Untitled

by Monica Zarazua

One Beginning

“You have a treasure at home,” Mrs. Wicker told me. “Go home and ask your dad what these words mean.”

I shrugged a little confused about why I would do that, but she was a teacher so maybe she knew something I didn’t. This was in the days when I wore my hair in long, crooked pigtails.

“What’s under a pig’s tail?” my dad would ask me. I didn’t know if I was supposed to answer so I didn’t, but I did give him that look that only daughters can give their corny dads when they tell their corny dad jokes. I answered in my head: A pig butt but my head’s not a butt.

“What do these words mean, dad?” I showed him the list of colors in Spanish.

“Hmmm….I don’t know. I don’t know Spanish.”

So that was the end of that conversation. We’ve never been people to have long or winding dialogues. Nowadays, we clink our beer glasses together in a toast, then I listen as he gives me advice about the car or retirement. Sometimes we talk politics and our voices rise, but we mostly try to end with beer glasses clinking one more time.

“Salud!”

That’s one Spanish word my dad knows, along with llaves, cerveza, m’ija, and the phrase: ¡Tú, qué chula!

My pops will get stopped in L.A., Oakland or Tijuana and be spoken to in Spanish. He always tries to be nice and pretend to understand, nodding,

“¡Sí, sí!”

He’s a muy Mexicano-looking man con rasgos indígenas, but who in his heart is a Michigander. He’s third generation born and raised in the U.S. I’m fourth.

April 2022 for spring break I decided to road trip through Michigan. I had been working on a fictional story about a nefarious company that erases people’s memories for profit--also somehow already turned into a TV show. Anyways I found myself trying to reference family history. Hmmmm…it seemed a great idea and excuse to travel to Mexico and do some on the ground research. Originally my idea was to go to Chihuahua. It was rumored that our people came from there. This rumor started in 1953 when my grandma gave birth to Santiago who emerged with bright red hair. My grandpa did a double take. Who was this kid? How was it that he had one dark kid, another slightly lighter child and then all of a sudden a red haired kid? Everyone joked it was because he worked at Dow Chemical, but he decided on the narrative that he was just powerful like that and could make babies of all different colors. Another relative made the more realistic connection of red hair to Zarazuas who lived in Chihuahua.

So I thought I’d take a trip to Mexico but when I reread my grandma’s six page biography I realized most of her life was in Michigan. Michigan is where she went to school, where she fell in love with her first husband, where she worked the fields, where she birthed her children, where she fell in love with her second husband, where she left her second husband then went back, where she started watching telenovelas, and where she died.

Michigan isn’t your average spring break destination but I wanted to go to the places she named in her life story.

Before the Roadtrip: Not All Facts, Some Truths

My childhood memories of my aunts and uncles are mostly of them making jokes out of every situation. Take my uncle who worked as a correctional officer. One day he was cleaning one of his guns and had a bad accident. The doctors had to amputate his leg below his knee. What did the family do? 1) Showed up at his bedside 2) Started calling him Lefty.

Everybody’s got nicknames mostly from childhood but some that endure.

Anselmo Antonio: Zorro / Anteater / Big Daddy

Justo: Juice / Juicy Fruit / Mouse / Bull Nose

Pedro: Petey / Duke

Ramon: Raymond / Beaver / Linc Hayes

Daniel: Danny / Chief / Indian / Wild Indian / Buck / Shoes / Patches / Radio

Santiago Jose: Jimmy / Elephant Ears / Dumbo / Patches

Alejandra Bonita: Doodie / Lion Head / Sea Hag / Coke Bottle Eyes / Pee Pee Pants

Guadalupe Linda: Loopie / Loops / Pig Nose

Timothy John Glenn: Tim / Moose / Lefty

My dad and his siblings were born between 1944 and 1962.

Four served in the U.S. military.

Pedro Zarazua - U.S. marines

Justo Zarazua - USAF

Santiago Zarazua - U.S. Army (82nd Airborne)

Daniel Zarauza - USAF

They worked in the fields until December 31, 1959 when my grandma married her second husband. According to my dad, “This was the end of the era of working in fields to live and survive for the Zarazua clan.”

