Weslaco's Birthday Parade

In the fifties, Weslaco used to have big yearly birthday celebrations, complete with huge parades comparable with the Rose Parade. Organizations would work almost the whole year on plans for a special float that would compete with all the floats in the parade. These participating floats were not only from local organizations but even from some outside the Rio Grande Valley itself.
Just like in the Rose parade this floats had moving parts and were usually constructed with millions of flowers. I remember the St. Joan of Arc PTA working on one in the year 1959, when I was in the eight grade in that parochial school. We all helped to put it all together, using crepe paper flowers and real flowers to cover the whole framework. There was a big arch and beneath the arch was a young man with a guitar, depicting Elvis Presley.
Seeing the whole parade was really amazing and I remember sometimes it would take hours to pass in front of our main street with about forty floats, more than twelve bands, both local and from other areas, cars, firetrucks and other vehicles, including some antique cars. People sometimes assembled hours before the parade in order to get good vantage points on the main route. It was an unforgettable memory each year!

Cascarones

When I was a child of about eight or ten I used to make "cascarones" to sell to public school kidsat Easter time, who passed by our house everyday."Cascarones" are decorated Easter eggs made from empty egg shell that have been washed and dried and then filled with paper confetti and sometimes flour. They can just be colored but I chose to make them into faces with different costumes--old women, clowns, little girls or boys and even animals such as rabbits.

Idolina Gracia-daughter of Josefa Gracia

I have a very clear memory of the day my cousin Idolina Gracia was born. (I now know this happened on December 14, 1947)
My aunt Fita was living in a small rented house in the backyard of a woman named Dona Angelita, half a block away from a corner store about five blocks down the street from my mother's and my home on Iowa street. My mom and I were at my Aunt's house and so was my Uncle Nazario when Dr. Glass came to deliver my cousin. Uncle Nazario, being a man and me , being three years old , were thrown out of the small house to fend for ourselves. I remember clearly my Uncle placing me atop the fence post in the yard and holding ,me there as we watched some cats playing across the street and watching the cars pass while we waited for my cousin to be born. The fence post was a railroad tie anout 8 inches in diameter and ample room for me to sit atop of it and heavy chicken wire with 2 inch squares was nailed to the huge posts as a fence.
I remember later when we went back in to see my newborn cousin wrapped in blankets and was told her name was Idolina!

Two Families

Be cause of my mother being the 11th child of my grandfather, Miguel Lopez, she was the link joining the two families. The older kids had been full grown and out of the house when my grandfather was widowed, so they were not as closely acquainted with the children born to the second wife as the younger children were, such as my mother and my Aunt Josefa, who was the 12th child.
As I was growing up, I noticed that the older members of the family visited my mother often, as did the members of the second family. My mother and my aunt were the link tying the two families together for many years.

Abuelita Maria

In 1952, my father had an old Model T car, which he had fixed to have room for carrying his carpenter tools. he removed the trunk closing and added a wooden area he made to look like a pick up truck. My father, Jose Villarreal was a freelance carpenter, who could give you an accurate detailed list of the lumber needed to make whatever size building anyone wanted, mostly little houses used for homes by hispanic people in Weslaco. He could figured out exactly how many 2x4's. etc for whatever addition or construction was wanted. Usually my mother was the one who putted it down on paper, because he didn't know how to read or write, but he did know exactly how many pieces of each piece of lumber he needed. I could never figure out how he knew that, but he did.
As soon as I learned to write, it became my task to put down on paper his summary of lumber needed for all his work projects.
In 1952, because there had been very few jobs, my parents decided to go try to find work in Kenedy, where my mother's oldest sister, Maria, lived with her husband and two married children. Her husbands name was Nicolas Aguirre, and he was in charge of a farm and he had three houses for himself and his two married children, Ernesto, married to Catarina, and Aurora, married to Ortiz. Ernesto had five daughters, Olivia, Ofilia, Ofelia, Odilia, and the youngest Orselia, just a toddler then. Aurora had only two girls, Adelaida and Ana. Adelaida must have been in her early teens and Ana about 5 years old.
When we arrived in Kenedy, we stayed at the farm with Maria, who I always called "abuelita", or grandmother. It was a learning experience for me to be living in a farm. I saw my Abuelita and Catarina making corn dough for "tortillas" and "gorditas" They used two old methods---"el metate", which was an old stone utensil that looked like a slide, with a stone that looked like rolling pin, but was a square shape for grinding the corn into dough. They also had another kind of grinder, very similar to a coffee grinder.
My Abuelita was an expert in needlework. She made all the clothes everyone used, and always decorated all the children clothes with crocheted edges. She even used crocheted edges to decorate and finish the edges of panties, slips, nightgowns and even bed linens. All the women oin the household were expert quiltmakers and they had beautiful quilts, both pieced and appliqued. She even made her own towels and potholders, both crocheted and quilted.
Besides all the sewing and other needlework, my abuelita was an avid reader. She was the one who named me Odilia after the magic swan in Swanlake, the ballet. Having left school very young, she had made it a point to educate herself on her own.

