Many have wondered, “Why did your wife stay with you?” She is an incredibly strong, hard-working and disciplined person. Her approach to life was formed in the dusty mercado of Tlacolula, where the women haggle and barter. Females basically control the bulk of the area’s commercial activity. It is both communal and rigidly structured. Semi feudal structures dictate who can enter the guilds that control occupations from shoe shine boys to pork belly venders. There are no high hopes for quick fixes to any problem. Zapotec women play the solid, sensible role. They enforce the community morality with multitudes of subtle methods of persuasion.
They know the arid terrain. Eventually, maybe not till next year, the rains will come again to re-fill the river and re-supply the moisture in the agave cactus. My brother-in-law has a plot that was deeded to him from the association of ejidos. His dad, my father-in-law, had been an ejidatario, farming on communal land with plants that take seven years before they can be harvested for mezcal.
Gloria supported me as I went to grad school. In 1988 she gave me a second son. I named him William Dunlay Drew Jr. – after myself and our namesake, Uncle Willy. With possible jail time hanging over my head, we committed ourselves as a family – no matter what might happen. I told my toddler sons that I would make men out of them if they would make a man out of me.
My wife was used to hard times. With only a grade school education, she had seen little to hope for herself in Tlacolula. She had always been mocked as the resistant student, the stubborn one in the family. One morning when she was about 28, she and a friend set out to cross the border and join her sister, Natividad, here in Chicago. By the time my mother-in-law realized she was gone, the two emigrants were already meeting up with a coyote who could help them cross in the trunk of a car.
In Chicago, Gloria worked in factories and hotels – sending money back to the family to help with medical bills for her brother Efrain. My cuñado had been the sole survivor when a bus crashed with a tractor on a winding mountain road. Now he is a paraplegic. He teaches tourism and hospitality in Oaxaca. The teachers in my wife’s home state are in the front lines in opposition to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
One afternoon, Gloria was assembling tables and chairs at Douglas Furniture. Immigration police blocked all exits and started checking for papers. That was her first deportation. The second came when she tried to run across the border to return. She had managed to get her green card before I met her.
She carries an instinctive passion for the undocumented, the poor, the worker, and the indigenous. She labored for 17 years in the shipping department of a printing company. All the while she ran our household on a budget that was beyond frugal. Cleanliness, good food, established routines, discipline – she helped me straighten out my life. Over the years she has rejected all of my attempts to apologize. She says, “White people say they are sorry so they don’t have to change”.
I got involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. At first I complained that the members are too self-deprecating and dependent on religion. Then, it clicked. I decided that my higher power was the community morality that needs people to be good to each other. I had a short relapse one day when I discovered an old dope hiding place in my apartment. That night I almost ended up in lock up again. I had made a risky turn to pick up a street walker on Cicero Ave. In the cop shop my pupils were dilated like saucers. But the cops let me go with no charges.
Around this time, Mech, my original supplier, crashed his motorcycle into an overpass on the Kennedy. He had been partying all day with tequila and cocaine in the forest preserve. His wife found pieces of his brain mixed with the wreckage the next morning. I ran into his compadre, Bosco, recently. Bosco couldn’t even remember me. He was pan handling in front of El Guero supermarket. His prosthetic leg was bothering him. It was unattached next to his wheelchair. He asked me how to say “I lost my wallet” in Spanish. He also died not long after that.
One day while talking on the phone with one of my old friends I made the mistake of using the phrase “born-again” to describe my clean and sober life. A few days later another friend cautiously asked me if I had become a born again Christian. I told him that I had used the phrase figuratively, like in the Glen Frey song “I’ve been born again. I’m a brand new man”. I felt totally embarrassed. Would old friends think that I had become some holier-than-thou Bible thumper? I could just imagine the gossip spreading like scraps of paper in the four winds.