MARIA TREJO
If you happen to spot Maria Trejo by her bright blonde curly hair, you might miss her just as quickly as you saw her. To her, retirement is the last thing on her mind. Early mornings and evenings, she speed-walks throughout Harbor Village, a low-income housing community in the South Bay region of Los Angeles where she lives. Her golden rule is to not stop moving. She arrives at Harbor Village’s community center early on Thursdays to help pass out bags of non-perishables to her neighbors and leaves only when the weekly food bank runs out and everyone who came has their fill of what they need. At 60-years-old, she is still a housekeeper and now only occasionally bakes cakes -- all on top of making sure her four children and husband are taken care of.
Trejo makes being busy appear to be like an art form as she moves and speaks with a sense of urgency. However, this comes at no surprise. Work is what she has known her whole life.
Although each day was structured to a tee, Trejo remembers her twenty years in Zamora, her country-side hometown in Mexico, with a deep level of fondness.
Day after day was spent with her five brothers and sisters in the dripping subtropical heat that lingers over Zamora, which exports mass amounts of produce to the United States every year. They cut bright red strawberries and tomatoes with precision. Everything from carrots, cilantro, watermelon, sugar cane, and potatoes were planted and harvested by their collective hands and sold to local markets on a daily basis.
“It was simple. You work on the farm in the morning and return in the evening, bathe and rest. It was a beautiful lifestyle. I was my happiest then,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like work when you know how to do it well.”
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Her first taste of labor on her family’s farm began at the young age of seven, shortly after her father was murdered. He was killed after being robbed, forever leaving a wound on her soul that would never completely heal.
“I was left without a father and had to start working right after. I never went to school when I was young. I never went because I had to take care of my siblings. I was the oldest,” she said.
This work ethic, planted within her by her mother among the fields in Zamora, would prove to be lifelong testament to her resilience.
At twenty, she bid farewell to the only life she knew to begin a new one with her husband in Los Angeles. Not knowing what to expect, she hurriedly packed her bags, because a “chance for something new is one you don’t take lightly. You just go.”
For Trejo, the path to citizenship was not the most difficult part of leaving Zamora. She was touched by the kindness of her immigration lawyer, who despite a language barrier, helped her and her husband easily transition to life in the U.S. by offering them discounted rates. Trejo had seen many people return to Zamora because of extremely high lawyer’s fees, a lack of a place to stay, and no one to turn to. Luckily, she did not have deal with any of those issues because her brother had made the move shortly before her.
The most heart-wrenching part was being apart from her family; the clan Trejo spent day and night with since she was seven. Having her brother around was helpful, but nothing close to home.
“I was sick to my stomach with how much I missed Zamora. All I wanted was to go back, but I knew I couldn’t,” she said.
The best and only way she knew how to deal with intense levels of anxiety and stress was to work. And to work a lot.
A friend she made taught her how to bake cakes. Another took her to clean her first house. Trejo learned the bus routes that took her from Harbor City to Torrance almost instantly. And soon after, her children were born. A new schedule was adopted, which involved more work.
Her daily schedule became one where she took her children to school, cleaned a house with a friend for $25 each, picked up the kids, rushed home and made it to her night classes at the high school near her home. Trejo spent years learning to read first. Then, English. Driving came last. The weekends were reserved for intense days of baking. This routine was life.
“My back and arms hurt a lot now from years of making cakes and cleaning houses,” she said as she cracked her thumbs. “I’ve done well though.”
“Well” to her means the ability to send money back to Mexico and ultimately, for the opportunity to return. Trejo’s been able to return to Zamora, but nothing had truly been the same since she left when she was twenty. Her siblings, too, could not keep planting their seeds in the countryside. They spread across the U.S.; in Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
She speaks to them as frequently as she can because she’ll always feel the same responsibility to them as she did when she was a little girl teaching them how to plant cilantro in the sticky heat.
“I’m their second mom! I still have to keep them in line,” she laughs.
When Trejo passes by the beach on her commute to work, she remembers her first months in the U.S. and how much she longed to hear her family’s voices. She, before coming to Los Angeles, had never seen the vast beauty of the ocean, but instantly connected it to her brothers and sisters and their childhood summers in Zamora’s rivers. Little reminders of what she once knew as home make her smile.
“I haven’t been back in ten years. Now that my mother passed away, there’s no reason for me to go,” Trejo said.
And just like Trejo does best, she gets her mind off of it by working. Her hands can show you.