María Isabel Part 1

The mother of María Isabel Flores García was both fiercely protective of, and deeply ashamed of, her daughter, in only the way a mother can be.

                Doña Marta García gave birth to María Isabel the 15^th of April, 2008, at a hospital in the fertile San Fernando Valley, where she was a migrant worker married to María Isabel´s father, Don Isaac Flores.  “Don” may not be the right word to describe Isaac, inasmuch as the “don” implies some sort of honor or maturity.  Isaac did work very hard, and doted on his newborn daughter, but he was deeply machista and emotionally, mentally and physically abused Doña Marta.  Although they both worked all day long in underneath the broiling California sun or its bone chilling winter winds, Isaac believed, as his father and his father before him had believed, that all the work around the house was to be done by his wife, whom he had won over with his skills dancing norteña in a Fresno dance club.  Isaac was also very possessive; he frowned upon her socializing with men who were not family, even his own friends, with the kind of insecurity hard-boiled into young men (or old boys) of a certain stage.

                Doña Marta had barely learned she was pregnant, eight weeks after the nuptials, when she first became aware of Isaac´s possessive nature.  Isaac had passed out at the bar and Doña Marta, abstaining from alcohol because of the new life within her, accepted a dance from Isaac´s friend Daniel.  It was a very friendly dance, but when she mentioned it the next day to Isaac, he began screaming at her, calling her a puta and a ramera, and threw an empty bottle of Budweiser into the wall, and forbid her to ever dance with another man again.  He didn´t talk to her for three days.  Doña Marta, more stunned than afraid, accepted his conditions so as not to upset him further.

                Thus life proceeded.  One afternoon, when she was six months pregnant, after a day of picking what was left of the grape harvest, they stopped at a gas station to pick up a case of beer for Isaac and his cousins.  Since Isaac was driving, Doña Marta went in to make the purchase.  As she stood in line, a young gringo man asked how far along she was, and told her a story about his own pregnant wife, and Doña Marta laughed.  When she returned to the car with the beer, Isaac was silent.  When they got home, he grabbed her by the arm and pinned her shoulders against the living room wall.

                “Only because you are pregnant,” he railed, “do I not knock you into tomorrow!  What did that fucking gringo say to you? Why did you smile at him? Do you want to be La Malinche and fuck that gringo? I´ll kill you before that happens!”

                Doña Marta, for the first time in her life, felt fear, real fear, that fear that settles in the pit of your stomach and eats into your tripas.  She withdrew, she smiled at no one, she only worked, ate and slept.  The only thing that brought her joy for many years was the criatura in her womb that would become María Isabel.  At night, after Isaac fell asleep, she would talk to her panza, telling her baby that she couldn´t wait to meet her and that she would be the world´s greatest mother and that the baby would never want for anything, because her Mami and Papi loved her.

                To Isaac´s credit, he was a much better father than husband.  After the birth, he didn´t work for a week, relying on the small sum they had saved for the occasion.  He was sweeter with Doña Marta than he had been at any point since their courtship and cried every time he held little María Isabel, either forgetting about or unable to summon his sacred machismo. Isaac´s female cousins swarmed around Doña Marta, making sure she made a full recovery, and raving over the beauty of the young criaturita.  Doña Marta depended on them, since her entire family was in México; she had come north with a brother who had been deported several years earlier after a field had been raided by ICE agents. She called them every day for a month after the birth, and one of Isaac´s cousins sent them pictures over the computer.  Every night and every morning she prayed to La Virgen and thanked Her for her wonderful new life.

The mother of Erick Arturo Wagner Montalvan was both outwardly critical of, yet absolutely worshipful of, her son in a way that only mothers can be.

