LA FAMILIA MENDEZ
(WORK IN PROGRESS - UPDATED 6/30/26)
Mario Méndez-Colón
Mario Méndez-Colón was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, province of Spain, to Marcelina Colón-Perez, age 13, and Bernardo Méndez-Cruz, age 26. In 1898, eighteen year old Mario, a native son of this central mountainous region that was the wellspring of the island’s revolt against Spain, would witness the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. He was now part of the spoils of war.
There is no indication that Mario was in the least bit political or centered on anything but the survival of his family. But his spirit was unquestionably instilled in his offspring. In 1908, now living in Utuado, he would marry Maria Porfiria Velez-Montalvo, six years his junior. They would have thirteen children. Ten of them would survive; some of them would become part of the vast Puerto Rican migration to New York, all would remain doggedly proud of their heritage. Their’s was a pride borne of an amalgam of years of personal identification melded with political struggle, economic privation coupled with cultural identity.
By 1910, Mario and Porfiria, along with their two infant children, Virginia (Viña) and Sixto, were living in Utuado’s Barrio Angeles. A coffee farmer, Mario and his little family were somewhat better off than their peers. But a decade later, the island’s problems had engulfed them. Now with eight kids, Mario and his family were living in Lares where he worked as a laborer. In another ten years, the family would now consist of eleven kids with no one but Mario working growing fruit.
In 1935 everyone in the family was pitching in; Mario, an agricultor, worked on a tobacco farm, Porfiria and Viña worked at home as seamstresses. Twenty five year old Sixto worked as a store clerk and Jose, Rosa and Gonzalo as laborers on a tobacco farm. The older children would soon leave. Four others remained at home. Blanca and Marcelina (Celina) worked as bordaderas (embroiderers) in a textile workshop. Their world would fully collapse in 1942 with the watershed moment that marks the beginning of their odyssey. Their matriarch was gone and their sky was black with the birds of war and of privation coming home to roost.
The transfer of Puerto Rico from Spain to the US had brought systemic transformation. Large US corporations took charge, they mechanized what had been smaller enterprises into sugar cane Centrales, displaced workers and disrupted what had been relatively isolated and autonomic communities. What little economic progress there might have been, it never filtered down to their rural island homes. They had eked out existences as essentially the indentured servants of a feudal agrarian economy. The men worked in harsh and unsafe working conditions as jornaderos (day laborers, usually cutting cane or harvesting crops) on land owned by U.S. corporations whose profits tripled but paid slave wages.
Jack Delano a WPA photographer described it thusly:
Our travel took us through every one of the seventy-six municipalities of the island, photographing coffee haciendas, tobacco farms, sugarcane fields, and grinding mills. We recorded the misery of tiempo muerto, the dead season, when the breathtaking, silvery fields of guajana, the sugarcane flower, obscured the ugly brutality of unemployment and want. And we witnessed the zafra, the sugar harvest, when men and oxen strained every muscle under the broiling sun and forty-three sugar mills spouted black smoke into the sky day and night. (from Puerto Rico Mio: Four Decades of Change - Cuatro Decadas de Cambio)
The females fared no better. Scrapping for work from their homes, they made the textiles that brought top dollar in the New York market. The rural west end of the island would become famous for these bordaderas (embroiderers) and their traditional needlework such as mundillo (bobbin lace). While there were many workshops (talleres), the Mendez women, isolated geographically and too young to go unescorted, worked from home. La industria de la aguja paid pittances, 50 cents per 10-hour day if in a workshop, 25 cents if from home. Middlemen and and subcontractors took commissions.
And then, yet another war. The island's strategic importance, a nimble enemy, the omnipresence of US troops, the draft, war vigilance and hysteria, prowling U-Boats - it was a metaphor for more than their physical insularity. The sinking of the SS Coamo in 1942 - with the loss of 186 lives - underscored it. The siblings would leave, now part of the initial flow that would balloon into “The Great Migration”.
On January 11, 1944, preceding by only a few months the Allied invasion of Normandy, Celina, one of the younger daughters. along with her four-month-old infant, would board a seaplane at Isla Grande and head to New York. She would be the tip of the spear. On October 21, 1946, as seemingly a counterpoint to the ending of the hostilities, Viña, the oldest, along with her husband and their teen daughter, would also leave San Juan for the Big Apple. So, too, the youngest; Irma and her forty-day-old baby. Estrella - with baby Blanca, six-year-old Mario, and infant Jose - traveled soon after to rendezvous with Orestes. Sixto, the oldest male sibling, had preceded them in getting to New York a few months earlier. Their siege of New York City had begun in short waves and would ultimately merge with other parts of their nuclear family. In the process they forged a tightly-knit vibrant tribe facing the environmental, racial, and cultural vicissitudes.
