Un Cigarrillito

“‘Buela², what’s a memory you have of your childhood that many people don’t know about?”

Abuela: “Uy… Hay un montón, ¿cuál quieres que te cuente?³”

Junior year of high school, Ms. Hinojosa, our history teacher, assigned us a project to collect an oral history from someone we valued in our life.

“What do you mean history from someone we know?” I remember the class feeling confused. Up until that point, we had been taught that history comes from textbooks, or worst, terribly boring black and white documentaries on VHS shown on a TV that had to be rolled into the classroom.

I thought hard about who I should ask. My mom always talked to me about her childhood, so I thought I already knew everything about her. My dad’s childhood was a history not meant to be shared in a classroom setting if I didn’t want to get sent to the principal’s office. After some negotiation, I decided to interview one of my abuelas, Abuela Hortencia, who I miss dearly. For the phone interview, Abuela was in Springfield, Massachusetts, having her cafe con leche, and I was in Alhambra, California, sitting in the bathroom - I don’t remember why I was sitting in the bathroom.

Abuela: Of course I didn’t finish school! I had to pick tobacco.

My grandmother stopped going to school after the 2nd grade. Her family had a tobacco farm and sold cigars and tobacco for a living. It was the perfect task for someone her age and size. She would do it briefly before school and after school. There came a time when it was more cost-effective to simply have her join the family business.

Months before this interview, I had received an award from the school district for the most hours worked as a high schooler in one year. To say that I was proud is an understatement: I averaged 30 work hours per week, had just gotten a 25 cent raise and a promotion to Cash Register Lead (still don’t know what that is), all while going to school and learning English. 

My grandmother was one of perhaps hundreds of young people in Puerto Rico, a territory of the US, who had to give up school to help the family. My grandmother had always been described as a wife and a parent who dressed in style, loved coloring her hair red and liked

to drive with the windows down. No one had told me that Abuela was essentially forced to stop going to school and pick tobacco at such a young age. 

Abuela: It wasn’t too bad. I loved being outside and sneaking in un cigarrillito for myself, too, haha.

Had I heard my grandmother tell me this part of the story now at age 33, I think I would’ve laughed with her too. After all, my grandmother was hilarious. However, at 16 and as a kid terrified of addictions, I was horrified. I remember reprimanding her when she told me this. Abuela, ¿en serio?⁴ 

Growing up, I had known my grandmother to be a smoker, but this confession came around a time when she had stopped smoking because they had found some manchas en sus pulmones⁵. I remember feeling annoyed at my family because, in my mind, they all knew that my grandmother had been a smoker her whole life, including her childhood, and no one had made her stop. 

Now, I love thinking about her little cigarette confession because the spirit of that confession lives in every member of our family. Any chance we get, while navigating lives that don’t always feel fair, we choose to sneak in a little fun and pretend that everything is in fact okay. Any time we gather in Springfield, around the coffee table where she most likely took my interview, we play all sorts of pranks on each other and always end up remembering Abuela and how she would sneak in a little prank herself.

Until this day, I regret not spending more time collecting these histories from her. I wish I had understood then that she was the only direct line I had to Puerto Rico in the 1930s. If I could talk to her again, I would ask her so many more questions about what it was like to live in a US Territory right in the middle of the Great Depression, two world wars, the Ponce Massacre, a time when you couldn’t legally display the PR flag (if you’ve ever wondered why, this is why Boricuas love our flag). What other stories did you wish to tell?

By the end of that 1-hour interview, Ms. Hinojosa had accomplished her learning objective with me: History lives in every single one of us. 

Abuela, I hope you enjoyed smoking the cigarettes you made!

P.S. My grandma is no longer with us. Dementia, not las manchas en sus pulmones, took her. Her memory slowly left her, but she drank her cafe con leche until the very end. 

 ^2. ‘Buela is a shortened version of abuela which means grandmother.

^3. Oh man, there’s a lot. Which one do you want me to tell you?

 ^4. Seriously, grandma?

 ^5. Spots in her lungs