One of my favorite stories regarding my tía Flora, who was not just my aunt but became a friend (meaning, once I was grown, we often enjoyed a good “just between us girls” laugh together), took place in the 1970s when she would have been in her forties. Tía Flora and my mother did not share the same father; their widowed mother remarried before dying young. My mother’s father, from his photographs, was evidently indio. They were from the state of Guanajuato, which is inland. Tía Flora’s father came from the port city of Veracruz, where ships once arrived carrying slaves from Africa. Veracruz is permeated with Caribbean culture: marimbas and fried plantains, tall “mulattos” (as they were known and how my mamá’s half sister would also have been seen), and palm breezes coming in from now oil-spilled beaches.
Tía Flora inherited her father’s kinky hair, which she always kept closely cropped, a look that enhanced her pretty face with the large gold hoop earrings she favored most of her life. She was certain she also got her love of music from this father she hardly knew, who gave her no reason to think so but who, she came to believe, had come to México by boat from Cuba as a young sailor or stowaway. (He did bear the same surname as the island’s revolutionary dictator, after all.) Ah, what difference would it all make? Tía Flora thought, cherishing the notion of a bloodline to Havana. Before the Cuban Revolution, when Tía Flora spent her teen years working in the kitchen of a private residence in la capital, she listened to Benny Moré, Cachao López, and Miguel Matamoros, who brought their sones, boleros, and mambos from that country to México.
She was a girl dreaming like all teens dreamed, and what she began to dream about was an island where the air smelled of butterfly jasmine, young people spent their evenings sipping rum drinks from coconuts and eating guava sweets, a far-off land surrounded by salt water—nothing like the asphalt density of Mexico City, where she was born and grew into a young woman with generous hips that swished to a palm rhythm of their own when she walked.
My aunt never made it to Havana. She never danced to “Lagrimas Negras” under a Cuban moon. She never worked her naturally copper-colored body into a swimsuit to lie out on a beach, not in Havana, Veracruz, or later in Chicago, where she and my mother took all of us children to the Twelfth Street Beach plenty of times during the summers. Neither of them went in to bathe with us splashing, tireless children. They watched from the shore with sandy tacos wrapped in wax paper and hard-boiled eggs and Kool-Aid in a big thermos, all of which we had carried on the very long jaunt from our inner-city flats. Too many unruly kids to pile on a bus might have been their thinking. (Or anything to save a buck, which could have been my mother’s motto.)
When she was old enough, maybe fifteen or sixteen, Flora left the kitchen she grew up working in and, soon after arriving in Nuevo Laredo to join her grandparents, married a soldier. After two children and before the age of twenty, she was widowed. She remarried—a Tex-Mex field worker with a pencil-thin mustache and Western boots—and my mother urged her younger sister and the new husband to come up north to Chicago. My aunt had learned to cook a wide range of delicacies, and she had no problem adding to her menu her norteño husband’s preferences: flour tortillas, pinto beans, fried potatoes and eggs, and, of course, lots of red meat. Tía Flora was never a woman who liked to argue, so she kept her husband happy. But she did love to dance, which he did not. Unfortunately, the cowboy husband never came around, not even to slow dance to please his wife.
By the seventies, salsa was all the rage. Tía Flora developed an ear for the hot rhythms coming in from New York to Chicago, turning them on low on the radio or tuning in to watch the bands on the Spanish channel on the portable TV she kept in the kitchen to keep up with the popular telenovelas. Not normally the jealous type, my aunt’s husband resented the swashbuckling actor, Andrés García, who was a regular on the Spanish soaps.
One time, my aunt vividly recounted to me over one of our savory lunches, her husband had had it with her mooning over the actor. Andrés García not only always got the girl, he even got the wives watching him on TV. My aunt’s husband said as much as he walked passed the little TV and finished off his resentment with an actual hard kick to the set. Sparks flew out of the picture tube. He went out the back door, smug and satisfied. My tía Flora stood stunned by the stove, where she had gotten a clear view of it all from a few feet away. Her husband had slammed the door behind him. By the time he got downstairs and went outside, however, if it wasn’t for her whistle that gave him just enough warning to get out of the way, the busted television she dropped from the second floor window would have landed right on his head.
That wasn’t the story I wanted to share about my live-wire tía Flora, although that one was a good one, too. We were friends, confidantes, as I have already mentioned, mostly in the way traditional married women with children had friends—in the kitchen while preparing meals, quick chats on the phone between chores, at family gatherings when others’ ears were not close enough to pick up private anecdotes. My aunt was the family woman and I had grown into the career woman of the new generation, symbol of hope for possible true liberation from men’s incessant needs and demands.
My mother, from whom no doubt I acquired the somber manner that has so often been misinterpreted as aloofness, was so different from her only sister. I’ve always been attracted to the gaiety displayed by some extroverts. My aunt brought out the deep, hidden lust for life in me that I am very certain she also had and, for our individual reasons, we usually kept beneath the surface of daily affairs. Over the years, as a grown-up, (unlike with my mamá) it was my aunt who received my stories without judgment—news of the public life that evolved from writing, my ended relationships, my comings and goings. One time, Flora told me that in a conversation my mother had expressed concern that I might or could write about our family. My aunt told me she replied, “I don’t care if she writes about me. She’ll make me immortal!”
There is another story my tía Flora shared with me during one of those moments stolen from her endless duties to a large family, work, and husband, whom, as I recall, did little else but drink. Before the drink took over, he worked at a factory. After that, I rarely recall him not swaying. He also made a couple of benign passes at me, which I did not mention to my aunt, even after she surprised me one day when we were alone and shared how her husband had said how fine I looked. One day when he was perhaps in his sixties, Flora found her man dropped dead on the linoleum floor.
The account I remember fondly had to do with the super salsera Celia Cruz. This was before the singer exploded into galactic stardom, before the pink wigs when she became a parody of herself (while still putting out hits), and before her right-wing declarations. I’m speaking of the era when la gente could just go to whatever ballroom Celia with a band of salsa kings came to play at and dance their socks off.
My tía’s Celia Cruz remembrance was another example of getting the last say with her husband, with whom, she swore after his death, she was passionately in love all their days. All that week the radio had been announcing Celia Cruz’s concert coming up on Saturday at Chicago’s famous Aragon Ballroom. The Aragon was situated clear across town from my tía’s casita in the barrio. Her husband had only one female performer for whom he would have spit shined his boots and gone to see and that was Lucha Villa, the ranchera singer who, it was my tía’s opinion, sounded like a lovesick ewe. Short of Villa’s appearances, he was not interested in the crowds, the price of concert tickets, and most of all, acting all a fool on the dance floor.
Flora, though, had no intentions of missing out. It was only a question of how to pull it off. She made a plan. On Saturday, she went about the house doing her chores. Like many working Mexican women who had the custom of wearing the kind of apron that buttoned down the front and had convenient pockets, my tía Flora always wore hers, even to the market. Her favorite mercado, a good mile walk away from her front steps, was stocked with every ingredient a fine cocinera like her might require. When Flora’s husband came in that day (he spent his weekends going in and out until late evening when he’d come in with a six-pack to settle in for the night), she said, cheerfully, “I feel like cooking something . . . rico tonight. How ’bout it? Care to join me for a late supper?”
If you’d ever tasted her dishes, your eyes would have lit up like her husband’s must have at the invitation. Saturday was date night for the two and she said, “Don’t wait around for me, Viejo,