When I was growing up on the border I did nothing around the house except wash my own underclothes - panties, slips, camisoles and pajamas. I washed them by hand because my mother said they would get ruined in the old roller machine. My mother did the cooking and the rest of the wash.

Monoyama Genre
Peter Voshefski
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The maid did everything else - la muchacha is what my mother called her - “the girl.” We had several girls throughout the years. My mother called the maids, muchachas; others called them criadas a term my mother frowned upon and one we weren’t allowed to use; and still others called them gatas -- implying that they were stray cats and treated them as such. My mother never had to admonish us about the use of the term gata. I had never been too fond of cats and to call a girl a gata gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Some people made their girls wear uniforms, another custom my mother disapproved of. Not only was it cruel to make someone who earned so little money wear a uniform, she said, it was also pretentious in our middle class house of only three bedrooms.

Being a “girl”, especially if they were young, had its advantages, mostly economic. Poor rural families would send their daughters to the cities to work for middle and upper class families and it was a quasi-respectable thing to do for a living. It was better than staying in the village and suffer hunger and it was certainly better than taking the wrong road and ending up a prostitute. Being a "girl" was a way for these girls to work, send money home, and stay out of harm’s way. The biggest risk the girls took was in being sexually exploited by unscrupulous patrones. My father was a man of honor in that regard. Besides the fact that he worked most of the time in Mexico and wasn’t home much, his bad habits were tightly contained inside a bottle of tequila, so our home was safe.

For as long as I could remember, we had a girl. They came to us with their meager possessions: an extra change of clothes, a small bag of sundries. They slept in a foldout cot in our bedroom and were given one drawer to put their things in. They stayed all week, leaving on Saturday evening and returning on Monday morning when my mother would pick them up at the border crossing. The girls came and went; some lasted a few days; some a few months, and if it worked out, they lasted years.

There was Panchita who had to get fired because she flirted with my father and what kind of foolishness was that, so back to Caborca she went. There was Ramona who was so fat and loved to eat so much that my mother had to hide the food to no avail because Ramona was such a thorough housekeeper that she found all the hidden goodies and ate them anyway. There was Natalia who looked like Jackie Kennedy and managed to dress like her too - and how she did that on ten dollars a week was beyond explanation until we read about her arrest one Monday morning when she didn’t show up for work. Our house was just a front; apparently, selling heroin was a much more lucrative endeavor than being “a girl.”

Some of these girls that came and went weren’t girls. There were older - women who had to support the children they left behind with their families in the village, homeless women who hadn’t married or had no family.

In spite of the fact that it was cheap to have a girl and great to live in a spotless house, it wasn’t always easy. One time we had this older woman, Rosenda from Magdalena and you could tell she felt uneasy with the arrangement. She liked to read books and after she ate her dinner, which was always after we ate dinner, and after she cleaned the kitchen for the night, she would ask my mother if she could sit in the living room and read since she didn’t like to watch television. You could tell my mom wasn’t crazy about the idea of Rosenda sitting in the living room. The living room was the special room where none of us were allowed to go into. It was for other people, not us and it was certainly not for the “help.” It had the good velvet sofa and the glass cabinet with all the crystal stuff and the Lladró figurines of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It was strictly for company but my mom didn’t say, “no,” when Rosenda asked if she could read in there. She said yes. She explained to us that Rosenda wasn’t like the other girls we had had; she was older and had been a schoolteacher; she had fallen on bad times so she was working as a girl.

Well it happened one day that my mom made chicken in mole Poblano for dinner. As usual, we ate dinner before Rosenda. And we all said how delicious the mole was and my mom even said that it was the best mole she had ever made. We got carried away and by the time Rosenda sat down to dinner, all that was left of the mole Poblano was a pile of bones in the pot. I remember it was very cold that night and it was December because my mom had gone up to the attic and pulled down the plastic elf she always placed on the roof before Christmas.

My mom tried to be nice and she said, “Rosenda, I am so embarrassed. The kids and I ate all the mole and all that is left is the sauce. There’s beans and rice, but all the chicken is gone. I’m sorry.”

Rosenda went up to the stove and peered inside the large pot with mole sauce and the bones and she took the blue enamel spoon that was lodged inside the pot and hit the stove with it and started screaming and saying, “The time of slavery is over!” She kept hitting the stove with the spoon and repeating this over and over again.

