Limpia 1
Where Mamita came from
Maria de Jesus wants to go to Taco Tio in Echo Park. She remembers exactly where it was. Right on Sunset Blvd just like she said. I always thought she just wanted to sound cool. It’s Los Burritos now, but she says only the sign has changed. I walk across the street to take pictures of her staring up at the bricked corner taco stand. There are no tables, there never were. There are counters to lean on so you can eat burritos or hot dogs. Her 4’9” stature can hardly accommodate this, but she manages to place one elbow on the counter and one hand on her hip. Head in hand, I watch her collapse in tears in a way that I’ve only seen happen once or twice.
I rush over and put one hand on the back of her heart. I let her sob which sounds like a cross between a lamento and keening. When she’s done, she says, “I have such good memories working here. And all the people I knew.” In an instant, there’s something different about her. After she’s wiped away the last of her tears, we order hard shell tacos.
Maria de Jesus has never met a stranger. She talks to the people taking our order and making our food telling them she used to work there in 1961. For four years, she’d leave my brothers with El Ramon and she’d work from 8 to 430, Monday through Friday. She hadn’t been back in over 50 years. I can’t hear what else she’s telling them.
I notice a man with a little girl. She’s about 4 years old, small enough to be sitting on a counter meant for elbows and tacos. He’s picking up one pinchful of food at a time; frijoles and arroz; iceberg lettuce and tomatoes; shredded cheese and salsa. He’s placing it so carefully in her mouth like the most important communion in all the world is happening at a taco stand on Sunset Boulevard. She smiles after each bite. Every few minutes she leans toward him to wrap her arms around him and each time he embraces her. He’s at the age where she can be either his daughter or his granddaughter. Like my mother who had her first child at 17 and her last at 38.
I don’t know what’s making him look at her the way he is, but I want to know more. If it’s his daughter, he had her later in life. Maybe she was his last chance. She could be his granddaughter, and maybe he has a strained relationship with his child and so in this way, he’s making up for it. That’s a possibility.
But then, he says, “You’re my little mamita.” And I fall in love for her. Because there’s “mama” and there’s “mami” but “mamita,” it’s so much more. It’s so much more, I want to have a daughter just so I can call her that. And I do. And people ask, “why do you call your daughter, mamita?” And I don’t why. My mother calls me “mami” and my brother, he calls me “madre” and that’s just the way it is where I’m from. Since time out of mind, you call your daughter “mama.”
And I don’t just call her “mamita.” I tell her often, “you’re my little mamita.” I look at her the way he looked at her, the way no father has ever looked at me, but I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Not on that day when the first mamita who came into my life and her father offered me redemption. That to give what I never had makes me feel so fucking rich and it never did matter. We all got what we came for.
Limpia 2
Tina of Echo Park
L-E-M-O-Y-N-E. Lemoyne. I ask if she’s sure it’s not Limón. And she repeats, “Lemoyne.” She goes on the way she’s always said it… the mornings were so cold, and in the afternoon, you needed to wrap your sleeve around your hand when opening the car door otherwise the metal would burn your hands. And the walk back home, it was so grueling. All the way uphill, so steep, it felt like you were climbing a ladder. She had to do this every day.
We are walking around a neighborhood my mother cannot recognize. The GPS has taken us to the end of Lemoyne Street, but my mother still can’t find her old house. She insists that the street was longer. Much longer. And I tell her, maybe she’s remembering it differently. She said the walk home took an eternity, but this walk doesn’t seem very long. We get back in the car and start making turns and more turns only to find they built a school that cut off Lemoyne right at the center. After a couple of right turns, we got back on track heading uphill toward my mother’s home.
It starts to look familiar. My mother tells us to pull over. We get out and start to look at the house, the plants and she assures me, this is it. I take pictures, and a young woman pokes her head out the screen door and asks, “can I help you?” My mother tells her that she lived in this very house over 50 years ago. The woman, Tina, asks if we want to come in.
