Gratitude & Family
Happy Thanksgiving
The difficulty about living thousands of miles away from my family is that I miss several events, ranging from birthdays to weddings to Thanksgiving dinners. For the first time since the beginning part of this decade, I’m breaking bread this year apart from the ones who taught me how.
Unfortunately, I’ve also missed several funerals. That was the case a couple months ago when I was unable to join my extended family in paying respects to my Tía Irma, who was my dad’s aunt by marriage. She was laid to rest in my hometown of Eagle Pass, Texas, just a few weeks ago.
Although I hadn’t seen Tía Irma in several years, I distinctly remember her voice, especially when she was in her Houston kitchen getting her homemade tamales ready. I can’t say I know much about her family background, other than the fact that she married my paternal grandmother’s brother quite young and, originally, lived down the block from her and my dad in the early 60s and 70s. Eventually Tía Irma and Tío Maco moved, making our interactions few and far between. Nevertheless, they’ve both played a huge role in our family narrative.
Who knew, though, just how far that narrative went! A few years before she passed, my grandmother (who I called Nana) shared some information about our family history, namely how she and my grandfather met while working in the fields. I’ve always known that they were both migrant farm workers in Idaho considering that’s where my dad was born in 1960. But I never knew just how long they lived that life. For all I knew, it was a brief moment in the Olivares timeline.
That’s when my dad sent me a black-and-white photo he received shortly after Tía Irma’s memorial. It shows Nana, her sister (my Tía Corro), and Tía Irma in the fields dressed for the elements. He shared that it was taken in the early 1950s around the time that Tía Irma and Tío Maco married. So that means a full decade before he, himself, was born. Certainly not a brief moment, after all.
The more I looked at the picture, the more emotional I got. Here were three young Mexican-American women, almost 60 years ago, doing the kind of work that our community is ridiculed for today during this particular political climate. At a time when our federal government seeks to erase the lived experiences of the Latinx population, here was a reminder of our nation’s past. And it just so happened to include my family…the WOMEN in my family.
I constantly remind myself of my blessings. To know that I, the grandson of migrant farm workers, am able to pursue my professional goals in New York City just a few generations later, is humbling, to say the least. It’s quite fascinating to recognize that your family’s history helped shaped that of our country’s. But honestly, whose hasn’t? And that’s what makes it all the more beautiful. Which is why I’m incredibly grateful to have this be my lineage; to have this be the story I share this year at the Thanksgiving table when no one else around me already knows the details. I’m grateful to have these images, to have these relatives, and to have this moment to embrace and appreciate it all…this time, over pecan pie.
