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little nana's cup

Several years ago, while visiting my beloved ninety one year old gramma Lou, she entrusted to me a little pink and white vertically striped demitasse that once belonged to her mama and my great-grandmother, Concepción Bedoya Madril.  I never met my little nana as people in my family endearingly remember her; she died several years before I was born.

However, I do carry with me her name, Concepción-it is my birth given middle name (My mom seriously considered endowing me with it as a first name but discovered my name Clarissa in a novel, days before I was born and changed her mind).  I wholeheartedly believe that I possess part of my great-grandmother’s mestiza spirit, her strength, her invaluable historical memory and knowledge, and her great capacity to love.  Since receiving this precious keepsake, I have not let it out of my sight-I always display it in some prominent place in whatever rented/temporary home I live in.  I was livid one day when I discovered that a guest in my home had used it as an ashtray!

My great-grandmother was born in the late nineteenth century near what is now Tucson, Arizona (southeastern part of the state); at the time when she was born, this area had not yet become Arizona, the forty eighth state of the United States (AZ later became a state on February 14, 1912).  Before her, two generations of women were born and resided in the same area, which was still part of México.  Tracing my maternal roots, there are no stories of immigration from México to the US, rather, la línea migrated over their native land. 

At just two years of age, my great gramma, Concepción migrated to Dome in what is now southwestern Arizona from Tucson.  Her mother had died giving birth to who would have been little nana’s younger sister, who also died-little nana became the sole surviving child of her parents.  Not long after their deaths, an uncle of little nana’s brought her on horseback from Tucson to Dome, where her father and new stepmother moved to after they met and married (this stepmother rejected and abused my little nana for being the child of another woman).

Little nana spent most of her life in Dome, which for a time bore the name Dome City-these days it is called Dome Valley.  Later in life, when she was married and a mother, little nana would go outside each morning to feed wild desert mockingbirds.  From her hand, they ate tiny breadcrumbs soaked in liquid, either water or condensed milk.  I am told that little nana loved, loved, loved birds, and gramma Lou implies that she reveled in this daily ritual, a part of the day that she claimed for herself.

Her tiny cup is the only tangible object I have that belonged to my great gramma Concepción.  To me, it represents her life, her beautiful person, both shaped by her early forced migration to Dome, her subsequent chosen migration to Yuma, Arizona, then her return migration to Dome where she died at almost one hundred years old.  I like to think that this cup represents the important personal time during which she would reflect on the experiences that shaped her life, both past and present.