Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Eric Gutierrez

LOS ALELUYAS
God and Revolution on Calvert Street
by Eric Gutierrez

Juarez. Where Mexico becomes Tejas, and within that city of Juarez, a square of flinty hard ground, not large, just the size of a child's cold body, about the length of a wheelbarrow and as deep as farewell. It is there Pascual dug a grave for Manuel, the child of Mexico, in the state of Zacatecas, in the nation of Mexico, in the summer of 1916.

They had started on the Rancho of Mesillas. There was nothing left. Not for, not against the revolucionarios, not for, not against the federales, they had left the rancho. Villa's men had taken the last chicken. Carranza's men had taken the last bean. All that was left was to get shot or go north.

Pascual had been torn from his sleep by three drunken revolucionarios looking for more mescal. In their search, they smashed what few possessions were in the one room home on the dirt floor and then turned to Clotilde, who was rocking the baby Manuel in her arms, Juanita and Maria clinging to her skirts. Pascual stepped in front of the men, promising to show them where they could get plenty to drink and eat, good drink, too, not the poor homemade mescal but real liquor and the best tequila. They drove him in front of their horses, half-naked for five miles, hooves clipping his bare, bloody heels. He guided them to a neighboring rancho but as they approached he heard them laughing, "En la vuelta nos lo tronamos." But before they could draw their pistols he took off through the scrub. The three men emptied their guns, but it was too dark or they were too drunk, and all they hit was the night air and the hot hard earth.

He ran as far as he could, collapsing into a shallow ravine where he buried himself in earth and scrub. For several days he lay just beneath the skin of Mexico, part of the terrain, his blood seeping into a land already dark with blood of men like him.

When the revolucionarios finally left the rancho, they took Irineo Garcia, Clotilde's 14-year-old brother, to fight. The boy promised his sister he would find her husband and together they would return to the rancho of Mesillas. But Clotilde knew that there would be nothing left to come back to at the rancho. The patron had been hanged, along with his two sons. Most of the animals had long ago been slaughtered and those that were left were now part of Villa's army. It would be a milagro if Pascual or Irineo survived the battlefield or if she and her children survived among the ruins of the rancho. Even now Juanita and Maria had the gaunt, drawn look of old women although they were only five and three. And Manuel was so tiny and listless, he didn't even cry. She prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe for help, but the mother of God had left the rancho of Mesillas along with Villa's men and would not come back.

A few days later, when Pascual emerged from the surface of the earth, dirt caked in his nostrils and pores, Clotilde was feeding the girls small clods of dry masa. She handed the baby to Juanita and walked slowly toward her husband. "Estas viviendo?" Yes, he was alive. But if he were going to stay alive, he would have to leave the rancho forever and soon. Villa's forces, or the federales, would be back.

That night, Pascual, Clotilde and the children made their way north to Juarez. Like hundreds of others, they waited for Enganche—permission to cross the line between revolution and work, between those who would die and those who would live. Weeks passed in the border town filled with campesinos looking to enter los Estados Unidos. They came and kept coming. Pascual spent long hours waiting in front of the government offices, listening to young men preach revolucion y justicia while in their makeshift home Clotilde discovered small pink blooms on Manuel's cheeks and torso. Small pox.

There in Juarez the child Manuel was supposed to die. Everyone said so. He was so small, so weak. He would stay behind in Mexico, forever a child of one country, one family, one home. Money was paid. Pascual dug the grave. But the child of Mexico didn't die.

"Because I placed a silver medal in the shape of a torso at the feet of the Virgen, a milagro, for Manuel," Clotilde would remember thinking, decades later.

Then word came. Enganche. Work in the copper mines of Sasco. They have to go. This may be their only chance. But the saint was hungry for more silver. The child of Mexico refused to get stronger and yet he refused to die. A child with small pox would be turned back at the border, they would all be, cierto. They could not wait on the saint. They could not afford another milagro of silver. So Clotilde took the child of Mexico from the grave. Even though he's already half a year old he's no bigger than a newborn, so she hides him inside her coat, carries him against her belly, prays he doesn't cry. Pascual tells the border guards that Manuel, their child of Mexico, is dead. He is buried in Juarez.

"He dug the grave himself," Clotilde tells the Americanos as she stands behind Pascual, both of them staring at the ground on the very edge of Mexico.

My grandfather Manuel was reborn that day on the train to the copper fields of Sasco, becoming something unknown, one man living as two on opposite sides of the border, echoing each other's lives.