The journey would be to an inhospitable and hostile place; they would be mischaracterized as lazy and shiftless, denied opportunities of employment and shelter, and treated, as the US Supreme Court would characterize them, foreigners in a domestic sense. The would illustrate the classic émigré success story - but one with sazon Boricua, sometimes picante and bitter and at others dulce, but always brave, vibrant and vivo.
Virginia and Moises Perez
When Virginia “Viña” Mendez-Velez de Perez was born on June 11, 1909, in Utuado; her father, Mario, 29, her mother Maria, 22. She married Ramon Moisés Pérez-Montalvo on June 30, 1929, in Utuado, living there until their migration to New York in 1946.
The first born, she was by virtue of that status the matriarch. While her siblings were mercurial and histrionic, she was the wizened and stoic elder. She calmed turbulent waters, helped litigate tribal disputes or just passed along sage advice. She was the chairman of the board. She commanded respect, maintained a proper demeanor, and never engaged in the hysterics that characterized her sisters.
She had always been married to Moises - from their early days in rural Puerto Rico where the young couple, now with two young children, struggled to eke out a hard-scrabble living - he on a tobacco farm and she in a sewing workshop - to their migration to the land where the streets are paved with gold. He was her perfect counterfoil; quiet and self-effacing. She was the strong one in their family, a characteristic of all of the Mendez women. Together, they raised, in addition to her three kids, her niece Lydia.
They lived for many years on New York’s West Side where Moises - a jack-of-all-trades handyman - was the superintendent of a tenant building. Forced out by urban renewal, they moved to Rockaway Beach, where Moises helped maintain the amusement park, and then back to the fatherland. Viña maintained her dowager status until her death on October 29, 1993 at the age of 84, Moises having predeceased her in a tragic car accident years earlier.
Sixto and Angelina ("Chela") Rios
Sixto Mendez-Velez, born in 1910, bore his father’s physical features of blonde hair and blue eyes - and also, his temperament. Like Viña, he took seriously the responsibilities and demeanor expected of the elder children and, also by nature of his station, was given proper respect. Industrious, hard-working, and taciturn, he was best left unbothered lest you find that you had riled a hornet’s nest.
He and Angelina Rios-Montalvo, two years his junior, married in 1935. Also of Utuado, “Chela” shared his childhood background, living at home while the males worked on farms and the women took in sewing. She eventually left the nest, living as a boarder while working in a sewing workshop in Utuado, and then almost immediately marrying Sixto. Daughters Porfiria and Narda, followed closely.
In February of 1947, Chela, now pregnant with Sixto Jr., shunted her nascent family to New York’s Spanish Harlem where Sixto Sr., having secured a “super” job, awaited. Nephew Noel, born in 1941 and now seven years old, along with his sister Iraida, traveled by air to join the family as full members. The birth of Pedro, along with the inclusion of his sister-in-law Janda, completed their tidy little clan.
They would move to Newark where the kids spent their formative years and where Sixto worked as a carpenter. Sara, the brood’s youngest was born in 1957. Their lives, fairly mundane, were upset in 1968 when Noel’s plane was shot down in a fight over Quang Tri province, Viet Nam. His status remained “killed, missing in action” until 2002 when his remains were identified and his status would be changed to “Remains Repatriated”.
In those intervening years, Sixto had retired, moved back to Puerto Rico and then to Florida where his sisters now lived. He died in 1992, his death sparing him the anguish of his youngest dying of cancer the following year or from reaching closure concerning Noel’s death. Chela’s death would follow shortly.
Rosa, “Pepin” and Ulisses
Third-born Rosa Maria would inhabit this earthly plane until the age of 22. There is some indication that she might have lived for a short while with a cousin in Guajataca, but primarily she lived at home, worked as a laborer on a tobacco farm and died single.
Next born, Jose “Pepin” Fabian, also would perish young. Having worked as a tobacco farmer for 8 years, he would die in 1939 at the age of 28, a victim of schistosomiasis, a disease that languished around the centrales, exploiting poverty through poor irrigation and lack of potable water.
