Editor’s Note: Growing up in a Mexican-immigrant family in the United States wedges children in between two cultures. In the following excerpt of his new book, author Carlos Gil explores how his siblings and his mother navigated some of these cultural conflicts.

This excerpt, “Looking Back at Our Toughest Years” is taken from the new book, We Became Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream, by Carlos Gil (Xlibris 2012), Chapter 11.

In this chapter I begin to analyze the conflict that we “Mexican” kids remembered on account of Mother’s difficulty in raising us in southern California. The “restaurant years” refers to one of the periods in our family life in which we ran a restaurant in order to survive on account of Dad’s loss of an arm in an industrial accident and we kids helped out. In the previous chapter, our Grandmother, Carlota, dies and so does my father, Bernabe.

In other words, the integrity of the family became altered in the second half of the restaurant years. Mother lost her lifelong partners, and her oldest children began rebelling and stepping away—by 1957, four years after we closed the restaurant—both Grandma and Dad had passed away and Mary, Manuel, and Mike had flown the nest, Martha had entered her most vulnerable stage before moving away, and I was packing my bags as well. My siblings and I had overlooked this convergence as a way of taking a second look at Mother’s frustration and crabbiness. [Note: Mary, Manuel, Mike and Martha are Carlos’ siblings.]

Mexican rules of behavior had a lot to do with it

There is yet more to consider. Would she have been less cranky had she not lost her mother and husband in these critical years? Probably not!

My assumption is that Mexican rules of behavior need to be taken into account, especially where girls are concerned. By this I mean that traditional practices about how children should behave and the values behind these practices drove my mother’s compulsion to watch over her children like a hawk, apart from whether her mother or husband was well or not.

The rules clashed with American behavioral practices or, at least, those present in Southern California, and it’s fair to say that Mom reacted more acutely about this contradiction, Mexican vs. American, than did my Dad. She was far more alert about my sisters breaking these social rules than us boys and, at times, her conduct became frenzied and hurtful to some of us. It’s safe to say that the relations between Anglo children and their parents, at least, those she might have been able to observe on the edges of Los Angeles, failed to impress her in a positive way.

The cultural views came from provincial Mexico

The tenets Mom guarded about how children should behave were rooted in the back country of her birth, where she grew up—the Mascotan highlands of Jalisco. They were written and engraved in the minds of the local people there, rich or poor, and it’s fair to say that other simple folks elsewhere in the rugged Mexican landscape held similar views. The rules rested on the belief that everyone’s behavior was tied to a code of honor—and respect, above all. Children needed to absorb these lessons so they could become valued members of the community otherwise they would be ostracized. To allow these lessons to fall by the wayside amounted to great negligence.

In the world in which Mother grew up, children were expected to honor and respect their parents. No one except God stood above them. If there was a single value or moral cornerstone upon which the structure of our family rested, this was it. We learned this lesson from our parents, especially Mom, and she learned it from her own mother. Everything else cascaded downwardly in priority. She verbalized this to us in a million ways.

Even in her late nineties, she underscored this ideal when she insisted that Soledad, for example, her third daughter already married and in her late fifties, perform eldercare for her—and Soledad saw no leeway. In fact, she seems to have embraced it with filial loyalty. In other words, Mom seemed to be drilling into us that respect and honor for one’s parents included taking care of them in old age. Mom had taken care of Grandma Carlota to the very end, and now it was one of her daughter’s turn to do the same. It was Mom’s turn to be taken care of and, in this way, be honored according to the world she left behind in the Jalisco highlands.

Breaking the rules was almost unavoidable

If we, the children, showed disrespect in some form, we got hit quickly. Sometimes we didn’t know why we got into trouble but hindsight indicates that la falta de respeto or the lack of respect could take surprising and unsuspecting forms. If you consider the fact that we were also learning new behaviors outside our home, since we were growing up in America, then the possibility of breaking the rules or showing disrespect could be multiplied many times. Honoring and respecting your parents could take many forms, and we learned slowly and painfully as we went. For example, when Mary or Martha asked to be allowed to nurture friendships with classmates, like spending the night with one or more of them, she was usually denied, presumably because Mom could not trust these friends to subscribe to the behavior requirements she expected from her daughters.

Girls were protected by strict rules

Sitting at Mother’s dining room table, interviewing Mary one day, with Mom following the proceedings with keen interest, I asked Mary about her school days. My sister reminded me that she had only attended up to ninth grade. Asking her why she hadn’t gone beyond ninth grade, Mary started to answer the question when Mother suddenly interjected. She understood the question I had posed my sister in English and helped answer the question by admitting she was so desconfiada (someone who is untrusting), but she didn’t say more, and I unfortunately didn’t ask her to clarify. Without any objections from Mom, Mary, however, filled in for her with the following words:

“The main reason that they [our parents] were strict was that they didn’t want to give a girl a chance to talk to a boy. That was their concern. Most parents [in the community] used to feel the same way. It was more important to keep you at home under parental surveillance [than to let you go on to school. At home I was always busy]. I was always responsible—all my life—for my brothers and sisters, like being the second mother. [I was] always there!”

Distrust of the American world

As a new immigrant, Mother distrusted the world that surrounded her family and believed that her children could fall into harm, her daughters in particular. Physical harm, possibly, but moral harm, most probably. This meant that by the time Mary started grammar school, Mother still could not easily trust the teachers or the schools in San Fernando and so it was better to have her daughter close by and safe—this was about twenty years after immigrating to America.

