Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.
I was born in 1960 and raised in Houston, Texas. I thought of myself as Mexican American when growing up; only later did I realize that I was also a second-generation Mexican immigrant and that ethnic identifiers, what people call themselves, routinely change over time to reflect people’s identity, politics, and their social and economic circumstances.i It was later when I came to understand that as a twentieth-century industrial city, the history of people of Mexican descent in Houston is uniquely “modern” when compared to other large cities of the southwest, especially those with a colonial past.
Like most people, my earliest childhood memories are kaleidoscopic in nature—fragmented and jumbled. Can they be made whole? To what end? To what extent does my perspective on my family’s history resonate with others?
This project is motivated by my interest in recovering my familial history, which was rarely communicated in any coherent manner to my generation of siblings. While I knew that my paternal and maternal grandparents were immigrants from northern Mexico who came to the USA in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their progeny, little was ever conveyed to me about their pre-immigrant past or our familial ties in Mexico. According to a 2013 report from the Pew Foundation, my experience is not unusual for many second-generation immigrants.ii While many immigrants relocate to seek refuge from a difficult situation in their homeland, many do so with the idea that they will return home when the conditions that spurred their departure improve. This is especially true when their new destination is a neighboring country, and their country of origin is undergoing a difficult period that is expected to eventually pass. That expectation nurtures a hope that returning home is not only possible, but likely. México de afuera as an expatriate ideology emerged with particular force in the first quarter of the twentieth century, an intense era of displacement, exile, and migration from Mexico during which many migrants anticipated an imminent return home and strove to nurture their patriotism for the homeland. In this context, new immigrants often viewed their goal as recreating Mexican life in the United States. In this respect, according to Daniel Morales, a community of Mexican-descent people was but an extension of Mexico.iii But once an immigrant realizes that there will be no return home, either because of prolonged difficulties in the homeland or an unexpected acclimation to their new environment, their orientation becomes forward-looking and grounded in their current geo-location. They settle into jobs, begin raising a family, and develop familial and communal ties in the host country. In pre-high-tech eras without internet and international phone plans, when one lived a modest, working-class life, a return to one’s nation of origin for a vacation or to maintain familial ties was rare and costly so maintaining a connection between family in the ancestral homeland and the new homeland was difficult. Thus, while certainly not literally, or even practically true, it often seemed to me that our history began and ended with the border. As a child, our extended family consisted of my grandparents, my parents, my seven siblings and myself, plus our huge extended family of 12 aunts and uncles and more than 70 first cousins. In the Prologue to Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History, a book on the relationship between literary and historical writing, I wrote the following paragraphs in memory of my grandparents and to acknowledge the limits of our relationship to them and their Mexican past. Additionally, I share other excerpts of life-writing, or creative non-fiction, that have informed my scholarship for more than three decades. Creative non-fiction imagines what life may have looked like for people in the context of their place and time. Historical fiction imagines what likely happened to real people without supporting documentation but accounting for the confirmed arc of historical events. The details and the events in the vignettes of creative non-fiction that follow directly below and in later chapters are a mix of actual events and imagined conversations designed to fill in gaps and provide emotional depth to our family’s story.
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When I was a child our large family’s Sunday visits to our maternal and paternal grandparents were as regular as church. We tumbled out of the station wagon and paid homage to our grandparents, whose small houses smelled like the inside of a cedar chest and were as neat and clean as they were dark and cool. The visits always started off formally with a ritual hug, kiss, and pinch of the cheek followed by a survey of our appearance. Were we clean? Groomed? Eating well? Well-behaved?
We kids marveled at how these small two-bedroom wood-frame houses had managed to hold our parents’ larger families of six and nine children respectively. Invariably, after our grandparents asked us how school was going in their halting English, the conversation between grandma and grandpa and mom and dad would take place almost exclusively in Spanish. Sometimes we stayed listening in amazement at how they could understand each other when it seemed everyone was talking as fast as they could all at the same time.
Grandma and grandpa on both sides of the family spoke little English despite having lived in Texas the vast majority of their lives. Driven from their home country of Mexico by the quest for a better life and a civil war that lasted much of the first three decades of the twentieth century, the USA seemed to promise economic opportunity and safety. My grandparents arrived in Texas sometime between 1903 and 1924. Fifty and sixty years later they could look back without regret upon their lives of work, of survival, of hardship, of tenacity, and, yes, of dignity and progress despite an often unwelcome social and political climate. Though I know they loved us, their children’s children, dearly, our relationship was mitigated by our mutual language limits. Separated from them by only a generation, our first language was English. So, it was that we moved among them with respect, a respect not unlike our Catholicism, borne of fear and love—undergirded by these qualities, our relationship was also limited by our ignorance of the particulars of their lives.
