Stories are one common highlight across all Latino cultures. We share them repeatedly, and each time they tend to get more and more exciting. But exciting for whom…and at whose expense?
A fallacy about Latino storytelling is that the stories are often thought of as extraordinary and valiant. From the outside looking in, these stories can easily be misconstrued, or outright dismissed as nothing more than facetious. But for those performing in them, it’s an entirely different feature. My family’s story is about assimilation, acculturation, and how life events can develop into mental health issues, including: depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “Common mental health conditions among Latinos are generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, PTSD, and excessive use of alcohol and drugs. Additionally, suicide is of great concern for Latino youth.” Although Latino’s have a similar susceptibility to mental illness as the general population, there is a striking disparity in terms of the quality of the treatment they receive.”
There are a few reasons for this, including lack of information, misunderstandings about mental health, lack of health insurance, immigration status, and language barriers. Still, though, there is one very unique, but astonishing reason, among the Latino community: privacy. Many Latino’s know the old saying: “la ropa sucia se lava en casa ” (which roughly translates to: “don’t air your dirty laundry in public”). We all need privacy at one time or another but privacy concerns can have clamorous consequences, including alcohol and drug dependence, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, street gangs, and many more….
Though I’ve seen many clients, and some of the many forms mental illness can take, I can only attest to the complications of my own family.
Part II
At the tender age of four, my father’s desperation to get back at his wife for divorcing him, and his desire to see his only daughter without the court’s involvement, provoked him to abduct me and take me to Mexico, where he thought she could never find me. My mother was in the U.S illegally, and traveling to Mexico would mean she would lose her ability to return to her American-born infant son. I have zero recollection of my time in Mexico. I can, however, summon up the Greyhound bus ride; I mean, who could forget the image of that skinny dog on the side of the bus? My father, of course, made light of everything and told me a story of his experience with this peculiar breed of dogs on our way to Tijuana.
When my father told his version of this story, and many others, he was usually surrounded by friends and family around BBQ fires, when he was introducing me to people, or drunk at weddings and other family gatherings, they sounded something like this:
“I told her mom I was taking her to the movies, but we hopped on a bus to Tijuana. Next thing I know, the crazy lady shows up with a SWAT team and hauled me off to the can. Little did she know that the chief of police was my godfather? Ha, ha, ha!
She was all smiles outside on her tricycle. We ran inside. We could see immigration everywhere as we peeped through the curtains in fear. We also saw her following them around the complex, saying, “Hi, hi.” She was definitely brave, ha,ha,ha!
He was so drunk they took him to the can. Next thing you know the cops showed up with the kids in their pajamas, that must have happened hundreds of times. But hey, what are uncles for right? Ha, ha, ha!
You should have seen how tiny she looked, she had the whole club cheering her on, and she won that dance off the minute she got on that stage. Ha, ha, ha!”
For some reason, these stories weren’t as funny to me as they were everyone else, in fact they made me feel very uncomfortable. So, while everybody else laughed and mocked my father for his blunders, I just sat there motionless, only smiling when my cues arrived. This would become an all-too-familiar mise en scène.
So familiar, in fact, that I even told the story to my own children, only to later recount my truth with a weighty heart. The idea that my father would even insinuate that me being left outside, alone on my tricycle surrounded by “La Migra,” was a joyful experience, with me saying, “hi, hi,” is preposterous. I do remember riding that tricycle in Isla Vista, and I do remember being left outside. I was desperately looking for my parents, for what seemed to be an eternity, and out of that desperation I approached an immigration official who gave me a quick push toward the apartments we lived in…
Part III
Unlike the stereotypical poor family from Mexico, my father came from an inheritance of wealth, and in Mexico wealth brings power. At the age of 28 he abducted my mother, who had just turned 16, from some village in rural Mexico and brought her to his home; my grandfather paid a dowry to her poor mother. Dowries were a custom drilled into indigenous Mexicans by the Spaniards. Shortly afterward, he would illegally bring us through the border and into the U.S. I was just a few months out of the womb. According to my paternal grandfather, my “abuelito,” the entire family was against my father’s decision.
