticed that my other aunts always discriminated against her, and I often wondered why. For many years, I thought it was because she had had a difficult life, and she was poor. She became a widow at a fairly young age when her daughter Angélica, who was twenty years older than me, was about eleven years old. In an attempt to make some money to stay alive and provide for her daughter, Tía Tenchis left her hometown of Monterrey and went to Houston. After working there for a few years, she returned to Monterrey and set up a Mexican souvenir shop in what was called a passageway in the downtown area of the city. Today, that area would be referred to as a small shopping center.

Before too long, she found the little money she made at the shop was insufficient, especially when Angélica married a man named Jesús, or the Loafer, as the Martínez women called him. This man never worked or brought in any money for the family. Hortensia was forced to give them money so they could survive. The only thing Jesús was good for was making babies and spending what little money they had on himself and on alcohol. Soon the family was replete with children who were going hungry. My aunt decided to leave her home and go back again across the Rio Grande to Houston to get a job there. Her plan was to work and then send Angélica's family some money so they could eat. As she had done the previous time she left Mexico, before crossing the river, she looked at image of Saint Christopher on a prayer card she carried with her and entrusted herself and her future to him. She arrived in Houston without the proper papers, but luckily, she arrived there without suffering the slightest mishap and without any problems with the Border Patrol. Ever since she went to live in Houston, she became known privately in the family as Tía Pochona. We never called her that to her face because it's considered an insult, referring to a Mexican living in the States who gets her languages mixed up. When she was with us in person, we always called her Tía Tenchis.

We called Tía Leticia Lety. She and her family were prosperous and lived in a beautiful modern house in Puebla's aristocratic country club area. Unlike that upscale domicile of hers, the house in which I grew up was modest, not very large, and in a middle-class neighborhood. Despite these obvious differences, there were some similarities. In both our houses, the image of Saint Martin was never to be missed in its prominent place right above the main entrance door of the house. The legend is that Saint Martin was a knight on horseback who cut his cape in two to give part of it to a half-naked beggar. For this and other charities, he was canonized as a saint. For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask what miracles this saint could do for us. I don't know if it was because I thought it was shameful and embarrassing that my family was so superstitious, that perhaps it was via some mechanism of denial of those superstitions on my part, or simply because it had always been part of the decor. In any case, I became used to it and usually did not give it the slightest thought. Another similarity between our two houses was we both also had a long string of garlic bulbs bound with a red ribbon beneath the image of Saint Martin above our doors. This was another bit of decoration I never truly understood. I think it had something to do with the superstition that it could ward off evil spirits, but I never asked about it.

As usual, the main topic of discussion in the first gathering for the quinceañera was the beauty of my cousin Sofía, Tía Lety's daughter. She was nine years younger than I. She definitely was extraordinarily beautiful. There was no doubt about that. I agreed when people said she was as beautiful as Vivien Leigh, the actress who starred in the movie Gone with the Wind, but no, Sofía was even prettier. Her hair was straight, black, and shiny. Her skin was nearly flawless and had a pinkish-white hue. Even when she was a middle-aged woman, she was still quite attractive, although she lost many of the youthful features and charms that made her the object of much attention and affection in her younger days. Perhaps the only thing she then retained of that youthful beauty were her honey-colored eyes, which continued to shine like stars, and her fleshy red lips.

The four sisters insisted on calling Sofía La Niña (which literally means the little girl). There was always some religious connotation to that name as well since the correlate, El Niño, refers to the Christ Child. The sisters did almost seem to worship Sofía. When we were all together at Tía Lety's house, most of the conversation centered on the myriad of the family's superstitious recipes on how to maintain Sofía's beauty, attract good luck and love, and protect her from evil. My mother's name was Alicia, just like me, and she was entrusted to give the beauty recipes. Here is some of the guidance she offered:

Make sure she doesn't go out in the sun because she will get dark, and no one will want a dark-skinned girl.

Don't let her play tennis because she has asthma, and she could have an attack if she exerts herself physically.

Don't let her be seen by other people too much, especially potential suitors. If you let her go out too many times, the same thing will happen to her as happens with tortillas: nobody wants the one on top of a stack. (By this, Mother meant that the top tortilla on the stack might be spoiled by too much exposure.)

Don't forget to put the alum stone in her underwear drawer so you can see the figure of whoever casts a job [a spell] on her.

Most importantly, you have to always place a glass of water on the nightstand next to her bed so all the envy she stirs up will gather in the water. That keeps any ill effects of the envy from reaching her.

Tía Tenchis, who was usually intimidated by her sisters and never said much, managed to interject, Yes, but look at what happened to my daughter, Angélica. She is very pretty, too, even if she didn't have all those protections. As usual, her sisters contradicted her and tried to put her down.

Oh, come on. Angélica is not even half as beautiful as Sofía, said Tía María Elisa, the old maid and black sheep of the family.

But people have often said Angélica strongly resembles Jackie Kennedy, and my Angélica is nearly six feet tall, Tía Tenchis answered back, but no one would