They all have a Virgin Mary somewhere in their backyard or in their living room.

They are collectors.

Uncle Zorro - houses

Uncle Justo - classic cars and vintage items from the 50’s like the town telephone booth and an old gas pump

Uncle Pete - casino winnings, Christmas trees

Uncle Ramon - horses, wolves

My dad - any old school candies like Root Beer Barrels and Bit o’ Honeys that he can hide in the car so my mom doesn’t see them

Uncle Jimmy - trips to Cancun

Aunt Doods - Walking Dead paraphernalia

Aunt Loops - husbands (just kidding), porcelain figurines and fancy glass things

Uncle Tim - mocajetes, t-shirts, wine making materials, vacuums that can be repaired

They are mildly competitive in who makes the best beans (Uncle Tim won the last round).

The uncles gave up drinking years ago. Me, my aunts and my dad will still sip.

The Road Trip

April 2022

Rosebush: A village with no identity, a school that is no longer there, a place where people fall in love

“I never knew ma’s dad was not her real dad.”

~Aunt Doods

My Aunt Doods loves rummaging and finding Prada purses for cheap. When I was a kid she asked me about the book I was reading and I loved her for that. She wore my grandma’s wedding dress for her wedding and in her basement she’s got her Walking Dead corner, her corner with kid’s toys for one of her godchildren, the sports corner, and her “Mexican” corner complete with a Chihuahua with a swinging head (purchased on sale at Amway).

My parents, Aunt Doods and I went on a hunt for a cemetery. When she was alive my grandma would have people drive her there, but who was she visiting? Nobody could remember. With the help of the internet we figured out she was going to visit Pedro Sanchez: the man who my grandma recognized as her father after her biological father abandoned the family.

We put the address in el google and it led us to a large red house with a large red barn. Not it. But then up the street, there it was looking like a small cemetery in a small town like one you just might see in Mexico. Me, my dad, Aunt Doods walked up and down the rows. The earth was soaked from winter rains. There was a headstone Sanchez but no Pedro Sanchez. Up and down but nothing found. We left, called a phone number on a sign, got the number of “Carl” who knew everything about the cemetery but who didn’t pick up. We went back one more time to look. Pulled up the google and it showed us the surrounding headstones. There. Sixth row from a tree. At the end of the near a lamb carved from stone. We found him. We took photos, touched the headstone. Aunt Doods said a prayer. We jumped back in the car which was heated up like the observatory where we’d gone to see the butterflies that day when we ate at Olive Garden to belatedly celebrate Aunt Dood’s birthday, and that night when she looked at all the old photos using a magnifying glass.

Quanicassee: swaplands

“I don’t remember nuthin. I stay focused on the future.”

~Uncle Zorro

Uncle Zorro is the oldest. He’s the one who used to speak and understand Spanish. In my childhood he was the quieter uncle, listening and laughing but not the one cracking jokes. His home was an open home where there were always kids running around.

Six of us piled into a minivan and headed to Quanicassee where my dad and his siblings lived as children before their father died.

Uncle Zorro pulled over near a marsh grown with reeds that grew higher than our heads. We listened to the cacophony of birds that we couldn’t see. Everyone started talking about how they would swim in those waters. It would be so hot after work and so hot after school that they’d jump straight in.

“All the Mexican families lived together,” said Zorro. “Remember, Danny? Grandma Zarazua had pigs.”

Later when we passed one of the current day “Mexican houses,” -- mobile homes where current day migrant workers live, Uncle Zorro remembered something else.

​​“The ones we lived in. You could see the curtains move [from the cold air.].” His hand waved slowly from side to side.

Pinecone: Beans, string beans, potatoes and a pickle factory up the street

“Potato season would be done by the time school started. We’d be praying for school to start.”

~Uncle Justo

What I remember about Uncle Justo when I was a kid is that he had a monkey. He also lived near a lake and in winter we would slide around on it. He raised two children who were not his but who he raised as his own.