In 1928, orange orchards, lettuce fields, and acres of commercial roses surround the barrio of Van Nuys. In the San Fernando Valley there's plenty of picking to keep a man and his sons busy, his wife and daughters fed. Pascual, Clotilde, and their family are prosperous compared with life on the rancho. They are buying their own home. Juanita is married; Maria, Manuel, Gonzalo, Abel, and Antonio are healthy and working; Irineo, Esther, Raquel, and Sarah will be soon. When they still went to mass at Saint Elizabeth's, they had filled up an entire pew.

But now the Morenos don't attend mass. The entire barrio knows it. It was bad enough when Pascual became a communista, skipping mass completely and spending his Sundays at El Salon, the meetinghouse where party members would come to speak from 30 miles away in Los Angeles. But then his wife began attending meetings at Pastor Arredondo's storefront church—a Protestant church. Sin verguenza. The barrio was wary of the year-old church housed in a former carniceria. Communists were one thing, but Mexican Protestants, nothing more than apostates who no longer believed in saints or popes or rosaries.

Maria Pacheco, Clotilde's comadre, Father Carlos from Saint Elizabeth's, and even Pascual, had all tried to dissuade or forbid her from attending Protestant services at the old carniceria. For Pascual it was a question of faith. He believed in Communism, not God. The party was his religion. He warned his wife against Pastor Arredondo's storefront salvation. Priests or pastors, Catholics or Protestants, they were all chinchîs, bedbugs, sucking a man's blood, stealing the sweat of his brow and calling it an offering. But Clotilde didn't listen to her comadre or her priest or her husband. She just continued to read her Bible, studying it alongside her children learning their multiplication tables and the history of the American Revolution.

One Sunday, Maria, her head still covered in lace, came to the kitchen door and breathlessly told Clotilde how after mass Teresa Gutierrez, Lydia Mendoza, and some others spoke of asking the bruja on Calvert Street (the one who had been seen flying over fences and rooftops with her long silver hair and nightgown floating behind her) to do whatever was necessary to make Clotilde return to the one true faith. Clotilde laughed and sent her away with empanadas wrapped in the front page of El Peludo, the Communist paper from Buenos Aires that Pascual read because it was endorsed by Trotsky.

Not long after that, with the exception of Maria, Clotilde's comadres stopped speaking to her. She had already lost most of her other friends. They still liked the family well enough. Pascual was a hard worker and didn't make trouble when he drank. And Clotilde might be skipping Purgatory and going straight to hell, but if anyone in the barrio became sick she was there with an olla of albondigas. Hadn't she practically raised those children across the street—pobrecitos—because their mother and father were too drunk or careless to do it themselves?

Nonetheless, they were good Catholics and now that Clotilde had become one of los Aleluyas, they couldn't just pretend nothing was wrong, that everything was as it should be. "Ay viene la Aleluya"—"Here comes the Hallelujah"—they would whisper until they weren't whispering at all. At school Manuel's new name became Sabadito, little Sabbath. Some of the most devout Catholics had even begun saying that instead of praying los Aleluyas se azinquechan, a street term for mating mongrels. Finally, Maria beseeched Clotilde to talk to Father Carlos and finally she agreed, more out of the desire to calm her comadre then a need for confession.

The priest and Clotilde spoke for hours. She responded to his arguments and chastisements with scripture, even refusing to call him Father, because she had read in her Spanish-language Bible, "Call no man father, for your father is the Lord in Heaven." According to family lore, the priest was impressed. "Mia hija, you know your Bible," he supposedly said. "Go in peace and God bless you."

So for almost a year Clotilde waited for her blessing on the hard chair in the old carniceria. She had found Pastor Arredondo's church because of Manuel. He and some other boys had started hanging around outside during the evening services to listen to the strange hymns. One night, Pastor Arredondo poked his head out the front door and surprised the boys by inviting them inside rather than chasing them off. Later that night at dinner, Clotilde was intrigued when her son told her how the services were in Spanish instead of Latin and how people asked questions. She had always felt that with Father Carlos mass remained a mystery, one he seemed to enjoy keeping to himself. So the next night she had taken her Bible and went to listen, hoping to actually understand what she was supposed to believe in and why.

So La Aleluya began attending Sunday services at the carniceria and eventually, after several months, her heresy became accepted as part of life in the barrio, just like the midnight flights of the bruja, the Communist rallies at El Salon or the sound of children crying or laughing or singing. She had lost all of her old friends with the exception of Maria who continued to light a candle for her soul but even she no longer came to visit as often or for as long.

