This is a continuation of the "Happy Birthday Tata Ulla" blog. What follows is a patchwork portrait of my aunt and godmother Julia Munguia in 1950-60s Nogales, Arizona, a sleepy border town of seven thousand plus souls, separated from Nogales, Sonora by chainlink and barbed wire.
My "Tata Ulla" as witnessed through my young eyes and adolescent brain. It wasn't until much later that I began to "get" who she was. I'd never met anyone quite like her - a petite, funny, maddening, eccentric soul who was born and lived in the same house for 90 years.
I remember the furniture, the rotary dial phone, the piano, and furniture fixed and frozen in time. Re-arranging anything was unnatural. This order was disrupted when sister Leonor married and moved out of the house leaving the mother, who didn't drive, and the macho, autocratic father to dance a new dance with the remaining daughter, Julia.
Did she ever see it coming? Young Mexican girls were expected to marry and raise a family. Becoming a caretaker, a spinster was not ever imagined. I wondered if there was ever a moment when she just might have considered packing her bags and stealing away in the middle of the night. Doubtful. Even if that thought had crossed her mind, she squelched it, the tug of her Mexican/Catholic upbringing shut the door on any other life choices. Having a beau didn't seem likely either. Even if marriage were an option, it was doubtful that any 1950s caballero was going to come calling, propose marriage, and inherit two aging parents in the bargain, uh-uh.
Besides, there was the job: full-time secretary to the school superintendent and a fixture among students and teachers, a two-minute drive to the office, in at 8 out at 4, summer vacations, and as recession-proof and low-stress a job as any in town. A perfect fit for our increasingly eccentric, mildly OCD Tata Ulla.
Fortunately, she wasn't completely on her own. Two sisters and a brother lived five minutes away. This meant ritual Sunday visits and an audience with Mama Milia (Emilia) and Papa Grande (Jose Maria). Winter visits spent in the living room and summer visits on the porch.
MM knew maybe five words in English and PG knew enough to get by with his feedstore customers so all the chatter was in Spanish. MM would fuss over us repeating sweet grandmotherly nothings. She'd grab and press us against her talc-scented ampleness. PG, would smile and say things like "Ay Carai!" while keeping a safe distance -- one would have thought we were radioactive.
I don't recall them ever setting foot in our home. My guess is that MM played the "mother-in-law" card one too many times and Dad told her to "stuff it" in Spanish--a much more colorful language for insults. After that, other than my parents' wedding photos, I don't believe there's any photographic evidence of Dad and the in-laws ever breathing the same air, ever.
Our Tata Ulla chose to ignore the drama--not having children of her own, she adopted us. She was the doting aunt who drove us to the obligatory Sunday mass in her Plymough 4-door sedan. The entire mass experience was torture which we endured knowing that a pancake breakfast at Sunderman's Colonial House would follow. We were hers without the inconvenience of parenting.
With the exception of the polio pandemic and the JFK assassination, she never seemed to pay much attention to events beyond the town's city limits. Other cultural rumblings: Brown v. Board of Education, Cuban and Hungarian revolutions, the Korean War, the Cold War, Sputnik, Martin-Luther-King, Little-Rock-Selma-Birmingham, the Beat Generation, Elvis-Chuck Berry-Bob-Dylan-the-Beatles, and Viet Nam were never topics that surfaced in polite conversation -- unladylike is my guess.
In the early 1950's, the outside world became hard to ignore when television insinuated itself into our sleepy little border town. I remember seeing my first television set in the front window of Larriva's Furniture Store. It was an expensive novelty, out of reach for many, and too new and faddish for Julia. On any given evening people would gather on the sidewalk in front of the store, transfixed by the black and white images flickering on a 12-inch screen -- a tube in a box that ushered in a cultural revolution.
More to follow...
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