Years later I would wonder how they felt about this generational shift, this language gap that existed between us. Did they think us sell-outs, cultural misfits, as a tragic consequence of assimilation, or did they foresee that cultural characteristics like language would be the price we paid for “Americanization,” for ”progress?” From my perspective as a child, I saw them as a link to an archaic past, one that I did not fully understand yet nevertheless knew I should revere. And despite not being able to share the details of our lives with them, I sensed that we pleased them, and that they loved us unconditionally despite our language differences. (Mendoza, 2003).
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My parents, Mary Martinez (1927) and Joe Mendoza (1928), experienced not only the economic hardship of the Depression, but the 1930s era of Mexican deportation and the suspicion of being un-American that everyone, but especially those who were “foreign-looking,” faced when they participated in labor strikes or stood in line for government assistance. The Catholic schools my parents attended in East Houston forbade them to speak Spanish under the threat of corporal punishment or some other form of humiliation. Intimidated, they often suffered in silence. My mom tells the story of how even in high school, despite the fact that she was one of the few graduates in her family, she was so shy about speaking in public that she would ask the teacher if her friend, Mary Escalante, could read her work for her rather than suffer the embarrassment of having her accent “corrected” in front of the class.
Even now I cringe when I think of how 25 years later the nuns at Resurrection Elementary where Mary and Joe (the Spanish language versions of their names had long ago been anglicized) sent their children, practiced the same pedagogy. I recall classmates being forced to stand in front of class every afternoon and practice saying “chair,” “church,” “chicken,”‘ “children,”‘ “shutters,”‘ “shine your shoes,’” and so on, so they could improve their enunciation of English and eradicate their Spanish accent. (Mendoza, 2005)
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Interstate 10 slices through Denver Harbor like a swollen scar of an improperly cared for wound. Railroad tracks surround it-—they are the sutures holding our wounds together. The healing process is never-ending. People are contained within by the less visible barriers of poverty and comunidad. In our house on Zoe Street, I used to lie awake at night in one of the upstairs bedrooms my father and his compadres had added on to better house our large family. There, the painful squeaks and moans of rusty freight cars passing in the night would sing me to sleep. Those eerie sounds both haunted and tempted me. They seemed to call, to dare me to hop on and take off to new, unknown places. Their motion was persistent—-shhh, shhh, shhh, all roads lead out shh, shh, shh, they whispered. In the dark, in my bed, I let them take me away to happier, unreal places. During the day these cumbersome caterpillars crawled rudely through our world. Doug, Larry, and I used to wait for them on Wallisville or Old Clinton Road—out of defiance we jumped on them, only to hop off after a few blocks. The ride was always disappointing, falling far short of our expectations. (Mendoza, 2003
Knowledge of my family’s history was also kaleidoscopic in nature—not known with any certainty beyond that facts that both sets of grandparents had come in the first quarter of the twentieth century from northern Mexico. (Re)Constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston is premised on the idea that neither my experiences nor my limited knowledge about my past is unique, that this dissonance with my past is a result of twin pressures: my family’s need to look forward and educational policies that sought to provide a master narrative of the state and nation that homogenized our experiences, flattened, or eradicated our differences, and built a consensus narrative that elided conflict or injustice, rather than reflect a past that was, in reality, complex, and often conflicted.
This book seeks to explore the interconnectedness of place and ethnic identity in the emergence of Houston’s Mexican American community through the lens of one family’s experience. Thus, it is at once communal, familial, and personal. The book also addresses the challenges associated with piecing together one family’s narrative over three generations as a representative framework for understanding change, social transformation over time, and the role of memory, as well as its limitations, in crafting one’s story. Using a combination of archival resources, oral histories, and secondary sources, I intend to convey the story of the Mendoza and Martinez families over three generations as they navigated migration from northern Mexico, social and economic challenges, and searched for and built a new home and a sense of belonging in east Texas.
Every time one writes (his)stories based on “truth,” one (re)creates a representation of a memory, dream, wish, or desire of an actual event as one remembers or interprets it. I don’t believe there is a singular absolute truth that suits everyone’s reality or experience. Nor do I believe that what we call history is necessarily truer than what we call fiction even if the former proposes to be grounded in “truth,” “reality,” or “facts.” The perspective of the writer matters. Memory is never pure, unbiased, or even neutral.
This is one family’s story over time. Mine. That does not mean that all of my family members would claim this to be their story in the same way I do. I respect that. Even though my siblings’ memories inform this story, ultimately the book is the perspective of one family member who seeks to create a concise and coherent narrative to represent three generations of his family’s experiences. I am not a historian, a sociologist, or an anthropologist. As a literary and cultural critic, I am an analyzer and crafter of words. I admire the power of language, the skill it takes to tell a good story, the power of story to inform, motivate, and inspire us, to soothe and arouse us, to give us cause to reflect, dream, or rouse us to action. Each of the above academic disciplinary practitioners also believe in and practice storytelling using methodologies that gather data to tell a story. Each in their own way has a different relationship to facts, data, memory, and truth. In many respects, (Re)Constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston borrows, utilizes, and blends those methods while also adding an element of creative non-fiction to fill in gaps and convey a slightly more comprehensive picture as possible of what my family’s life, past and present, may have looked and felt like. And yet, even as I acknowledge the limited perspective I offer, I hope that this story resonates with others.
