My dad loved to tell us about our
antepasados, our ancestors, and how
our family settled in and around Zapata, Texas before it was a part of the
United States. His family passed down stories
via oral tradition and he did the same to us, repeating them over and over
until they became part of our memory.
We teased Dad about his obsession
with family history and made fun of his tales from “the good old days,” but it only
encouraged him to share them with us one more time.
His stories still rumble in my
brain. They still make me smile. They still amaze me.
My favorite: Agapito Ramírez, an
old great uncle. He never married, but
that didn’t stop him from leaving behind several descendants. He fought in the Mexican Revolution alongside
Emiliano Zapata which made Tío Agapito very old when I first met him. I don’t
recall being in school yet so I must have been four, maybe five.
I had heard
so many stories about him from my dad that when he rode up on a horse at my
grandmother’s house, I wanted to get a really close look at him. We had been
sitting on my aunt’s front porch, but the women scurried inside and dragged me
off with them.
All I got to see was a tiny man
who reminded me of Yosemite Sam from the Saturday morning cartoons. He wore a holster with two guns strapped to
his legs and sported a huge, dark, handlebar moustache. He didn’t look mean
but, if the stories were true, he was dangerous.
He owned some property nearby,
never owned a car, and still considered himself a Mexican citizen. Under The
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexican citizens with land on the United
States side of the border could either stay on their land and become American
citizens or lose their land and move to the other side of the Mexican border to
remain Mexican citizens. Most of my
father’s family stayed with their land, Mexican citizens one day and American
citizens the next. For a lot who stayed, they and their children (like my
uncle) refused to surrender their patriotic roots.
During the Mexican Revolution in
the early 1900’s, there was no border between his land and his mother country
Mexico, and he joined their fight for freedom.
Tío Agapito often talked about
his battle experiences and Dad would share the less cruel tales with us - how
the winners would loot the dead bodies, how the men would execute the wounded
enemies, and how Tío Agapito often escaped death.
Whenever we made the trip down to
south Texas, someone would drive out to Tío Agapito’s property (he never owned
a phone either) and let him know my dad was visiting the family. Tío Agapito must
have liked my dad because he often made the long ride out on his horse to visit
with him.
Me? I still got hustled into the safety of the
house with the women, but I would sneak away and peek at him from behind a
window curtain. He caught me once. He
winked at me and I noticed a smile behind his big bushy moustache.
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