The sheds were built to provide a dry, shady place for the artisans who lived and worked there. Five of the dwellings had makeshift sheds, constructed by setting up two poles and extending the kitchen roofs of tarpaper, tin, and corrugated metal over the low front door-way. The only pavement in the yard was a walk of rough stone slabs laid by the tenants themselves, in front of the apartments.
The empty lot was enclosed on two sides by the walls of adjacent brick buildings and in front by a recently built brick wall with a narrow open entrance that leads to the courtyard. When she died, Guadalupe’s worldly possessions were worth only $121.13. Guadalupe and her first husband, Ignacio, were among the very poorest, with a combined monthly income of only $5.20. The average monthly income in the vecindad was $8.40. The rentals for the huts were from $1.60 to $2.40 a month. The Panaderos vecindad where she lived consisted of a row of fourteen one-room adobe huts about 10 by 15 feet, built along the left side and across the back of a thirty-foot wide bare lot. Guadalupe’s parents spoke no Indian tongue and, as far as we know, they followed no tradition other than Mexican folk Catholicism. She did not know where they originated but they were probably part of the urban proletariat in León.
Both sets of grandparents were dead by the time Guadalupe was born. The extended family was small and they had few relatives to help them. Illiterate, they supported themselves by making native sweets which they sold in the plaza. Her parents were religious and had been properly married in church. Guadalupe was one of eighteeen children, only seven of whom survived their first year. Her sad experiences, not unusual for those times, help us to understand her situation at the time of her death. Thus she lived through some of the most difficult years in the history of Mexico, when bloodshed, violence, hunger, and much suffering occurred. Born into a poor family in Léon, Guanajuato, in 1900, she was ten years old when the Mexican Revolution began and twenty when it ended. Her life was a story of deprivation and trauma.
#HOUSE OF VELEZ PART 2 ALL DEATHS HOW TO#
Guadalupe died as she had lived, without medical care, in unrelieved pain, in hunger, worrying about how to pay the rent or raise money for the bus fare for a trip to the hospital, working up to the last day of her life at various pathetic jobs, leaving nothing of value but a few old religious objects and the tiny rented space she had occupied.īoth her life and death reflected the culture of poverty in which Guadalupe lived. His mother replied, “Poor people don’t belong in heaven, they have to be thankful if they can get into the earth.” The struggle to get Aunt Guadalupe decently into the earth is one of the basic themes of their story. The Danish novelist, Martin Andersen Nexö, writing in his autobiography about his early life in a Copenhagen slum, recalls that when he was about three years old he asked his mother whether his brother, who had recently died, was now an angel. For the poor, death is almost as great a hardship as life itself. Their stories highlight the difficulties encountered by the poor in disposing of their dead.
It presents three views of their aunt’s death, wake, and burial. This articles is drawn from my book, which is based upon taperecorded interviews with Manuel, Roberto, and Consuelo Sánchez. In December, 1962, one month after Guadalupe’s death, I returned to Mexico to study the effects of her death upon the family. Moreover, ‘she, her husbands, and her neighbors in the vecindad, were better representatives of the “culture of poverty” than were Jesús Sánchez and his children, who were more influenced by Mexican middleclass values and aspirations. Here I shall limit myself to relating a single dramatic incident, the death of Guadalupe, the maternal aunt and the closest blood relative of the Sánchez children.Īlthough Guadalupe was only a minor character in my book, she played a central role in the Sánchez family. Many important changes have occurred in their lives. Indeed, we have been in constant touch and not a year has passed without my visiting them. In 1961 I published my book The Children of Sánchez, but this did not mark the end of the study nor did it terminate my relationship with the family. Thirteen years have passed since 1956, when I began my study of Jesús Sánchez and his children, Manuel, Roberto, Consuelo, and Marta, in a Mexico City slum.
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