My mother looks around the living room like she’s standing in the Taj Mahal. She narrates, “your brothers and I would sleep in this corner of the living room. I’d be home at night with them when El Ramon had a gig. I was always so scared.” Tina walks us through the tiny house and my mother asks her if she feels safe living here and Tina says that she and her roommate love it, and my mother continues how she never went to the back of the house. Tina leads the way to the kitchen in the back and I’m curious as to what was so scary. We take a peak out the window and the entire earth seems to drop. The back door leads to a small deck which leads to the longest staircase I’ve ever seen—the staircase also very steep to accommodate the sharp drop. We see houses down below—lots of brush, lots of overgrowth and now I know what she was so afraid of. She was all alone at the edge of the world. Save for the man who beat her.
She cries while glancing around the living room, examining the walls and corners, imaging the mattress on the floor, the toys in a pile, the bruises on her arm. She clears her throat and moves on to complimenting Tina on how cute she has it decorated. As we walk outside thanking her endlessly for letting us inside her home, my mother recalls how the house was painted green when she lived in it.
I could never understand why she wanted to go back to a place with such vivid and awful memories. And I told her that we could go anywhere she wanted, and this is what she picked.
I get it now, sometimes you have to go to the old haunts and visit the old ghosts to let them know that you’ve grown far from their fingertips. How even 50 years later, you have to go back and re-name that burial ground a meadow of sorts. You have to re-open the wound, re-patch it up better. And wouldn’t you know, Elysian Park is just down the street. We could bury the gods of abuse and alcoholism and machismo right above the Dodger Stadium. I will be my mother’s accomplice. I will help her drag all of it up that hill. Because I know in my bones, my healing starts with her healing. And to do otherwise would be to work around the scar tissue and we deserve better than that.
So next time we’re there. We’re riding those swans on Echo Park Lake and eating fruit cups full of jackfruit and pineapple topped with chamoy and when we float by the lotuses growing majestically out of the mud, we’ll nod and say, yes, I know.
Limpia 3
Maestra
The six eggs she asked me to bring were carried with caution.
They are room temperature just as she instructed.
During the platica, we talk of susto and if catatonia is another word for it.
It is not.
Susto is what brought me here.
That day in July when I forgot what my name was.
And that night when it felt like fire ants were crawling in my brain.
The room is dim, and the candles are burning.
Copal smoke is making shapes in the corner.
Who do you pray to?
Forget about optics, Maestra wants to know who do you pray to?
She needs to know who to petition on your behalf.
I say my mother prays to God and Jesus, but not the Virgin Mary, you can leave her out.
That’s who she prays to, can we go with that?
She starts with the first egg at the crown of my head.
Crucito crucito crucito crucito crucito.
It occurs to me; this is the first woman to ever rub an egg on me since my Tia Minnie Mo passed away.
She continues drawing the shape of little crosses with the egg against my scalp and forehead, cheeks, lips and I could so easily drift off to sleep, but I know she’s going to ask me to turn over at some point, so I stay present. I feel for the sound the egg makes against the bones of my face.
This is the deepest prayer you can ever receive.
She stops and I hear her crack it open and empty it in a bowl and she moves on to the second egg.
Cross shapes written on my body, short and fast strokes, she’s erasing something set deep into my bones.
I turn over for more crosses.
She places one hand behind the ankle and one on the other.
She pulls away from them quickly, gently. She does it again. And again, and whatever has made its way in me, she knows it’s not letting go easily.
Please, leave me and don’t ever find me again.
I sit up, her small, mighty hands rest on the top of my head. She begins to sing, I begin to cry. The hot tears burn my face.
I don’t care. At least I’m crying.
An ocean of agua de Florida is sprayed from her mouth to my back.
It trickles down and off comes the big blue house, the Austrian pines and everything buried beneath it.
