Come at daybreak and see her in the quiet streets of Xochimilco selling bread, or in the afternoon when she offers golden mangoes steeped in vinegar. To survive in Oaxaca, she’s been selling, washing, ironing, cleaning, tending animals and children since her mother died and she was left an orphan. She’ll be 65 this year. Most days there’s food and she thanks the Virgin for it. On occasion, however, there is nothing and she wonders why the Virgin is not answering prayers that day. In any case, she’s accustomed to it. She’s been always poor, always will be, and finds advantages in being so. “The rich are never at peace. They use up their lives worrying about money---getting it, spending it, losing it. I don’t have those problems.”
Born on August 15, 1933, she was given the strong name Asuncion Natividad: “Asuncion” in honor of the Virgin whose assumption into heaven is celebrated on that date and “Natividad” in honor of the small village in the Sierra Juarez in which she first breathed the mountain air of southern Mexico. Natividad was itself named in honor of the birth of Jesus but is more commonly remembered as the site of what was once the richest and largest silver and gold mine in Oaxaca.
In the 65 years since birth and baptism, Asuncion Natividad has had no experience at all with the silver and gold that echoes in her name. The small, unadorned room in which she lives, however, is marked and graced by images of the Virgin who sees from heaven the tribulations of the poor, heeds their prayers, and blesses them with help and consolation.
Help and consolation have been surely needed. She moved with her family to Oaxaca a few years after birth. What she remembers most about her father is that “he abandoned us for other women.” Too few years later, her mother died and at eleven years of age Asuncion Natividad was entirely on her own, alone in the city. She took work where she could find it: swept streets and floors, washed, ironed, cared for pigs.
A woman with a family and large home just off the zocalo offered a place to sleep, food, and five pesos a month in exchange for servant chores. Glad for shelter, she took the job eagerly, learning only later that it came with beatings. Harsh beatings for infractions real and imaginary; beatings for refusing to eat the worst of the scraps left on family plates, beatings with a leather strap for stealing pesos she never touched. Suffered at the age of 14, the memory makes her cringe today in her one-room rental on the banks of the Jalatlaco river.
What did she conclude from her work as girl-servant? Don’t work for other people! Girls are too vulnerable. Work for yourself. She left her “patrona” and learned how to make walnut candies, sweet rolls, tortillas, rice pudding, preserved squash and sold the food door to door. It was hard but what she earned, she kept. And she survived.
It got even harder at the age of 17 when she married a man met at a neighborhood dance and proceeded to have five children. She remembers her husband for laziness, beatings, and abandonment. Like her father, he left her for other women and, once more, she was on her own. How did she manage? “Hard work, just hard work,” she explains. Selling food, washing, ironing, caring for other people’s children.
Which is how she survives today. At 65, she looks back on a life of work and vulnerability and she does not complain. Nice if life had been easier but it has not been so. She has no pension, no money in the bank, no pesos coming in, and selling food has become more difficult. Competition from stores large and small has grown enormously over the years. Certain confections of nuts, milk, sugar and vanilla continue to be popular but prices are up and after buying tortillas and beans with the occasional egg for herself and the two grandchildren who live with her, there’s not enough to buy ingredients for another tray of sweets.
The past has been hard work and worry and the future promises more of the same. Who cares? Who helps? She knows of no governmental office, church, community organization or person to turn to when the food runs out or the grandchildren need a doctor.
Yet she doesn’t blame, criticize, or speak bitterly about institutions or persons for not helping. Life is trouble, not an entertainment. Fathers and husbands abandon wives and children. Mothers die. Housewives beat young servants. Like it or not, that’s the way things are. There are good things, of course: the friend next door, the store that gives her credit, ranchero music, the grandsons living with her, but real change, real goodness comes only in heaven, not on earth.
The Virgin looks down from the nearest wall as Asuncion anticipates the life to come. In heaven, she says, there will be recompense, rewards and punishments, satisfaction for the miseries endured. Those who have been bad will suffer, those who have been good will be blessed. Fortunes will be changed in heaven, but only in heaven, not here, not now.
Her’s is the ancient hope for the great reversal, the hope expressed by the Virgin herself, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices . . .for he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty and exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.”