Sentimental Sunday: Meeting the Family

My parents, Gilbert and Joan Huesca, with my grandmother, Catalina (Perrotin) Huesca, at the Los Panchos Nightclub (owned by the famous Trio Los Panchos), Mexico City, December 1954

Talk about love at first sight. The whole large Huesca family turned out to meet them at the airport, laughing and crying.  My mother, who had come from a small family of two children, suddenly had five new sisters and five new brothers.  She was ecstatic. She and my grandmother – my Abuelita – who had been corresponding for several months by now (each in her own language), embraced each other as if they had known each other all their lives. “Hija mía! – my daughter!” my grandmother cried, throwing her arms around my mother.  Pointing to her stomach, she asked in English, “Baby?”  “Sí!” my mother exclaimed, as my grandmother hugged her and my father triumphantly again.

They all went to my grandmother’s apartment on Carpio Street, where she prepared a special dinner in her tiny kitchen to welcome my parents.  Long after everyone had gone home, my parents and my grandmother sat up late into the night, talking up a storm.  When many years later my mother would tell us the story of that first night and the days that followed, she would marvel at how she and Abuelita could spend hours alone talking, my mother speaking English and my grandmother speaking Spanish, and yet they seemed to understand each other perfectly.

Catrin (Huesca) and Ricardo Díaz, about 1950

Catrín and Ricardo Díaz, my father’s younger sister and brother-in-law, hosted a party to welcome my mother to the family.  My uncle Ricardo Díaz, was a musician and singer in Mexico who was a member of the world-renowned Jarocho group, Andres Huesca y Sus Costeňos.  His nickname was El Pollo, or The Chicken, because of his rotundness.  But his heart and his sense of humor were even greater. 

As the night came to a close, my mother asked my father how to thank her new brother-in-law for his kindness.

“Muchas gracias,” my father instructed her, “tú eres muy amable.”

By the time she found Uncle Ricardo, however, the original translation had evolved to, “Muchas gracias, Hermano (Brother). Tú eres un muy gran mueble.”

My ever-smiling uncle, Ricardo Díaz, and my father, Gilbert Huesca, at my grandmother’s home on Carpio Street, Mexico City, 1972.

The group around them fell silent for a moment.  My father, grinned in amusement. “You just told him that he’s a great big piece of furniture,” he whispered to my mother.

My mother was mortified by the thought that she had insulted her host. But Uncle Ricardo loved it.  He began laughing heartily and hugged my mother.  He and my Aunt Catrín were charmed by her earnestness and unabashed effort to communicate in her broken Spanish.  Although my father and his younger sister had always been close, that evening would mark the beginning of a lifelong close fraternal love between the two couples and eventually, their daughter

My parents’ stay in the Federal District came to a close after Christmas.  My father had originally proposed a honeymoon in Acapulco, but they never made it there until many years later. It didn’t seem to matter, though. Rather, they went to the 300-year-old colonial town of Tequisquiapan, Querétaro (a two hour drive north of Mexico City), for some much-anticipated time alone.

The name of the town, pronounced “Teh-keys-key-ah-pahn,” seemed to melt in their mouths whenever they would mention it in the years that followed. They said it with reverence and ease and lightness, as if it held a wonderful memory that forever would be known only by them. 

Copyright ©  2012  Linda Huesca Tully