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Nasario García shares life and loss in 'Martíneztown, 1945'
Stories of a child and a dog are often so very tender in the telling.
That is certainly the case with “The Day I Shed a Tear/El día que derramé una lágrima.”
It’s the first in Nasario García’s 15-story, bilingual collection titled “Martíneztown, 1945: Tales of Life and Loss in an Albuquerque Barrio.”
Together, the tales form a memoir as seen through the eyes of young Nasario.
Nasario was 6 when his father gave him a dog. Nasario named him Chopo.
When the family relocated from their ranch in New Mexico’s Rio Puerco Valley to the Santa Barbara-Martíneztown neighborhood in Albuquerque in 1945, Chopo came, too.
Sadly, Chopo didn’t live much longer.
“He was the first and only dog I ever had as a kid,” García tells readers at the beginning of the story. “Because of the hurtful and ugly way that he died, I never had the desire to talk about him until now.”
Young Nasario and Chopo were companions for three years.
On Nasario’s return home from his third day of classes at Santa Barbara School, his mother told him something was the matter with Chopo.
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Nasario found Chopo under his dad’s car, listless, his ears chewed and bleeding and his ribs oozing blood.
His mom said a neighbor told her that Chopo had followed Nasario to school and on the way back a pack of dogs attacked him. Somehow, Chopo managed to reach home.
Nasario consoled his pet, watching as his stomach heaved. His rough breathing lasted a few minutes.
“Suddenly his body shook and went motionless. I put my ear to his stomach the way Grandpa did when his horse died back at the ranch. … My beloved dog died quietly before my eyes. A profound loneliness came over me. … I felt empty inside. I had lost my good friend. What would I do without him?”
He cried and cried.
Nasario’s father came home and initially decided to bury Chopo at a nearby dump. But the dump didn’t accept dead animals. Instead, his father said they would bury Chopo at the ranch, their former home.
Nasario explained to his mom he wanted to bury Chopo next to the chicken coop because Chopo enjoyed chasing the chickens for fun.
“He was happy teasing the chickens so I want him buried near a place that brought him happiness,” he told his mom.
His mom gathered several rocks and placed them to mark Chopo’s grave.
The other stories in the collection are mostly about the family’s neighbors.
There’s Chato, who stutters terribly, though only when he chats with people he doesn’t know. He carried around an axe to chop wood for neighbors.
There’s Don Hilario, an elderly bachelor who has his share of girlfriends, “but not one reached the doorstep of his liking and well-being,” García writes. So Hilario devotes his life to his pigs.
Each year, weather permitting, he hosts a matanza (pig slaughtering) for his close neighbors; until one year when a neighbor worries that he hadn’t seen him around.
There’s Nasario’s first time at the movies. He becomes frightened when galloping horses fill the screen. He thinks they are going to trample him. So he jams himself under the seat in front of him.
There’s Borrego, the nickname of a young man whose hair is dyed white like a lamb’s; lamb in Spanish is borrego. Spanish is Nasario’s first language, but he doesn’t grasp Borrego’s Spanish slang, which mixes in pachuco words and expressions, or chuco, for short. Pachuco also refers to a mid-20th century Mexican American urban hipster called a zoot suiter. The zoot suit itself features pants ballooned at the top and tapered to the ankle, a long, loose-fitting jacket and sometimes with a wide-brimmed fedora.
There’s Tranquilino, aka the Tank, a man who swears a lot; even more-so when he is drunk.
Readers should be advised the book contains swear words in English and in Spanish.
“Innocent, hapless, heart-rending, and kind human beings in my adopted community (of Santa Barbara-Martíneztown) inspired the accounts herein,” García writes in the book’s introduction. And they’re endearing and neighborly, too.
The barrio is located northeast of Downtown Albuquerque. Nasario and his family lived in his paternal grandparent’s storage shed for five years before building an adobe home in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.
The book contains four appendices — a Spanish/English glossary of words in regional usage and standard Spanish with translations in English; a list of common Spanish exclamations and expressions; a pachuquismos/zoot suiters’ vocabulary; and a list of pachuquismos/zoot suiters’ exclamations and expressions.
“Martíneztown, 1945” is part of the University of New Mexico Press’ Querencia Series. It is García’s 37th book. A noted folklorist, scholar and educator, he lives in Santa Fe.