                Erick was born on March 25, 2009, at the local hospital in the small northwest Iowa town of Storm Lake.  The town was big enough to have a hospital and a small liberal arts college, and not one bit bigger.   In the 1960´s and 1970´s its townpeople considered it to be a hidden jewel; there was the lake, and the meat packing plant in town was a union shop.  Storm Lake had a thriving middle class and attracted visitors from a wide circumference who wanted to lake but didn´t want to spend the money required at Okoboji or the Minnesota lakes.  In the 1980´s the union was broken and the plant temporarily closed down; the town received a large influx of Hispanics and Vietnamese immigrants when it reopened paying half the wage it did before.  The natives who could relocate, for the most part, did; those who couldn´t took job alongside the immigrants and begrudged them, begrudged the greedy, union-busting owners, begrudged their friends who had left, begrudged the small, educated “elite” who staffed the college and the schools and the city.  Meth and booze took hold.

                Kevin Wagner was largely ignorant of these changes.  He left Storm Lake when he graduated from high school in 1982, enlisted in the Army and did very well, became a non-commissioned officer and a lifer.  Kevin loved the Army, its clear chain of command, its emphasis on teamwork, its structure and its grand tradition.  He served in the Persian Gulf and completed his twenty years in 2002 in the run up to the Iraq invasion.  He offered to stay on and help out in whatever way was needed. His commanders accepted his offer but to his surprise, he was sent with a superior to Colombia, where the U.S. was providing military and financial aid to the Colombian government in their half century battle with the leftist guerrilla group, the FARC.  While the world watched Iraq, Kevin was installed in a makeshift base in the Colombian Andes, overseeing one unit of many that was being built up to fight the rebels. Kevin didn´t follow the politics, he just did his job like a good Army man.  One week, on leave, he went to the capital, Bogotá, and toured a museum.  He liked the tour guide so much that, in a move completely out of character for him, retook the tour the next day and summoned up the courage to ask the tour guide to have a cup of coffee with him and tell him more.

                The tour guide´s name was Ana Lucía Montalvan Castillo.  She had grown up in a small town called San Pablo, about an hour from Bogotá, and hailed from a middle class household, and studied language in college.  Her English was quite good, although her accent tended a bit British, and she thought the fortyish American guy was quite adorable.  Kevin´s visits to Bogotá became more and more frequent.  When Kevin´s tour finished up in 2006, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted, in an English that was quite a bit more American than it had been in 2003.  She didn´t want to be an Army wife, though, didn´t want to move every two years, was tired of being in a long distance relationship, and insisted on living together, in one place.

                The only place Kevin knew that weren´t army bases was Storm Lake, Iowa.  At first Ana hated it; Storm Lake was about 1,000 times smaller than Bogotá.  But as the first year went by and she started working in the local school system, she came to appreciate the small town, the tight connections, the Fourth of July celebrations, the lack of traffic and the Iowa Nice.  They didn’t worry about money; Kevin had his pension for the Army and they had moved into his parents´ old house after they purchased a condo right on the lake.  Her biggest pet peeve, really, was when the white Storm Lake people assumed she was Mexican.  She had never been to Mexico and before arriving in Storm Lake had never ate a “taco” or celebrated el Cinco de Mayo.  She was lighter skinned than most of the so-called white natives, for the love of God!  But that was small.  Kevin opened up a small motor shop; they lived life slow and steady, and life was good.

                Just one thing was missing, and he came along in March 2009.  They called him Erick so his name would be roughly the same in English and Spanish, and both parents were proud as peacocks.  Kevin had an enormous family spread out over northwest Iowa and southwest Minnesota, and little Erick wanted for nothing.  Ana´s sister Cecilia came up (she was the only one who could get a visa) and stayed for two months.  Kevin´s dad, smitten by the little guy, brought him over to the condo every day and sat out on the dock with him, telling him his glory stories playing football and baseball for the Storm Lake Tornadoes.  They had a huge celebration on the lake for little Erick´s one month birthday, with a keg of beer, an enormous sheet cake, and a whole roasted hog.  Cecilia live streamed the party home to their parents in San Pablo, and the girls´ parents cried with joy at their first grandchild.