My early education from Kindergarten to 8th grade was at St. Joan of Arc parochial school in Weslaco, Texas. In retrospect, I feel it was the best education anyone could have had, because those nuns gave me a very strong core of learning

Offering Flowers in May

When I was seven years old, we had a beautiful thing happening every night for the month of May each year in our Catholic Church named St. Joan of Arc. The church had the rosary each evening with little girls offering flowers to Our Lady at each mystery. Little girls dressed in white with their first communion dresses and veils and carried bunches of flowers from their garden. They lined up at the door and at each mystery, they walked in with beautiful singing to deliver the flowers to the altar where teen girls took the flowers and placed them on a table. These young girls would then collect the flowers from the table and take them back to the door to be randomly distributed among the little girls who would walk again to the altar with them. At the end of the rosary, the flowers were then placed in large vases in from of the huge statue of the Virgin Mary.
This beautiful ceremony was repeated every night until the last day of May, when one little girl was chosen to crown the Virgin Mary. i think this was a beautiful ritual and I was one of those little girls who participated. To this day, everytime I smell real flowers or a garden, I remember those beautiful evenings in church giving homage to the Virgin Mary.

My Great Aunt Andrea

I will always remember the image of my great grand aunt on my father's side. Her name was Andrea Garcia Valdez. My family used to visit her in the 40's when I was a small child and she died when I was 12 and she was about 104. The image that has stayed in my mind all this years is of her sitting in front of her huge wood stove in her kitchen..the kind you see depicted in Christmas cards. She still cooked and cleaned her house when I was a child. She wore her shoulder length hair in a little bun held together with wire hairpins, which she sometimes placed on the stove front fender to redo her knotted bun of hair.
She was a widow with three sons in their 40's still living in the property, but in small houses of their own. her only daughter, the youngest married several times and had two sons and a daughter in their teens. Sometimes she too lived on the property or with her mother between marriages, but her children were a troublesome lot most of the time, getting into trouble. Both she and her daughter died young and Aunt Andrea and her middle aged sons had to deal wityh the two young boys.
The youngest of the three brothers, married and moved to Mexico with his wife, but the other two remained single all their lives. They showed a lot of respect and help to their mother as she aged. She was their bank...with two little cloth bags in different colors hanging on the inside of the waist of her skirt. Before they went shopping for anything, they would as her for the money and she would go to that respective little bag and give that son his money.
Both uncles were always talking about current event happening in those years because they always read the newspapers daily. they also both spoiled me with little presents. It was actually with some fabric that one of them, Nieves, gave me that I made my first dress for myself when I was 13. It was a weird color material of little triangles in orange and pink, but I did like it very much.
After they died, I lost track of my young cousins for many years, but saw the wife of one of them in Fort Worth in 1992.

Tomasita Villarreal

My aunt Tomasita Villarreal, my father's sister, was a seamstress well known in Rio Grande City for many years. Her specialty was wedding dresses and everything needed for a wedding. She made from scratch and showed me how to make the little white orange blossoms used in the wedding crown, the wedding lasso and the wedding corsages and the bride's bouquet! She could make all of it from scratch and they looked just like the ones bought in expensive boutiques. In fact her living room looked like a boutique.
She also made wonderful machine embroidery on blouses, dresses and even pillow cases or other linen. She was very talented. I will never for get the things she created. She had a lot of patience in her work.

Quilting in my Family

Quilting in my family was very important when I was a child. My mother and some of my aunts all made quilted blocks and made them into quilts.. I remember my mother carding wool given to her by her brother from his own sheep. When the wool was first brought home by my mother from her brother's place was all rough and had thorns and stuff that the sheep got into, before the wool was sheared off the sheep. She had wooden cards, or wooden paddles with nail-like things to kind of clean out and sort out the wool to prepare it to be used as the stuffing put between two fabric parts--the front part made up of pieced blocks and the backing, sometimes made from one color or pieced also. She had huge wooden frames, to hold the basted quilt to work in the patterned quilted stich lines. Sometimes she would make a quick tuffed quilt, putting in tufts of thread scattered throughout the quilt instead of stitching lines.
Sometimes instead of a pieced quilt she would make an appliqued one. I remember one she made appliqueing fan shaped forms to each block. Another one had the little sunshine girl with a sunbonnet applique. She also made one with pansy appliques.

Paper Flower Wreaths

I have mentioned before that my mother made flowers as a hobby. These are the kind made with crepe paper used in that time of the 40's and 50's very frequently by hispanic women, in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The crepe paper had a certain stretchability that was very useful, especially when making roses. Rose petals were cut and stretched into the shape of real rose petals and then arranged aroung a wire to shape into a rose and tied with a slim wire, usually pulled out of a piece of screen window wire. These flowers and some made like carnations were then arranged into a wreath. These wreaths were used at funerals or taken to the cemetary to decorate tombs, especially on November on the day of the dead.
My mother used to make many wreaths to go visit the cemetary burying places of all her relatives whenever we could go all the way to Escobares, near Rio Grande City, Texas. As a child I used to make some small wreaths about 12 inches round for all the relatives too, all by myself. This is how i learned to make paper flowers, by copying my mother.

Mother's Day in my Childhood

When I was a child in the Rio Grande Valley, Weslaco's hispanic community celebrated Mother's Day by wearing a small artificial flower on their lapel--a red one if their mother was alive or a white one if she were dead. These small individual artificial flowers were usually sold at the local 5 and 10 downtown store, but more often than not, they were peddled door to door a few days before Mother's Day in May.
Since making crepe flowers was one of my mother's hobbies, I took the task of making 30 to 50 small crepe paper flowers, mostly in red, but some in white too. I remember they looked like little carnations. My mother contributed the crepe paper and my father the wire. The wire was usually the copper looking little wires inside a thick wire, usually left over from car repairs. It was very flexible and could be covered with twisted crepe paper, after the little flower was finished.
There were certain steps I took with each flower. Using a piece of wire about 4 or 5 inches, I would tie 2 or 3 small pieces of yellow crepe paper on the tip, twisting the wire to hold the bits of paper in place to be the flower center. Around this center I would wound a strip of crepe paper, usually 18 to 20 inches long and just about 1 1/2 or 2 inches wide, with the edges on one side cut or slit to look like flower petals. I would tie this to form the flower with a small screen window wire. Then I would cover the flower stem, or wire with green crepe paper strip. A piece of fern from my mother's garden would then finish the tiny corsage and I usually added a straight pin for pinning it to the lapel. My aunt Fita would go with me door to door to sell them for 25 cents each, usually late in the afternoon to escape the hot sun of may in the Valley. I then used this money to buy my mother a mother's day present.