Mother’s Devotion Guided 3 Generations

Josefina Barbosa Canales suffered a terrible accident in the winter of 1943. It was a painful tragedy that gave her a chance to prove her mettle as a mother.

The immigrant homemaker was about to give birth to the fifth of her 10 children when she was horribly burned at her home in the old town of Olive, now part of Orange. Her chenille robe caught fire when she moved too close to a portable heater to keep warm, severely burning her lower body.

While recovering in the hospital, she gave birth to her son, Jim. Doctors said the infant should go home while mom recuperated. Josefina told them: “We go home together, or we don’t go home at all.”

She got her way. Josefina nursed her baby for weeks in the hospital while the staff nursed wounds that would leave her left leg badly scarred.

Jim, now 57, joined his siblings Thursday to bury the woman who defined her life by her devotion to her children--and her children’s children and their children too.

“The sense of the sacrificial life permeates the Hispanic culture, and in many cases is typified by Hispanic women in the sacrifices they make for their children,” said Bishop Jaime Soto following the funeral Mass at St. Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim, where Josefina and her late husband, Santiago, were veteran volunteers.

“In some cases, we’ve seen the abuse of that ethic [through domestic violence],” Soto confided to me in the empty church after mourners filed out. “But on the other side, the Hispanic community is filled with great examples of heroism and exceptional beauty that is only revealed through the generous gift of oneself to others.”

Josefina Canales was 85 when she died last Sunday in her Anaheim home. She was quite helpless at the end from myriad maladies. But she found the strength in her final hours to give her motherly blessing to each of her five sons and five daughters, to her 21 grandchildren and to her 32 great-grandchildren. She made the sign of the cross on their foreheads and, one by one, she gave them a private encomienda--a piece of advice, a request, a warning, a wish.

“She always told me a bunch of stuff,” said 9-year-old Nicole, the youngest of the grandchildren. “But one of them is, ‘Homework comes first before anything else.’ She also said, ‘Be good to your mother.’ And if I did anything wrong, ‘Don’t just say you’re sorry, because actions speak louder than words.’

“She was a very good influence to me,” concluded the pigtailed fourth-grader.

After the funeral at her late grandma’s house, Nicole proudly showed me a picture taken when she was a toddler. She’s sitting on her grandmother’s lap, looking straight at the camera while the gray-haired Josefina holds the girl up and smiles adoringly at her.

Persistent Health Troubles

What the picture doesn’t show is that Josefina is in a wheelchair because she only had one leg. The other was amputated several years ago after a small bruise became gangrenous, a symptom of her debilitating diabetic condition.

Sadly, the leg she lost was not the one that had been so badly burned decades earlier. When she woke from the surgery, recalled her daughter Josie Montoya, Josefina joked bitterly that the doctors had cut off the wrong one.

But, just like before, she didn’t let her injury interfere with her maternal instincts. She still made the effort to care for her last grandchild, as she had done for all the others. Her family tried to dissuade her, saying she needed to save her energy now for her own health. But Josefina wouldn’t hear of it. She believed the children belonged with family, not with strangers in day care.

The disabled woman had a technique to care for Nicole as a baby. She’d ask her late husband, himself suffering from emphysema, to fetch the diapers, powder and milk bottles and arrange them on a single bed in her small room. Santiago would lay Nicole down in position, and Josefina would roll to the bedside and tend to the baby from there.

“She was the ultimate mother,” said Montoya, an Anaheim community activist, while comforting one of Josefina’s weeping great-granddaughters. “And that’s amazing because she didn’t know a mother’s love herself.”

Josefina Barbosa was born Aug. 14, 1915, in Durango, Mexico. Her mother died two years later. At 14, she came to the United States with her father, an old-fashioned man who believed a woman’s place was in the home. He had come north not out of need, said Montoya, but out of determination to break up the unapproved romance of one of his older daughters.

The family settled in Colton in Riverside County. In Mexico, Josefina had learned to cook and clean from an early age, but she didn’t have much formal schooling. Once in California, the Spanish-speaking teenager was placed in first grade, an adolescent among little children who made fun of her. It wasn’t long before she dropped out of school altogether, partly to spare herself any more humiliation. Her father, who took charge of her teaching at home, would hide her from the truant officer.

Much later, Josefina would teach herself English by helping her own children with their homework.

Josefina was 20 in 1935 when she married Santiago. The newlyweds moved almost immediately to Orange County. As parents, they were a bedrock that is rare these days. Santiago worked for the same orange-packing house, Olive Heights Citrus, for almost half a century. He was still on the job at 75 when his wife’s failing health forced him to retire against his will, his daughters said. He lived to be 91.

Meanwhile, Josefina cared for the kids, her own and those of less-fortunate mothers. She took pride in her kids’ appearance and could turn a discarded coat into a garment to be worn with dignity.

“We were the cleanest most starched kids in the school,” recalled Montoya.

Josefina managed to cook cafeteria-sized meals that fed the whole neighborhood and the frequent unexpected guest. Her enchiladas served at church fund-raisers were so tasty that fellow parishioner Carl Karcher, of fast-food fame, coveted her Mexican recipes. According to family lore, Josefina shrugged off the tantalizing offer since her recipes couldn’t be written. She cooked by instinct, a pinch of this and a dash of that.

After the burial, Josefina’s family gathered at her simple Anaheim home with the gloriously colorful roses, daisies and gladiolas in the front yard. Those flowers were her babies too.

The talk soon turned to Josefina’s strength. She had become a citizen in June 1998, after the death of her husband, who had insisted on remaining Mexican. Josefina studied hard for her test, even though she was in pain from extreme arthritis, angina and osteoporosis that resulted in a fractured spine and three broken ribs. She took the oath in her wheelchair, and I had the honor to be with her that day for a story I wrote.

The postscript: Last month, the dying woman filled out an absentee ballot from her hospital bed for next Tuesday’s election. She did it with the help of her eighth child, Rita Maria, who vowed after the funeral to mail it, hoping the vote still would count.

Rita, an attorney who was her mother’s roommate and caretaker, celebrated her 52nd birthday one week after Josefina was admitted to the hospital. On the eve of her daughter’s cumpleanos, Josefina was afraid to fall asleep because she feared she wouldn’t make it through the night.

The dutiful mother was determined to stay alive at least one more day to wish her daughter a happy birthday, which she did.

“She was trying to hang on for me,” her daughter said.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.