Commentary on local issues, viewpoints of residents and community leaders, and letters. : Mi Madre : A Woman’s Struggle for Dignity and Identity ‘Was Not Pretty’

My family recently celebrated mother’s 79th birthday. Today, besides being an excellent cook, my mother, Isabel Rodriguez, is seen in the community as a strong-willed matriarch.

She was born in the midst of the Mexican Revolution in Vasis, a mining town in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico. Her father, who rode under revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, died in the war.

On her eighth birthday, my grandmother pulled her out of elementary school in the provincial capital and took her back to the province, to work as a maid at the home of the English patron and owner of the silver mine, where my relatives labored. She desperately protested the move.

Five years later, she became the sole support of her five brothers, sister and my grandmother. She began to develop a sense of independence and security, so repressed in women all over the world then and now. As she tells it, she bided her time to find new opportunities. However, it wasn’t to happen soon.

She suffered another setback when my father, who had courted her for some time, abducted ( se la robo ) her at gunpoint and on horseback, a feudalistic practice of the times. He took her up in the mountains for six months until he thought she was “tamed” and in love.

“It was not pretty, my son,” she recently told me of the abduction. “The backward beliefs of the coercion and submission of women in the countryside should not be folkloric or laughed at.”

As many immigrant families do, my parents began their journey to the North. They made a few stops in several Mexican cities and were pioneers in developing the social network for the hundreds of relatives who migrated later. Throughout those times, my mother was in charge of our upbringing and education while my father was the breadwinner.

In 1963, seven years after migrating to Los Angeles and with eight sons and one daughter, she decided to separate from my father, to become independent.

She never remarried.

“I have dedicated the rest of my life to my family,” she said.

Three years later, she participated in her first U.S. political demonstration. It was against brutality by Hollenbeck police in the Pico Gardens Housing Projects in Boyle Heights. As we, her children, grew politically, she did too. In just about every endeavor we engaged in, she was there in body and soul.

In 1972, she became treasurer of CASA (Automoso Center for Social Action), the precursor organization of the immigrant rights movement and founded by Bert Corona.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were turbulent times, the days of the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. They were also times of repression and infiltration. In the darkest of the night, my mother was there when the police would break into our home and terrorize our family and friends, Carnalisimo activists. She always stood proud and unafraid, and she never blinked an eye.

For the last seven years she has been a restaurateur, and her mole (a Mexican sauce made from herbs, chilies and chocolate) is famous. She is proud of herself and us, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her story is the story of many Mexican women born here and on the other side of the border in their search for dignity and themselves.

I’m proud of my mother.