{"id":2471,"date":"2018-12-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-01T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/?p=2471"},"modified":"2023-06-28T17:57:52","modified_gmt":"2023-06-29T00:57:52","slug":"menudo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/","title":{"rendered":"Menudo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Menudo<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n By<\/span>Lynn Tamayo<\/strong>\n \n December 1, 2018<\/span>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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My mother continued to wear her wedding ring after my father drove away. It didn\u2019t dissuade the male charity, though. She wasn\u2019t particularly pretty. Even as a child, I could see that. But she had a way of joking and using her smile to make men do pretty much anything for her. Her voice was deep and raspy from years of smoking, and she laughed loud and hardy. She didn\u2019t pretend to be offended by men\u2019s jokes like other women did. The garbage man took \u201cprohibited\u201d items. The neighbor\u2019s gardener mowed our front lawn on his way from one paying customer to the other. Sometimes the milkman left two bottles with a charge slip for one. A nickel couldn\u2019t get you much at the T&R market and the fruit was always bruised. But Ralph the owner extended credit to my mother for just about anything. He would even extend her payment due dates. He would sell her two rolls of toilet paper and give her three, or sell her a box of laundry detergent and add a bottle of fabric softener to the bag. Sometimes he would give her recently expired meat without charging a penny.<\/p>\n

The first time I saw my mother smile in that special way was a year after my father had left. It was Sunday and most people in our neighborhood ate menudo on Sunday \u2014 except for us. We ate menudo on New Year\u2019s Day, or when a neighbor invited us to Sunday breakfast. Eggs were less expensive and sometimes Father John, the parish priest, would give us a loaf of fresh bread. I didn\u2019t know we were different from the other families. There was always food in the kitchen and clothes to wear. The clothes she made from the small scraps of fabric she kept at the back of her closet didn\u2019t look any different from my friends\u2019 clothes purchased at Sears or JC Penney.<\/p>\n

This Sunday wasn\u2019t like other Sundays. It was special. It was my mother\u2019s birthday. I watched her finger through her purse and reach down between the couch cushions looking for coins. I watched her apply red lipstick and brush out her curly auburn hair. Then I went with her to Juanito\u2019s Bakery. Customers were lined up outside the building with empty pots to buy the rich Mexican soup for Sunday breakfast. The smell of roasted red chili peppers, tortillas de mano, and steaming tamales filled the air. You might not have been hungry when you got there, but you were starving by the time you got to the front of the line.<\/p>\n

The bakery charged for the menudo by the ladle. \u201cQuanto?\u201d the man behind the counter asked. \u201cFour,\u201d she answered. She opened her coin purse, shrugged her shoulders and smiled. I noticed that they seemed to be staring at each other. \u201cOne. My child support check hasn\u2019t come yet,\u201d she said, tilting her head to the side and grinning. She didn\u2019t get child support checks. This was before the Deadbeat Dad laws. Then, only men with some sense of responsibility voluntarily paid child support. Our kitchen pantry, once overflowing with food purchased with my father\u2019s paycheck from the Ford Motor Company, had been reduced to one shelf of discount canned vegetables. The man folded in his lips, put four ladles-full into the pot, added a pata, and winked at my mother. \u201cUno,\u201d he said to the cashier.<\/p>\n

The four-for-one menudo always tasted better than the regular menudo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Lynn Tamayo<\/strong> is a writer living in the Los Angeles area. She is studying English\/Creative Writing and Narrative Structure at the University of Southern California. Her work has been published in Semantics Arts and Literature Magazine<\/em>, Los Angeles, and in The Underground<\/em> literary magazine, New York. Lynn\u2019s creative work grows from a desire to encourage the elimination of stereotypes and labeling by presenting an intimate look at the individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-2471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2018","tag-prose"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMenudo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Menudo - Palaver Arts Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Palaver Arts Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/palaver.arts.magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-12-01T08:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-06-29T00:57:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/175\/2023\/06\/palaver-logo.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"710\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"198\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"akcannon\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"akcannon\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/live-usc-dornsife.pantheonsite.io\/palaver\/#\/schema\/person\/8ac801b3c8176b6860207b43ecbe9e78\"},\"headline\":\"Menudo\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-12-01T08:00:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-06-29T00:57:52+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\"},\"wordCount\":1,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/live-usc-dornsife.pantheonsite.io\/palaver\/#organization\"},\"keywords\":[\"Prose\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Issue 04: Fall 2018\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/palaver\/fall-2018\/menudo\/\",\"name\":\"Menudo - 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