Strange that Mexico has so much ambivalence about the mother. Funny how in this crazy fragmented state of mind we call Mexico there is la chingada the raped, the most exploited, victimized and defiled mother, and there is the Blessed Mother, la Virgen de Guadalupe, the mother of all mothers. When it comes to mothers, we Mexicans have it all. And whether it is out of guilt, out of pity, or out of fear of the powerful wrath of la madre, in Mexico the mother is venerated.

The Egg of Night
Carole Pryharska
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“La madre es sagrada," my mother announced often. The mother is sacred. She believed it when she said it and fully expected to be worshipped as a result of it. Look at the many monuments to the mother we have in Mexico. Do other countries have that many, if any, monuments honoring the mother? I wonder. The United States has phallic symbols, called obelisks, all over the place - the Washington Monument being one of the largest, and Santa Fe has one that commemorates the killing of savages, but if we went toe to toe, I would wager that we would find more monumentos to la madre in Mexico than phallic symbols erected for el padre in the United States.

How well I remember our own monumento de la madre in Nogales, Sonora, the granite statue of mother and admiring son. It is still there. There is adulation in the boy’s eyes. We practically genuflected when we would pass it by on Obregon Avenue on our way to buy coffee or sugar or meat at the butcher’s. My mother never failed to point it out, “Look to your left! El monumento de la madre!" she called out proudly, as if they had erected it in her very honor.

On Mexican mother’s day, the faithful would put flowers at “la madre’s" feet. “Look at all the flowers people brought to la madre," she would say as she careened around the corner in her powder blue ’51 Ford.

While as Octavio Paz explains, a male macho chingon says, “soy tu papi," to succinctly assert that you are in his domineering presence, my mother had her own version of asserting her power and I doubt she ever read Paz. “Soy tu madre," she would declare with steel in her gaze. And when she said those words, and you didn’t hop-to, may God have mercy on your soul, for the depth of regret and the appropriate penance, was not too far behind.

The paradox of the power and weakness of the Mexican woman has always puzzled me. When sociologists like Oscar Lewis label Mexican women as passive and submissive, I have no idea what they’re talking about. In my family, you just didn’t mess with women and I had the strong impression that you especially didn’t mess with mothers.

And when it came to our own Emmita, no matter what you did to get away from the wrath of her, if you violated her laws, you were pursued, found and dealt with. Expounding about the mother’s sixth sense, she billed herself as saurina, which at the time I understood to mean simply “psychic.” It wasn’t until after her death that I read a book on Yaqui women where they define saurina as a mother who uses her psychic powers to protect her children.

The saurina factor always intrigued us. She could control us by simply saying, “I have a presentimiento.” To my then teen-age brother, she would say, “Don’t go to La Nuit tonight because I have a presentimiento,” and bam! home he was with the rest of us watching Bonanza. On Monday morning, my brother would find out there was a terrible fight at the nightclub he and his friends frequented, and his buddy Guillermo got a black eye and spent the night in a Mexican jail. My brother, thanks to el presentimiento de la madre, was spared.

With all her skills and nerve, my mother was far from perfect. She was un-educated although she bragged that she repeated each grade twice so she really got twelve years of school instead of six. She was too emotional, often violent with her words, a spoon, a shoe, or whatever else happened to be at her reach. She cared too much about her looks, and subsequently yours, and had her own very specific ideas about how the world she ruled was supposed to work. Like Porfirio Diaz who brought such beauty and tyranny to Mexico, she could give it and take it away. She could make you feel like a million bucks by noticing the small and significant things you did, like the time I spent my dollar allowance on an embroidered handkerchief for my grandmother. She bragged about it for weeks. “Guess what Ana did with her allowance this week?” I would hear her on the phone, telling my aunts, her friends, anyone who would listen. It made me happy to make her happy. Her approval was anointing.

But heaven help you if you crossed her, or wore the wrong outfit. “You look like the maid.” She announced in the lobby as I walked down the stairs of the Hotel Laval in Hermosillo, Sonora. We had accompanied our father on one of his business trips and were spending the weekend in the capital city. It was Sunday and we were going to church. My un-pressed yellow cotton sundress accessorized with red rubber sandals didn’t match her Kim Novak lined linen suit. We did not look related. She was disappointed in my choice of appropriate wardrobe for the occasion. I was thirteen and should have known better. Her public words were a splash of water on my hot, red face.

I wish I could say that she didn’t know better but when I observed her with others she could be as gracious as Grace Kelly herself. One of her favorite explanations of how to treat people diplomatically was, “con guante blanco,” with a white glove. More often than not, when she dealt in disapproval, the gloves were off.

