Remember Mariachis at My Funeral

If you saw her on the street, you wouldn’t have looked twice.

My mother, Marina.

Marina, levantate. A basket of sweet bread with pink-cloud icing at dawn. Boxes of Chiclets rattling like marbles at the plaza. Handmade ladies’ dresses starchy and heavy on her 5-year-old arms. She wants to play, but she can’t. Her family is starving, it is in the years after the Mexican Revolution, and her own mother is sewing, embroidering, crocheting, baking, doll-making, ingenious in the way that poverty forces you to become an artist. Or a warrior.

Her mother says that people buy from her because she’s so little and has those prized fat legs. She sings too, a verse with each sticky campechana. Oh, how she makes people laugh and spend, but more than anything she wants to go to school. But there is no money. And when she is in the fifth grade, her mother tells her that she is too old, that she is a young lady now.

To escape the mother who is devout and cruel at the same time, she marries the first man who asks her. He is twice her age, and she is barely 15. He is even worse than her mother and denies her custody of their baby daughter, thinking that she won’t dare leave.

She leaves him anyway. She is desperate.

Barely 18, she crosses the border because she has heard that dreams come true over here.

Then came many years, another marriage, eight more children. Even at 70, my mother did not reach 5 feet tall, though there was nothing stooped about her. Toda mi cara es una arruga. My face is one humongous wrinkle, she would admit. But that’s what two divorces, no chance at an education, smoking, coffee, sleepless days and nights of work, no money and drinking will do to a woman who didn’t know what the American Dream would cost.

Mami had old-yolk fingernails from her years of restaurant frying and disinfecting bedpans.

Varicose veins clogged her legs from years of standing on the job.

A lightning bolt of gray streaked her naturally black hair, razored like a man’s because she had more important things to worry about than beauty. High heels anyway, because she had great legs, life is short, so let’s go dancing.

Es un orgullo ser mexicana. My mother began my Spanish classes as soon as I learned how to read in English. It is important to know two languages, she told me.

One day, you’ll see. And year after year, the education continued. The Alamo? Santa Ana? He’s a traitor. What are they teaching you in school? There is another side to everything. Remember that. Don’t be ashamed of who you are.

Last June, then-presidential candidate George W. Bush made a 15-minute appearance before the National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists in Houston. We were asked to submit questions in advance.

Sir, if you were born poor, where would you be today?

As someone read my words, I realized that poverty cannot be held in your head. You have to hold her in your arms, like my mother.

Bush seemed surprised, but I think it was from nervousness. He rambled something about how he assumed that he would have had good parents, and how he would have gone to college . . . he was sure. But he didn’t seem sure at all.

My mother, Marina, never told me how she crossed the border. Only that she was 18, and she had big dreams.

Last year, on Oct. 7, she died, just a couple of days after Cuco Sanchez, the Mexican singer and composer, her favorite. I think she must have planned it.

Don’t forget me, she would write me, her first-born in the U.S. When I’m gone, don’t forget your brother in prison, take care of the one who is retarded, reach out to the sister who has forgotten where she comes from. Don’t let your baby brother get all squash-headed from his doctorate, visit your older sister in Mexico, she will need you more than ever. Be a familia for once.

Forgive each other for the past. Help each other. Love each other.

She made me promise.

And, don’t forget the mariachis at my funeral.

I don’t care if you get me a cardboard casket, but don’t forget my music.

She wanted trumpets, guitars, silver buttons blazing from men in their charro suits. Have them sing, “La barca de oro” when they drop me into the ground. Because at the next border, I have the right kind of papers. Por favor, mijita. Don’t forget.

She made me promise.