The blackest calla lilies are gone, the mounds of manzanilla, the Passiflora that never grew, the jars and jars of breastmilk. Gone.
Off comes the shit his mother burned all those years ago.
I won’t bathe for days.
I feel too clean.
Limpia 4
Maria de Guadalupe
Xibalbá.
She has called me down.
Almost a year after she passed, I had to see her.
It wasn’t hell, but it was deep in the earth.
Cool and in a cave, mud floors.
Chairs scattered about with people, awake, but slumped over, hopeless.
I walk around the chairs carefully, and I find her.
I fall to my knees, and cry like a child in her lap.
She holds me.
I’m heartbroken and so is she. It was her life, after all.
Both sharing our devastation it happened too soon and so non-sensical.
The pants she gave my mom were still in the back seat of her car.
She shouldn’t be here. My mother always said she was the strongest.
We’re in disbelief death was able to take her. But here she is.
And she doesn’t want to go any further.
I promise her I will leave out Red Marlboros and pretty earrings every November.
I tell her she can send the hechizos de bruja in my dreams. I will write them down.
This makes her smile.
When I wake up, my bones are so heavy, I feel like I’ve been sleeping for centuries, dragged through a marsh wrapped in barbed wire. Rocks have been shoved down my throat and they are stuck.
I’m worried it’s COVID. But it’s not.
This is the first time I’m dream sick.
Limpia 5
Maestra knows when I’m in trouble
The bus ride through the desert is bumpy and I’m worried it’s too much for my mother.
I see Maestra and her son and I ask where they are going but they can’t say. She turns to my mom and asks, “How are you, Maestra Gonzalez? How are your legs?” My mother says that that they hurt all the time. Maestra tells her that they will be praying for her legs.
The bus stops and there are groups and groups of people walking, some to the left and some to the right. It’s dark and I can sense they are all going on a pilgrimage. My mother starts walking to the right of this dark, vast desert and Maestra and her son are going to the left. He shouts for her to hurry and that they need to get going.
My eyes water as I tell Maestra that I am so happy I got to see her before I went on this trip with my family. She stands in front of me and places her hands over my ears. She uncovers the left one and bites the tip of it fast and hard. Hands still cupped over my ears, she starts singing. An other-worldly voice, it’s not English or Spanish, I’m not even sure it’s human, but it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard. Her voice lifts me off the desert floor and I’m floating in the New Mexico sky. An orchestra begins and it gets louder and louder and this is not just an orchestra, it’s music for heaven, for the celestial spheres, straight out of the codices, it’s not meant for humans to hear. But I can hear it, and I feel it move through the corridors inside my body, caressing every pocket of pain.
She stops and removes her hands and quickly covers my eyes. Complete blackness. All I see is a neon bolt of orange lightning flash horizontally across my eyes. We hug and part ways.
I wake up that morning and I feel as whole as a newborn baby.
Limpia 6
Michtlán
If the afterlife is how she is remembered by the living, then I find her in the perfect place.
If heaven is a favorite moment replayed over and over, then she found it.
About a year after the cave, she wanted me to find her again. So, I go where she calls me.
An estate sale.
Yes, this is right.
When I see her, I hug her, and I start to look around at the tables covered in jewelry boxes, and crystal figurines, and racks of fur coats. Piles of pearls, cocktail rings, vintage purses. We glance at one another and we both smile. This is a good one. And we know it.
The November before, for her—I had set out the pink cake, a pair of pretty earrings, and the red Marlboros. I had cempōhualxōchitl in terracotta pots. I had calaveras. I lit candles and prayed to the glow of the flames. I did this for days and days.
What is a prayer if not a hymn making its way out of the cathedral that sits in your rib cage?
Kimberly Castillo is a writer from South Texas with a BA in Journalism from the University of the Incarnate Word and an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. She lives in Colorado and most recently attended the Yale Writers’ Workshop, where she deepened her work on ancestral lineage and legacy.