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CARMEN |
 CARMEN SUAREZ ...a remarkable life |
Carmen's the living link
to a century of la familia
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
A paperback book on pills lies on top of a cluttered
dresser that dates back in style to somewhere in the ‘30’s.
A sock marks her place. Someone must have given her the book,
perhaps to help her live longer, but Carmen Suarez doesn’t
need that advice: she is already 102 years old and says she is
ready to go anytime.
Si Dios quiere–“if God wills it.” She always
punctuates conversation with this phrase.
Carmen still lives in the small stucco bungalow on Grande Avenue
in Tucson, Arizona, which has been her home for the past 60 or
so years. Lately a live-in helper has joined her, but Carmen
still takes care of herself, sometimes walks with a cane, and
rides the bus into town with her companion. Her family is all
around her within the frames of pictures that fill her mantlepiece,
book case, drawers. The voices of her children, grandchildren,
nieces and nephews come through on weekly calls from Texas, California,
Virginia, Massachusetts. Nana Carmen. Tia Carmen.
One son calls every night from his home in Virginia. Only one
of her five children has remained in Tucson. He lives close by
and serves as the point person for her well-being.
Carmen was my mother’s first cousin. Although that makes
her my first cousin once removed, I am tempted to call her Nana
Carmen. This title has the soft lilt of her own speech that accompanies
a self-deprecating turn of the hand and a knowing look that says,
“I know what’s really going on.”
Cousin Carmen was born in Hermosillo, Mexico, the capital of
the state of Sonora, in 1901. Her father, Genaro Minjares, was
a barber with a talent for art. I hear he did artwork for a government
building as well as more mundane sign painting. Carmen inherited
his artistic talent and expressed it in sewing, which she started
doing as a child. She was apprenticed to a woman who made wedding
finery by hand for the wealthy brides in town.
When her younger sister, Juanita, took a secretarial position
in Nogales, which straddles Sonora and Arizona, their mother
sent Carmen along as her companion in this rough border town.
The two sisters would remain close for the rest of their long
lives.
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Genaro Minjares, a barber with gifts as an artist. |
Carmen went to work as a seamstress and met a tailor named Francisco Suarez. She asked him to teach her his tailoring skills. They married a year later in 1922 and moved further up the Sonoran desert to Tucson, which she would call “home” ever after. Still a territory when Carmen was born, Arizona had now been a state for 10 years.
When Francisco was offered a job in the copper mining town of Jerome, Carmen traveled up to the mountains between Prescott and Sedona to check it out. What she saw was a boom town with 88 miles of underground tunnels. Because of cave-ins and slipping buildings, Jerome was switching to open pit mining. Dynamite blasted day and night. Carmen turned around and went back to Tucson. She refused to have her young family live in “the mineral,” as she called it. Francisco worked there a short time and returned to Tucson.
Later, he accepted a better job in Fort Huachuca, fast in the desert mountains near the Mexican border. It was late in the ‘20’s when Francisco became a tailor for the officers of the U.S. Army’s 10th Cavalry Division, which was stationed there. He never used a pattern; he measured the blue wool for the dress uniforms and the khaki for the breeches by hand, using a special metal tipped yardstick and a long table where he cut out the garments. Again, Carmen and the children stayed put in Tucson, but she made extended visits to the Fort.
Fort Huachuca played a special part in the history of her adopted country. Its soldiers had captured Geronimo 20 years before she and “Suarez,” as she always referred to her husband, arrived at the fort. Francisco must have triumphed at knowing that General John J. Pershing rode out its gates in 1916 to lead a punitive expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico. His father was a judge and his sister was a journalist, both Federalists opposed to Pancho.
Whenever his sister crossed the revolutionary’s warpath, she hid out in Nogales until things calmed down for her. But in death Pancho got the upper hand. When the City of Phoenix rejected a statue of him reining in his galloping horse, the City of Tucson took it in over the objections of Francisco and Carmen’s son, Ruben, who had become the City treasurer. It now sits in a square off the main street, partially masked by trees.
The family returned to Tucson. Carmen went out to work at Santa Rita Cleaners and Francisco became a tailor for Jacome’s Department Store. He died in 1944, leaving Carmen with three teenagers at home. Ruben and his brother Mario had joined the Navy. When the cleaners closed, Carmen began a four-decade employment at Porters, a store specializing in fine western wear. When she retired, Porters gave her the industrial Singer treadle she had used all those years. She caressed it as she told me that she had customized the outfits of three rodeo queens on that machine. Her pride sparkled as if they had been the royalty of Europe. She also fine-tuned some western outfits for John Wayne.
