Remembering Juana Antonia

Thoughts on 92 days of quarantine. 

My great grandmother, Juana Antonia Alvarenga was born on February 3, 1900. She had a calm disposition. I never remembered her being angry or yelling, almost as if she would accept things as they came without ever stressing over them. 

She was the kind of women who carried a lot of pain in her heart without letting anyone know her emotions. Mami Toñita was sweet as honey and pleasant to be around. 

In those days girls married young. Some of her friends even at age fourteen. I can only imagine her entering her teen years when World War I began. It ends when she was 18. A war that killed 22 million.

Shortly after around 1920, the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. Thankfully mama Toñita made it alive but her husband did not, leaving her with a newborn to raise. She was 20 years old. She found herself in a sad predicament to look again for love and support. At last, she found the love of her life, my Great-grandfather, Fidel Melara and together they had one daughter. My grandmother Hilda. This was her second child to a second husband.

Unfortunately, as soon as Fidel knew of her pregnancy he disappeared and never had anything to do with her. He was dating someone else who he ended up marrying. Mama Toñita became a single mother raising two daughters ages eight and five when the global economic crisis began causing inflation, unemployment and famine. She had just turned 29. 

And if that wasn't enough, four years later, the Nazis came to power. She had met Rafael Vides by then, a military man with whom she had two children, Tito at age 37 and Estrella at 40. Between those two pregnancies, World War II began ending six years later at age 45 with a balance of 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million died too. By now, in her middle age years, mama Toñita experienced two wars and a pandemic.

Mama Toñita died in 1982, right in the middle of a violet civil war in El Salvador that lasted for over a decade. Amazing to think of how many people have somehow survived wars and catastrophes. 

I am 60 years old and for the first time I understand what it would be like to face a pandemic. I can't complain given the fact that our circumstances are so much better. We have plenty of food, water, electricity, cell phones, and a safe place to live. Nothing like that existed back in the day.

My great-grandmother never murmured, it was not part of her DNA, she never lost hope and her joy of living. Whenever I feel a little down from so much anger, turmoil and confusion, I think of mama Toñita. If she could do it, so can I.

Con amor,

Vero