Having read recently of a commemorative service for veterans, I felt compelled to write about my maternal grandfather, Bonifacio Rodriguez from Puebla, Mexico — a veteran of war in another country, the Mexican Revolution.
While visiting my grandfather back in 1974, when I was 27 years old, he asked me to sit at the kitchen table of his rental home with the alley address 1414 Avenue C (Rear) in Galveston, Texas. Knowing my interest in history, he said he wanted to tell me of his early personal life, something that his own Texas-born sons did not know of and still refuse to believe.
Drafted at 19, Bonifacio’s service in Venustiano Carranza’s army took Privado Rodriguez to the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts and mountains to combat Francisco Villa’s troops. He related atrocities he witnessed, such as women and children being gunned to pieces as they were caught in machine gun cross fire.
One story he shared involved going for supplies along trails in total darkness. Leading packhorses on foot, he and his comrades heard rifle fire and decided it best to bed down in a small town’s plaza where they noticed others already sleeping there. Upon waking at dawn, they realized they had been lying among “tamalitos,” the petate-wrapped bodies of recently executed soldiers. Bonifacio’s squad hastily got out of there.
There was one instance in which my grandfather was punished for grievous neglect of duty. He was responsible for saddling the officers’ mounts and securing them while they attended a strategic planning session. He sat on the curb minding the mounts and took out his revolver. While tooling around with the pistol, it went off and accidentally grazed one of the steeds on the neck. The whole herd stampeded down streets and out of the village. After the horses were recovered, the officers made an example of Bonifacio. He was stripped to his waist and received several stripes from a leather whip in front of the assembled soldiers, a show of the harshness and reinforcement for the demands of military discipline.
The story reminded me of my Latin II classes and translating Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I remembered that falling asleep on guard duty resulted in execution, and thievery in amputation of the hand.
Another instance my grandfather recounted involved a derrota, a running retreat to avoid being overtaken by the victorious Villistas. The Carranzistas headed west across the Sonoran desert, making it to the port of Guaymas on the Sea of Cortez. There they boarded, horses and all, a barco de vela y de vapor (a steamship with sails) named Bonita. It listed heavily as they sailed south safely to the port of Mazatlan. From there they were shipped by rail into the interior of Mexico
Bonifacio eventually mustered out and made it back to his hometown of Puebla. He was so fatigued upon arrival that he got off the train and sat down on the depot sidewalk, putting his head between his knees and crying, just glad to be home. A woman tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Bonifacio, ya vamonos a casa.”
It was his mother, Maria de la Luz Rodriguez, the same name he would give his first child and only daughter, my mother, Maria de la Luz Rodriguez, who was born in the city of San Luis Potosi, Mexico in 1922. My Grandmother Maria was one of three orphaned sisters from San Luis. Bonifacio and Maria lived in Tampico for a short while. Bonifacio and his brother Angel brought my months-old Mom, my grandmother, and her two sisters, Teodora and Aurelia, to Nuevo Laredo in 1923.
Bonifacio would cross the international bridge into Laredo to work at Panaderia El Fenix, then return to Nuevo Laredo before the bridge closed at 10 p.m. One evening he worked late and did not cross home because the bridge had closed. He lay down on a bench at Plaza San Agustin to get some sleep. A local Mexican-American police officer woke him, advising him that he could not sleep in this public space. The officer offered a bench in his back yard at his nearby home. In the morning Bonifacio washed his face in the policeman’s garden, preparing to return to El Fenix.
Upon learning of Rodriguez’s predicament and family situation, the policeman offered to help him with immigration procedures and paperwork.
Bonifacio, my grandmother, and my Mom were soon allowed to enter the United States. The immigration procedure included being sprayed with delousing powder, as was the norm for all newcomers at that time. Bonifacio jumped to the female side of line when he found out that the immigration officials were stripping women for dusting, which they were about to do to his wife and child. He loudly protested “Somos gente limpia, no tenemos piojos!” (“We are clean people, we don’t have lice!”) The immigration officers backed off and allowed Maria and my Mom through without the procedure.
My great uncle Angel and my grandmother’s sisters likewise soon immigrated.
Shortly thereafter Angel and Bonifacio came across a publicly posted notice called for laborers to work in the pine lumber camps of Louisiana. Bonifacio, Angel, Maria and my mother Luz boarded the Texas-Mexican Railway with dozens of other would-be laborers heading east toward the Gulf Coast.
As the train stopped in Robstown, my Grandmother advised Bonifacio that the baby needed milk. The Robstown depot was lined with deputies with orders not to allow any Mexicans off the train. My Grandfather didn’t speak English, so as he stepped off the train with baby bottle in hand, he was stopped by Anglo deputies who summoned a Mexican American officer to translate. The deputy told Bonifacio to climb back aboard the train, and that he’d bring him the baby’s milk. This favor Bonifacio never forgot, and its memory he shared with me as an example that there were good people everywhere.
He and Angel, both bakers and cooks by trade, were not assigned to the lumberjack gangs and instead were relegated to the camp kitchen. They had left my grandmother and my mother in New Orleans.
Bonifacio recounted how the Anglos and Franceses (Cajuns) mistreated Mexicans and blacks. The worst physical harm was upon the blacks, who were subjected to bullwhipping as a form of motivation to work. This also was the punishment for men who tried to run away, as they were kept out in the Louisiana pine forests away from any towns and they were forced to buy all life’s necessities from the camp store.
They lacked hope to escape, as they didn’t know where they were. The laborers who were forced to buy their food and supplies from the camp store owed more than what they made in wages, making them virtual slaves.
Bonifacio said they didn’t beat Mexicans, but berated them with harsh cursing. He was advised early on by a white foreman to say he was Native American, referring to him and Angel as “Chief.” It seems they were less mistreated this way.
Eventually, my great uncle Angel managed to bribe a Cajun to take him away in una piragua (pirogue) they poled through the bayou. He got to New Orleans, met up with Maria and baby Luz, and found a job in a restaurant. He saved enough money to go back, pay off debt to the company store, and to buy Bonifacio’s way from the lumber camp.
They eventually moved to Beaumont, where Bonifacio and María had three sons. My mother recounted that when Bonifacio worked in hotel restaurants, he would bring home leftovers after work. She especially remembered Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and ham.
The Rodriguezes eventually moved to Galveston Island, where Bonifacio worked as a cook, a carpenter, a stevedore, house painter, and a cabinetmaker that refitted yachts. As his boys grew up in that alley three blocks from Galveston Harbor, he’d take the older ones to work with him to empty and clean the holds of ships.
He never learned to speak English, but vividly recounted learning curse words in English, especially when black dockworkers would yell “Go back to Mexico!” He’d yell back “You go back to Africa!”
Such were the lives and social relations at which 21st century politically correct citizens now wince. These antagonistic feelings are still there, simmering right under our smiling facades or openly glowering in the case of white supremacist hate groups.
For my 50 years as a health care provider and post-secondary health, social and behavioral science educator and a frequent traveler (42 of the 50 states, and nine foreign countries on three continents), I have learned as my grandfather Bonifacio, an immigrant, told me all those years ago — there are good people everywhere. We must be vigilantly careful to maintain our freedoms and hard-earned rights in this, the greatest nation to live in.
The stories of the past. Fascinating how times change but elements of customs & kindness continue.