Yvonne Martinez grew up in a family where secrets hid in plain sight.
Even as a child she had suspicions about her hard-drinking and perennially well-dressed Grandma Mary, often found in the company of men; her white brother who appeared in the middle of a family of nine brown Mexican American children; and her mother’s black eyes and swollen face.
But mysteries were noticed in her family, not discussed.
Sexual abuse passed down silently through the generations to Martinez herself, the details of which she can only allude to in her sweeping new memoir, Someday Mija, You’ll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman, published in October by the Berkeley-based She Writes Press.
As painful as it was at times to dig up the truth, the emotional and spiritual journey Martinez takes ultimately turns the process of discovery into one of liberation. She will rely on such skills later in life during her career as a union rep, including for city employees in Berkeley, where she learns to voraciously “follow the dog” wherever it may lead.
“I wanted to write down for myself what I knew to be the truth. So if a toaster was flying or something was going on that was dramatic and painful and everybody said, ‘No, that didn’t happen,’ I knew it happened,” she said. “There’s always this fear of going there because there’s so much pain associated with knowing. But when I did I got stronger. It’s the same thing in my union work. Sometimes it takes you to places you don’t really want to go to, but you know you have to go there. That’s where the hard part is. ”
Martinez, 69, was sitting in her cozy apartment on the top floor of an 1886 North Berkeley Victorian.
Writing the book took 25 years because Martinez, who was working, penned an essay at a time. The result is a memoir in essays, the first two thirds of which are devoted to family stories and the final third to her union work.
As she documents life in Salt Lake City during the mid to late 1950s, the book explores Mexican immigration, assimilation and the bigotry her family experienced under the majority white Mormon population, followed by the cultural reaffirmation that takes place when they move to the Chicano stronghold that is Los Angeles.
From farm to restaurant
Originally from central Mexico, Martinez’s family arrived in Salt Lake City as beet workers at the turn of the century. From the get-go, some of her family members were involved in subversive acts that pushed back against the Mormon majority. In fact, her book came out 100 years to the month after her great grandfather was killed as a bandit by Utah Mormons. That story is the first in a series of generational traumas.
Because fieldwork conditions were horrible and discrimination rampant, Martinez’s family chose other ways to get by. Her great grandmother Mercedes, for example, sold “a taco at a time,” eventually getting enough money to rent a storefront. “They found a way out of no way,” Martinez said.
Martinez was born out of wedlock, so her mother had to work in a restaurant to support them. Her great grandmother raises her. Her mother, a third-generation assimilated American, at first ignores the advances of a Mexican laborer who keeps showing up at the restaurant.
“My mother was all about Frankie Lane and Patsy Cline and cashmere sweaters. And there was my stepfather, wearing a dragon shirt, who can barely order from the [English] menu. He was a laborer in the Bracero Program and also a painter and had this political education having grown up in 1940s Mexico. He thinks he was impressing her,” Martinez said. “She was not impressed.”
Nevertheless, the couple does get married and have seven children together. One is the result of an affair Martinez’s mother has when her husband is deported after great grandfather Vidal calls immigration in an attempt to stop the beatings. The story becomes another hiding-in-plain-sight story that her mother denies.
Martinez’s stepfather returns, and as a condition of their reunion, Margaret makes her husband promise that she will accept the white child, Sal, as his own. He does. Yet this arrangement is hidden from the family.
“Opening the door just a crack to Sal’s whiteness would have opened the door to more than we as children could ever see or know about our parents,” Martinez writes. “Doors that opened beyond Mother’s swollen face and black eyes and my brother’s white skin. Doors that opened to all the family stories and secrets.”
Life in the white Mormon majority of Salt Lake City exposes the family to both overt and covert discrimination. Her stepfather, proud of his Mexican culture, “railed at blatant Mormon bigotry,” Martinez writes, often doing so with his hands. In one scene, where Martinez’s pink Schwinn is stolen by Mormon children down the street and repainted black, her stepfather forces one of her brothers to retrieve the bike, even though a fight will ensue.
“The lesson was that you had to fight for it,” Martinez said. “He didn’t want his children to be victims.”
Her stepfather moves the family to Los Angeles when Martinez is eight to free them from the psychological effects of being a persecuted minority.
“He could see that we were learning to hate ourselves in Salt Lake City,” Martinez said.
In Los Angeles they settle in South Central, a Black neighborhood, where they are again a minority, yet are buoyed by the city’s thriving Chicano culture brought together by the Catholic Church. Her Catholic school experience was a positive one, “a place where you learned about a value that’s bigger than yourself.”
Martinez’s mother and stepfather are among several complex characters who could be dismissed as pariahs but also have benevolent qualities Martinez recognizes, which makes for more nuanced storytelling. None of the matriarchs in her family, for example, protect Martinez from the same sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of family members. Margaret verbally and physically abuses her daughter, yet Martinez, as a child, also recognizes her mother’s mental illness and eating disorder that cause her to act strangely.
