Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Xorje Olivares, Host: Let’s say in the next couple of minutes you were to get a phone call from, I don’t know, your sister, and she says something’s wrong with mom. They don’t quite know what it is, but just to be safe, they’re gonna take her to the emergency room.
Now, maybe you’re like me and you live thousands of miles away from your immediate family. You’ve got a new job, you’ve got a few friends, maybe somebody special that’s keeping you rooted in this new city. But most of all, you probably have a routine. The thing you’ve worked really hard to craft and maintain so you can live life the way that you want, and on the terms that you’ve chosen, because that is one of the advantages of being grown and an adult.
But your sister calls you back, and the doctor is saying a few things that you don’t understand, some things that you do, but you don’t want to hear it, because it starts to become very real. This is happening and I’m not ready, but it’s mom, so routine, ni que nada– I would drop everything to help her, right? Even move back home?
I’m Xorge Olivares, and I’m the son of aging parents so at some point, I’m gonna be confronted with this very real situation, and I think I know what I would do. But will I actually go through with it when push comes to shove?
So today I want to ask, what are we willing to sacrifice right now in order to care for a loved one? This is Hyphenación, where conversation and cultura meet.
Xorje Olivares: So I’m really happy to have this conversation today with two folks who have been a bit vocal about this very personal topic. The first is poet and writer, Yosimar Reyes, who has spoken openly not only about migration, queerness, but also about being a caretaker for his grandmother. So Josimar, thank you so much for joining us today. And I wanna share a photo that Yosimar gave us as a team to be able to share with our audience. Yosimar, who is this wonderful woman in this photo, and did you have a nickname for her? Did she have a name for you?
Yosimar Reyes: Hi everybody, this is my Abuelita, Madonia Galeana Dionisio. Her nickname for me was Gordo, I’ve always been known as Gordo. And for her, we just call her Abuelita or Mama Doña would be the name that we everybody referenced her as.
Xorje Olivares: I love and slightly hate that I feel like growing up, everybody’s nickname for children is having to do with weight. Like either you’re Flaquito, you’re Morenito, you’re Pretito. I mean, obviously that’s more skin tone, but
Yosimar Reyes: Yeah, usually your parents are your first bully, so you get conditioned into facing the world through them.
Xorje Olivares: I just have a little bit of a thicker skin because of it. But thank you so much for joining us, Yosimar, for this conversation. And also joining us is Profe Anita Tijerina Revilla, who is department chair for the Chicanx and Latinx Studies Department at Cal State LA, who’s also talked about queer Latinidad and about her own journey as a caretaker for her niece and nephew and also for her sister. So Profe, thank you so much for joining us. And we also have a photo that we’d like to share. And who are these? Cute little critters.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: Saludos, thank you for having me. These are my niece and nephew, also my son and daughter. I adopted them a few years ago. This is Ray on the right and Michael right next to me and myself, Ray and Michael, my niece and nephew, also my daughter and son.
Xorje Olivares: I love that.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: And they call me honey.
Xorje Olivares: Honey! Ooh, has that has, has it always been honey or has there been a journey to arrive to honey?
Anita Tijerina Revilla: Honey works really well for the kids Because. I am their tía but I’m more than their tia and their mother is very much a part of their lives so we didn’t, I didn’t want them to call me mom.
Xorje Olivares: Honey is so sweet. And there’s such a term of it’s such a term endearment regardless, like anybody who can call you honey, there’s already an element of love that you can’t hide from.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: Yeah.
Xorje Olivares: But I’m excited for us to have this conversation because it is rooted in family. And a lot of what’s happening for me and my family is we’re approaching that point where we’re caretaking and caregiving, which I’m gonna use interchangeably, but this notion of being at home to care for a loved one, it’s kind of coming close. So I’m approaching that process of when I’m going to need to go home to be a caretaker for one of my parents. And I want to start with you, Yosimar, if you don’t mind, because maybe a few days ago, you did post something on your Instagram that was about this caretaking journey for you. So I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the decision to first even become a caretaker for your grandmother.
