'My mother, however, enchanted me with Dickens, Twain, and stories of a fairy tale kingdom called New York, where she had grown up. The fact that I am a writer shows she won,' writes Luis Alberto Urrea
y mother was the only American in our uproarious Mexican family. She didn’t speak Spanish, she didn’t like California, yet she often was the life of the party. When we gathered, she laughed easily and often, even when she didn’t understand the jokes. Her elegant manners delighted my relatives, and when she served them coffee in her antique demitasse cups, it was the most exotic thing in the world to them.
I was born in Tijuana and raised in Barrio Logan in southeast San Diego. Growing up, I knew bits of my mother’s history; she was born in 1916, which sounded so long ago. She grew up in New York, which sounded so far away from our dirt alley apartment. The stories she told me sounded like something from the Emerald City. She’d grown up in a magical sounding place called Staten Island, and her mother had owned an antique shop in Manhattan and knew Steinbeck and Einstein.
Eventually I took my family—the wife and daughter my mother never met—and we set out to retrace her steps. We explored London and found the remains of the trucks the Dollies drove in museum reconstruction sheds. We touched the old seats she might have sat upon. We went to Cambridgeshire and I stared up at the bedroom window of a thatch-roofed house in Glatton where my mom had been bivouacked, where her photo albums showed her staring into the sky with a dreamy look as bombers rumbled overhead.
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