Ruben remembers the family sitting around the dining table, telling scary stories. La Llorona (the weeper) was one. Their version had the desert wind carrying the sound of her endless wails over the drowning of her child in the nearby Santa Cruz River. Books and learning were important. When I visited Carmen’s house for the first time last month, she flourished her hand to a floor-to-ceiling book case and said, “We had many good books here.” Her daughter, Lettie, recalls that her mother’s study for U.S. citizenship was a wonderful time in her life and that citizenship was a proud, happy achievement.
Carmen infused her quick intelligence and curious mind into all five of her children. When they got out of the service, each of her three sons enrolled and graduated from the University of Arizona.
As a student, Mario acquainted himself with some of the merchants in El Hoyo, a barrio next to the Santa Cruz River, and wrote short stories based on these and other people he got to know there. His stories still appear in a number of anthologies. He became a professor of literature at Cal Poly Pomona.
Ruben made his career with the City of Tucson. He retired as controller. For a while he had served as acting city manager. Now he sits on the board of an urban renewal project called Rio Nuevo. The master plan calls for elaborate redevelopment plans that will lap up close to Carmen’s block on Grande Avenue. Perhaps gentrification will endanger the liquor store on her corner and the video store across the street with the mural of La Virgen de Guadalupe.
Eugene’s career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs eventually brought him to Washington DC. On the side, he started catering Mexican food for large parties. This touch of Arizona was such a hit that Eugene retired and now produces Abuelita brand tortillas, which he labels as “Virginia’s finest.” He has actually put his mother’s face on a tortilla. She is the Abuelita–“grandmother”–on the wrapper, next to the logo of a woman grinding corn on a stone.
Her stunningly attractive daughters--Lettie and Graciela--took secretarial jobs, married, and ended up respectively in Virginia and in Texas. Carmen worries about Grace’s health. She has outlived Mario, who passed away five years ago.
Carmen has 16 grandchildren. Her 27 great grandchildren range in age from 27 to 2. One great-granddaughter graduated from Harvard this June.
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still hale and hearty. (photo by the author) |
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Most of la familia gathered in Tucson two years ago for a mega-reunion in honor of Carmen’s 100th birthday. We attended a Mass at the historic St. Augustin’s Cathedral downtown where a number of the family have been baptized and married. The priest had the block of us stand up and said to the congregation, “This is Carmen’s family.”
I looked around: we were short like she is and I am--and tall like my husband; we were mostly dark-haired but some were blond. The blood from Mexico that we poured into our children was blended with that from Germany, Ireland, Russia, Britain, Italy, France, the Netherlands. As we sat down, Carmen–all 4’10” of her–remained standing. She turned to us and to the congregation and waved. Then she sat down.
Last month I came home to these people for our second reunion. For so many years I didn’t know most of them existed. Although Carmen’s mother and my grandmother were sisters, they lost touch raising their families in different countries. As an adult, Carmen made a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area where my grandmother had settled and where her family still lived. She found my mother and dad’s house, but we were away on a trip. She and my mother finally met in 1960 when my parents and I took a trip to Tucson. I was amazed at how they resembled each other in the expression of the eyes. Later,her sister Juanita’s daughter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and we two cousins became quite close. When Juanita moved in with her daughter, Carmen made frequent visits and I tried to see her each time she came up. A bond grew between us.
Carmen continued to fly to California and Back East to visit family until she was in her late ‘90’s.
At age 93, Carmen made a silk dress as a birth gift for my baby granddaughter. Accepting the fact that not all the family remain practicing Catholics, she said it could be worn for a Baptism or for simply a nice occasion. The dress was perfectly tailored. The color matched the baby’s light blue eyes.
My daughter keeps it like a painting.
Carmen and I sat down next to the swimming pool last month at the hotel where the out-of-towners were staying for the reunion. She is more hard-of-hearing than she was two years ago and slower to understand who is who and how exactly they’re related. She seems to catch on better if someone explains it in Spanish, which I can’t do. But her wry humor remains intact.
“I don’t know why people say TooksÛn (this is the way she draws out the name of her home) is so dry. . .” She looks at me. “. . .when there’s all that water!” And she points to the shimmering turquoise pool.
Carmen stands at the headwaters of a large, wonderful family that this only child never knew she had.
©2003 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are from the family archives. All rights reserved.
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