Sometimes I would like to remember all of it. Not forgetting any of the stories, the “vivencias” of my childhood in Mexico City. Fourteen people lived together in our house. My parents, my grandmother, eight children, our nannie and two extra women that helped my mother and were there to be sure that no one would go crazy in such a large household.

For me, as a little girl, the purses that belonged to my mother and grandmother and my nannie resembled their owners. I envied them their purses.

My nannie carried large plastic bags and baskets to the market that held all the things she bought. And then she had her tiny little coin purse where she kept money and the ‘estampitas’ that we gave her.

After school I would buy my nannie tiny pictures of the Virgin or of saints that she particularly liked. Then I would go into the church and pray on my nannie’s behalf. On the back of each estampitas I wrote a list of the prayers I had made for her. Ten Our Fathers, ten Holy Marys and five ‘aculatorias’ – those little religious mantras that the nuns taught us.

For safekeeping, my nannie kept her coin purse either close to her heart or tight in her hand. It carried her sweat as well as the estampitas.

Biography