Mi Mama

My mom, like most people’s moms, grew up in a time fundamentally different from ours. Not just the time, but the place, and the people, and the beliefs they all held. Guadalajara through the 1970s and 1980s was a uniquely Mexican clash of Catholicism and hard rock. My mom and her friends consumed American films and stories like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, fascinated by the big ‘Hollywood production value.’ They listened to songs about relationships, heartbreak, and lost love. My mom loved Luis Miguel.

She was the third sibling out, after her sister Karina and her brother Jair. Fourth and final was Sayra. My mom says she learned about American music from Jair’s records – he loved Billy Joel as a teenager, and the sounds filled their three-story home on Avenida Guadalupe. Abuelo, my grandfather, was a doctor. He had his own practice, specialized in plastic surgery. Abuela owned properties in Mazatlan, a small coastal town about a 6-hour drive from Guadalajara. Their combination of incomes put my family in the upper class of Mexican society. My mom and her siblings were sent to the best schools and had a membership to a club deportivo, which I guess was the equivalent of a country club in Mexico. It had all the same amenities — sports facilities, restaurants, and trainers – but a lot less golf and a lot more soccer.

Abuela’s father was from Japan. There was no missing that part of her identity. Maria Teresa Shimizu was her full name and she looked entirely Japanese. So my mom and her siblings had a culturally-mixed upbringing, their home peppered with Asian decor and Mexican cuisine. Their Japanese heritage resonated especially strongly with her older brother Jair, who would go on to live in Japan for several years and later design his own house with a sunken table and a tea room.

My mom and her siblings all attended university. The family had a long line of dentists and doctors, and pursuing higher education was not up for debate. Most of my mom’s girlfriends got married straight out of high school and she could have done the same – but she came from a family where, for generations, education was of the highest importance and value.

This didn’t go over well with Roberto, the man she was dating at 20. He was 6 years older than her and they’d been dating since my mom was 16. He told my mom to drop out of school so they could get married and she could assume her position as his dutiful wife and as mother to his children. He saw no reason to wait any longer and told her to choose: her degree or their relationship. She rejected the proposal and that was the end of it.

My mom had other suitors before meeting my dad and never put their wishes over her own, either. There was Alejandro, the close friend she had dated briefly, who asked her to dinner weeks before her wedding and tried to convince her to call off her engagement and be with him. With sympathy and pity, she said no. And of course, there was Tomas, the non-committal but enticing man that my mom flirted back and forth with for years. He had too much of an ego to be forward with his emotions, and in a flurry of regret, he sent a cassette and a letter to my mom’s house a year into her marriage. The cassette had a single song: “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” by The Shirelles.

She wouldn’t.

My family was filled with strong women who acknowledged their privilege and used it to seek out opportunities and jobs. Tia Soraya, one of Abuelo’s sisters, was a teacher for decades. Tia Marta was a dentist. Tia Monica still works as a dentist and Tia Kari owns her own business. Abuela’s property business was time-consuming. She managed land and apartment complexes in the most meticulous way. My mom studied tourism and hospitality in school, and immediately secured a job as a travel agent. But as forward-thinking as all of these women seemed, there were still societal barriers deeply rooted into Mexican culture. The hippie feminists and equality advocates that had come into prominence in 1970s America weren’t making their way over to Mexico. As teenagers, my mom and her friends never talked about sex. It was a taboo and a deeply un-Catholic topic of discussion. Wage inequality was rampant and no one ever really addressed it. Growing up, my mom didn’t have a single friend who came from a non-Catholic family. Everyone went to church, everyone followed traditions of courtship and parental involvement in romantic relationships. It was cool to be wholesome. When there is a homogeneity of beliefs, it’s hard for the spark of change to happen.

So in Guadalajara, it didn’t. Women assumed submissive positions to men, and men, too, faced their own sets of challenges with their deeply-embedded machismo complexes. There was one way to be a “true man” and no way around it. Freedom of expression and experimentation when it came to identity, values, or even clothing, were not tolerated.