Yosimar Reyes: Yeah, so I’m originally from the state of Guerrero, Mexico. I migrated to the United States when I was three years old, and it was my grandma who actually carried me across the journey to bring me to this country. And when we landed here, like so many young people, I was 3, so my mom wanted me to go live with her, but my grandma was part of those formative years, and so I thought my grandma my mom, so I had this affinity towards her, and I always wanted to be with her. Um, and so my relationship with her has always been me and my grandparents. I’m the one that grew up with my grandparents, um, but, uh, once I graduated college, I went to live in Los Angeles and I was there for about five years. And then COVID happened. And I think one of the interesting things I am based out of San Jose, California, um during that time, five zip codes were disproportionately impacted by positive COVID cases. My grandma was part of one of those zip codes. And so I think out of that, I saw her getting older. I saw just, you know, her just aging. And so, I decided to make the choice of like, I need to leave to go back home and help her. And yeah, I think that’s when I– it wasn’t an active choice, but more like something natural that was just happening and then I decided to move back home and that’s how I ended up taking on the role.
Xorje Olivares: So you wouldn’t say it was necessarily because there was this expectation that Yosimar at some point is going to move back home, take care of Abuelita, that it felt more of an in the moment decision because of the global pandemic that was happening that was forcing us to rethink how we were approaching things.
Yosimar Reyes: Yeah, I think it was just a natural course. I think for me, one of the things that happened between the relationship with me and my grandparents is that you just know what’s instinctively, you just know, like this is what I need to do or like that. And it didn’t necessarily feel like a burden or it didn’ feel like I was making a sacrifice or making a choice. I was like, this is my calling and this is the next step that I need do. But back then, I didn’t have language to call it what it is.
Xorje Olivares: I love that you’re saying a calling because I want to ask you, Profe Anita, if you think that for you being a caretaker for your niece and nephew was a calling, or if it was something else that you had to in the moment figure out how to respond to.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: Yeah, it’s funny, I do not think it was a calling, I think it was codependence. You know, I’ll tell you a little bit about me and my life. I grew up with a single parent. She was widowed at the age of 30. She had three kids and she always put herself last, right? And so codependence literally means that you take care of everybody at your own expense. And so for me, what happened is my sister had grown up, this is my little sister and I have an older brother too, but she had grown with depression her whole life. We knew it since she was little. And later on in life, she was clinically diagnosed as bipolar, having bipolar experience and schizoaffective disorder. And it wasn’t until maybe she turned 30 that she started to show or exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia and what other people call madness right? Yeah, she started to have delusions and she started having like a deep paranoia. And so it was also connected to drug addiction and the drug addiction was connected to her depression. And so all of this is like, again, as I’ve learned little by little, I’ve come to understand my sister’s experience more. But back then, all I knew is that my sister was sick and something was happening that we didn’t understand. She had two small children. They were three and four years old. And the first time she got hospitalized, she was arrested and brutalized by police merely for exhibiting this anger and this madness. And so she was in the hospital right after she was in jail, I had to fight to get her out. And when she got out, she came directly to live with me. It was my, maybe, second year as an assistant professor in Las Vegas. I had just started my career and I had worked my whole life not to be a parent, especially not a teen mom or a single parent. Those were things that were stigmatized with me growing up.
Now, of course, I honor single mothers and single parents just like my mother, but that’s not what I wanted to be. I wanted it to have a career. And the only reason I even went to college and wanted a career was to take care of my impoverished family because I had come to believe through my mother that having that education would allow me to help pull them out of their poverty. And so little by little, those are the messages that I got. You have to take care of your family, and you have to sacrifice your life to take care of the people in your family. And I accepted it with lots of love, but I don’t think there was really choice involved, right? It was a limited choice and it wasn’t until much later that I actually said yeah, I did make a choice and I’m grateful that I had that opportunity and it’s one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had to be able to parent children who are now 20 and 21 years old. They’re adults and so I feel honored to have been their safety and the person who took care of them. But back then, I was mourning and grieving my life, the life that I had as a single queer person starting a job in Las Vegas as a women’s studies professor. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do is to parent when I didn’t plan on doing it, especially for children that young.
Xorje Olivares: I definitely understand the point that you’re, you’re making. You did say about, uh, you felt like you sacrificed your life and I’m curious, Yosimar, you did say that, you’ve reflected and you said that it was a calling to be able to help your grandmother, but did you think that there was a moment where you were sacrificing your life? And unable to do things that you had already put in your head that you wanted to accomplish as an individual.
