Ying and Yang, Latina Style
Marisella Veiga     [Photo]

I would go to college like she had, my mother told me while I was in the eighth grade. The best reason for doing so was preventive: I could support my children and myself in case I divorced.

Ah, dreaded divorce, the difficult disruption of the traditional Latino family —particularly hard on Latinas. My mother knew of bad marriages: the husband no good, the wife needing to get away. .But how? And then, if she left, what resulted? Poverty and social ostracism.

Higher education would at least help the economic problems of a divorced woman.

What my mother and I didn’t discuss were alternatives. What did women do who — formally educated or not — weren’t married or wouldn’t marry? Although I had a few offers in my flirting years, I didn’t marry until age 43. Quite a few years passed without male protection, since I left my father’s house and the comfort provided by two brothers to go to college when I was 19.

I always did well in the classroom. However, understanding the “how-tos” of caring for myself by learning traditional male roles, things my father and brothers did naturally, took a long time.

Dumping my kitchen garbage into the big plastic can and rolling that out to the curb for weekly pickups was easy. Making money, managing finances, buying property and maintaining it was much harder. At times I didn’t think I could continue.

When I finished graduate school (in poetry of all things), I couldn’t find full-time work in the academic world, where most U.S. literary writers seek refuge.

Yet I had learned that Latin American writers mostly worked as journalists. I moved to Puerto Rico and became a freelance business reporter. My vocabulary in English and Spanish expanded: mortgages, closing costs, IRAs, tax reform, tax deferred. I didn’t earn enough money to save any, but I had an idea of what could be done with it if that day ever came. This education was vital.

My father, a certified public accountant, taught me to balance my checkbook. Though he could complete my taxes and file them, he didn’t. He referred me to his accountant; I signed a check every year for those services.

I bought a new car and paid the dealer exorbitant interest rates because I lacked an advisor. When the time came, I hired my own mortgage broker, realtor and lawyer. I took the advice of these professionals, particularly important in the case of a lawyer.

As a single homeowner, I wasn’t concerned with interior design or hosting fun dinner parties. I was overcoming the fear of the lawn mower parked in my living room. My friend John explained what to do over the telephone. He also said, “You can do it!” I called him back when the lawn was cut.

When I bought the house in Homestead, Florida, my brothers were living out of state and my father was in Miami. One hurricane season it seemed Homestead could get hit again. My friend Cameron arrived with plywood in his van and covered my most vulnerable windows. That year I saved up $3,000 to buy aluminum shutters to cover my windows, so I, still unmarried, could protect my property and myself.

In short, I learned to wield a pickaxe in order to plant fruit trees before I ever changed anybody’s diaper. Because I had been raised traditionally, naturally, I longed for nightly home-cooked meals, a clean and welcoming house, and space for lengthy beauty treatments. Today, I have more time to devote to those pursuits, but I still mow the lawn.

(Marisella Veiga, of St, Augustine, Fla., is a free-lance writer and contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. She recently celebrated her fourth wedding anniversary. Veiga may be contacted by e-mail at mveiga@aug.com)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
09/18/05
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