all about my mother

 
My project of the past couple of days has been to write a paper proposal about my dissertation methodologies.  The call for papers asked for "war stories" about first time field experiences.  I don't know about war stories, but I know that my research story has interesting roots.  They're my own roots actually.  I chose my mom's hometown on the Texas-Mexico border as my anthropological field site.
 
My mother raised me with stories about growing up in segregated South Texas.  Her family had immigrated from Mexico to the United States in the mid-1940s and spent nearly twenty years in the Lower Rio Grande Valley before making one last migration to California, where wages were better and racial divisions less stark.  Thirty five years later, I made my first migration to South Texas with my mother.  Driving along the city’s grid of streets, she transposed a history of Mexican/Anglo segregation on neighborhoods, businesses, churches, etc.  To hear stories about segregation is one thing; to see inequalities mapped onto places is much more powerful. 
 
Two years later I moved to La Feria.  Without getting into the particulars, it was a wonderful year for me, both in terms of research, but also in terms of life.  And it was meaningful for me to be able to spend some time treading the same paths my mother and my aunts and my grandparents did in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  I relished meeting people who remembered my grandparents.  I met a gentleman in his 80s who told me that my grandpa - Don Pablo - had taught him how to play the guitar.  I guess it's comforting for me to see that even when people leave a place, they leave behind memories and shared experiences.
 
In any event, I spent a good part of the past couple of days thinking and writing about auto/ethnography - the ethnography of one's own group or an autobiography with cultural relevance or anything in between!  And I've been writing about my mother and her family and the reasons that drew me to La Feria. 
 
Last night, tired from the writing thought process, I told my mom, I'm tired of writing about you!
 
She smiled smugly and said, I can't help it if I've led such an interesting life!
 
I rolled my eyes and she added, Well, why don't you write about you?
 
It occurs to me that I am.  After all, her story is also mine.