There are No Tender Spaces on the Border, by María-Luisa Ornelas-June
In terms of Mexican female icons, La Llorona is a close second only to la Virgen de Guadalupe. She does the heavy lifting to get kids to bed and be careful around water. The scuttlebutt is that she drowned her children when she discovered her husband (sometimes a wealthy Spaniard, sometimes a military officer) was cheating on her. In her grief, she drowns herself and, surprise, surprise, is condemned to walk the Earth until she finds her children. She now haunts the countryside and riverbanks, wailing for her children.
Being a Border Babe, I, of course, have a local spin. We aren’t scared of La Llorona. To understand why, you must understand the Tejanos' history along the Río Grande in South Texas. In pre-colonial times, the inhabitants of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico through to the Sierra Madre, the Seno Mexicano, were nomadic. The land required the Indigenous people to move locations twice a year in order to sustain themselves calorically. Collectively known as Coahuiltecans, they weren’t organized into pueblos but smaller tribes with a multitude of names, many unknown. The Seno Mexicano didn’t have gold or silver veins. Without gold or silver, the Spaniards treated the Seno Mexicano as one big land border between themselves and the French in Louisiana. Through European eyes, this land had little value and required taming. We live in a tropical desert plain, and the Río Grande is the very reason that we settled in this particular spot on the Seno Mexicano. Despite the preciousness of the water, its presence still holds the story of La Llorona. Man versus land begins the conflict inherent in the Seno Mexicano.
Because political borders require people to hold the land, the Spaniards needed settlers in the Seno Mexicano, even if there weren’t any minerals or metals of interest to extract. The conversos from Spain, the Sephardic Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in 1492, were more than happy to settle in an area that the Spaniards were likely to ignore once they claimed it. But no one asked Mother Earth if she needed taming, and no one asked the Coahuiltecans what they thought about the Spaniards settling the Seno Mexicano.
So, the Spaniards fought the Coahuiltecans. The Coahuiltecans fought the Spaniards as well as the invading Comanches and Apaches, who were being forced south because of Anglo settlement in the Americas. The Spanish conversos, who were also criollos (the Spaniards born abroad), fought the peninsulares (the Spaniards born in Spain) for freedom from Spain to create the country of Mexico and take one layer away from the multi-layered Spanish casta system. The Mexicans fought the French, the Mexicans fought the Tejanos, the Americans fought the Confederates, the Americans fought the Mexicans, and the Mexicans fought the Mexicans to abolish the last of the Spanish casta system. Americans fought the land, filling in salt marshes to create the Río Grande Valley and then dammed the Río Grande with the Falcon reservoir to provide water for this valley created by an Anglo marketing myth. Two Texas towns and one Mexican town were flooded, but it only affected brown folk, so that was a price that the U. S. government was willing to pay. Today, common folks on the Mexican side of the border get caught in the crossfire of the narco wars. Humans trafficked across the border are subject to the cruelty of incarceration, family separation, and possible deportation once they reach the United States. The conflict continues. History shows that there are no tender spaces on the border. And in the version of La Llorona that I was told, the man that cheated on La Llorona was a capitán, a military man, our omnipresent cucuy (boogeyman).
How do you raise children in the midst of constant conflict? You make them battle-ready. You make them brave. When a child falls, we tell them, “¡Levántate, estás bien!” Got bullied in school? We click our tongues, shake our heads, and tell them, “Ehhh, no fue nada.” Your boyfriend breaks up with you? Click your tongue, shake your head, and tell him, “Ehh, ¡me vale madre!” Literally, it’s worth a mother; figuratively, I don’t give a damn. We don’t, as the Millenials say, hold tender spaces on the border. One day, when my sister was eight years old, a 10-year-old boy taunted her on the school bus. All the way home, she sat quietly. When the bus reached our stop, she got up, ran up to the seat where the boy sat, and rammed his head against the window. She then ran past the nun and off the bus, giving him the bird with both hands as the bus drove off. She was battle-ready. Would La Llorona wail about the loss of childhood in battle-ready children?
A therapist described this kind of parenting as jungle parenting because we imagine everything outside the home is a threat. And it is. We live within a border zone that has an extra level of military occupancy, the Border Patrol, that other parts of the country don’t have. Fences and concertina wire line the Río Grande, and even today, that burro, Governor Abbott, puts buoys wrapped in concertina wire within the Río Grande. The scariness of a phantom-like La Llorona is upstaged by the reality of conflict and militarization on the border. There are no tender spaces on the border. But with or without tender spaces, the border is our home.