My father had brought shame to the family by marrying a poor girl and his sisters mistreated her during her short stay in the family villa. My abuelito made traditional “Charro” outfits for Mexican celebrities, which eventually led him into politics… and deeper into alcoholism. My father was one of twelve brothers and sisters and my grandfather’s “consentido.” Whether you’re religious or not, you may be familiar with the term “made in his image?” Or, in other words, “the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” and my father was my abuelito’s favorite for a reason. My father’s mother died when he was only fourteen, and my abuelito married a woman thirty years his junior. Much like my grandfather, my father was a popular man not only within his own family but within the entire municipality; he was also a Don Juan.
For my father, having the first child with light skin, red hair, and the name of his deceased mother was an avenue for admiration within my family. For me, it was a ticket to do as I pleased. So, when my teenage aunts decided they wanted to go clubbing in Mexico and I begged to go, they took me. At the age of 8, I was introduced to my first of many club scenes. I had American Michael Jackson’s moves, so winning dance offs was quite easy. I went to the club countless times until I was 12. It was exciting, but watching bar fights that regularly ended with gunshots was not.
As far back as I can remember, all my family did was attend parties, meet fancy people, and travel. Aside from the occasional trip to the mountains to tend to the families many cows, bulls, horses, and endless rows of crops, they also spent a lot of time telling stories. Stories that I particularly enjoyed but questioned.
This was contrasting to what my maternal family was like. They were poor and many times senseless. They owned pigs, chickens, and lived in homes made of adobe and river rocks. Meals were cooked in a masonry oven, and the bathroom was outside in plain view of the public; the only thing covering you from them was a three-foot wall made of river rocks. I won’t even get into the option for toilet paper. Baths consisted of trips to the river, only fifty yards or so away from the village known as “El Rancho.” This was also where we washed our clothes. It always felt like my grandmother paraded us (my youngest brother and me) around that village; maybe it was because we had shoes and clothes on, something unseen there in the 80s. Clothes in El Rancho were mostly worn by the adults. Shoes were made of rawhide and recycled tires and distended tummies and runny noses were always in abundance. People lived differently than I had ever seen in Santa Barbara. People died every single week, and the bodies, much like our own, were paraded around town and kept in family homes. Endless cries that turned to wailing were heard throughout the night; it was terrifying. With my maternal grandmother, my abuelita, there was never any comfort or reassurance during these times, you had no sense of security— that is unless you believed that people made of wood, resin, or plastic material are going to save you. The rainstorms in El Rancho were just as terrifying, if not more so. The lighting and the thunder were ceaseless, and the lack of electricity made it even more petrifying. My abuelita chanted to an invisible God and lit candles for the fragmented statues of Mary and bloody Jesus on her wall. The experience was straight out of a William Friedkin film. The floods would create chaos. You would see cows, other animals, and even people being washed away in palpable fear.
Despite all of this, my abuelita was a hardworking woman. She had fair skin, a weathered face, and a shawl over her shoulders that also covered her hair, which I only saw at bedtime. She was a single mother who slept with a shotgun next to her bed and hid rifles all over the place. She also had the temper of a raging bull. I think she was only nice to my brother and me. My father took all but one of her children to the U.S., and she hated him for it. She was separated from her husband and I’d never met him. As a matter of fact, I never even knew who he was, and no one talked about him.
My mother, the oldest of seven, never mentioned her father. Her parents never divorced because they were Catholic. Instead, her husband did the next best thing; he married his niece and had eight more children. This was all I knew of him. It was not until my abuelito told me he was a, “good man,” a man full of countless stories of “El Norte,” and that he had gone to the United States to work as a bracero. The Bracero program was a farm labor agreement with Mexico that stemmed from an alleged labor shortage during World War II. While walking in the local market one day, my abuelito stopped us and, with a whisper, leaned over and said, “Look, there he is.” I saw an insanely tall, thin man, bronze skin lit by the morning sun. As we got closer, it was hard not to be mesmerized by his blue eyes. I had never seen a brown man with blue eyes. Faintly, I heard my abuelito say, “These are your daughter’s children, your grandchildren.” My abuelito let go of my hand and scooted me toward the strange man who embraced me as if he had known me my entire life. I did not realize then what a significant moment this was. Sadly, I never saw him again. He became another story, created and told by my abuelito for years. The story came crashing down twenty years later, with a text from my brother who informed me that he was terminally ill and was being taken care of by my abuelita; yes, the same woman he had abandoned many years prior.
Part IV
Though I was not raised in Mexico “all the way,” I was sent there every summer (June to mid-September and then again for 3 weeks in December) from the ages of five to fifteen.
