Childhood Stories Give a Rare Look at a Past to Be Proud Of

The little house on Hoyt Street in Pacoima was a warm place, always lively in the 1940s and ‘50s.

On a chilly morning the smell of champurrado--a Mexican Christmas chocolate drink--sweetened the home, built by young Mary Helen’s father, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1920s and added to the structure piecemeal as the family grew.

The house was filled with the chatter of eight children and two parents, humming with sentences that often started in English and ended in Spanish.

Hoyt Street, like other streets in Pacoima, had no sidewalks. On those dirt streets Mary Helen and the children of other immigrants played hide-and-seek.

The children’s games sometimes led them into an orchard of cactus in the yard of Dona Luisa, a caring old woman famously set in the Mexican ways she and other immigrants had brought to the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley.

These are the stories that Mary Helen Ponce, now 58, tells of life in one of Los Angeles’ venerable barrios in her autobiography, “Hoyt Street.”

Some regard the book, which Ponce began as a class project while she studied at Cal State Northridge in the 1970s, as the first genuine Chicana autobiography. Southern California’s Latino families are sure to find a simpler but no less important meaning in her tale: a rare occasion to see themselves in print and feel proud.

Suddenly, what you thought were the lackluster, vaguely embarrassing details of your family’s immigrant history--struggling with bottom-rung jobs, fumbling with the English language, putting enough food on the table--are elevated to bona fide pieces of American history.

It’s good to be back at Grandma’s house with its kitchen smells and the chaos of untold numbers of family members running in and out. It’s good to be in a place where people randomly mix English and Spanish. It’s good that your parents work in produce packing houses and can bring home the fruits of their trade.

At book readings, Ponce takes small audiences into her first Communion, an awkward first kiss with a boy named Lupe, and Dona Luisa’s sad eyes, welling with tears as Ponce’s family waved goodbye when they left for the summer to work en el fil--harvest in the California farm fields.

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Ponce finished high school, married and raised four children before she started taking classes at Cal State Northridge in her 30s. She got a doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico in 1995.

It was the New Mexico University Press that took interest in a collection of stories about growing up in a California center of Mexican American culture.

Ponce’s father, Tranquilino, moved the family to Hoyt Street from Ventura after coming to California from the Mexican state of Guanajuato. He worked in the local farm fields.

The memories flood, good and bad. There was the time she spent at the Guardian Angel church, where she learned to admire la Virgen de Guadalupe. There, she also began to “wonder why all the important people in the church were men”--like the priests.

It was at a church jamaica, or dance, when she finally got the nerve to peck Lupe on the lips. Lupe’s full name was Guadalupe. It was one of those traditional Mexican names the non-Mexican kids made fun of, both because it was Spanish and because it could be the name of a boy or a girl.

At home, her family’s love was abundant enough to share with Dona Luisa, the thin, white-haired next-door neighbor with no known relatives whom the Ponce family had adopted as a grandmother.

In accordance with Mexican tradition, at age 3, Ponce--as her older sisters all had done--went to sleep with Dona Luisa, to keep la vieja, or the little old lady, company during cold nights.

Mexican American children lived in two worlds, that sanctuary of the home and church in the barrio, and the intimidating Anglo environment they had to venture into.

Told to speak only English at school, the kids tried to Americanize, not necessarily because they loved American culture. Sometimes, they acted out of shame for who they were.

There was Nancy, one of Ponce’s friends. Nancy’s true name was Natcha, before she settled on the Anglo version and “started thinking she was so big,” Ponce said.

She remembers the time she and her sisters were found free of lice, but her friend Concha, who wore her hair in elaborate braids, was found to have them.

Concha was sent home with a yellow slip. Her parents would not be able to read the English words, but somehow they would understand. They had gotten this message before.

On their way home, Ponce and other friends tried to make Concha smile. Ponce put her arm around her. Que verguenza, she remembers thinking. What shame.

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Opportunities for Ponce’s generation were few. Perhaps a handful of her peers who graduated from Pacoima Elementary actually went to the local high school.

Girls in their early teens were often expected to stay home and help around the house. The young men got jobs.

Ponce’s little house and others around it were torn down long ago to make way for a housing project. But she still returns to the Guardian Angel church occasionally for special services.

The church remains a refuge for Pacoima residents, many of them new immigrants, like Ponce’s parents long ago.

“I’ve always felt safe here,” she said.