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Chapter 32: Raúl and IreneTwo tough beginnings, two happy endings
The lives of my cousins Raúl and Irene started out tough. But both are crafting happy endings for themselves. Raúl began to feel more secure after he, Irene, Jaime and Richard squeezed into my family's one-bedroom home.
And even when he was basically on his own, he did well in school - and he loved sports. ``Sports took me off a road to ruin,'' he says. ``When we moved back to Tucson, and I lived with my father, I hung around with a gang. We used to steal. ``I was looking for something. My father was very abusive. ``Sometimes I would not see him for a week or two. I'd wash my own clothes and make my own food. I just survived.'' Raúl made the all-city football team at Wakefield Junior High. At Pueblo High School, he learned more discipline under Coach Lou Farber. ``He and Ed Brown, an assistant coach, were very instrumental in my life. They were very good people and role models.'' Raúl was becoming a star at running back and linebacker.
Then at age 16, he became a father. Belen, his high school sweetheart, gave birth to a boy, David. The couple married shortly before Raúl turned 17, and moved into a house off South 10th Avenue in the city of South Tucson. In his junior year, a knee injury ended his football career. Worse, he couldn't work for a while. The good news was that a larger community beyond his family cared for him. The student body, faculty and coaches hosted fund-raisers to help the young couple. Dan Eckstrom, later mayor of South Tucson and now a Pima County supervisor, sold tamales his mother made to raise money. ``There are not enough words to express what Dan and the officers, coaches and students did for me. They were great people,'' says Raúl. Raúl quit school and went to work - bag boy, stock clerk, foreman at a manufacturing plant. He bought his first house, a four-bedroom home, in 1975. That year he and Belen had their fourth child, Celina. Their two other sons are Greg and Steve. Raúl continued to work hard, usually holding two jobs, and in the 1980s he bought his dream home - a two-story, four-bedroom house in a southwest subdivision close to lush desert hills. ``It was a house that I wanted all my life. But, you know, having what you want and being unhappy just doesn't work. We ended our marriage there.'' Raúl remarried in 1989. His wife, Mary, is a petite woman with a kind heart. If Raúl had his life to live over, he would wait on marriage, continue his education and emphasize education to his children. But he thanks God the kids turned out well, and he's pushing college for his eight grandchildren. He also thanks God for Mama. ``I used to always say the Lord has taken a lot away from me. He took my mother, my grandmother. But, I realized, he blessed me with my aunt. So he really never took anything away from me.'' Irene dropped out of school in 1964 to marry Reynaldo Martinez, a handsome, muscular man she met while dancing at Del Rio ballroom. She was 16; he was 18. ``When we first married, Rey used to work in cotton. When the cotton season was over at the end of December, we went to California. There were beets, grapes, potatoes, tomatoes and oranges. ``I worked with a lot of pesticides. Pilots would spray the fields by plane, and we'd be working there,'' says Irene, who a year later gave birth to a son. ``We didn't stay too long the following year because Little Ray kept getting sick. They came back to Marana and chopped lettuce in the fields. ``Oh, God, it was a lot of stoop labor with the short hoe. We'd be bent for hours and hours and hours.'' Irene got pregnant again, giving birth to Tina Louise in 1966. And Rey turned out to be unfaithful and violent. Irene had seen her mother suffer such a relationship. She would not. They separated. Irene picked lettuce up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, while a friend cared for her children. Her divorce was final in 1970. By then, the single mother had met George Romero. She believes God sent him and his parents into her life. George's parents, Altagracia and Alejandro Romero, had left the ranches and fields for South Tucson where Alejandro built and maintained the city's streets. Altagracia made Irene her project. ``Come to Tucson and get a job. Go to school. You have to do something with your life to better yourself,'' she told her. When the Welfare Department offered her an opportunity to go to school, she went for it. She moved into a trailer park on Tucson's southside with her children. She enrolled in a job-training program and became a nurse's aide, following in her mother, Florencia's, footsteps. In 1971, Irene began working at St. Mary's Hospital rehabilitation unit with stroke patients and others who suffered from paralysis and brain injuries. She and George were married in 1972. George, an insurance agent, moved his family into a nice southwest-side mobile home park, on the site of retired cotton fields along South Mission Road. Irene gave birth to Gracie in 1973, and later went to work as an assembly worker at various electronics plants before returning to work with the elderly. She suffers from numerous illnesses including fibromyalgia, a muscle disorder that causes agonizing pain and inflammation. But she still wakes each day with a good morning first to God, the Blessed Mother and the santos. Irene and George keep la familia together, hosting all the family celebrations. George is the king of carne asada. The cookouts are mostly an excuse to gather everyone together with Mama to play poker. Every time Mama walks into her home, Irene just smiles.
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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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