Managing my thoughts and feelings between two countries, and two very different families, while struggling to learn a foreign language and hiding the fact that I was a “bronc” from my friends gradually became unmanageable. It got even harder when I realized my “stable” family (my paternal side) was a fraud…they were masters at putting on a façade for others. They masked their flaws and insecurities through stories. They inculcated a subliminal fear into all of us, an uneasiness instilled by our mothers, aunts and grandmothers that we had to be on guard, constantly, so that we didn’t give people anything to talk about behind our backs; to shame the family was emotional suicide. While my father’s family had a legitimate reputation to maintain, my mother’s didn’t seem to care what others thought about them at all.
My maternal family was, as they say, a bunch of “locos.” As a clinician, it’s not always ethical to diagnose people in your family, but for the sake of understanding, I can say that my mother’s family is occupied by emotionally dysregulated people, which is a nice way of saying they have distinctive borderline traits. The screaming, the yelling, the blame, and self-pity were in abundance, and they ravaged anyone who recognized their issues. I spent the first ten years of my life in their care, with the exception of weekends, which I spent with my father and his family. To this day I can only imagine what their lives must have been like during their formative years, before my father brought my mother to the U.S., before she begged him to bring all six of her siblings out from their impoverished lives. And though my father raised those little children in the U.S., he resented them for their ungratefulness, for their underdeveloped reasoning, and for their defiance when beating up their big sister.
My paternal family, on the other hand, was employed in entertaining people with stories to avoid the underlying pain they experienced as children when they lost their mother, when their widowed father became a drunkard and married a very young woman they resented, when they were left without their mother’s inheritance because her family disowned their father after remarrying. It was children raising children; and while my grandfather splurged amongst the stars partaking in Charriadas and raising his boys to do the same, making his Charro suits and courting politicians who, during an inebriated stupor, employed him as a land commissioner. The countless nights of agony from watching their fathers limp body dragged into their home smelling of brandy, urine, and vomit. No amount of marble floors, housekeepers, or drivers were immune to the stench of the secrets this family held. The affairs, the “other children,” the political bribes, and the kids who grew up telling stories to hide their anguish.
The stories of crossing the border, by any means, included swimming in a “blood-thirsty” river, running in panic from La Migra through an unforgiving desert whose heat could reach up to 120 Fahrenheit, witnessing friends, strangers, and relatives dying off one by one due to heat related illnesses and dehydration. Adding insult to injury, my family experienced all manner of racism while living in the United States. I would give anything to annihilate the memory of the first time I witnessed my father (a decorated charro/cowboy in and out of the U.S.) cower down to another man, a man who my father called his boss, a man who belittled him, taunted, and threatened him with La Migra. A man who he called “El gringo.” This man was neither the first, nor the last, who educated my father about the color of his face, or his place in this country. On a separate occasion, this type of crushing injustice had me crying, trembling, and gasping for air at the frail age of seven during a DUI stop.
My father curled up on the parking lot pavement, sweating blood from his face as he was being flogged by the gringo police officers whose skin color resembled an all too familiar sight. As I sat in his truck, trying to force my little brother to the ground with my foot to shield him from the grim scene, with my tiny hands imprinted on the window, I caught a glance of my father’s distended eye that would later close shut. He looked directly at me and in his fragmented English begged the police to stop, “Please, sir, respect my babies, respect my babies.”
This “story,” and so many more, was never included in any of the stories my family told. That is not entirely true, because if you asked my maternal family about any of the preceding events their porous boundaries would engulf them, they would laugh out loud, blaspheme my father, and the humiliation would crush me in an instant.
Part V
Some would say my life got off to a rough start, though most Latino people would remark that my upbringing was nothing out of the ordinary. That this was “normal.” What was surely atypical, though, was the relationship between my parents. As the only child of divorced Catholic parents in the family, a disgraceful reality already, I was constantly scrutinized and seen as a symptom of their illness. Whether unconventional, or from some perspectives reasonable, to me it felt that my upbringing was inimitable.
It was not until junior high school that I began to ask questions. And as much as I wanted the answers to these questions, they were met with dead air along with my own stories that I tried so desperately to share. These stories are only glimpses to a childhood that would fuel an adolescence full of confusion, indignation, and a disturbing sequence of events…
… events that can only be expressed through stories.
