Most people are familiar with the federal camps that John Steinbeck made famous with his novel The Grapes of Wrath, when the federal government came in and set up massive tent cities for the immigrants from the Dust Bowl. I finished my master's, and I became an administrator of an early childhood program, and I did that for five years. But, you know, once she planted the seed, I really couldn't stop thinking about it.
#AMELIA AND ELEANOR VOCABULARY TEACHER WEB PROFESSIONAL#
After I had turned in some work, a professor came up to me one day after class and asked me to stay after, and she asked me if I'd ever considered doing any professional writing. I went back to school to get my master's in education.
After that, I got married and stayed home with my children for a number of years. I became a bilingual Head Start teacher in Escondido. And so it was very much an epiphany to discover that she had this whole other sort of princess life in Mexico. In my mind, there wasn't anything before that. It was sort of a revelation to discover that she was actually wealthy and that she had servants, because I always thought that her beginnings sort of began in the farm labor camp. I was an adult before I knew anything about her Mexican life, living in Aguascalientes, and what it was like for her to grow up there. But it wasn't until I was a grownup and had my own children and she would come to my house and spend two weeks at a time with me on various occasions that she would sit around and reminisce about Mexico. When I was growing up, she would frequently mention her life in the farm labor camps, and so I always knew about that part of her life. But it was how I adapted to my new environment. So that's really when I got sort of obsessed with them and then spent most of my time riding my bike to a little branch library in East Bakersfield, and loading up my bike basket with books and coming home and spending an awful lot of time reading. They became redeeming to me, because I could escape into them. I'm not sure why I fell into books, but I suspect it was because I was coping through them. Her mother stayed home and took her every Tuesday, and I started going with them. My mother worked, so she couldn't take me to the library on a regular basis.
And I started going to the library every Tuesday after school with a friend of mine. When I was in fifth grade, we moved across town, and I was the new kid at school. One of the things that I think prepared me the most for being a writer was that I was blessed with a lot of big blocks of unchoreographed time and a lot of benevolent neglect that gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time playing and developing my imagination. I had a really interesting, fun childhood. And the next weekend, I'd go to my other grandmother's house and eat red mole and enchiladas, rice and beans, and lamb stuffed with garlic. So, one Saturday I would go to one grandmother's house, and I would eat fried chicken, black-eyed peas, smothered greens, and peach cobbler with big, fat dumplings that would stay in your stomach for about a week.
She lived out in Arvin, California, and she was from Oklahoma. I have a lot of fond memories of big family gatherings at my Mexican grandmother's house. So, when people ask me, "What was your childhood like?" I tell them the truth. I was the oldest of three daughters, and I'm the oldest of 23 grandchildren on my mother's side. Well, I was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, in the San Joaquin Valley.
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