Through American Eyes

                                                                                         

                                                                             

Jesus "Chuy" Gonzales, circa 1930, Santa Monica, CA

     When I think of the 4^th of July, of course I think about U.S. independence from England, starting with everything I learned in school, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, about Washington crossing the Potomac, the battles in Boston, at Bunker Hill, at Virginia, and in, what was then rural New York, and the end of the war with England in 1812.

     With other Americans, I celebrate U.S. independence. As an army veteran, having served in combat, I feel a deeper sense of my “American-ness,” not necessarily patriotic, more abstract, a certain sense of “being,” maybe because when one has faced the possibility of dying on foreign shores for a country’s independence, it’s different than just learning about it in history books, shouting “USA!” “USA!” “USA!” or celebrating with fireworks and barbecues.

     Yet, as a descendent of Mexicans, the border, barely two hours away, I also think about my family’s history, especially, when my home state, California, in 1776, was still part of Spain, and the first Spanish-Mexican-Indian settlers were arriving and founding missions at San Diego and San Gabriel.

     That too is my history, much like the history of Americans whose roots go back to Africa, England, Amsterdam, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Poland, Asian, and the Middle East, all of us coming from somewhere else, that is, except for native Americans, whose roots go down deeper than everyone else’s.

     In some ways, for Mexicans, like native Americans, it’s difficult to reconcile our immigrant status, since our history has us on this land before it became the U.S. For us, the border is an artificial line, one our ancestors have been crossing for generations, and, as mestizos, our indigenous blood, identifies with the ocean, canyons, mountains, cactus, and the eagle, on both sides of the border, which writer, Carlos Fuentes referred to as a “scar.”

     Maybe, that is true for all Americans, dualities, hyphenated social beings, whether we accept it or not. What is it to be an American? Few can define it. It’s too complex. It isn’t a piece of paper, alone. It’s metaphysical, like a Mayan whose ancestors on this American continent go back 2,000 years. Isn’t he or she as American as a German whose grandparents arrived on Ellis Island in 1920?

    I remembered this when I interviewed my uncle back in 2001, after the Trade Center fell, Americans were on a war-footing, not really sure why, but questioning what it was to be an American. I’d venture to say, my uncle was as American as any other American. Read and see for yourself.

                                                                                      

Chuy and Lupe Gonzales, Nine Decades an American

                                                          Jesus "Chuy" Villalobos Gonzales

                                                                 Santa Monica/Venice, CA

      "At Grant School in Santa Monica, I was a good baseball player, first base. Oh, I used to stretch to get that ball. One day Mrs. Stratman, my teacher, who was head of the team, told me, 'Jesus, you got to bring shoes to school.' I said, 'Mrs. Stratman, you're gonna punish me by making me wear shoes. Okay, I won't play [baseball].' She thought about it and let me go barefoot."

                                                                       1.

     I spoke to my uncle, Jesus “Chuy” Gonzale[s] (some family members spell their last name with a “z”), my mother’s second oldest sibling, at his home in Venice, just off busy Lincoln Boulevard, a mile or so from Venice Beach, where he settled with his family in the 1950s.

     Always known to us kids as Uncle Chuy, I remember the adults switching between the informal “Jess” or “Chuy,” sometimes, “Jesus,” if they wanted to be formal. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, and he was elated when I called to tell him about my project and ask about coming over to talk to him. Since he was the only Gonzales sibling who, in his teens, returned to Mexico to live on the family ranch, temporarily, he’d always enjoyed talking about his memories. 

     At 92 years of age, when this interview took place, he still looked spritely and told me my cousins were angry at him for climbing up on the roof, recently, to clean the gutters. He also said, proudly, the California Department of Motor Vehicles had granted him a driver’s license for another year, but he admitted, he rarely got behind the wheel.

     Like his father, he was short, trim, and darker skin, but he always looked much taller. He wore casual slacks, a dressy short sleeve shirt with a white t-shirt underneath. He spoke English, not with a Spanish accent but more of a sing-song working-class American intonation. When he slipped into Spanish, usually to make a point or quote somebody, you’d never think of him speaking English. 

     He told me he arrived in the states as a child, probably six or seven years old, the second oldest child of the seven who left their rancho, Mitic, in Jalisco to settle in Santa Monica. I told him I’d recently chatted with a man I knew as Andy, whose wife’s family owned La Talpa, a popular restaurant in West L.A. Andy had mentioned that he’d come to the states from San Gaspar de Los Reyes, a town neighboring Mitic. He said he knew Mitic well, and even remembered Las Palmas, my grandmother’s village.

     My uncle was surprised. He said he’d heard his mother’s village no longer existed, then said he hadn’t visited the area in many years.

     There had always been some question as to the name of his father’s ranch, my older aunts called it Mitic, but my mother and the younger aunts called it Mitique.