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Marrying my dad was probably the most experimental thing my mom ever did. He was born in Egypt but moved to Los Angeles at five, where he grew up in a small apartment on the West Side. He had no siblings. His upbringing was fully Arabic and stories of his struggle to assimilate always make me weirdly sad. He once showed up to a classmate’s birthday party in elementary school in a full formal suit. In Egypt, it was normal to dress up to celebrate a birthday, but as he looked around the room at a bunch of kids in jeans, tees, and converse high tops, it became clear that he was different.

Growing up, his whole life was church. His church friends were his only friends and he would spend entire weekends hanging out with them, watching TV, listening to records, and skating around Los Angeles. He had the same relatively wholesome upbringing as my mom and felt comfortable in his bubble of religion. After attending UCLA, he pursued a career in music. He put aside his college degree and spent several years playing gigs, mostly Latin jazz, salsa, and (briefly) rock in a cover band.

In his early 20s, he and his church group would go on vacations together during the summer and winter recesses. One winter, they decided to go to Mazatlan, the town where Abuela’s properties were, and where my mom and her whole family also happened to be vacationing that very same Christmas. My dad saw my mom on the beach playing volleyball (I imagine slow motion, dramatic music playing in this moment) and was captivated. He approached her and after some brief small talk, asked her to get drinks at the hotel that night and something clicked – they dated long-distance for several years. They both lived at home that entire time, so parental watch was always present. My dad brought his mother to Mexico to show my mom’s parents that he came from a good family. They were never allowed to sleep in the same room, but the supervised romance was romance nonetheless. They always say the center of their relationship is God, and that despite all of their ups and downs over the past 25 years, that that is a grounding fact for them. They married in 1990.

The high of marriage soon dwindled and depression crept in. My mom had never lived anywhere but Guadalajara, and she soon felt like everything was too much. Of all her siblings, my mom was the only one that married someone not Mexican, was the only one that ever actually left Mexico. All of her siblings still live within driving distance of the house they grew up in. Meanwhile, my dad was busy at work all day then busy studying for the bar exam after hours. He wanted to work hard to provide for my mom, but she couldn’t do the same. She wasn’t an American citizen and her B.A. from the University of Guadalajara was nothing but a slip of paper to American employers. Especially with a degree in tourism – a field of study that didn’t really exist in the United States – she was uniquely unqualified for most positions. To make matters worse, her English wasn’t strong by any means, and she felt very, very small in the big sea of Los Angeles.

She called Mexico everyday, paying extra for the long-distance phone plan. She started going to therapy. My dad tried to integrate her into the community he already had, but the fact was that he, too, had broken the norms of his family and friends. Most of his friends married from within the church, or had at least married American women. My dad showed up with a young, Mexican-Japanese bride and it would take time for her to learn their inside jokes and long-standing traditions. There was no haven for her.

Things started looking up when her mother-in-law got her an administrative job at the UCLA office where she worked. The job was monotonous, but it was a job, and it got her out of the house from 9 to 6 everyday. In that job and in every small job my mom would have thereafter, she always befriended the people that were often overlooked. The janitors, cleaning crew, back room assistants, and bus boys of every employer. They all spoke Spanish and most of them had, at one point, also come to America and faced the desolation and strangeness of being in a new country. My mom has always found comfort in the Spanish language and the people who speak it. She is instantly home.

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My mom and dad enjoyed married life for five years before deciding to have me. Soon after that, they moved from North Hollywood to a small home in Encino. My dad was now employed at a law firm, and my mom’s life became defined by her motherhood. My sister Leilah was born two years later. We got a dalmatian and named her Spotty. My mom had her own car – a black Jeep Cherokee.

She was a gracious mother, fiercely devoted to her children, working tirelessly to make our lives the best they could be. She lost sleep, but it didn’t matter to her. Afternoons were spent on our shaded porch, playing games, painting, listening to music, or watching Spanish cartoons. She put on the songs of Topogigio, the Spanish mouse very similar to Mickey Mouse. He sang the songs that reminded her of being young, so our home echoed with the sounds of his squeaky, Latin voice, and the strangely catchy showtunes. My sister and I loved The Wizard of Oz, so she spent months painting a mural on the wall of the room we shared: Dorothy and her friends on the way to the Emerald City. It took up the entire wall next to our wooden bunk-beds with blue sheets. One year after she finished it, we moved to the new house, a couple miles away. The new owners painted over it immediately.

