| |
|
Guadalupe Salazar Diaz married at 25 to a man she later discovered was 17 years older. I Lupe spoke with a song in her heart when she would say, “If I had known he was so old, I would not have married him, pero…ay guapo !” I was always curious about why she never bothered to ask him his age, but she told me it never occurred to her to ask. It was no secret that her Spaniard husband, Manuel Prejano Diaz, loved her as much as she loved him.
Lupe was the mother of nine children. Four of her children, including my mother, were born in a bed at home. But when the fourth child, a little girl, died just hours after birth, Lupe knew the others must be delivered in a hospital. Lupe wanted to keep her children alive by delivering in a hospital from that time on, and ended her childbearing years with eight children to sing to.
Lupe was the grandmother who had tea parties with me from a set of miniature, brown clay painted dishes that she brought from Mexico . She would pretend to fill the little cups with tea and serve imaginary cakes then pretend they were delicioso ! And she would sing the Spanish songs of her childhood and chuckle with delight when I would try to sing along.
Lupe was also the seamstress who worked for hours with embroidery thread and sequins making beautiful Mexican costumes for the local musicians and dancers to wear in their performances. She also made little dolls for the church carnival so they could be offered as prizes for the bingo games. She dressed those little pre-Barbie dolls in traditional satin, Mexican sequined skirts with white blouses, and colorful little ribbons in their hair. And no matter how much I begged, she would never give me one and would gently remind me that they were for the church and the nuns needed to raise money for the poor people so she had to do her part and make the dolls for others not as fortunate as we were.
We were just a few inches above that poverty line ourselves. But mi abuela would always have a pot of beans, some rice and tortillas for anyone who came to visit because people were always hungry. My mother would later explain that during the depression their house was “marked” by what they referred to in those days as “hobos.” (People we would now call homeless.) Being marked meant that if you knocked on the Diaz house back door, and offered to rake the yard, clean the gutters, or sweep the sidewalk, Lupe would give you a bowl of beans with tortillas. At times this was the only meal the hobos would have for days. As my mother explained, “We were poor, but we had a roof over our heads and mom could sew all our clothes so we were rich by the living standards in those days.”
Lupe had a vision of the Virgin as all good Mexican grandmothers will. The Virgin appeared at the foot of her bed on the day she thought she was dying. But the doctors put a pacemaker inside her and the picture of the Virgin would hang on the wall above her sewing machine as a reminder that she was saved by a milagro . She would joke that the pacemaker could keep time with her singing so she would never miss a beat. And Guadalupe Salazar Diaz was a woman whose heart never stopped working. On the day my grandfather died, her husband of over 50 years, she took time to comfort others. When my two-year-old daughter, Laura cried because I was leaving for the funeral, mi abuela quietly walked to the back bedroom, climbed up on to a chair and reached up with all four feet eleven inches of height, pulled out a rather dusty, worn out doll for Laura from the top of the closet, handed it to Laura, smoothed her hair, and spoke softly to her in Spanish promising her we would be back soon.
So much of my grandmother that was invisible to many was only visible to me, not just because of the legacy of love and compassion she left, but in how she lived her life—always singing a song, feeling the music of life that was hard, and beautiful, and unfair, and wonderful.
Lupe was one of the invisible women who helped carve a place for her family in a land that she would be saddened to know might not welcome her now. Guadalupe Salazar Diaz, the woman who taught me to remember that the lessons of experience make up the compositions that orchestrate the important music of life.
|
|
