Maternal Grandparents
In which Teófilo gets to share a few of the memories his grandfather shared with him, along with additional stuff Teófilo has dug out in the course of his inquiries.
Origins
Don Pedro Vélez Irizarry was born on June 8, 1907, the son of the aforementioned Don Florentino Vélez Colón and Doña Cayetana Irizarry Torres. (Please remember that “Don” and “Doña” are honorifics and that I’m using Spanish naming conventions, denoting the given names with both their respective parents' last names - their patronymic and matronymic). The Birth Registry Book recording his birth is either lost or wasn’t scanned. The only record I got for him is his baptismal registry at St Joaquín Church in Adjuntas, yellow and many times folded, which records the baptism on July 28, 1907, of a boy born “50 days before.” Therefore, even Don Pedro’s date of birth is an approximation, something that didn’t seem to bother him or a fact he was resigned to for the rest of his life. Like most of his siblings and his ancestors, he was born at home, in Don Flor’s homestead at the Barrio (Ward) San Patricio in Ponce.
Don Pedro appeared for the first time on the 1910 Census, the youngest of Don Flor’s five children at the time: Rosa, Nemesio, Primitiva, Isabel, and Pedro. A sixth child, Angelita, would arrive in 1915. The Census records the location as “Sendero Jauca” (“HAH-oo-cah Trail”), along with 11 other homesteads dotting the landscape at the time. I’ve been trying to locate this “Sendero Jauca” in contemporary maps to no avail. A 1945 map shows a few scattered homesteads in San Patricio but no sign of the aforementioned “Sendero Jauca.” It’s gone now, swallowed by the surrounding tropical forest.
1910’s Memories
I remember asking my Grandfather Don Pedro many questions about his youth when I myself was a preadolescent though I must confess that the fog of age has begun to settle upon me and I can’t remember all the anecdotes. For example I once asked him what his very first memory was and he took several seconds to think about it and he did answer, but I don’t recall in detail other than it was about watching his mother do something. I too am aging.
Don Pedro was seven years old when he met my grandmother Mamá Ana, born Ana María Pérez Vélez, in Adjuntas in 1914. Therefore Don Pedro saw his future wife as a newborn in a convergence whose meaning would become plain in time. Don Pedro recalled seeing a beautiful, very fair-skinned baby girl, cradled in her mother’s arms. The “Vélez” in my grandmother’s matronymic isn’t a coincidence either, for my grandmother’s mother, Regina Vélez Colón, was a sister to Don Pedro’s father Don Flor, making my would-be grandparents first cousins to each other.
Don Pedro referred to Mamá Ana and her parentage as sefarditas or of Jewish Sephardic descent. I wish I could’d asked him his meaning, but I reckon that at the time the term Sephardic lacked any significance to me.
I’ve been able to trace back Mamá Ana’s male lineage to the late 18th century: she was the daughter of Joaquín Pérez López, son of Juan Pérez Vargas, son of Juan Pérez Pérez, son of yet another Juan Pérez, matronymic unknown though some researchers suggest “Acevedo.” Being first cousins from her mother’s side she shared the same ancestors as Don Pedro on that side.
Mamá Ana was the middle child among nine other siblings: Justina, Domingo, Joaquín, Avelina, Santiago, Benedicta, Antonio, Salvador, and María. I met all of them when I was a boy but Domingo, Antonio, and María: María because she appeared to have died as a child; Antonio because he was a child-molesting pervert, and Domingo, I don’t know why. Maybe he died before I was born because I don’t have a date of death for him. They were all from Adjuntas, my great grandfather Joaquin’s hometown and, like so many of my ancestors, he tilled the land at a coffee plantation. Don Pedro’s parents, Don Flor and Doña Cayetana, were my grandmother’s baptismal godparents according to the copy of her baptismal certificate I’ve located. Every joyous event remained within the extended family back then.
I once asked Don Pedro about his memories of the 1918 Puerto Rico Earthquake, also known as the “St. Fermín Day” Earthquake. This earthquake measured 7.1 in the Richter Scale and its epicenter was located somewhere in northwestern Puerto Rico, along the Atlantic coastline. The quake was accompanied by a tsunami which swept Puerto Rico’s west coast. Many buildings crumbled, including Ponce’s main parish dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, not yet a Cathedral. The church suffered extensive damage, losing its two side towers. Puerto Rico - and Ponce - would not see another earthquake like the 1918 Earthquake until the “earthquake storms” starting in 2019 through 2021.
Don Pedro was 11 years old at the time of the 1918 earthquake. He said he was working on his father’s property when he felt the earthquake. He had to take a knee to keep his balance and watched the plantain or banana plants “whiplashing” and almost touching the ground. When the quaking stopped, he ran to his home to check on his mother. He found Doña Cayetana kneeling, praying, a broken oil lamp by her side. I have a vague memory that Don Pedro also said she’d cut herself with the broken lamp’s glass.
