Publishing News and a Poem for My Grandmother

I'm excited to share that Writer's at Work has chosen my poem, Ghazal of the Traffic, for their Poem of the Month series. It's great to have one of my "My L.A." poems finally find a home. You can check it out here.

From Ghazal of the Traffic

On a corner a child sells ripe mangos, yellow and green.
She looks familiar, but I have traveled too far in the city.

A hipster girl draped in vintage wails down Hollywood Blvd.
Countless are the broken dreams and scars in the city.

Radio gossip: coke-filled-photos, anorexia, Anna Nicole.
We keep our famous in air-punched-holed jars in the city.

In other news, this past Wednesday, May 11th, marked my grandmother's 90th birthday. That's right, 90! We had a mass to celebrate this past weekend, much like the one we had last year that I wrote about in this post. To commemorate the day, I wrote a little poem about my grandmother. It is a bit of a love letter to my grandmother and to all my cousins. I feel lucky to have had 3 brothers and 15 cousins to grow up with. Like I tell my cousins, Erika and Gloria, at every family wedding (after a couple of rounds of tequila), "I'd kill for you!" Of course, actual blood shed is highly unlikely, but there is little I wouldn't do for my family. I think it also fits into the "My L.A." poems because when I think of L.A., I often think back on weekends spent at my grandmother's home in Boyle Heights.

A shot of my grandmother's front steps.

On the Front Steps

We ate pink and blue ice cream
shaped like feet and rockets
bought from rusty trucks
singing down Fairmont. We gossiped

and giggled into cousins’ ears,
sugary colors dripping onto the
red concrete below us. We watched
the boys play football in the street,

and our grandfather manicure his lawn.
We inhaled the fragrances of orange,
guava, rose, fern, and every other plant
that grew green and full around us.

We grew much the same way
over years, maturing like plants
around her as she nourished us
with tacos de crema, bowls of conflais,

huevos con weenies smothered
in katchun katchun. She tended
to our insatiable bellies with pieces
of chocolate and cookie, and fueled us

with spoons of frijoles from a pot
that never emptied, and like magic
she nursed her little plants
from a tiny kitchen, and we sprouted

into wild creatures too big for front steps.
Knowing we could never be potted
and still, she sent us off with a kiss
and a prayer, “Que Dios lo bendiga,”

and stood at the top of the steps—
yellow light of the house framing her
small body like a saint—to wave us goodbye,
our bellies full, our hearts and minds strong.

My niece, the next generation of little plants.

For My Grandmother: An L.A. Story

From left to right: my father, grandmother, mother, and me

In my search and thirst for the past, for the faces of our history, I have forgotten the faces that brought me to the subject of immigration in the first place. I have forgotten that the story isn’t always something out there in the world, but something right here inside my own home, inside my own family.

This past Saturday my family decided to have a Catholic mass in my grandmother’s (my father’s mother) honor. In December my grandmother was in the hospital after she suffered an episode, which many of us feared was a stroke, and that our worst fear––the inevitable truth of her passing––was upon us. Watching her, my tiny grandmother, skin as delicate as tissue paper, struggling and crumpled in her hospital bed, I tried to hold back tears, as I suspect we all did, in what seemed like an attempt to keep this fragile creature from dissolving.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a stroke, and she was back in her Boyle Heights home by Christmas Eve. To celebrate, we had a mass said in her honor this past weekend in a small Catholic church, Mission San Conrado, up above Solano Avenue, in the shadow of Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium.

Yesterday, once again looking through Don Normark’s photos from the book, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, I came across a black and white landscape shot of Solano Avenue and the north slope of La Loma. The homes of La Loma are gone now, but the church, the site of my grandmother’s mass, stands at the foot of that hill, and it is still green, still looking untouched. After the mass, my brother Andres took his son Armando and our nephew Gabrielito up the steps behind the church, past the ceramic alter to the Virgin Mary, to explore this greenery. I wasn’t up there with them, but I’m sure the boys played pirate, adventurer, conqueror, as I’m sure the boys of La Loma did 60-70 years earlier.

Inside the church, during the homily, the priest (speaking only in Spanish) addressed my grandmother, who with the help of her youngest daughter slowly rose to her feet. He asked her, are all your children here? She nodded. And are these young people your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? She smiled and nodded.

Some of the great-grandchildren attempting to sing for their great-grandmother

And señora, he asked, where are you from in Mexico? Teocaltiche (a small pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico), someone in the aisles assisted. Is anyone else here from Teocaltiche? My father raised his hand high up and let a proud grin spread wide over his face. And señora, how long have you been here? My grandmother laughed, shyly keeping her glance low in what seemed like an old school sign of respect for clergy, Cincuenta años. Fifty years, she told him.

And here I was trying to find an L.A. story, lamenting the loss of the culture and people of Chavez Ravine, not realizing that culture still lived in here. Normark’s photos illustrate a lost town, but the hills are still here, the Spanish is still here, and family is still here.

In 1949, Normark stumbled into Chavez Ravine. In 1949 my grandmother was raising three young children in a poor pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico (my father once told me how they didn’t have electricity in Teocaltiche, and that the children waited for full moons to play out in the streets at night). In 1949, the inhabitants of Ravine's La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde communities grew their own vegetables and milked their own goats that grazed along the green hills all around their homes. In 1949, my father scaled the hills surrounding his town with his grandmother to collect nopales (cactus) to accompany the simple meal of frijoles, chile, and tortillas that his mother was preparing back home for dinner.

My father, first on the left, with his siblings, cousins, and grandfather in Teocaltiche, Mexico

And now in 2010, sixty-one years later, the houses on the hill of La Loma are gone, but my family thrives. And my small, unassuming grandmother stands in a church beaming with pride to be surrounded by her still growing family of seven children, nineteen grandchildren, and twenty great-grandchildren. And in an hour two of those great-grandchildren, Armando and Gabrielito, will be conquering the hill just outside. And somehow, there is comfort in knowing nothing is ever completely gone.