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Chapter 26: My cousin's hellManuel the wife-beater was a ‘mean, drunk marihuano’
The Arizona Daily Star After I was born in 1956, Mama decided to stay home and care for both her children at the home Daddy and his brothers had built on the southside. ``I wanted to raise you my own way. I wanted to teach you manners, morals and values. So I started ironing for others. I ironed clothes for four families, and I was paid about $10 a week. I ironed seven days a week, and my back hurt more from ironing than from picking cotton.'' Daddy eventually left the fields and went to work cleaning southside bars before getting a job as a truck driver for a sand-and-gravel operation. Life got better at our house. All worked. Raymond and I played in the dirt yards and streets, and everyone was healthy. In the home of my Mama's sister, Florencia, and her husband, Manuel Herrera, things were different. Mama had been right about Manuel. He wasn't a nice man. He beat his wife viciously. The women relatives knew, but when they tried to help Florencia leave, she defended him. She even resisted Mama, who pushed her to divorce him and leave with her children. ``She would tell me: `He is my cross,' '' Mama recalls. ``They married through the Catholic Church, and the vows were important to Florencia. Police would arrest him, but she would not press charges. ``I would tell her, `Let (brothers) Juan, Florentino and Chilo get ahold of him. Just let them know what he does to you. They'll make sure he doesn't do it again.' '' I think Mama could have done it herself. I saw my Daddy use physical force on her one time. He had been drinking. He came into the kitchen and grabbed her arm roughly. Mama picked up an iron skillet and whacked him in the head, just hard enough to get his attention. ``Touch me again and I'll kill you,'' she warned. It worked on Daddy; Manuel Herrera was another story. My cousins Jaime and Richard were too young to remember much, but Raúl and Irene still cannot forget those days, more than four decades ago. ``My father was mean, a drunk and a marihuano,'' says Raúl. ``He was very macho, and his forte was always to have people on the edge of their seats. ``You never knew what he was going to do. He was a very unpredictable person. One minute he was OK. The next minute he was the devil. ``I was so small, but I would try to help my Mom so many times. I would jump on his back. I would kick him and bite him, whatever it took. I always got my ass whipped for it. ``I still have flashbacks of my Mom being on the bottom and him whipping on her. I'm all over his back. These are things that are very clear to me. . . . I can never forget. It was rough.'' Florencia had a second cross to bear. By 1958, she was seriously ill. The lymph nodes in her neck had swollen, as they had when she had tuberculosis in high school. She went to the county hospital where she waited for hours to receive medical attention. You're poor, you take a number and wait. She got tired of waiting. Florencia went home and kept getting weaker. ``I remember when they took my Mom to the hospital. She was almost in a coma,'' says Raúl, who was 11 at the time. ``She didn't even know who we were,'' says Irene, who was 9. ``She was out of it. They took her in the ambulance. I didn't get to see her after she left.'' Mama went to see Florencia. She had nursed her through tuberculosis. She had been so proud when Florencia graduated high school. She had expected, hoped for, prayed for, so much more for her little sister. ``I had to wear a gown and a mask, and could only stay minutes with her. She was pregnant. I prayed to Santa Teresita de Jesús to have God take her if she was to continue suffering. She had suffered enough.'' Florencia died from meningitis just after Easter in 1958. The child she carried was too young to survive. ``I recall coming home from school and seeing my uncles' cars there,'' says Raúl. ``I knew something had happened. As soon as I walked into the house, I saw Tía (Nala). . . . There were a lot of people there. I saw their faces. I understood from their expressions that my Mom had passed away.'' The news was delivered to Irene more harshly. ``I remember walking home from school,'' she says, her voice cracking. ``The little boy across the street met me about three blocks from my house. He came up running and says, `Irene, Irene, your mother died. Your mother died. Your mother's dead.' ``I ran all the way home. I remember my Uncle Johnny, my Aunt Eleanor and my Dad were there. They just sat me down and told me the news. It was just more bad things after that,'' she says.
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Ch. 1: Field of death
Ch. 18: The New Deal
Ch. 24: Cotton pickers and copper miners Ch. 27: The family doubles its size
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