Recalling a Neighborhood’s Dirt Streets, Sweet Memories

PACOIMA —  The little house--la casita--on Hoyt Street was a warm place, always lively.

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

The house was always vibrant with the chatter of eight children and two parents, filled with conversation in a Mexican American manner, in which sentences that started in English sometimes ended in Spanish, or the other way around.

Hoyt Street, as other streets in Pacoima--or Pacas, as Mexican Americans called it--had no sidewalks. On those dirt streets north of San Fernando Road, Mary Helen and the children of other immigrants played las escondidas. Hide and seek.

The children’s games sometimes led them into an orchard of Nopales--cactus--in the yard of Dona Recallsof HerdLuisa, 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.

“Our lives revolved around the home, school and the church,” said Mary Helen Ponce, author of “Hoyt Street--an autobiography,” during a book reading recently at the Echo Park Public Library.

Ponce, 58--who now lives in Sunland--was born in Pacoima. Her book, which started as a class project while she studied at Cal State Northridge in the 1970s, has been called the first genuine Chicana autobiography.

At the book readings Ponce occasionally holds around the region, she takes small audiences far away into a simple Mexican American childhood. 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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Even now Ponce sprinkles her English sentences with the Spanish words engraved in her vocabulary from childhood.

She finished high school, married and raised four children before she started taking classes at CSUN in her 30s. By 1995 she had earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico.

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

Ponce’s childhood home was at 13011 Hoyt St., just north of San Fernando Road and Van Nuys Boulevard. Her father, Tranquilino, moved the family there from Ventura, a previous stop after coming to California from the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Tranquilino, like many other immigrants, worked in the fields of local farms. Some men worked in the lemon-packing houses. And the most prestigious job, the immigrants thought, was that of a truck driver.

The children spent their days at Pacoima Elementary and Guardian Angel church near Hoyt Street.

Mexican American families in the barrio lived more modest lives than families across the tracks in what is now Arleta and, to the north, the city of San Fernando. Those wealthier neighborhoods, where few of the population were Latino, boasted bigger and more-modern homes.

For Ponce, growing up Mexican American in Pacoima provided good and bad memories.

Count among the good ones the time she spent at 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--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, Ponce said, 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, a thin, white-haired next-door neighbor with no known relatives who 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 viejita--the little old lady--company during cold nights.

Dona Luisa, loved and welcomed at the Ponce home, had her own way of doing things, the reason why she was allowed to help with certain chores, such as washing clothes, but not others, like cooking. For one, she often forgot to wash her hands.

And “while paring potatoes,” Ponce recounts, “she skipped the holes. Her tortillas were shiny with lard, raw in the middle and burned on the edges.”

But the one thing Dona Luisa knew how to do well was love, said Ponce, who through childhood was cradled to sleep in the old woman’s arms.

But growing up Mexican American in those days, said Ponce, was not always pleasant.

Mexican American children lived in two worlds--that safe 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.

With names the Anglos perceived as funny, strange customs and too many children, Ponce saw it was hard for Mexican Americans to fit in. The teachers’ efforts to Americanize them, to the embarrassment of the Mexican American children, also entailed sanitizing them.

In the spring, when lice hatched, the children were marched to the nurses’ office to be inspected. Although the same inspections took place in schools where Latinos were few, the Mexican American children felt singled out.

She remembers the time she and her sisters were found free of lice. Not all Mexican American children had piojos. But her friend Concha, who wore her hair in elaborate braids, did.

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 an arm around her.

Que verguenza, she remembers. What shame.

Opportunities for Ponce’s generation were few. It was only a handful of her peers who had graduated from Pacoima Elementary that actually went on to San Fernando High.

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 the San Fernando Gardens public housing project. But she still returns to Guardian Angel church occasionally for special services.

The church is still a refuge for Pacoima residents, many of them new immigrants. Just like Ponce’s parents were decades ago.

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