Para mi madre...

On the train, I figured out today that this project is for my mother.

Oh, "Train Sidebar"...I have not regularly taken the train since I moved here 9 years ago and I can't figure it out. I carry too many things. I get on the wrong line, going the wrong direction and I get impatient waiting. I try to park by a stop, but that's not helping, timewise. I will say that it makes me feel really urban though. And connected and small. Observant. I seldom shut up and it makes me scared to be around so many strangers and so I sit and watch and listen and now it makes sense why all those writers and poets and artists draw from the urb for their work. I'll let them to it, because I'm just a visitor...but still. Now I get it. Extraordinary to have stuffed so many people into these containers, yet that's what's ordinary. The exceptional in the quotidian.

Ok, back to my mother.

I went to Best Buy today to buy a fabu digital recorder. I saw Austin Talley there, one of my DePaul students from when I subbed for Carlos Murillo's Solo Performance class. Well, not MY student, but you know what I mean. (Oh, shoot. I never got back to Carlos about subbing this year. I'm such a mess sometimes) Anyway, Austin helped me pick a recorder and we talked shop for a bit. It was a good day. But I was wearing too many oils and perfumes and I could tell he was having trouble breathing by me. I need to tone it down in the morning with the oils and stuff. So then the whole train thing, right? I'm waiting down by the red line on Clybourn and North and looking at my digital recorder. Then my mother comes to my mind. My mother always had a recorder. From the time when they were those big, analog, push numbers. To the smaller ones with the tiny tapes. She's always had one. She records her prayers and incantations and sermons in them. Every morning at 5 or 6am you can hear her in her bathroom playing the tape recorder. And opening my spankin' new digital recorder made me think of her. Only I'm not using it for prayer and meditation. Or to learn English words, as she did for a time. I'm using it to capture my mother, through other women's voices. I think...I don't know, I think this project is for my mother. To find out what I can't ask her. I do ask her, but she wont answer. Maybe strangers will answer.

I don't know if this makes any sense.

My mother's never had a voice. Not at home in Mexico with my overbearing dad, when they were married. And not in seclusion in Texas after their divorce. My mother has been voiceless. She was told to hush up and be a good girl, a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, but to never speak up. "Calladita te vez mas bonita," she had always been told. And she told me the same. But strangely enough (and to her private joy) I am not quiet. Nor demure. I am not a good girl. Well, a "good girl." Not in the way she was taught. I can't cook or clean or make clothes and knit like she can. Well, I can knit. Scarves. Mi nana Dona Luz taught me that. But I'm not...voiceless. I refuse to be. Or actually, I've never even considered that option. In a way, I'm more like my father; Alpha, entitled, boisterous, invasive, inconsiderate, outgoing, involved.

But my mother is a mystery to me. Even when she seems simple and plain. She is a mystery. The loud ones are always the ones easy to figure out. It's in silence that there's mystery.

So, I'm not going to tell her just yet. But 27 is for her. For her to get to speak up.

Ok, off to translating this questionnaire and getting the legal stuff together for my first interview tonight.

Bolivia. Elmwood.

--tanya