When the gloves were off, her unleashed mother power made her a force to be reckoned with and just as she unleashed herself on us when she disapproved, she also protected us against the world with the same unfettered passion.

All of us in the family have Emmita stories but Lori, our youngest sister has the most. Perhaps it was because she had the disposition of an angel and never caused anyone any harm; perhaps it was that with her young and tender fingers she could cure my mother of her worst migraines with her famous head massage, or perhaps it was, as we most cynically called her lambiscona, she was the one who sucked up to her the most. No matter the reasons or the sibling envy, Lori’s reward is to have been the recipient of the most Emmita interventions.

There was the time that a boy was harassing Lori in Junior High. Lori took to wearing pants under her skirts and besides offending my mother’s sense of fashion, my mother had a presentimiento that all was not right with her baby girl’s world. When she questioned Lori about the odd habit of wearing pants under skirts, my sister wouldn’t tell her why. Out comes the bare light bulb hanging from a ceiling in the form of an Emmita statement, “Tengo un presentimiento!”

It turns out there was a boy, unfortunate soul, that was flipping Lori’s skirt up when she walked past him in the hallway. Lori had asked him to stop; she had told the teacher who looked the other way and claimed Lori was exaggerating and so the only other thing left to do was to wear pants under her skirt. At the time, girls couldn’t wear pants to school; it was against the rules.

Since my mother allegedly didn’t speak English (we later found out that was a lie) and the principal had been imported from some obscure town in Maine and didn’t speak Spanish, Emmita took matters into her own hands.

Another one of her skills was the fact that she could drive anything that had wheels and drive it anyway she wanted. Parnelli Jones could not hold a candle to my mother behind the wheel of a car. She understood the meaning of car-as-lethal-weapon better than anyone. Ten years had passed since she drove her beloved 51 Ford and she was now driving a Chevy stationwagon. The gold 1963 Belair Stationwagon she drove, was affectionately called el buñuelo after my father rammed it against a high wall on a narrow street in Nogales, Sonora after one too many tequilas one fateful New Year’s Eve. Nobody was hurt and in our usual way, we put a positive spin on it by christening the car after the golden sweet and deep-fried fritter traditionally eaten on December 31st.

Gazebo Love
Carole Pryharska
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After finding out the truth about Lori’s pant-under-the-skirt outfit, the first thing she did was drive el buñelo up the hill to the school and park it right in front of the office. She waited for the boy to come out the main building and walk across the street. She got out of the car and introduced herself as Lori’s mother and told the boy that from now on Lori was going to wear skirts to school, like all the other girls. That’s all she said. (The guante blanco approach).

When Lori got in the car, Emmita explained that tomorrow she would wear her little plaid orange and brown skirt with her orange sweater and matching knee socks. It would look nice with her brown and white saddle oxfords, she said. Lori, the docile and obedient angel child she was, complied and dressed the next day in the recommended attire.

Well as luck would have it, the boy, not well-versed in the subtleties of Emmita’s white glove communication, relished the opportunity to not only flip Lori’s skirt up in front of the throng of Junior High students walking down the hallway at the end of the day, but claimed that Lori was wearing dirty underwear. Emmita was parked and patiently waiting outside the school reading the newspaper when she saw red-faced Lori run across the street to the sanctuary of el buñelo.

“Let’s go,” Lori sobbed, slamming the door, humiliated in her orange and brown plaid skirt.

Emmita was silent and still.

“Let’s go, Mami. Let’s get out of here. Can’t you tell what happened?”

“Just a few more minutes,” Emmita said, as she waited for the boy to cross the street, unlock his bike and start heading back down the steep dirt road home.

“What are you doing?!” Lori exclaimed when she heard my mother rev up the engine as she watched the boy ride down the hill.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt him.”

“What!” Lori saw that Emmita’s eyes had become suddenly greener. “Mami, are you crazy?”

“I am a little,” Emmita said, “But don’t worry; it’s going to be okay.”

Careening is such a wonderful word. It implies some kind of wild abandon, some kind of disregard for conventional laws.

The boy wasn’t hurt, but with the skill of a race car driver fully in control of his machine, Emmita forced the boy to go over the sandy embankment of the arroyo below.

“Oh no!” Lori cried slinking down into the seat. “Oh no!” As they careened down the hill and back up again.

Emmita parked the buñuelo on the side of the dirt road and got out of the car. She was wearing a green corduroy dress with a wide suede matching belt and high heels. She looked down into the arroyo where the boy was picking up his dusty bike and she said, “I only give two warnings.”

The boy looked up and said not a word.

Rumors circulated Nogales Junior High that Lori’s mother was crazy but Lori never wore pants under her skirt again.