The truth was, it was Clotilde who had changed. The people in the barrio were the same. St. Elizabeth's was certainly no different. She had been the one to insist on knowing why she was kissing beads, kneeling to statues, confessing to a father younger than she was who hadn't seen the bullets and the graves, the grace and the sins that she had seen. It was blasphemous, she knew, to question this way but it didn't feel wrong. She wasn't santucho, she was a sinner, she knew, but, still, it didn't feel wrong. Maria had tried to talk sense into her, reminding her how the Virgen had saved her Manuel's life back in Juarez. Perhaps. She wasn't so sure anymore. Was it the mother of God? The milagro of silver? Or God himself, taking pity on the foolish, misdirected prayers of a mother and child of Mexico?

The first time she opened the Bible she immediately closed it, pushed it off her lap as if it were something poisonous and ready to strike. Was she insane? With barely a sixth-grade education on the rancho how could she possibly understand the word of God? Priests would tell her all that she needed to know. She should just trust them. All she needed was to be obedient, make her confession, say her rosaries. But she wanted God. She was hungry for God. Not for penance or saints or incense—but God himself. She knew he existed. Even when the war came, when the revolucionarios took her and her husband from their bed, groped her with drunken hands, when they marched Irineo to war and she thought she'd never see Pascual again, she knew there was God. He had not answered all her prayers, but he had not left her alone. And so she picked up the Bible, she opened it somewhere between Creation and Second Coming and looked for God.

It was a stifling hot Sunday outside the carniceria. Manuel and a few other boys clung to the wall in a thin strip of shade while inside Pastor Arredondo led the congregation in song. A sturdy woman in a black dress that clung to her broad back and chest stopped at the hose next to them for a drink of water. "Pasa, Señora, pasa," Manuel offered. "There's cold water inside."

Gertrudis Davis, a widow from Santiago de Chile and a deaconess of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, drank her water and took a seat. Pastor Arredondo was preaching on the Ten Commandments and when he asked his flock which of the Commandments were the most important, the widow Davis was not shy. The pastor praised her answer but before he could continue, she launched into what she called the Forgotten Commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy.

"We haven't forgotten, Sister," interrupted Pastor Arredondo. "Today we are keeping the Sabbath and together …"

The widow Davis smiled indulgently, interrupting right back. "But, Señor, this isn't the Sabbath. This is Sunday. The seventh day, Saturday, is the day our Lord rested."

Pastor Arredondo was hard pressed to wrest back the sermon and he quickly closed with a hymn. The final verse of Hay Poder had barely settled over the congregation before Clotilde was asking Sister Davis about this seventh-day Sabbath. Manuel had been home for hours and Maria had started preparing dinner by the time their mother rushed into the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind her. Kissing the five of her children present, she put down her Bible, grabbed the olla of frijoles and fell happily to work.

The next week and for several weeks after, Sister Davis would come from Los Angeles on the trolley to study scripture with Clotilde and two other women from Pastor Arredondo's church. Pascual was not pleased. Even though he was a Communist and an atheist, he hadn't really minded Clotilde's religious life. The truth was he secretly took pride in his wife standing up to the barrio and the Catholic Church. She might make a Communist yet. And frankly, as far as he was concerned it hadn't mattered all that much when she left the chinchîs of St. Elizabeth's for that chinchî Arredondo and his butcher shop church. Nothing had really changed. But these Adventistas were trouble.

Now Clotilde didn't go out to worship, she had these santuchas come into his house every Saturday. Every Wednesday and Friday night, too. But probably the worst part of his wife's conversion was the food. Before she would make his favorite, cabeza de borrego, every Sunday in the oven of the woodburning stove, the leftover tender brains turned into tacos, and during the week there would be tripas, carnitas, and big bowls of menudo. Then that widow, as squat and powerful as a stonemason, showed up with dietary ideas from the Adventist sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Since then, Clotilde was constantly lecturing him on the Reforma de la Salud. First the sugar bowl disappeared from the table, then fried foods, finally both meat and lard. The frijoles didn't even taste like food anymore. "Necesito mi carné!" Pascual would yell, pushing away a steaming plate of vegetables. "I need my meat! No quiero comer cochinada! I'm a man, not a rabbit!" Finally, Clotilde compromised. On working days, when he was digging ditches for the power company, she would feed him meat. But no pork, no lard and no exceptions.