In this section, I explore my family history in Mexico and seek to establish a context for their migration al norte. The Mendoza and Martinez family stories that precede our immediate grandparents are ones that I have recovered only while working on this book. I have often wondered about these unknown ancestors, where they lived, what their lives were like, and what motivated them to leave their ancestral homes. I have often felt that one’s sense of self is deeply imbricated in one’s geographic location. The interconnectedness of genealogy and geography is not happenstance, but rather a portal into understanding the workings of culture and everyday life.
In my father’s small home office were three very old, beautifully framed large photographs of austere looking people. I was told that these were my father’s maternal grandfather from Mexico, who he had no memory of ever meeting; his mother as a very young woman; and a 1924 wedding photo of his parents. He had inherited the photos from his mother when she died in the early 1980s. In their photos, his father and mother were both dressed formally-—he in a suit and she in a lace dress. These photographs were some of the very few artifacts I had of a great grandparent from Mexico and of my grandparents as a young couple in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
José and María Mendoza wedding photo, 09/17/1924. From Mendoza family archives
A few weeks of research on Ancestry.com was revealing. I learned that my father’s grandfather on his mother’s side was Irineo Olvera, spouse of Adelaida Cano Olvera, both from Parras de la Fuente in Coahuila, Mexico. From birth certificates, baptism records, death records, and marriage certificates, I learned much more about these great-grandparents and others. Below I share partial results by way of family trees that began with my parents. What we will see is that I have been able to uncover my genealogical roots quite extensively in some areas with lesser results in others. I begin with my paternal grandfather for brevity and ease.
José Mendoza lineage family lineage (2022).
José Mendoza, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1891 in Cedros, Zacatecas to Nicolás Mendoza and Tomasa García. This information was obtained from the marriage certificate issued in 1924 when he and my grandmother Maria J. Olvera were married in Houston at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Houston’s Second Ward. For reasons I will explain in the next chapter, I have been unable to locate any additional information about his parents.
I had better luck researching records on my father’s mother and her family. For several generations going back as far as the late eighteenth century, it appears that my grandmother’s maternal ancestors resided in or near Parras de la Fuente in Coahuila, although a great-great-great-grandfather of mine, José Antonio Casmiro Cano, was born in Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero in 1784. Thus, the union of my father’s grandmother’s maternal grandparents was a result of a migration northward of more than 1,400 kilometers by José Antonio. Records reveal that the family of Felix Martinez, my mother’s father, lived in various small municipalities in north of Monclova in Coahuila. He was born in Escobedo, about 185 miles north of Parras de la Fuente and approximately 512 kilometers from Teocaltiche, Jalisco, Mexico where his father Luis Martinez was born. It thus appears that some ancestors were moving northward in the mid-nineteenth century. Going back eight generations, the recovery of my maternal grandmother’s family history is the most extensive. While the more recent generations resided in the Monclova region of Coahuila, eighteenth-century ancestors came from Tamaulipas.
María Olvera Mendoza family lineage (2022)
Map of Southern Mexico from the city of Zihuatanejo in the State of Guerrero
Felix Martinez Family lineage (2022).
Zapopan García family lineage (2022)
What does it mean to see the records of marriages, deaths, and births? Many members of both sides of my family were practicing Catholics who underwent the rite of baptism. While it is difficult to discern facts of their everyday lives, such as their economic status or occupations, it is also clear that life was fragile and death of children or women in childbirth was not at all uncommon. One can surmise that they did not lead lives of luxury. Migration within Mexico was most likely motivated by a search for better living conditions. Stability in a region likely meant that sustenance and living conditions were sufficient enough to provide food, shelter, and a sense of community for the family. I cannot know with certainty what life in these small villages entailed for my ancestors. I can imagine, however, that they were immersed in the local economy as agricultural workers, or engaged as miners, or employed on a hacienda as peones. I can also surmise what it must have meant to uproot themselves and leave their homeland in the first part of the twentieth century.
As I begin tracing their journeys to Houston in the early twentieth century, I will try to recreate the circumstances which led to the profound, and no doubt difficult, decision to migrate al norte. While I do not have the benefit of many documents or first-hand accounts in my grandparents’ words, I will utilize scholarship, familial oral histories, and creative non-fiction to portray their stories.
(Re)constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in Twentieth Century Houston
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