As a result, teaching natural consequences is of utmost importance. Did you do something stupid after your parents warned you of the repercussions? The parental lecture starts with a simple question: ¿Por? The rhetorical answer that your parents make you say out loud is: pendejo. (Figuratively, the word means stupid.) On social media, one person described that single syllable, por, as the most effective parenting tool Mexican-American parents use to make children acknowledge their stupidity.
On the border, though, we even take battle readiness and bravery one step further. When conflict and death are constant and beyond our control, we often laugh in the face of tragedy. We are taught to be irreverent. After all, if you can laugh, you have a measure of control, if only about how you feel. My father had a stroke on December 31, 1999, and died on January 1, 2000. At the funeral Mass, my brother, sister, and I were sitting together in a pew when my brother leaned over and said, “I guess dad wasn’t Y2K compliant.” There was no wailing. We laughed. There. In the middle of my father’s funeral Mass. There are no tender spaces on the border.
The irreverence explains a lot about the Tejanos. Our battle cry is ¡Puro pinche pari! (Spanglish for a damn good party.) Moving what was undamaged from your home after a hurricane? Some primo is bound to yell out, “¡Puro pinche pari!” Recovering from a triple bypass surgery? The compadres will bring a plate with carne asada from that weekend’s fundraiser for your hospital bills and encourage you to eat. “Al cabo, te limpiaron las arterias. ¡Puro pinche pari!” Crying to your girlfriends because your boyfriend broke up with you? They’ll drag you out the door saying, “Fuck it, let’s go out and forget about him. ¡Puro pinche pari!”
The last time I heard the story of La Llorona, I was a university student at UT Austin. One weekend night, we sat outside our dorm drinking, and some guy told the story of La Llorona, complete with a falsetto voice, crying, “¿Dónde están mis hijos?” As the night wore on, one of the boys went inside to return his beer. While he was peeing, one of the other students who’d hidden in the shower called out with the requisite falsetto voice, “¿Dónde están mis hijos?” We laughed and laughed as he stumbled in panic out of the dorm.
When I married my spouse 35 years ago, I remember that he had tears in his eyes during the ceremony. He was moved by the tenderness of the occasion. I, on the other hand, did not cry. This Tejanita was in law school and saw the ceremony as simply embellishing a basic contract. There, in the cathedral, in front of the altar, my mind went through the steps to dissolve this marriage if necessary. A divorce would be more complicated (minus the complication of planning a flamboyant 1980s wedding celebration) but something that, as a would-be lawyer, I’d be able to handle. I’d establish my venue and jurisdiction in Laredo and Bam! I’d hometown his ass so much for the tender moments of a wedding.
Being raised in constant conflict also lowers our threshold for danger. On our honeymoon in 1988, my spouse and I went to Cancún. While there, we took a fishing trip for the day. Although I was raised on the tropical desert plains of South Texas, Laredo is more on the desert than the tropical side of the plains. I’d never been out on the ocean in a boat. Soon, I was vomiting nonstop. An hour into the ride, I asked the captain how close he could get me to shore. He said that he could not go back as he had other paying customers but that he could get me 100 yards from shore. After swimming, I could walk through 100 yards of jungle and come to the highway. At the highway, I was to turn right and walk to Cancún. I asked if I could take a pair of swimming flippers with me. He said that if I didn’t return them, he’d charge us for them. My spouse was stunned; he didn’t think I would actually go through with this. With eight pesos tucked in my swimsuit, I jumped in the water. I swam, marched through the jungle in my flippers, found the highway, and flagged down a taxi. The driver told me it was 15 pesos to take me to town but agreed to take me for the eight pesos I had, and I got into the taxi wearing nothing but my swimsuit and flippers. With the benefit of hindsight, my blood runs cold thinking of what might have happened, but at the time, I thought I’d rather face sharks, jungle creatures, and possible brigands on the road than spend one more nauseating minute on that godforsaken boat. From a feminist and game theory perspective, that early showing to my spouse of the lengths I’d go to get out of a bad situation was quite the power move.
As I said, there are no tender spaces on the border, even when you’re on the opposite end of Mexico, 1541 miles from the Río Grande border. For this Border Babe, perhaps there are no tender spaces anywhere.
Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, María-Luisa Ornelas-June, attended UT Austin and UC College of the Law, San Francisco. After a short practice, she followed her spouse to postings in the Netherlands, Singapore, and India. In Singapore, she taught legal research and writing to law students at the National University of Singapore. María-Luisa resides in Houston, Texas.
María-Luisa documents the folklore of Tejano culture. She is currently working on a book. Her previous works have appeared or are forthcoming in Chamisa: A Journal of Visual, Literary, and Performance Arts of the Southwest, The Nasiona, and in an anthology, ¡Somos Tejanas!