My mom got her citizenship when I was in elementary school, after a long and rigorous process, complete with ruminations and scrutiny over her commitment to and knowledge of American history and anthems. There was a ceremony downtown. She was handed a diploma, alongside an auditorium full of other immigrants looking to better their lives. We went out to eat afterwards, I can’t remember where.

Soon after, my mom enrolled in culinary school. She went into full ‘student mode,’ staying up late studying for her exams on the different spices, the temperatures at which certain foods should be cooked, and the technical terms for preparation techniques. We didn’t see much of her at this time, but we were the taste testers for all of her practice meals. She graduated at the top of her class. We ate at Marie Callender’s afterwards. No restaurant could taste as good as my mom’s food, but we figured it would be good to give her a break from cooking.

She worked at several restaurants following graduation but found that the schedules were too demanding. She cooked and cleaned late into the night on the weekends. The kitchen was hectic and stressful, and the joys of preparing gourmet dinners were clouded and then muted by the shrill yells of head chefs who expected her to put her children second and be on call for any shift at any time.

A string of restaurant jobs wore her down, and she decided to sneak into the world of pastries. She started at Viktor Benes, a modest bakery located inside the grocery store near our house. She was the only woman in the kitchen and the only one with any sort of formal training. The staff was comprised entirely of Mexican men who’d been there 20 years, most likely illegally and with infinite dedication and loyalty. They arrived at 5 am for ingredient prep and left at the end of the day, depended on the job for any sort of stability, unlike my mom, who viewed it as supplemental income and a way to improve her skills. It was dull at first, piping the same cupcakes for hours on end, placing strawberries on fruit tarts for days on end. The owner of the bakery was not Mexican, and was blatantly racist toward his staff. He made comments at my mother especially because she was a woman, but she knew the job could help her in the future. It was only two blocks from our home, and she was finished by 3 everyday. So she sucked it up. Over several years, she fine-tuned her cake-decorating skills and got to be in charge of special orders. She proudly showed us photos of her creations. The job was far from glamorous or exciting, but she was cooking. She was doing something she loved.

She always made the best desserts for our birthdays. My favorite was strawberries-and-cream cake. She put her heart and soul into everything she made for us, and I was lucky to come home every night from school to a fully-prepared meal waiting to be eaten. We knew she missed home because she would spend weeks making traditional Mexican dishes. Posole, a warm hominy soup piled with fresh vegetable toppings, was one of her go-to’s. She always made it around the holidays. There were the flautas, chilaquiles, sopes, and gorditas. They were all variations on the same ingredients – corn tortillas or corn chips, beans, meat, cabbage, queso fresco, and my mom’s homemade salsa. I think of my childhood and I can’t separate it from these dishes. I think of waking up on Christmas morning to the smell of tamales, which my mom had spent weeks preparing. Chicken and tomato sauce spew out of the moist masa, which we unwrapped rapidly. I remember carne asada on summer days. We knew it was a carne asada day when my mom took the dusty cover off the barbeque in the yard. She seared the meat until it was crispy and it was always accompanied by the best guacamole.

I have yet to taste a guacamole as good as hers. I never knew if my mom’s food was really spectacular or if we just thought it was because my mom made it. As a child, I thought that there was no one in the whole world who could make sopa de frijoles as good as my mom. I was convinced that her flautas were better than the flautas made by anyone in the entire Latin American region. My mom always said the special ingredient was love, and we laughed because it was silly, but I think it was probably true.

Sarah Yanni is a senior at USC majoring in Narrative Studies. Her writing focuses largely on her own experience growing up in a Spanish-speaking home, the awkwardness of rebellion against tradition, and the undeniable ties to family despite it all. In 2016, she was admitted to the Under The Volcano Writer’s Program in Mexico and had the opportunity to workshop with her favorite writer, Sandra Cisneros. She lives online at: sarahsophiayanni.com