The Weekly Soap Opera

Memories of life in Villa de Garcia - 1954-1960

One of the fondest memories from childhood was gathering in the evening to listen to the radio.  I remember that we were the first household in our part of town to have a radio and neighbors would come in the evening to visit, talk and on certain evenings, just to listen to the “Novela” (soap opera) on the radio.  Sometimes, my grandfather, Serafin, would listen to the baseball game.  Other nights we would listen to the radio while we shelled pecans or sometimes shucked corn so that it could start to be boiled overnight and taken to be ground into masa (dough) the following day.  

We lived in Villa de Garcia, a town about twenty miles northwest of Monterrey.  Try to imagine a town with no electricity, no running water, no sewer, no telephone and no paved streets.  I think there was electric power in the center of town – City hall, some of the stores and businesses around the Central Plaza also had electric lights.  Some of the “well-to-do” family houses also had electricity, but for the rest of us, we lit our houses with kerosene lamps.  One of my various chores around the house as a 7-year old was to go to the store and buy kerosene for the lamps.  The kerosene containers were glass liquor bottles carried in a form-fitting net weaved from thin hemp twine.  I don’t remember if someone at the house or one of our neighbors weaved it or maybe it was bought at the market in Monterrey – you could find anything at the market (Mercado) in Monterrey and I loved going there.  Most of the time the kerosene was bought in larger cans, but when we ran out before a new can was bought, I would have to go buy it at the store. 

The pride of our house was our battery-operated radio.  I don’t know when it was bought or who bought it, maybe my father could have brought it when he came home from working in the U.S., or maybe it was bought in Monterrey.  It used a large dry cell that had to be replaced what seemed to be once every month or two depending on how much it was used.  The battery was so large that I could not carry it.  One of my two uncles, Serafin (Jr) or Rufino would bring a new battery from Monterrey when they came to visit us in Garcia.

I remember us listened to the radio at least once a week in the evenings when the novella came on.  When my mother had a quilt project, usually in the Fall, the routine of setting up the quilting frame started after dinner.  The bed in the large room was pushed to the wall, the chairs and small tables were moved to the side and the quilting frame was set up in the middle of the room.  My mother’s friends and some of our neighbors would start coming over around sunset and start carding the wool that was going to be used for the filling of the quilt.  One of my jobs, as well as Evaristo’s - our neighbor’s son, who was my age, was to keep the quilters supplied with carded wool throughout the evening.  It was actually hard work to pull the wool apart with those two big brushes.  Needless to say, whey could quilt faster than we could supply and my mother and Celia (Evaristo’s mother) would card for a while to build up the quilting supply.  Evaristo and I would sit up in the base of the large “window.”  It was like a casement window but without the glass.  The window had both doors and shutters that could be opened on warm days.  The house was made of adobe, but the frame on the large windows was stone and the base of the window was at least a couple of feet thick and a couple of feet above the floor.  This provided plenty of room for the two of us to sit and card the wool.  
 

At the beginning of the quilting session, the conversation was always an exchange of the news around the neighborhood or the latest information on family activities.  Sometimes they would tell stories, and I remember enjoying the ones about ghosts, apparitions, and people lost and never found, and I think for our benefit, they would throw-in an update to the story about a ghost pig that appeared down the street near the house.  I now think that was a way of keeping us from venturing too far from the house when we went out to play at night.  However, the conversation always managed to turn to gossip and I remember enjoying listening to everything and putting close attention to everything that was said.  Sometimes, in a juicy part of a conversation, my mother or one of the women would turn to us and the conversation changed topic right away.  Ah, but when the novella came on, and hour or so after they had gotten started, everything went quiet.  The novella was the most important thing in the world at that moment and no one, but no one could talk at that time.  We were only allowed to say something or ask questions during the commercials.  Evaristo and I as well as my sisters and little brothers could not keep quiet that long and we were put to bed in the other room during a commercial break.   If it wasn’t too cold, Evaristo and I would go play hide and seek or tag outside with the other kids that came with their mothers or other kids from the neighborhood.  We always made sure not to go too far for fear of the ghost pig.  I never did bother to think what would happen to us if we did see it, but our imaginations were full of terror.

The end of the novella usually meant the end of the quilting session and everyone would help pick up, put the quilting frame away and help move the furniture back.  Since I slept in one of the beds in that room, I could not go to sleep earlier like the other kids.

Quilting projects were not that frequent.  Sometimes the women just got together to crochet.  I think they got together to talk (and gossip) and crocheting was just an excuse they used to get together and talk about what was going on and plan out projects.  I remember them talking about one older widow down a side street from our house who would take in men to provide a “service.”   I never did find out what kind of service she provided, but I do remember seeing some men come in and leave the house days later when I would walk by on the way to the store or to take the clothes to be washed.  I also learned who in the neighborhood had lice and had to be treated with kerosene.  I often wondered what would happen if someone lit a match to someone who just had a kerosene treatment for lice.  There was also a lot of business arranged in those crochet sessions, like arranging to clean out the irrigation ditches, who had milk cows that could provide milk, arranging to buy water in barrels and to buy firewood. 

Santiago Fuentes

All the cooking was done with wood so firewood was a very important commodity.   Drinking water was also very important.  We kept several large (taller than me) clay jugs of water in the kitchen and they were filled with spring water just about every week.  I remember going with Santiago, one of our neighbors through the field on the back of the house, on one trip to get water from the spring.  He would load two large oak barrels on his ox cart, leave around three in the morning, get to the spring about six, fill the barrels and be back to our house before noon.   The day I went with him, I remember getting up and going back to sleep on top of the barrels on the cart, waking up when we got there and then walking back shooting at birds and lizards with my slingshot.  We had a couple of tacos, made with beans and eggs, for breakfast on the way back.

Sometimes, in the wintertime, the ladies would come over to crochet and listen to the novella.  On extra cold days, my grandfather would bring a metal bucket with hot embers from the kitchen and the women would sit around it, cover their legs with a blanket and continue their crocheting in quiet while the novella was being broadcast.  They would let us kids play with our toys near the bucket of embers as long as we kept quiet.  None of us wanted to make a sound because none of us wanted to go to bed.  I never did know what the novella was about or why they would even listen to them.  To a seven-year-old, they made no sense.  What I liked and have fond memories about is all of us being together in the evenings and feel at home.