My mother is three years short of a century.
She was born March 20, 1928, in San Antonio, Texas. As a child of the Great Depression, her girlhood was a procession of people and experiences mostly known today through history, sociology texts, and old movies.
From the front step of a three-room house with a potbelly stove at 616 ½ Leigh St. in San Antonio, Texas, she saw a bustling streetscape: the iceman in his delivery wagon, the organ grinder with his monkey, and the fruit-and-vegetable man in his red delivery truck, just to name three. The most exciting was the gravity-defying baker on a bicycle, riding with a Saturn-sized basket on his head loaded to the brim with pan de dulce, or Mexican sweet bread, for sale.
Next door, Señor Calvo kept his horse in his backyard stable, ready to pull his popcorn cart through the streets. This in a neighborhood two miles from the Alamo, where the history of the Texas war for independence from Mexico lived on in 19th century cannonballs still then found in pecan-strewn yards and under humble houses.
Fun was dressing up as ghosts to scare people after dark, riding the metal washtub down the street during torrential floods, and tossing the rare spare penny to the monkey to watch him scoop it into his cap for the organ grinder.
Covering 97 years, my mother’s memories can’t be detailed in a singular essay. Instead, these showcased snippets of lived experience serve to illustrate that mothers, like many of our elders, are an invaluable untapped microcosm of history. This is worth noting as Americans get ready to celebrate Mother’s Day with greeting cards, flowers and outings—the top three spending categories in what was an estimated $33 billion holiday in 2024, according to the National Retail Federation.
Our mothers’ lives bridge our past to our present.
If my mother’s world seemed small and poor, in 1,001 ways it was not. In Spanish, my grandmother read tales from Las Mil y Una Noches—in English, The Thousand and One Nights—bringing the world beyond Leigh Street, Scheherazade’s magical world of Central Asian pluck, heroism and ingenuity, into the life of my mother and her siblings.
No one talked about global warming, but it was hot then too, routinely over 100 degrees in August, and with no air conditioner, it felt hotter still. My mother assured me they did have air conditioning and described tying an ice cube to a pencil with a string and holding it in front of the fan. I still don’t know if that’s a true story or if it’s apocryphal, like the one my uncle from Helotes told about riding a pig to school.
These memories of pecan-shaded streets in San Antonio’s Lavaca area, the city’s oldest residential neighborhood, seem to recall a simpler, kinder time. But they obscure the harsh reality of pre- and post-war San Antonio, when Mexican American children sat in the back of the classroom, if not in separate schools, when the newspapers were filled with angry letters to the editor about too much Spanish on the radio, and when Euro American and Mexican American students rarely befriended each other.
In high school, my mother marched and played the drum in her junior WAC uniform, while her older brother, my Uncle Johnny, served in World War II, and wound up in a German POW camp after being reported MIA. Pages of scrapbook photos from the time show her in flowing homemade dresses at the Mexican American women’s Leticia Club dances, emceed by a young Henry B. Gonzalez in his pre-congressman days.
In drawing on these personal recollections, I hope to make the case that listening to our mothers and recording their stories is a way to honor them that will endure long after the flowers have wilted, the perfume faded, and the chocolate box recycled. I say this not just as a daughter, but also as a media historian who spent more than 20 years as a reporter telling the stories of others in the Milwaukee Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Bloomberg News.
You don’t need to be a professional historian or a journalist to take on this project. And it can be done in small steps, a short time frame, and with a smart phone in a Foto-Voz, as the UT Austin Voces Oral History Project calls it. Take a selection of as few as five photos from your mother’s past, and have her identify the individuals, places, and or subjects of the photos as she discusses her recollections.
At a time when the history recorded in museums, books, and documentaries is increasingly contested, memoirs and history from the ground up are all the more important, not just to individual families, but to others who want to learn what life was like in a particular time and place from those with first-hand knowledge. Stories of the past might be whitewashed, rewritten, or replaced in official spaces, but people’s consciousness of the past can’t be stripped away.
That history can only be forgotten, and only if we let it.
Melita M. Garza is an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, the author of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (University of Texas Press, 2018), and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
The post Our Elders’ Stories Bridge the Past to the Present. This Mother’s Day, Let’s Honor Them by Listening appeared first on Newsweek.