In one disturbing chapter her mother, after gorging herself on Wonder Bread and butter, places her newborn who has shat all over his crib too close to a wood-burning stove, burning his foot. Before things take a more dangerous turn, great grandmother Mercedes shows up and scolds her:
“‘These are your kids, goddam it. You better go where you have to go and find what you have to find to get yourself ready to take care of them. …There was no immaculate conception to birth them, and there isn’t going to be any miracle to raise them.’”
The book’s title comes from a pivotal scene in which Martinez’s suspicions about Grandma Mary’s profession are confirmed. Her grandmother shows up, upset and disheveled after physically “busting up a tavern” after the owners tried to act as pimps and bring in their own “girls.”
Grandma Mary didn’t have a pimp. She cut her own deals.
“My grandmother is saying, ‘Yeah, I am who I am. But you’ll learn the difference between a whore, the women who give it a way, and a working woman.’ Sex work is work. It was an attempt to regain her dignity. … You can’t sell out your principles and not do what you know is right.”
A legacy of digging deep
Grandma Mary’s words later inspire Martinez’s work as a union rep who was known for her insistence on maintaining her dignity and following the truth.
Martinez learned both legal and labor skills on the job. Her first position was as a paralegal in a law office, where she organized a union. That was followed by 27 years as a union rep, negotiating hundreds of contracts, organizing strikes and direct actions.
She worked in the Bay Area from 2005-15. In San Francisco, she represented the nurses at Laguna Honda Hospital and also the city’s health division, clinics and San Francisco General Hospital.
Her approach was bottom up because “that’s where the power was, with the workers who were in the fight,” she said. Martinez was also known as an unrelenting unraveller, which often led to her being transferred. Over the years, Martinez said she has been called a “bomb thrower” — and worse.
“When I approached this work I didn’t realize that there was something motivating me, that I couldn’t look the other way,” she said. “And I became very good at it.”
In 2007, when she took a position as a rep for City of Berkeley employees during Mayor Tom Bates’ administration, she thought she had “died and gone to heaven” because of the city’s progressive leanings. Once she got to work, however, she discovered that Berkeley was no different from many other cities. “That was the shock of it,” she said.
At the time, Martinez was working with a newly merged international union chapter of SEIU, which had previously been made up of a social workers union and a city employees union. The social worker contingent, made up of mostly Black women, inspired her with their activism, while the other branch was not so progressive.
When she began “doing what I did everywhere else,” digging into established contracts, past practices and election proceedings, Martinez said she was undermined by a union leader who tried to get her fired, claiming that “organizing was the devil.” Instead the leader pressured Martinez’s bosses to “kick me out of Berkeley, the city I lived in,” and assign her to another union. About 40 social workers created a petition to bring Martinez back, to no avail.
“I never got to find out what kinds of deals were going on below the surface,” she said.
In 2010, while representing city workers in Oakland during the Ron Dellums mayorship, Martinez discovered that parking enforcement was issuing tickets in the Oakland flats but not in the hills, a controversy that drew lots of press coverage. She had only just begun to dig further when she was transferred to Fairfield.
“There were two unions,” she said, “the activists and the people who were all tied up to the city.”
Martinez’s accounts of union work also reveal rampant sexual harassment and abuse that followed her, beginning in the 1980s when she started working for unions.
“There was no time when it wasn’t happening because it’s about power,” she said. “It’s always about power.”
She compared labor unions to a family in which members don’t talk about what’s wrong in the family with those outside the family. When Martinez experienced sexual abuse or harassment, she often postponed reporting it or didn’t report it at all in service of the union cause.
“You’re always fighting on all these levels. In Salinas I helped save a hospital so the campesinas wouldn’t have to have their babies in the field,” she said. “Do I quit the fight because my boss is an asshole? Once the hospital was saved, that’s when I could leave.”
While sexual abuse and harassment was rampant, Martinez also credits the efforts of a few outstanding men, who as colleagues, stood up for her. Discussing this brought Martinez to tears: “I’m grateful to them. I was overwhelmed by their courage. They risked their jobs for standing up.”
Martinez retired in 2015. Since then, she’s divided her time between Berkeley and Portland. She writes at a table covered in brightly colored Mexican oilcloth, not far from an ofrenda honoring her ancestors and a trio of Mexican woodcuts arranged on a wall.
She hopes to find a producer for her play, Scabmuggers, about how the labor movement is historically hampered by sexual harassment, racism and discrimination.
She’s also writing a second book, about growing up in South Central L.A. and the racism of Mexican Americans “that is there and has always been there,” she said. In essence, Martinez is throwing another grenade, ready to reveal what she knows to exist – even if it will be difficult.
“The healing journey goes along with the activist journey,” she said. “It’s really an ongoing process.”
