The Challenges My Mother Faced

My mother came to New York City at the age of 26 in 1934, I think it was. My father was already here. He came in 1929. They met in New York, got married in 1941. She had more formal education than my father. When she left Puerto Rico, she had already, well, many years before, she had gone through sophomore year, I think, of high school at Ponce High School in Puerto Rico. And she had had a difficult life already. She was an orphan by the time she was 13, so she was raised from that point on by her grandparents. But it's a murky kind of relationship. Someday I would love to look into that more because one of them was also her aunt or her uncle, I forget what the situation was.

And they had a daughter who was five years older than my mother, but her name was Pedrita. And Pedrita was the only surviving child of 13, I believe. And so you can imagine how they treated her. She was like the princess of the house. And I think my mother was more like the Cinderella and I think she just had a really hard life. So for a young Puerto Rican woman to leave the island in 1934, go on that ship and come to the States was a feat of such courage that especially as I got older, I just marveled at that, how she was able to do that. Now, of course, she came to live with somebody because a young woman would never, even of her age, would never have left and live on her own. So she lived with an aunt and I believe that she met my father at some get-together of the family and her aunt was involved in some way.

She worked in a candy factory. That's the only job that I remember her having before she met my father or maybe after she met him before they were married. I'm sure that she left that job right away as women often did when they got married and then the three kids came in pretty quick succession.

Then she stayed home and she was the homemaker, but she also, by the time Papi had his bodega, she was working with him and it was not easy because they had my brother and he needed constant attention, but she would take him with her to the bodega. Lydia and I also put in our time at the bodega. Me, a lot more, I think. I just spent a lot of time there and I loved serving people and so on when I was like eight, nine, 10 years old. So they were a pretty good team, but it was a very hard life for him all those hours that he put in, for my mother, all the hours and then at home and taking care of three kids and one with severe special needs and that fifth floor walk-up apartment going up and down several times a day was not easy.

So I have to say, I used to think that my mother was sort of passive and very reserved, and I got to understand later the kind of sacrifices she made for us and for the family; it could not have been easy for her.