     He said he’d heard both but thought Mitic was the correct name.

     I later found in the book Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico, edited by Arthur Anderson and James Lockhart, an Indian, Miguel Lopez, wrote a letter to the king of Spain, in 1611. Lopez, a colonized Indian from the province of Jalostotitlan, petitioned the king to remove a local Spanish priest, the vicar, Francisco Munoz, who, Lopez claimed, beat the Indians, took their food, and had a lady for his personal use.

     Lopez identified the village where this occurred as Mizquictlaca, a Nahuatl word, which the Spaniards, possibly, shortened to Mizquitic, one of the seven indigenous villages in the province of Jalostotitlan. Later in the letter, Lopez uses the name “Mitique and Mitic,” which was a second village of the seven original Texcuexe settlements.

     Whatever name the settlement used, one thing is clear, Mitic dates back to the early seventeenth century. It must have been a well-established community in 1611 to have a church and a vicar, unless the Vicar was visiting from Jalos, the largest town in the province.

     My uncle’s, and the Gonzales family’s, father, Nicolas’s parents, Juan Gonzales and Micaela de Los Santos, had deep roots in Mitic and the province of Jalos. Their parents, which would be my family’s great-grandparents, Perfecto Gonzales (born February of 1830) and Catalina Gonzales, are identified as “Spanish,” while Micaela’s parents, Salvador de Los Santos and Vicenta Villanueva de Los Santos, are identified as “Mexican,” or, I suppose, ancestors of the first Gonzales mestizos.

     He said, "You know, it was just a little rancho [when I visited] back then, but there were stores and businesses.” He added, as an afterthought, “I heard they [he wasn’t sure whom] changed our name from Calero to Gonzales, I think…or some name like that."

     "I had never heard that. Why?" I asked.

     He shrugged. "It wasn't unusual in those days," he said.

     "So, all this time the family thinks they are really Gonzales?"

     “It might have been a long time ago.”

     Before the Revolution, by all accounts, it appeared, the Gonzales family of Mitic had lived relatively well, ranchers and farmers, owners of large tracts of land, a sign of wealth in rural Mexico. “Today, it’s almost all gone, just a few ranches.”

     I reminded him when I called him in 1992, from San Juan de Los Lagos, asking the location of the family ranch, thinking it was close to San Juan. “No, Viejo,” he’d said, “it’s far from San Juan, closer to San Gaspar, maybe 45 minutes in a taxi. Our cousin, Franciso, and his family, should still be there.”

     I hopped into a taxi and headed for San Gaspar. From there, the driver, who had never driven to Mitic, asked for directions. After a grueling half-hour ride on a bumpy dirt road. I found Mitic and Francico Gonzales, working and operating the ranch. It wasn’t much of a ranch back then, mostly adobe and brick houses.

     I returned, again, in 2002, a few months after I’d interviewed my uncle. Franciso had remodeled his home, added a long veranda and shaded front porch. Adjacent to the house was a new barn, corrugated steel, large enough for trucks, tractors, and farm equipment. All around me I heard the hum of automatic milking machines. A row of cows stood under shaded stalls. A tractor was parked at the edge of a field. Francisco’s teenage-daughter kept watch over the cows. 

     A tall handsome man, probably in his early sixties, at the time, light skin bronze from the sun, and friendly eyes, wore a cowboy hat and jeans. He said, “No one from the north has visited us in many years.”

     He remembered visiting Santa Monica, maybe around 1965, where he worked with my uncle, Joe, who supervised a maintenance crew in a large apartment complex in Venice. I looked over at a crumbling adobe, right above where a small river passed. He said he kept it as a reminder of the old ranch. It was difficult for me to imagine what life must have been like when my grandparents, uncles, and aunts lived there.

     He showed me around the property, pointing out the property lines. I told him how calm and beautiful the ranch appeared, a shallow river and shaded trees, alongside the property. After, we retired inside and talked for a while. When it was time to leave, he removed his hat, wiped his brow, and told me how, a few months earlier, his teenage daughter had been kidnapped.

     “By who?”

     “Strangers. I guess one of them had had his eyes on her all along,” he said.

     He said he made, timely, telephone calls to some very important people in San Juan de Los Lagos. It didn’t take long before the police set up roadblocks, apprehended the kidnappers at the state-line, and returned his daughter.

     The irony wasn’t lost on me. I asked, "Didn't my grandfather kidnap my grandmother?"

     "Yes, yes I think I did hear it told that way," he said, “down there in the river.” He pointed to the river beyond his home.

     Strange how, even though there is much change in rural Mexico, some things never change.

     Later, when I told my uncle, Chuy, about my visit, I could tell by the tone of his voice he was pleased. He said he was glad someone in the family was still interested in the past and how much our family had sacrificed, and suffered, to start again in the U.S.