Don Pedro would share how Doña Cayetana cooked their meals in a fogón, a wood-burning or coal-burning stove; how they lacked plumbing, having to go to a near water torrent to get their water and then, later, from a well, and how everything had to be eaten fresh, as they had no icebox and refrigerators weren’t a thing back then. He also told the story familiar to many of us of how many miles - one, if that - he had to walk to attend school, barefoot - that would’ve been true -, on the hot tropical dirt, back and forth twice a day as he had lunch at his home. Shoes, when they became available, were set apart for special occasions such as Sunday Mass, weddings, and funerals. He would wear shorts until he became an adolescent at which point he was expected to present a more “grown-up” look by wearing slacks. He was expected to use the formal “usted” pronoun when addressing his seniors including his parents, instead of the more familiar “tú” I used to address him with in my more relaxed times. There was hardly any crime and people would sleep with their doors unlocked without fear.
1920’s Memories
The 1920 census records Don Pedro as a literate, 12-year-old with no profession of record. Don Flor’s profession continued to be “farmer” and his wife’s was “none.” Only Don Pedro’s brother, Nemesio “Tío Mencho” was listed as a journeyman in a place I can’t decipher.
Don Pedro came of age in the 1920’s. He was growing up to be a Caucasian man with gray eyes, which he inherited from his Basque ancestors. Like my Dad after him, Don Pedro, despite his sixth-grade education, appreciated the surging opportunities that his American citizenship - granted to Puerto Ricans in 1917 by the Jones-Shafroth Act - were opening up for him. He set his eyes beyond a life spent tilling the mountainous land surrounding his birthplace. He developed ambition and that brought him into conflict with Don Flor.
He never told me when he left his homestead, but I figure that he did as soon as he turned 21, the age of majority at that time. That was in 1928. Don Pedro’s ambitions came to a head about then and he and Don Flor quarreled. Don Pedro left home not before promising he would be back wearing a suit, a hat, shoes and driving his own car. I can imagine Don Flor’s face at the promise, the look of skepticism and the dark sense that his youngest male son would surpass him in life.
I think this is the period of his life when he first interacted with American soldiers. Don Pedro told me he was a shoe-shiner for a short while, and he shined many boots belonging to military personnel stationed in San Juan. Don Pedro told me it was near Fort Brooke, but this installation didn’t come to be known as such until 1944. Before 1944 it was simply El Morro Castle, as it is known today once again.
Don Pedro contemplated at one time joining the military, but his right arm bent at an abnormal angle, whether by accident or by birth i don’t remember. He would’ve failed his medical qualification test.
1930’s Memories
The 1930 Census still lists Don Pedro as living with his father Don Flor, who’s still listed as a farmer. However, Don Pedro was listed as a “fully employed, provisional dependent.” Since Don Flor would die in 1933 of “general peritonitis” following a laparotomy, Don Pedro’s promised fulfillment came to be between 1930 and 1933. He visited his father wearing a suit, shoes, a hat and driving a car - his car. Don Flor’s welcome was frosty and formal.
This is also the decade in which Don Pedro would have three romantic liaisons: with Modesta Ortiz who would become the mother of my Aunt Genoveva, the eldest of Don Pedro’s brood; with Natividad Hernández who would become the mother of my uncles Jorge Antonio and Daniel; and with Josefa Morales who would become the mother of my Uncle Teófilo, a.k.a. “César” as he dislikes “Teófilo.” (Decades later I would adopt “Teófilo” as my religious name, but that’s another story).
My Titi Gloria told me during a recent visit that Don Pedro was about to settle in with Ms. Hernández when my grandmother, Ana, moved in to intercept and get her man. Mamá Ana still lived with her parents, helping the household by doing embroidery and selling her work for cents at a time to a person in Adjuntas. It may sound miserable, but back then, one could survive on cents a day and that was the price she paid for not working the coffee plantation her father Don Joaquín cared for.
I’m told by various sources that Don Joaquín was a hard taskmaster, the stereotypical paternalistic, authoritarian, Latino man with a tempestuous temper. He was also a penny-pincher. Nevertheless, Mamá Ana stood up to him and declared her love for Don Pedro and no other. She would not compromise. She declared her intention to leave her paternal homestead. Don Pedro liked what he saw in the determined 21-year-old and allowed himself to be caught, settle down and start living his life “properly.” Pedro and Ana would marry in 1936 after obtaining an ecclesiastical dispensation because of their first-cousin familial relationship.
Don Pedro and Mamá Ana then moved to the neighboring town of Juana Díaz, where my Titi Gloria and my Tío Pedro Enrique would be born in short order by the end of the 1930’s. With their marriage we get closer to my own story.
One last memory Don Pedro shared with me about the 1930’s. On the evening of March 21, 1937 he arrived in Ponce to visit I don’t remember who - he told me, but I don’t remember. He found the town quiet, its downtown hub deserted. He wondered what had happened. His friend, or relative, or person he was doing business with told him “Don't you know, Pedrito? There was a massacre earlier. The police shot a number of unarmed Nationalists.” Apparently Don Pedro wasn’t aware of the curfew authorities had imposed. The shootout is known in history as the Ponce Massacre.
On to the 1940’s.
The 1940 Census found the fledgling family living again in Ponce, at an address in the Second Ward, Number 2 Dulcinea Street. The census lists Don Pedro as a “driver for a private employer” who worked 48 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Everyone else in the home, including Mamá Ana, is listed as unemployed. In that house, a year later, Mom would be born.