Growing up Poor

Growing up poor wasn’t bad. I didn’t know I was poor, why would I? All the other kids on the block were poor like me. Well, not like me because we tended to be the poorest of the poor. How poor were we? Go ahead, ask me. We were sooo poor, our cockroaches had to go next door to eat. Our mice wouldn’t eat the cockroaches cause our roaches were “empty calories,” they were "failure to thrive mice". Truly though, my first recollection of my boyhood home was a one room apartment in a one story tenement in south central El Paso.

I was born in El Paso, TX, a city situated on Texas/Mexico border, a mostly Mexican-American community that is representative of the broader Mexican-American population in America; and by that I mean that the local community was, and continues to be, mostly poor.  Such it was for me and my family.  I’m not sure exactly where in the city I was born, mom said I was born on Grama St and she has said I was born at 4,000 Bush St, in south central El Paso.  However, my earliest recollections from my pre-school days were on Dailey St and I tell folks that I grew up on that street.

It’s not exactly true that I grew up on Dailey St because we moved often in those days: I remember living on Dailey, in two houses on Mauer; on Colfax, two houses on Chelsea, and on El Paso Drive – all before I was in the sixth grade.  The common thread is that these homes were in south central, AKA poor, El Paso.  We were renters.  Nonetheless, I claim Dailey as the neighborhood where I grew up.

I’m not sure how old I was when we moved into that neighborhood on Dailey, but we moved out when I was about 5 years old.  The neighborhood had single family homes and a few single story apartments.  We lived in one of the apartment buildings.  Most of us were Mexican American, with one black family, the Waltons, in a yellow house in the middle of the block.  At one end of the block was San Juan Catholic Church with a small convenience store, Las Hormigitas, across the street.  At the other end of the block was a busy street and a grocery store called Leo’s.

I guess there was less than a dozen apartments in our building, immediately north of the apartment building was an alley and on the east side of the property was a large open space where residents parked their automobiles.  There were a couple of trees, no grass. 

The units did not have indoor toilets; there was a wooden outhouse by the alley that had a porcelain commode.  All residents used that toilet and everyone had to take their own paper.  This posed challenges in bad weather, during winter months, and at night.  For children, a dark, cold alley was not only uncomfortable, but it was chock full of imagined dangers such as “la India” our version of the boogey man.  My sister, the eldest, had polio and was easily frightened.  I remember her making me accompany her to the toilet to stand guard outside the privy.  This also caused another “condition” inside our home.  We had a bucket in the corner that doubled as a toilet for those times when going to the alley was ill-advised and the bucket was covered with a piece of wood to contain the emanating odor.

As long as I’m talking about plumbing, we had an indoor cold water faucet, no hot water at the sink.  There was no bathroom sink or tub in the apartment.  We had a gas pipe for the gas heater, but no gas for a water heater or a stove.  Cooking was on a kerosene stove and we had to walk to the corner store to buy the kerosene.  I remember carrying a glass jug to the store where they had a 55 gallon drum with a hand-cranked pump.  They would pump the kerosene into the glass jug for us. 
 

The kerosene stove was used for cooking and to heat the bath water.  Our baths were in a galvanized metal tub that also doubled as the washing machine.  When I first heard the expression “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” I knew exactly what it meant.  I was the youngest of five children – the baby.  My bath always came last.  It was much too laborious to change the bath water for each individual bath so we shared.  I was always last and I remember the water being a white, gray, bluish tint when it was my turn to bathe; the water was NOT clear for my bath.
 

Our apartment was one long room.  In that one room was the sink, the stove, the heater, the front door and our meager furnishings.  Our parents’ bed was toward the rear of the room.  The room was partitioned with a large canvas curtain.  Mom and dad slept on a bed in “their room” and all the kids (5) slept on one bed in the front room.  I guess we looked like a plate of rolled tacos.

There were a couple of other apartment units on our block, but most were private residences and from what I can remember they all had indoor pipes for gas and water, and they had a private bathroom.

Yeah, we were the poorest of the poor, but make no mistake, the entire neighborhood was poor. We were a group of low income Mexican American families, mostly two parent households in which the men were unskilled laborers and the women were stay at home moms. Across the street were two families, the Lopez and the Torres clans. Ofelia Lopez had a crush on me and I remember the scandal when her older sister Pilar was found doing the deed with some unidentified male in a car in the alley.

At the corner was San Juan Catholic Church. True to our, Hispanic culture, it played a central role in the neighborhood. On Sundays afternoons we would go to the church grounds where parents were baptizing their babies. After baptisms the god parents would come out and throw candy or coins for the neighborhood children, pipiluya it was called.  The neighborhood children would rush to pick up some candy or coins and the baptism party would depart in a caravan of cars.  The church had a grotto thing where we had the Virgen de Guadalupe and there was a water fountain. We would scoop up holy water in our dirty hands to enjoy a cool drink, mindless of the how dirty our hands were.  That water tasted different, it was good, but it was different from our tap water.  On late afternoons, after school, there were catechism classes for those preparing for their First Holy Communion.

In the winter, during the Christmas season we had posadas which are an annual reenactment of Joseph and Mary’s search a place to stay where the baby Jesus could be born. We started at the church, a procession of parishioners carrying a life size statue of the baby Jesus, and we would go to certain houses for a chocolate type drink, champurrado, and some cookies, biscochos. We had the annual offering of flowers to the Virgen de Guadalupe every spring. I don’t know where the name comes from, but she’s really the Virgin Mary, the translation for Mary is Maria, but she is not the Virgen de Maria. In Mexico, the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant, Juan Diego, just like she appeared in Portugal, the Lady of Fatima, and the Lady of Lourdes in Lourdes, France, in our culture she is known as the Virgen de Guadalupe.

This was my world from my first memories until I was about five years old. We had a black and white television and a phonograph. Mom and dad never married, but they lived together for about 13 years. Mom worked at a drive-in diner six days a week, Linda’s Jet Drive In, then she got a good job in the cafeteria of a pant manufacturing plant. Dad was an orderly in mental ward, then he got a job at the garage where they fixed the city buses. I remember waiting for them to come walking down the street after getting off work cause mom might have some sweet leftovers from the cafeteria or dad might have something leftover in his black lunch box.

We were five kids, I being the youngest, with three sisters and a brother. Since my brother was six years older, he was much too old for me to keep up with so I was condemned to life with three girls. They made a sissy out of me and I got picked on at school because of it. To make matters worse, boys started picking on me and then my sister Lucy would come to my defense. How humiliating, getting rescued by a GIRL! But what I remember - I remember fondly. I liked my brothers and sisters, still do. They are my favorite people in the world, next to my two daughters, of course.

We lived on beans, Spanish rice, fideo (vermicelli) and home made tortillas. My sister would form the assembly line and make tortillas. Being poor wasn’t all that bad. Mom and dad and siblings, lots of bigger people to look after me. After my siblings started going to school, I had to stay home with a maid. Back then it was not unusual to have a maid, they came from Juarez, wetbacks, and did domestic work. If it wasn’t for those maids, mom would not have been able to work and that would have made poverty a little more stinging. Life got worse after those days living on Dailey Street in El Paso, but the poverty got better. Go figure. Stay tuned for those details at a later time.