Well, no maid had every screamed at my mom and my mom didn’t know what to do or what to say and she said, “Please, Rosenda, we didn’t do it on purpose. The sauce is so dark, I couldn’t really see that the meat was gone,” and she tried to explain and Rosenda got the large enamel spoon and threw it across the kitchen at which point my mother said it was time for us to go to bed, which was odd because there was no such thing as bed time at our house; you went to bed when you were tired and that was it. But we all scurried out of the kitchen and my mom followed us into the television room. When the Lawrence Welk show was over, we heard the front door that led to the outside from the living room close and my mom looked at us in the dark room and said, “I think she’s gone.” We never saw Rosenda again.

Rare Rain Rarities
Peter Voshefski
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Yoli was our best girl. She came to us when she was thirteen years old and I was ten. Yoli was from Michoacan and had eight brothers and sisters and white skin. She slept on the cot in our bedroom and didn’t seem to mind.

At night, we ate dinner first, and then she ate and washed the dishes. At bedtime with the lights off she would tell us stories of her family, and how their father left one day to go to work in the United States and never came back and how her mother Berta, brought them to Nogales to see if they could find him. Yoli was the oldest of the family and helped her mother support her younger brothers and sisters; she had a sweetness about her and was so polite that we learned our best manners from her.

Her best talent, besides making killer flour tortillas, was that she could tell a mean story in the dark. She told us stories of her village, and how they used to put on variety shows and make their own costumes out of crepe paper. Once she told us a story about a pretty girl with big hips who went to work as a maid in the city and got fired and became a prostitute and worked in Canal Street in a red dress. Another time she told us about an evil man in her village who liked to scare little kids for sport and how the men in the village got together and beat him up and almost killed him if it weren’t for the priest interfering at the last minute.

We got to be pretty close and Yoli became like our sister. She started calling us manito and manita - little brother and little sister. She was very affectionate and would kiss my baby sister and I goodnight. My brother who was older than Yoli didn’t get a kiss and he would tease her and ask, “Hey Yolanda, don’t I get a kiss?”

And she would say, “No señorito, you certainly don’t!”

He would laugh at her and she would smile softly and ignore him.

Yoli started going to mass with us on Sundays and my mom bought her black patent leather shoes like mine and gave her a red plaid dress that was too big for me and she became part of our family. She was pretty and had white skin and sometimes she would be mistaken for a real sister and at mass one day a lady said to my mother, “Emma, I didn’t know you had an older girl!” My mother smiled and said, “You didn’t?” And when we walked away we all had a good laugh.

One night after the tenth repeat performance of the story about the mean man who got beaten to a pulp in her village, I asked her, “Yoli, why do you always eat dinner after us?” I felt bad asking her because after the Rosenda experience, I had a pretty good idea but I asked anyway, and she said, “ because you and I are not the same. ”

It was dark in our bedroom when she said that and she didn’t say anything else so I went to sleep feeling bad about asking such a question. The next evening at dinner while Yoli heated up tortillas and we ate our papas con chorizo, I asked my mom point blank: “Why can’t Yoli eat with us instead of by herself?”

Warm Blue Utah
Peter Voshefski
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My mom looked at me with those giant hazel eyes of hers and didn’t answer. My brother who was older and had a more sarcastic way of being since he was nearly fifteen said, “Maybe it’s because we’re better than she is,” and he filled his mouth full with this huge tortilla and his cheeks looked like they were about to explode and he arched his eyebrows teasing Yoli.

My mother gave him a look that if looks could melt you down he would have been a puddle of ooze under the table. “Yoli can eat with us,” my mother said, still giving my brother the evil eye. She went up to Yoli and kissed her on the head like she always did me and said, “Sit down, Hija,” and Yoli sat down with us at the round kitchen table and my mother served her chorizo con papas before she served herself and sat down.

My brother said, “Amá this is the best chorizo con papas you ever made!”

My mom glared at him and he glared back and then we all started laughing. Yoli stayed with us for four more years until she was seventeen and met a young man who worked at the Post Office across the line. When she got married we all went to her house for wedding cake.

Yoli was our best girl.