Manuel spent the last years of his childhood in an Adventist home and was baptized at 13. There's a photograph of him as a small boy, standing on the petrified dirt in front of a shingled home, its dusty rose paint peeling like petals. Although he is young, he shares the same direct gaze as his mother Clotilde and the rest of the small group, mostly women and children. They are all squinting into the sun, but it is a true expression, preternaturally creased foreheads and pursed mouths practiced over generations in lettuce fields, apricot orchards, and ranchos. Focused by the elements, their faces are impassive. Not blank, not vague, but unperturbed, as if watching their descendents, deciphering what manner of men and women we are and in their watching they think, "Pobrecitos, ellos no saben nada."

That home was the first Spanish-speaking Seventh-Day Adventist Church founded by Clotilde and her new comadres. Together, Dolores Saenz, Esther Medrano, and Clotilde had all left the church in the old carniceria to study the Bible and the works of Adventist prophet Ellen G. White. It hadn't been planned that way but Pastor Arredondo had given the women an ultimatum: Either stop studying the "doctrine of Satan" or give up their positions as deaconesses. So the women and two of their converts started their own congregation in Pascual and Clotilde's small home where the last of their 11 children were born. Not my grandfather, though. Manuel was a child of Mexico.

For 12 years they met in the living room on Calvert Street until the Moreno house could no longer hold the growing Adventist congregation. Still, its walls had been blessedly thin enough to serve God's and Clotilde's purpose. While his wife took turns teaching the lessons of Sister White in the living room, Pascual sat in the adjoining bedroom, stoically reading El Peludo, determined not to be distracted by the preaching a few feet away, rustling the pages loudly whenever the service came too clearly through the wall. Every Wednesday and Friday night and Sabbath morning he would stoically take his seat with his paper, staking his ground in his own home, refusing to join los religiosos. But the walls were too thin and the prayers and hymns made it difficult to concentrate on the Communist catechisms in the paper until he began to listen more than read.

He continued to take refuge in the bedroom whenever there was a service, slapping his paper against his thigh, noisily shutting the door, and scraping the chair across the floor. But as the Bible study whispered through the walls, he would strain to listen instead of trying to drown it out by clearing his throat loudly or humming the Internacional. For four years he stayed on his side of the wall, never stepping foot into his own living room where Clotilde was teaching.

One Sabbath, the paper unopened in his lap, its cries of Huelga! Huelga! muted in the crisp folds, Pascual listened to the walls singing. Aunque en esta vida no tengo riquesas/ Se que aya en el cielo tengo una mansion/ Mas aya del sol, mas aya del sol/ Yo tengo un hogar/ Hogar bello hogar mas aya del sol.

The hymn ended and when the walls asked him to kneel in prayer, he did. In the living room, Clotilde bowed her head and when the tiny congregation joined her in the Lord's Prayer, she couldn't help but open her eyes. The wall was praying too and in her husband's voice it said "Amen."

The Moreno house and its bad acoustics had, indeed, served their purpose. By the time the congregation moved out of Pascual and Clotilde's living room, los Aleluyas had all become Adventists. Their group had grown to 17 when the house in the photo with the dirt yard and parched sapling was purchased. Clotilde and her comadres had founded their first church.

I hated summer vacation. It meant two months in my grandparents' motor home driving through the dirt roads and suffocating heat of Mexico while school friends sat in air-conditioned matinees of Planet of the Apes and rode canvas surfriders through the pylons of what remained of Ocean Park Pier. The motor home was called The Establishment. I was mortified.

For months my grandfather would collect clothing, shoes, canned goods, and toys from the three Spanish-speaking Adventist churches his mother founded in Culver City, San Fernando and Van Nuys, as well as his own English-speaking church. My brother, David, and I would stack them in every spare inch of The Establishment, to be distributed in small pueblos and city slums on our route. The first day of the trip was always the most unbearable, David and I barely able to move among the boxes we didn't always secure properly. By the time we'd reach Tijuana, a carton of shoes would have spilled across the small strip of floor space or a flat of canned corn would have fallen, leaving lumps on our shaggy, scowling heads.

We would spend the weekend in Tijuana at the small church next to a field of cows and manure my grandfather had helped start by contributing money raised in Los Angeles, materials from the paving and asphalt business he had started with his brother Antonio, and his own endless sweat. After disgorging almost a third of The Establishment's treasure in the border town, making room to sleep and sit for a meal, we would head south toward the desert of Zacatecas.