In my grandma’s autobiography she talked about living in a chicory shack. I had to look up that chicory is the most common weed in Michigan and it grows on the sides of the roads. It’s a blue flower and the root has a flavor similar to coffee. Chicory can be used as a coffee substitute. I thought about that Vietnamese coffee that comes in a yellow can labeled: coffee and chicory. Now it made sense! Still, a shack could not have been built out of chicory. I wondered if by chicory she meant chick. Did they live in a house meant for chicks? It wouldn’t have surprised me.

Uncle Juicy Fruit is the one who clarified. Whatever crop they were picking, that was the name of the place they would stay in. If they picked potatoes, they stayed in a potato shack. Out of my aunts and uncles, he had the most details about the work they did. The farmers would pick up people in Saginaw and bus them to the countryside to pick crops. I asked him what my grandma did when her first husband died and she was left with eight children including a newborn baby. He told me she kept on working in the fields and all the kids would go and work with her. Later I mused on why Pedro Sanchez was buried in the middle of nowhere.

“He probably died suddenly and they buried him where he was. Nobody had money to transport the body.”

Wisner: Swans in the foggy, dry fields. Sugar beet shacks.

“When grandma got nasty, she got nasty.”

~Aunt Loops

For the first time in my life, I talked with my aunt who is also a teacher. We spoke as adults! Woman to woman! As a kid, she was the cool aunt always laughing at something--sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me. It wasn’t my fault I had pimples. It wasn’t my fault I was shy.

Aunt Loops was the second youngest. She didn’t work in the fields. She didn’t know her biological dad, and according to the other siblings she was the favored child, the one who got everything, the one who got the dolls while my other aunt got dog bones (so they say). She remembers grandma packing up the kids and the bird and leaving her second husband. For better or for worse, eventually they would go back home.

On the last night of the road trip, I slipped away from where my parents and I were staying to small talk with my aunts. Aunt Loops told me about her last job working in Saginaw as a librarian, and the stories the students would tell her, and how they would tell her not to go to their neighborhoods unless she was with them. She told me how she worked in a migrant program for five years in the summers. Every summer the same families came from Mexico and Florida. One family was all brothers Rodriguez, all married to Maria’s. She could never figure out who was who until they started to trust her: this woman coming around asking them to enroll their kids in summer school.

More Research

Definition of Chicano according to Cheech

“Lil satellite Mexicans living in a foreign country. Something small * chico * chicanos. Poor, illiterate livin’ in shacks along the borders. As soon as they could get a car loan and could move farther away from the border the term became less of an insult.”

Definition of a Chicano according to Urban Dictionary

It comes from a Nahuatl word meaning “Native.”

One Conclusion

I’ve never heard my dad’s family call themselves Chicanos or migrant workers or Mexican Americans, Hispanics causing Panic, Raza, paisa. I’ve heard them call each other nicknames. I’ve heard them say “Brother,” “Sister.”

Sometimes we live things we don’t have the words for. Sometimes we don’t see any stories like the ones we’ve lived so maybe it seems the story doesn’t matter much. It barely exists except inside ourselves. As time stretches on, maybe it seems like those stories fade, get smaller. I have this suspicion that this is what happened to my dad’s family. They were the only Mexican kids at their school. They worked hard, played hard. They fell in love, raised children, some got married, earned their retirements. They are connected to my dad and my dad is one of the people who gave me life.

My dad walks around the neighborhood waving hi to everyone. He will raise his fist occasionally and say “Viva la raza!” but it sounds like “rosa.” It’s hard to say what of his work ethic, his humor, his hips dancing, his loyalty, his hobby of tuning up his 1967 Mustang, his sentimental heart (he loves him some LeAnn Rimes), his facial features, his barely ever getting sick (strong as an ox), is the Mexican part. What are the origins of the father? What are the origins of the daughter?

On a Michigan state highway: Seeing these trees and this sky--white gray--feels like home. Being on this two lane highway with my parents, me listening to Koffee, that feels like home. Last night was a night for Norah Jones, the Roots. The snow is flying horizontal now.

“We were not rich but we were a happy family.”

~Eulalia Perez Zarazua Stricker (a.k.a Grandma)