If Mary or Martha (later Soledad and Emily) insisted on doing things their way by simply sneaking off to be with their friends, for example, not only did they put themselves in harm’s way from Mom’s point of view, but they also incurred falta de respeto, by dishonoring Mom’s advice. Disciplinary action was sure to follow.[i] [Note: Soledad and Emily were Carlos’ younger sisters.]

Mom expressed her old fears outright that day at the dining room table, “Yo era muy sin [confianza]! A’y que diga ella! Yo ni quería que fuera a trabajar!” (I was very untrusting! She [Mary] can tell you! I didn’t want her to get a job [when she stopped going to school at the end of ninth grade]). Mother softened her desconfianza in later years, allowing a longer tether for Martha, Soledad, and Emily, but Mary experienced the shortest one.

Mother naturally inherited a Mexican provincial outlook on life. It included rules about how people should interact with one another, how young women should express modesty in their dress, convey deference both in speech and in nonverbal communication, show respect toward elders, and so on. All this had the practical effect of laying out an array of non-written rules that were strictly observed in our home. Had we been raised in Mascota, it might have been easier for us to follow them, but alas, we lived in Southern California and by trial and error we proceeded to learn what we could get away with, the boys their way and the girls theirs.

Woe to us if we introduced American behavior standards at home

The bottom line is that problems would arise when we tried applying American standards of behavior at home, or at least, what we thought they were. Mom’s rules tripped us children repeatedly. It is safe to assert that gringo-inspired behavior at home generally created a lot of commotion.[ii]

My sister Mary was hurt by the conflict in cultural mores, whether she deliberately violated the rules or not, because she was the first girl in the family. The leeway she enjoyed was the narrowest. She felt caught in between.

“I was not a modern girl. In my world I was a very old-fashioned person. I never dressed up like that. I was always way behind, never went with the fashions of the day. Dora and I [wore] braids, long dresses . . .”

We were punished when we violated the rules

While our transgressions were not about smoking or drinking or taking drugs, Mom would be first to castigate us. She would often pressure Dad to confirm the penalty with his muscle, which he did often enough although we don’t know how reluctant he was to do so. The “hit” could take the form of sternly or harshly pronounced words by Mom, or it could take the form of some “physically coercive tactic.” By Mom’s hand, this could take the form of pulling of an ear, a slap, a coscorrón (hitting someone’s head with your knuckles), or a just a plain good beating. Inventive combination of all these physical and verbal acts worked very well too. Dad spanked us only when we were egregiously out of hand although he did a thorough job of it too. It seems none of us kept a grudge against him.

Our family was not unique as Mary observes below. Most families in San Fernando probably followed similar rules. “Harsh parenting” as practiced by Mexican fathers and mothers was discovered to be so prevalent in certain communities that it became the subject of clinical inquiry many years later. One group of investigators confirmed this to be true in northern Mexico, for example. The report stated that “a common disciplinary strategy used by Mexican parents is physical punishment.” The group also concluded that perhaps more in the case of Mexicans than other Latin Americans, “corporal punishment” was “seen not only as a necessary disciplinary method but also as a positive practice to produce good citizens.”[iii] It was good for the children, in other words.

Strict child rearing prevailed in the neighborhood

Many examples abounded nearby for us. My sister Mary remembered, in her words above, that on those lucky times when Mother allowed her to cross the street and spend a brief amount of time at Teresa O’s party. Teresa’s dad, Don Rodolfo and his neighbor, Juan Imperial, whose family organized the Christmas-time posadas that Mary enjoyed so much, “would patrol the street to make sure no boys would ever show up.” This means that they too subscribed to child-rearing rules that called for a close watch over youngsters, especially girls. Mary remembered clearly that her closest friend, Dora, experienced similar treatment by her own parents.

Cultural turmoil was part of Mom’s stresses

It appears to me that Mother’s bad temper became more understandable from this perspective. In other words, she fretted about our breaking the rules that she believed ought to guide our young lives, and if we add the anxieties that began welling up about Dad’s and Grandma’s increasing illness and what this would mean financially and otherwise to her, then the frustration and strict behavior she displayed toward us became more comprehensible.

[i] “Teenage girls are strictly forbidden to walk home from school with boys . . . [in one case in San Antonio in the 1950s a young mother remembered,] ‘I could never go out at night—had to sit at home and embroider . . . Sometimes I was let go to a show on Sunday afternoons but always had to be home by five o’clock . . . I couldn’t belong to any group at school which admitted both boys and girls . . . I was always treated very cruelly by my father. I was never allowed to have any friends, either boys or girls.’” Murray, CCVI, MA, Sister Mary John. A Socio-Cultural Study of 118 Mexican Families Living in a Low-Rent Public Housing Project in San Antonio, Texas (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America, 1954, reprinted by Arno Press, 1976), pp. 48–50.

[ii] Here are two examples of the many books on the subject of cross-cultural communication: David Jamieson and Julie O’Mara, Managing Workforce 2000 (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1991) and Marilyn Loden and Judy B. Rosner, Workforce America! Managing Employee Diversity as a Vital Resource (Homewood Illinois: Business One Irwin, 1991).

[iii] Frias Armenta, Martha et al., “Determinants of Harsh Parenting in Mexico,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (April 1988), p. 1.

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Carlos B. Gil is president of The GilDeane Group, publisher of DiversityCentral.com. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Department of History. He may be reached at: http://www.diversitycentral.com/contact_us/emailus.php

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