I visited my paternal grandmother last week. I sat in the living room of her two-bedroom, west- side apartment. I watched her cook, attend to her garden, pray in her bedroom, heard her hearty laugh.
It was a good visit and a long time since I had walked into her Menlo Park apartment. My abuelita Pepa died in 1986. She was 90 years old.
It was a couple of days before Tuesday’s Día de los Muertos when my wife Linda and I went to the duplex where Josefa Villalobos Portillo and my grandfather, Erasmo Portillo Jurado had moved to in the early 1960s, a few years after they had immigrated from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. They came to Tucson in 1956 — the year I was born — two years after my father, their youngest of eight children , had left Juárez for Tucson.
My grandparents were in their early 60s when they gave up a life they knew for a new beginning. They didn’t know English. My grandfather didn’t have a job. All they had was my father and his young family, and faith in God and strength of character.
My abuelo eventually found a job but he died about eight years after arriving in Tucson.
Their first apartment was on South Herbert Avenue, between East 17th and 18th streets in Armory Park. About 20 years earlier my Mexican-born maternal grandparents had lived on the same block. And this being Tucson, decades later my nephew lived on the same block.
Moreover, again this being Tucson with a few degrees of separation, a friend lives in the same red brick apartment where the Portillo kids and numerous cousins — Wilson, Garcia, Terrazas, Meza and Muñoz — would visit.
My grandparents’ story, of course, is a story of immigrants. It is an American story, one retold over and over. And one that will be repeated over and over, regardless if the Republican presidential candidate manages to scratch out a win Tuesday.
I wonder what my abuelita, who would see her grandchildren earn their college degrees and become nurses, law enforcement officers, a lawyer, administrators, educators and a journalist, would say about Donald Trump’s divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I suspect my grandmother would pray for him. She was very devoted to her prayers.
“Abuelita prayed her rosary on her knees in her bedroom two times a day, after lunch and after dinner,” wrote my youngest brother, Carlos. He spent a lot of time with our grandmother, after school and often overnight on weekends. He was her favorite grandchild, he said.
“She would bless me every night before I went to bed, later she would bless me before she went to bed,” he recalled.
For my other brother, Mario, his favorite memory of abuelita is when he left for military service and several years later when he graduated from the local police academy.
“She gave me her blessing each time. I felt special. I felt like I was in the Vatican,” he said.
My older sister, Carmen, remembers abuelita’s garden filled with chiles, sunflowers, colorful plants and snap peas “that would grow against the wall and would climb and develop into this beautiful wall of color.”
Carmen, who also spent nights at the Alameda Street apartment, also remembers my grandmother, who smoked a cigarette after every meal, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, sitting in the living room watching “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” “F Troop” and other programs on her black-and-white television. Although she didn’t understand the language, intuitively, I guess, she understood what she was watching.
“Oh, my God, she would laugh till she cried. She would wipe her eyes with her apron that she hardly would take off,” my sister wrote.
We remember: being sent on errands to Jeff’s Market, the Chinese grocer at the corner of West Congress Street and North Melwood Avenue, often with the S&H Green stamp book; Duqúe, her loyal dog who would growl at us if we hugged our abuelita too long; the bottle of Mogen David kosher concord wine on the small Formica kitchen table; her frijoles, fresh corn tortillas, caldos and what ever else she cooked; sitting on the couch crocheting doilies.
Sunday, the day the iconic All Souls Procession winds its way through downtown to Mercado San Agustín, a couple of blocks away from where abuelita lived peacefully, contentedly, comfortably, she’ll be remembered with love and devotion.
