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BUTTERFLIERS
Butterflier: Guadalupe Salazar Díaz
By Carolyn Diaz Muñoz
I occupy a space here in the present, in the past and in the future. I am every woman that my family ever bore and all the ones that will come after me. I embody the women whose story is the story of many women whose ancestors were immigrants.
I am mi madre, mis hermanas, mi hija, mis nietas, mis tias, mis primas, y mis abuelas.
But the one woman who is the most visible to my eyes, my heart, and my mind, who occupies a special space in my memory -- was my grandmother, Guadalupe. She taught me to fill my soul with music, use my hands for creativity and share my time with empathy.
Lupe was born somewhere in the state of Durango , Mexico in 1900. When she was 3-years-old and was happily playing in her front yard, she was kidnapped by strangers, left to die in an irrigation ditch, and was saved just before they opened the floodgates because workers heard her singing.
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Lupe was only nine when she held her dying four-year-old brother in her arms after he fell from a wagon and was crushed by its wheels. And many years afterward she would weep as she held the photo of Gonzalo when she told the story.
Ten-year-old Lupe saw the dead people hanging from the trees in Mexico during the revolution and hid in the hacienda of a neighbor until the soldiers passed by. And sang to herself to keep from being afraid in the dark on the long walk home all alone.
Known in her town for her beautiful singing voice, Lupe lost her father when she was 16 and immediately went to work to help support her mother and her 8 brothers and sisters, giving up music and school in Monterrey .
Lupe was also the young girl who refused to marry after her father's death because the young man who paid for a big wedding would not agree to let her mother move into their home. She said it was because she could never abandon her mother, brothers and sisters, and didn't care if the neighbors thought she jilted him and would die an old maid.
So, mi abuela, came to America in 1917 with her widowed mother to earn a living in dressmaking and embroidery. Guadalupe Salazar, who was a talented singer, also had a talent for sewing to match her determination. Both she and her mother became so homesick for Mexico , they returned to their hometown for a time, and later returned to the US because there was no work for two women with so many children to care for.
Without knowing the language of her newly adopted country, America , and with only a tenth grade education, Lupe learned what was required to become an American citizen and spoke the pledge of allegiance in English proudly in 1938. She would sing the national anthem louder and more sweetly than everyone else in the room.
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