Flat tires, freak rainstorms that would flood roads and leave us stranded, flies, open sewers, and my brother's fist were not my only torments. I could not speak Spanish and so had no company except for my brother and grandparents. Manuel always tried to keep us entertained, pointing out burros and indios as if they were rare comets and natural wonders never before seen, telling stories of great figures like Benito Juarez, and of obscure ones like Ysaac, his grandmother who was Yaqui Indian and so dark the one picture ever taken of her toward the end of her life came out as a silhouette. But the further we drove into Mexico the quieter my grandmother would become. Vivian was born in Santa Ana, California. She was not a child of Mexico. Neither was my brother and neither was I, for that matter.

And so we wrinkled our noses at the jicama and papaya sprinkled with cayenne my grandfather would bring us from a street vendor. We complained about the scarcity of toilets and the nonexistence of toilet paper. We handed over the canned peaches and corduroy trousers as fast as possible in silence, embarrassed by the gratitude and foreign words we didn't then understand. Most of the towns we went to were little more than clusters of shacks made from old wood, discarded tin or plastic and wire. Sometimes we would stay in the shells of churches that would never be completed or in crumbling plaster "motels" that stank of standing water and moldy sheets and at those times I would long for the luxury of The Establishment.

Once, outside Hermosillo, we stopped for gasoline and lunch at a restaurant. Two little boys, not so much younger than me, ran up to the Americanos—ran up to us—hands out, asking for money. Immediately, the owner of the restaurant came barreling through the door to chase them off but before they could run, my grandfather put a hand on each of their bony shoulders as he often did with David and me, and pulled them close. He told the patron that they were with us. After lunch—they ate fast, not saying a word or looking up—we found them tennis shoes and two boxes of cereal.

Over the course of six summers we never made it to the rancho of Mesillas. It wasn't on any map. The best we could do was find what Pacual and Clotilde thought might have been the small pueblo nearby that Villa's men had ransacked for beans and mescal. But my great-grandparents weren't there. They couldn't tell us for sure. Besides, it was too hot, too dusty, too long ago. All I wanted to do was get back to air-conditioning and TV.

The only time I've seen my grandfather cry was at his mother's graveside. Mama Tillie, as we called her, was 86 when she died. In the neighborhood where she lived out more than 50 of her years she was known and respected as Sister Clotilde. At the mortuary chapel, family and friends remembered the old stories, family lore repeated so often that it has assumed the dimensions of flesh and depths of knowledge gleaned from the crossfire of revolution, the dusty graves of Juarez, the reverent prayers coming from the walls. Although these stories were never told to me directly, I learned them from glances and arguments and whispers beside caskets and wedding cakes. They were our family's litany and we all had a part to recite even though I wasn't sure yet what the call was and what my response might be.

From a circle of elderly tias y tios, my grandfather motioned to my brother and me in our own circle of teen-age primas y primos. He put a hand on each of our shoulders and guided us up the aisle to the white and silver casket. The three of us stood in front of the open casket and even though I was 15, I kept my eyes on my feet, as I always did in Mama Tillie's presence. I could feel my grandfather struggling to find his voice, and I felt embarrassed by his grief. I had only ever known my grandfather as playful and quick-witted, so different from the defeated and angry men he grew up with. But this grief had changed something. And then I realized, for the first time he was not treating us like children. His manner was still his, but there was an added note, a low, knowing note, of men talking to men.

Standing before his mother's casket, my grandfather took in a ragged breath. He had something to tell us, a new verse of the family litany perhaps, or some wisdom that would guide us from inarticulate, surly teen-agers into the audacious young manhood he had assumed by our age. "Take a good look," Manuel finally managed to say. "That's where you boys get your nose."

The funeral was in the modern stone and stained glass Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Fulton Street in Van Nuys. In the Spanish-speaking Adventist community of Los Angeles, it's called the mother church. When my grandfather became an Adventist, his father, brother Antonio, and he literally helped build it to house the congregation of hundreds that had started in the living room of his childhood home. Several generations and branches of family were there. Comadres y compadres filled the pews. They sang her favorite hymn. Aunque en esta vida no tengo riqueza/ Se que aya en el cielo tengo una mansion/ Mas aya del sol, mas aya del sol/ Yo tengo un hogar/ Hogar bello hogar mas aya del sol.

Eric Gutierrez is a second-year MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School. This essay was written for the class "Religious Values and Cultural Conflict," taught in fall 2003 by Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity. An entertainment journalist before coming to HDS, Eric plans on pursuing a public ministry as a writer on religion and society and considers himself a member of the loyal opposition in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.