A Story of Stories

Autorentext

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez is an associate professor of English and director of the rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English graduate program at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1887–1942, which won the 2016 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Prize, and the coeditor, with Jessica Enoch, of Mestiza Rhetorics: An Anthology of Mexicana Activism in the Spanish Language Press, 1875–1922. She lives in Tucson.

Klappentext

One woman’s mostly unpublished, rich heritage of West Texas border folklore and literary history

Zusammenfassung
One woman's mostly unpublished, rich heritage of West Texas border folklore and literary history

Leseprobe

In 1991 as a young college student, I moved in with my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Doña Ramona, to attend The University of Texas at El Paso. In doing so, I followed the traditional Mexican custom of the younger generation caring for their elders. I took the small single room in the back of a duplex apartment in an old barrio with El Paso High School visible from the front step. Nothing fancy. During my college years, I never lived in the dorms or moved in with friends, nor wanted to. And I don’t believe that I missed anything. On the contrary, my life was all the richer for the time spent with my Doña Ramona. For five years, my grandmother and I ate, slept, and lived in close communion. Closing my eyes, I can see her sitting quietly in the sun-drenched morning nook of her dining table. Her figure, hunched over the edge of the table, cast a shadow over her breakfast: café con pan. Other times, she would lean into a card game of solitaire she incessantly played. 

I felt what many young kids might feel toward their grandparents⸺a mixture of deep love cloaked in a curiosity of their life and how they lived. I wondered, what would it have been like to live through the Great Depression? To live through the struggles of the first and second world wars? Living in an age of emerging technologies that she didn’t, or even want to understand, Doña Ramona came from what seemed a different world. This otherworldliness drew people to her. 

On many occasions, my grandmother and I sat in silence while I ate, and she played solitaire. Other times we talked. Between us, the cross-border language in personal and daily pláticas sustained our relationship. Central to Mexican culture and family life, pláticas or talks center around knowledge exchange. While eating lunch one afternoon, she pointed to the typewriter that sat covered on the cluttered desk in the dining room. In a calm, yet almost melancholy voice, she said, “Cuando era mucho más joven, me encantaba escribir.”

Leaning in to reach the desk drawer, she pulled out a thin literary journal with a brown cover. She opened it and showed me her name in the table of contents. She set it on the table as if to entice me to read her words and then went back to playing solitaire. In silence, I browsed the contents of the

yellowing paper journal titled Chicanas en la literatura y el arte. I noted the year―1973―and that she had published five short stories in Spanish. I don’t recall much after browsing the contents, but that was the moment when I learned that my grandmother was a writer and had published some of her writings in one of the most significant Chicano literary journals.

Through her daily actions, Doña Ramona revealed the mezcla of her beliefs. She practiced the customs of Mexican curanderas⸺women spiritualists, and healers. Her hot, freshly prepared food, sometimes made with fresh ingredients from the backyard, such as verdulagas or purslane, could heal any ailment. 

There were also times when I wasn’t feeling so energized that she confessed to tapping my energy, claiming I had more than enough. She would say, “Te estoy quitando un poco de tu energía. Tienes demasiado.” 

Always open in her conversation with people, she would ask family and visitors about their lives. If they engaged her, she stopped her card game, reshuffled the cards, and laid them out to read their fortune. A queen or king of hearts represented a love interest. A jack of diamonds represented a pending stroke of luck. The Joker represented unpredictable or complicated times ahead. My brothers, cousins, and even my college friends believed her fortune-telling. It may have been that she was just older and wiser

than us, but we were in awe of what she saw of our lives through a deck of cards.