Yosimar Reyes: Yeah, I think similar to Anita, I think one of the things that happened within my life is we grew up poor. I think, I used to say the term working class, but no. I think we need to name it– poverty. The thing with growing up poor is that it’s silent violence because you’re not aware of what you need. You’re not aware and I think poverty adds a different level to these circumstances in which I felt guilty. Here I am living in Los Angeles in a two bedroom apartment in Boyle Heights, having my fun after college years. I have a roommate, throwing parties. I have my own room, I have my own washer and dryer. I have all this stability. And then I would travel back home where my grandma stayed there sleeping on the living room couch. She’s still recycling bottles and cans. My brother’s sleeping on the floor. I have another cousin in the living room. And I just remember going to visit her and how much I hated the poverty in which she was living. But she loved it. This is all she known. This is a life she known, and I just feel a certain guilt. How is it that I’m traveling the country, that I am speaking at these prestigious universities, and my grandma is still living in the same apartment than since we arrived in this country? Yeah, of course there were moments where I didn’t want this responsibility. I wanna be myself. And then I think all the other layers that were undocumented. So it’s like this added layer of poverty, undocumented, all this stuff. And then that was the big tug of war of realizing like, damn, like, I’d see other people excelling in their careers. I can’t do that. I can move to New York and focus on my writing and live this writer dream because I have these people depending on me. But I think I would fight it a lot. I would have these moments of tension in which I was like, ah, why does it have to be me? Like, I don’t wanna do this. But then there was these beautiful, beautiful moments that I was, maybe because I’m a poet, I was ah this is sacred and something really beautiful and something that I don’t think not a lot of people get to experience and then when I had those moments it just made sense
Xorje Olivares: I’m curious, Profe Anita, like, about this tug of war, was there a moment because you did mention this, it was a huge sacrifice, this is not what you wanted but your life was taken in a direction that you had not anticipated, so was there time where there was a beautiful moment, or what was one of the earliest signs of that this could be an opportunity for you to feel grateful for being in this position as caretaker.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: I think it’s a fluid experience. It’s not a moment. It’s like you wake up in the morning, you think these babies are beautiful. They’re making you laugh. You’re hugging them and loving them. and then all of a sudden one of them has a meltdown and you have to go to work and your friends are going out and you’re not going out or you used to stay up till two or three in the morning and you have to go sleep. You’re falling asleep at 10 o’clock and can’t do your work but then you see them sleeping and they look beautiful. So there are many moments where you wonder like, wow, how did this become my experience? And I feel bad for the kids because they’ve heard me multiple times say, like, I didn’t plan to have children. My intention was to be child-free, not childless, child-free. And so I made the decision because I had already been parenting people. I was the one that was going to go to college and the one was going to take care of all these things because I was responsible. And so the fact was I had already been parenting. And so when I rece ived the children, I did it because I love them so much that I didn’t want them to be in danger. And I have to honor my sister in her choice because someone who is struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, they don’t always. They’re not always willing to release their children and let them be taken care of by someone else. But my sister trusted me. She had a deep trust and a deep love for me. And so she said, I’m going to need you to take care of the kids because I can’t do it. I can take care of myself, and I can take care of them, and they will be safer with you.
Xorje Olivares: Thank you for sharing that. We’re actually going to take a quick break and be back with more Hyphenación.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
Xorje Olivares: Yosimar, I want to ask you something that Profe Anita mentioned, which I feel like I’m going to struggle with is the ability to just be honest with whoever you’re caring for and mention the moments of frustration, mention the moments of joy. And just being transparent about how you’re feeling every step of the way. Was it easy for you to be open and transparent with your grandma about just anything that you were experiencing?
Yosimar Reyes: Yeah, I think one of the funny things about my grandma is that she was witty. My grandma was 89, 90, but that homegirl was…sharp!
Xorje Olivares: Yeah, good for her!
Yosimar Reyes: I was hilarious because we would go out to doctor’s appointments and also my I wasn’t babying her like she’s an adult she’s a grown woman so I wouldn’t necessarily baby her so if we’re arguing at a doctor’s office I’m like I’m sure people think this is elder abuse but this is how we get along like I could talk to her you know people review their grandma’s in a certain way but I grew up with her so she’s like my my friend so um but there was this moment where we would get into it because we’re so caught up and we were like, just fight, right? And she would get me frustrated because es bien terca. She wouldn’t do things. I would argue about her medications. One of the things about my grandma is that she didn’t trust doctors. So she was very much about, I’m gonna do it my way. And so we would tug a lot.
Xorje Olivares: ¡Me están mintiendo!