Andy, a Cousin from Grandma's Side

My mother arrived in Weslaco in the late 30's. She first lived in the west side of Main Street, just north of the railroad tracks. One of the neighbors there was Santos Fuentes, the brother of my grandmother Josefa (Fuentes) Lopez. He was a widower with only one daughter, Anita Fuentes. When she graduated from high school, she took a job with her Aunt Juanita, who was in charge of cleanup at the only local hotel in Weslaco, one of the first buildings in Weslaco to be several stories high. Since the Rio Grande Valley was a tourist attraction, important people came to stay there in winter, such as Ty Cobb.
Although after I was born in 1944, my parents moved to the east part of the then small town, out near the city limits, they still continued to see Santos Fuentes and his daughter often. By then Anita had married, but was separated shortly after, or maybe before her baby son was born. The story was the man was married in Mexico and his family came and got him.
Anita's son,Andres Zamarron, grew up knowing us as part of his family. My mother was his babysitter sometimes.
Tia Anita, as I used to call her was very good with a camera, and took all our family pictures on important events of the family. She took pictures of my First Communion, my graduation from parochial school from the eight grade, my senior prom and finally my graduation from high school.
In 1963, she moved to Santa Barbara, California. her last gift to me was making her son Andy give me a small Kodak camera. She was a very nice person, always looking out for others. She wanted to be sure we continued taking pictures. She also kept contact by mail with my mother and even with me when I married and moved away fron Weslaco. Often she would send me huge boxes filled with stuff such as jackets, clothes and costume jewelry.
I still remember a red double breasted carcoat, with brown barrel like buttons. I still own a pair of tiny black and white shell earrings she once sent me. After I had my kids, she would send me toys and yarn for me to crochet stuff for them. With all the moving I did at that time I lost track of her.
After I learned to use the computer in 2000, I began looking for her and I thought I had found her in 2003, and I wrote her a letter to an address I found in Woodland, California. I got an answer from her son, Andy, telling me she had died 5 years before after a long illness. He had been her sole caretaker and had felt all alone without family relatives other than his wife and was very happy to have found me. We have stayed in contact by mail and phone since then, and we finally saw each other via webcam a couple of months ago, when he started using his new laptop computer. He also saw my youngest son the same way.

First Reunion I Remember

The recent reunion reminded me of the very first small reunion I remember, which happened about 1948 or 1949, when I was about four years old or five. My mother had been very sick with some seisures that seemed like epilepsy and some pneumonia due to her asthma attacks. When she was well enough to write, she wrote some telegrams and sent my father to the telegram office. She notified all her relatives to come and see her before she died.
Soon everyone started arriving. My uncles Donato, Fortunato and Maximo arrived with some of the members of their families from Rio Grande City. My uncle Fortunato even brought a calf or some animal to provide food for everyone. They quickly made changes in ou outside fire to accomodate roasting the animal.
My cousin Ernesto and his family arrived from Kenedy, Texas. That was the first time I met my cousins, Olivia, Ofilia, Ofelia, Odilia, but Orselia was not born yet.
My uncles, Nazario and Fabian arrived with their families too. They all stayed some days but realized my mom was okay and then left. There was a lot of storytelling and eatting and drinking among all those visiting. Thank goodness the weather was beautiful and there was plenty of shade under the trees and the huge arbor so that everyone camped out. It became a small family reunion. I guess it was when my mother started bickering with some of them that they all realized she was not going to die.
Later she pulled that same stunt on them and again they all came and we had a great time, but the third time she send them telegrams, they all decided to wait and just come for the funeral if needed.