The Ties That Blind

Until I was a teenager, I thought the story of my grandfather’s coming to the United States to be another hardworking immigrant story. It went something like this: born in 1907, Refugio Martinez crossed the Texas border at 20 near Brownsville. He bought a worker’s permit for a few dollars intending to work, build a better life, and maybe start a family.

After he crossed over, he worked as a laborer for the remainder of his life, and, for long stretches of their lives, conscripted his wife and children as well. They were migrant farmers during the late spring and summer, picking strawberries, avocados, and potatoes all over the country. Then, in the late summer through early winter, they picked and chopped cotton in and around Stamford, Texas, where my mother was born and raised. My grandfather worked hard and raised, with his wife, a family of 11 boys and girls. He died in 1970, four years before I was born.

The one picture of him hanging in my parents’ house showed him with a wide, gap-toothed smile and wearing eyeglasses that caught the light and reflected back the room in a creepy, institutionalized way. He was a bald man in a wheelchair who looked astoundingly unhinged, and for a long time, this photograph of my mother’s father unsettled me. I knew him as a strict, unrelenting man who jerked my mother in and out of school with such regularity that, by ninth grade, she gave up entirely and took a job, plucking and washing chickens in a nearby factory.

While I was in high school, my grandfather’s “typical hardworking immigrant” story fell apart when my mother told me

Refugio had also had a second family. Or, rather, a first family—one he had left behind in Mexico, and one he had not divorced but abandoned. Thus my mother had half-brothers in some remote region of Mexico—Guadalajara, maybe, or Oaxaca—an extended, mysterious family she had never met. The revelation upended my small understanding of my grandfather.

Looking for answers, I learned what happened to Refugio’s first wife was nothing new. According to a 2005 study of mujeres abandonadas conducted by the Programa Estatal de la Mujer in Veracruz, Mexico, more than 2,000 women in that state alone have been abandoned by husbands who left promising them a better life and a more secure future. The reasons these men never returned to their families were not complicated. According to University of Texas professor Nestor Rodriguez, they either “find other partners, go broke and do not want to return without money, or are undocumented and do not want to return because it will be very hard to get back into the United States.”

Refugio’s reason felt obvious. My grandfather worked hard his entire life, so it was doubtful that he couldn’t find work or went broke. He had his documents, too, paid for at the border, and wouldn’t have worried about returning to Mexico and being unable to come back. Leaving me to conclude he found someone else—namely, my grandmother.

The more I looked into the phenomenon of mujeres abandonadas, the worse I felt about my grandfather’s transgressions. The worse I felt about them, the worse I felt about my own existence. The man who married my grandmother, who was part of the creation of my mother, who is inextricably linked to the creation of me, abandoned a wife and kids to the indomitable struggles of surviving in a Mexico that had only recently been torn apart by the Mexican Revolution.

It was painful to consider too deeply this idea that in order for me—along with my mother, cousins, aunts, uncles, and my own children—to exist, another family had to be left behind, and not in some mutually decided-upon manner. They did not divorce. He did not leave and tell them he was leaving for good, but left them with the same story all immigrants leave behind: one of progress, of possibility. And then he never came back.

In the intervening years, the two boys from his first marriage died—we never knew how or why—before my mother or her sisters and brothers could meet them. And then, too, his wife passed away, and so all that was left of his abandoned family was a vague family history.

For another 15 years, this is what I believed of my grandfather, and so my feelings for him were confused and unfavorable, to say the least. He had made what seemed like a wicked and harmful decision, full of selfish scorn for family and paternal responsibility. As a father myself, with a young daughter and an infant son, I worried whether these traits might have been passed on to me. Was it unreasonable to question my own qualifications as a father, my own ability to remain faithfully committed to a family? This self-doubt upset me as much as anything else.

But what my mother didn’t know is what I learned from her sister, Sofia, just this past summer. Sofia learned it from her mother, my grandmother, just before she died. My grandfather didn’t abandon his first family. His own brother was having an affair with his wife, and before a feud could grow between them, before violence could break out, their father stepped in. Told him to go to Texas, to find another life, to build another family. Refugio left because he was forced to leave.

For 15 years, I thought I was the product of my grandfather’s mistake, only to find out now that I’m the product of someone else’s.