Yosimar Reyes: Como, ese doctor no más te quiere enfermo para sacarte dinero. I’m like, girl, you’re on medi-cal. You’re not paying them. So, chill out. But then it was funny because obviously, my grandma, she was an emotional manipulator. So she would get mad at me and then shut down. I’ll come home and all the lights are off. And I’m, like, okay, this girl is going through it.
Xorje Olivares: Oh, no.
Yosimar Reyes: Or she would lock herself or she would go pretend that she’s sleeping in the garage. I’m like, girl, why do you have to sleep in the car? Do you have a bed? Like all these emotional manipulations, you know, all of that. But then I have to be like the conscientious one and I’m like, okay, she’s older. Let me give it. And then I’ll be like, I will eat them. I just want to apologize to you. I just wanna tell you that you’re not a burden to me. You’re the biggest gift I ever had. And I’m so sorry if I get frustrated with you, but sometimes this is very difficult because I’m doing so much and I just want to let you know that it’s not you. I love you and I care for you. And then she would be like, “I know.” And then we would hug it out. And we would have these episodes. We would have this telenovela episodes.
But then I started to teach my grandma how to use her words instead of these things. Like, hey, if you need space, you can just tell me, hey, right now I’m feeling a little sad. And it’s interesting because she started learning words like siento depresión, o me siento triste. Something that it’s not very common. I don’t think it’s very common in Latino, monolingual, Spanish. Deciré, tengo una tristeza. And then I would like, okay, let’s process it. What do we need to do? Or like, oh, let me, let us go walk or let’s, and sometimes it was hard because she, I understood she was, my grandma was so isolated.
I think one of the things that people don’t realize is that my grandma is very independent. So she’s used to making movidas on her own. And now because she’s older, she can’t necessarily go out to the store by herself. there’s certain things that she can’t do. So her life became reduced into somebody watching her. And I think one of the biggest things that I learned was the fact that this country doesn’t facilitate for you to think outside of your immediate needs. So for someone to come and take time to take her to a restaurant or take time to take her to the park, it was a lot. And so I think for her also realizing that she needed someone was a very hard, and that’s where the depression came.
Xorje Olivares: Prof. Anita, I want to ask because… Part of the, the caretaking journey sometimes is that there’s a difference of generations and we speak different languages. So I’m wondering if, if you had to, to deal with this interesting perspective of you were having to communicate with youngins who might not. Understand where you’re coming from because the lived experience is so different.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: That’s a great question. I think as a first-gen college-educated person, I was already dealing with that. All of this, when I talk about the kids, I can’t talk about it without talking about my mom, too. So from the very beginning, when I first read Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands, La Frontera, I called my mom up. I’m like, mom, why didn’t you teach me more Spanish? I used to speak Spanish before I started school. Why didn’t you continue? And she’s like mija they used to punish us, you know hit us with rulers. The white nuns would punish us for speaking in Spanish so I taught you English so that they wouldn’t do that to you. And so I did the work of teaching my mom what Chicana meant, what feminist meant. I taught her about colorism because my family is the darker one. My father was very dark skinned, Indigenous. So little by little, I was trying to teach my mom and also reclaim our cultural identity and our pride and remove all of the internalized racism that we had grown up with, similar to the sexism, et cetera. So when the kids came into my life, I did the same thing with them. Like I said, they were three and four years old. And I remember distinctly, Michael, either was three or four. And he asked me like, “Honey, why do you have a girlfriend?” I had a girlfriend at the time. It was my first partner after I became a parent. And I said oh, that’s because um I love her and she’s I’m in a relationship with her she’s my girlfriend and I said and he said “But why don’t you have a boyfriend” I said well I actually and at the time identified as bisexual, now I identify as queer and fluid but I said I’m bisexual so that means I can love boys or girls and it doesn’t matter to me you know if they’re a boy or girl I can still love them. And he said, “You know what honey, I think I’m bisexual too.” four years old. And I was like, Oh, okay, well, just so you know, whoever you love, whoever, you want to be a boyfriend or girlfriend that’s always going to be accepted in our home.
Xorje Olivares: I will say, uh, one of the things that’s possible when you’re physically with someone is getting to talk at all hours of the day, you know, during dinner, whenever the moment feels right and just learning about the person you’re with. And so I want to ask you, starting with you, What is something that you learned from your grandmother that you don’t think you would have ever had the chance to do unless you had all of that access to her?
