“Aren’t you scared?” Alfonso, my new brother-in-law, asked as we concluded a family visit near the Texas border before my husband and I headed for the city with the strange-sounding name: Guadalajara. Of all the things I had felt as I left Texas to move to another country, scared was not one of them.
The drive was long, but I was overjoyed to be in the interior of Mexico at last. A twelve-week college missions trip in Juarez, barely across the Texas border, with a weekend side trip to Chihuahua, had made me want to see more. We stopped in Monterrey, where I met my husband’s Tia Chucha, then we drove on to San Luis Potosi, where we stopped for the night. I’m not sure that I clapped my hands like a child when we finally saw the lights of Guadalajara in the distance, but I was that excited.
Some friends who had already been there for a year invited us to stay at their house while we looked for an apartment, but we didn’t get their letter with the address of their neighbor who would give us the key. We knocked on the door of the house across the street to ask if perhaps they were the designated keepers of the key. They weren’t, but they insisted that we stay with them, and for a week we had a bedroom, breakfast and dinner with that generous family.
We found a place to live–a furnished third-floor apartment and took care of business at the medical school and the American School of Guadalajara, where I had been hired to teach sixth grade. The apartment was cool and comfortable, but it was too pricey for our budget, so we moved down the street to more affordable old-fashioned suites. Bathroom and kitchen were decorated with beautiful blue tiles, and the yard had full-grown banana trees.
In February, we heard there was a vacancy in an apartment building on Morelos Street. The apartment was unfurnished, so it was less expensive than ours, just 600 pesos or 48 US dollars, and it was bigger, with three bedrooms, an open patio for washing and hanging clothes, and a maid’s room with its own tiny bathroom. We moved in with a formica table, plastic-covered chairs, and a bed, gradually acquiring other pieces of furniture as we were able to pay for them. We found a woman to come clean the apartment once a week. When our first son was born, she came to work for us full time. Esperanza stayed with us through four more houses and fifteen years.
Teaching sixth-graders at the American School of Guadalajara was a challenge. I had to master the science and math lessons just ahead of the students, since I was prepared to teach English and journalism. The students spent half a day in an all-English self-contained classroom and the other half in all-Spanish. I had two groups of all-English.
The school was a two-story cinderblock building around a large open courtyard with open-air hallways facing the courtyard. Behind the buildings was an open yard with a soccer field, a volleyball court, and basketball hoops. The office and library were near the entrance. A teacher’s lounge, bookstore, and snack bar were located in the classroom building.
The students wore uniforms–dark blue pants and pinstriped shirts for the boys, pinstriped shirtwaist dresses for the girls, navy cardigans for all. They were well-behaved. Monday mornings students, teachers, and staff gathered in the courtyard to salute the U.S. and Mexican flags, carried proudly by as they were paraded by a color guard, chosen for their good grades and excellent citizenship.. They stood up when teachers entered the classroom, and they said “Thank you, Miss!” when they were dismissed. There was a break between the English-Spanish switch, and “lonches” (sandwiches made with a bolillo (French bread) split in half and filled with ham, lettuce, and jalapeno chiles) were available at the snack bar, along with other treats. There was no formal lunch hour, since the students were out in time to go home for traditional mid-day meal around three o’clock.
Edna Mardus was the librarian. She was usually surrounded by kids, whom she knew well enough to make tailor-made recommendations of books she thought they would like. My school librarians had always seemed to be in charge of protecting the books from our grubby hands! In the teacher’s lounge, Edna had book recommendations for teachers too, and she always had interesting stories of her own to tell. So did her husband, Fred, who taught math, physics, and chemistry. Fred and his identical mirror-image twin were born in South America on February 28, 1904, to Hungarian parents. He loved to tell what the one-in-a-bazillion odds were of someone like him and his twin brother being born. In 1968, the whole school celebrated Fred Mardus’s 16th (64th) birthday. The well-traveled Marduses were gifted storytellers.
They were the first of many people with amazing stories that I met during my years in Guadalajara.
