So, who is Vera?

Our name leave you curious? This woman here is the reason. Meet my beloved abuela, Vera. ❤️

Vera was sweet and tough and full of mischief like all five of her daughters. Asking about the past was mostly off limits so it wasn’t until we all gathered for her funeral that we were free to dig around in old trunks, ask questions and share stories piecing together her life story. It’s a hardcore telenovela.

The majority of memories I have of my abuela Vera are at her yellow formica table in her kitchen on West 2nd street in Santa Ana, California. The center of the table was so covered in sauces and condiments that I fought all those little bottles for a spot at the table so I could enjoy her fresh tortillas with scrambled eggs and refried beans made with lard.

I learned Vera was born in 1914 in Chihuahua, Mexico and arrived in the US on a train designated for cargo during the Mexican Revolution. She was adopted when she was four years old. The couple, Ramona and Tomas, who thought they couldn’t conceive eventually did, and Ramona decided she no longer wanted young Vera. Tomas wasn’t having it, left Ramona and her newborn and traveled with young Vera to California from Texas, bootlegging liqueur along the way. He left Vera with the people she would come to call family, who were housekeeping and raising their children in a boarding house in Long Beach.

After graduating from eighth grade, Vera went to work in the fish canneries of San Pedro, California and while kicking up her heels at a dance met my grandfather. Vera married Cirilo and after bearing 5 daughters they stopped trying for a boy. The story goes, when her hard-drinking longshoreman husband died, her asthma vanished. I never met my grandfather Cirilo.

As a young widow with 5 daughters she worked hard cleaning houses, picking tomatoes and then finally making tennis shoes at the Randolph Rubber Company in Garden Grove.

I wonder about who her family in Mexico were and about what it must have been like for her to leave them at four. I wonder about the women and the circumstances that led them to giving her up. I sometimes think she was blessed with five daughters just so she could have the opportunity to heal her wounds through loving and mothering her girls in a way that she wasn’t.

Vera was incredibly resilient, proud, patient, generous and so funny.