Yosimar Reyes: Um, I, my grandma, you know, passed away in November, and I think not just because she passed away, I think I always knew my grandma as like this magical person. I’m like, Oh, I’d say it takes a really powerful person to raise a little queer child and to not murder their spirit. And my grandma never, my Grandma was an alcahueta. If I wanted something, she would make it work. And I think my grandma maybe was that because she was trying to make up for the mother that she couldn’t be to her daughters. And that’s when I got a complex idea of my grandma. My grandma was in survival mode. And so her way of parenting her daughters was probably not the kindness or not the most. And so now that she’s older, she’s confronting that because everything comes back. And so maybe the relationship with her daughters is not that close or it’s turbulent because they haven’t spoken about this and there hasn’t been a sorry. And so I think there was this constant thing.
But for me, I can’t speak to that because my grandmother was never that to me. And so I had the patience that obviously my mom or my aunts necessarily didn’t have with her, but I did. And so, I think what I learned was that, to view my grandmother’s life with compassion and now that she’s older, to confront her or to talk to her and see, listen, maybe it’s time you forgive yourself for what you didn’t do and think about the things that you did do. And so I think my-the most biggest thing of spending time with someone that’s elderly and someone that confronting their mortality is making sure that they make amends with the guilt or the shame that they carry. And so I’m happy to say that I was helping my grandma gravitate toward that and that I able to honor, ‘You were on survival mode, it’s not your fault. And look, look how far you made it. Look how you shifted. And yes you fucked up. There’s moments that you fuck up as a human life is not that. But I want you to tell you that at the end of the day, the impact in your legacy, the way people speak about your character, the way people thank you for the things that you’ve done for them, it’s very dynamic. So you also need to be kind to yourself.’ And so I think that was the biggest thing to be able to look at my grandma in the complexities of the things where she did mess up but also the compassion of saying you did the best that you could with what you had.
Xorje Olivares: Thank you for sharing that. Profe Anita, I want to ask you sort of the inverse of that, especially because we started this conversation with you talking about the very real sensation of this is not how you thought your life was going to go. So what is something you learned about yourself now that you are Honey and, uh, you’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.
Anita Tijerina Revilla: I think the thing that I learned about myself was that I had to figure out a way to take care of myself and my body, mind and spirit even while I was taking care of everyone else. Like, I even before I got the kids, I already was putting other people’s needs before my own. I was a people pleaser, always wanted everybody to love me and to accept me, especially because I grew up thinking I was unlovable. I, you know, grew up different. I have a different hand and a lot of people bullied me for my hand and I thought I would grow up to not have love. And so I think with the kids, I realized like I have to figure out what I need to heal myself because I want to be a parent that parents from a space of healing, that parents from a place of liberation versus fear. I was living my life through my mom’s trauma, and so I had to figure out how to heal, release her trauma and heal my own trauma. And I don’t think I would have gotten as far as I have without the kids. They hold me accountable. They use my words against me. They throw my feminism in my face, and they say they’re not as easily… convinced when I tell them something is good or bad. They challenged me and I like my mom taught me I taught them you have a voice
Xorje Olivares: Ah, you have a voice. Thats so powerful. I want to thank each of your for opening up and being as vulnerable as you have been on this very difficult topic. But I think it’s helping me, its helping other folks that are on the precipice of this journey for themselves. So I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to go in depth for what this experience has been like for you. So I want to thank you each for that.
And I want it to our listeners that if you want to follow our guests, I will put all of their socials, where you can find them online, all of the written works, that will all be in the show notes. And if you wanna communicate with us as a Hyphenation show… You can send us an email at HYP at KQED.org so we can know what you want to talk about on our program. But again, just want to say thanks to our guests and thanks to you for being here for this chat. Until next time. Hasta Lleugo.
Credits:
Hyphenación is a KQED Studios Production. It is produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral, Alex Tran, and me, Xorje Olivares. Chris Hambrick is our editor. Mixing and mastering by Jim Bennett and Christopher Beale. Jen Chien is executive producer and KQED’s director of podcasts. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Special thanks to Megan Tan, Martina Castro, and Paulina Velasco for their development support. Thank you to Maha Sanad and Alana Walker for their audience engagement support, to podcast operations manager Katie Sprenger, Video Operations manager Vivian Morales, and our chief content officer Holly Kernan. Okay mi gente, cuídense.