The death of nine-month-old Ulises had preceded them both.
Bernardino and Amalia Negron
As if these deaths had expurgated the lineage’s tragedies, the siblings that followed embraced folly that would do Loki, the Norse god of mischief, proud. The males perfected it as art, pushing life almost to its bacchanalian limits. Fifth-born "Berna"(1914) was, like his two younger brothers, hard-living and joyous. A dedicated and responsible family man, he was characteristically given to a boundless mirth. Raucous and tumultuous, the brothers loved to drink to get drunk, tell bawdy stories and argue Independentista politics.
They had Napoleonic complexes that manifested themselves, not in fighting, but in having a wild and crazy time like no giants before them. They were all graced with a Mendez heart, which is to say they were loving and generous and full of joy, all qualities sometimes carried to a fault, but always genuine.
Bernardino was an itinerant merchant, traveling the country selling trivialities like shoe laces, gum, etc., and like a jester, often injecting his hijinks into his family’s life lest they die of boredom. Candy for the kids, something pretty “for my sister”, and - for the old man? Rum...what else?
He would sojourn to the states, tipping his toe into the cultural maelstrom, but always returning to his beloved island. At the age of 24, setting up what would become his history of independent self-employment, “Berna” was living in Utuado with Amelia and infants Nelson Luis and Edna Emeli. A decade later, he had relocated his family, now with two more children - Luz, 10 and Mildred, 5 - to Aguadilla where he lived until his death in 1986. His father, Mario, now married to the much younger Josefina Collazo Montalvo, lived nearby with their three-year-old Lidia Mendez-Collazo.
Blanca Iris Mendez de D’Amato
Born a scant seven months after Berna, Blanca was the second-oldest of the surviving daughters and the family’s moral compass. She was straight-laced and religious, not that she was above a laugh or a bawdy joke. Stoic Viña was the family’s doyenne but Blanca was the vibrant gadfly, the one usually in the trenches, generally serving as aider and abettor or co-conspirator.
Along with her sisters, she had worked in the factories up North, had retired, and after suffering years of familial jibes for being a jamona (old maid) had married late in life to a wonderful Italian man. Together they enjoyed a life that was, as befits her Pentecostal upbringing, simple and unpretentious. Always in tow to her younger sibling, she followed Celina from New York, to New Jersey, and then to Tampa. When her husband died, she moved with her son to Tennessee where she died in 2003.
A busybody, she had few personal dramas, but in the family’s close-combat emotional wars, she served as aide-de-camp, usually to Celina or Viña. Like her sister Irma, she masked her Alpha persona as frail and unassuming but was quick to add oxygen to the emotional fires of whatever bochinche had taken center stage in the familial circus. And, like every one of the Mendez clan, she was a zealous scorched-earth dogmatic champion who took no emotional prisoners.
She too had contracted TB at a young age and had suffered a hospitalization that required the removal of a lung and a respite in an upstate New York sanitarium, apparently while Don Mario was still a man of modest means. To say that Blanca was mercurial is grievous understatement. Whether it had any bearing on her general temperament or not, her history with TB had made her a fanatic about cleanliness. Someone drinking from the same glass, not washing hands, anything not meeting her high standards would set her off to unheard of levels, to what these days are characterized as panic attacks; screaming, throwing herself on the floor.
But for all of that, she was the most humble and innocent of the lot; without pretention, satisfied with her lot. She was the one who gave you the sensible gifts like underwear at Christmas, took you to the doctor’s appointments, babysat, She would give you some pittance - a nickel, a dime - and you knew it was from her heart and that she didn't have much anyway. She would make you a meal even if you showed up on leave in the middle of the night. She was a crazy saint.
Gonzalo and Orestes Mendez-Velez
Blanca’s birth had interrupted the yearly trend of the birth of male children. Beginning with Berna, they now would include Gonzalo and Orestes (joined later by Aracelio).
Gonzalo had been the first family member to breach the mainland, his 1939 arrival in NYC aboard the SS Borinquen establishing the beachhead his sisters would follow. He joined the Army in 1942. He was now one of the 53,000 Puerto Ricans who served in the U.S. military during World War II. Whether due to his limited social and educational background or the Army’s institutional bias relegating minorities to support roles, he served as a cook, mustering out with the rank of Sergeant in 1945 after more than three and a half years of service.
It was a silver lining; he was young, a veteran, and the glut of returning job seekers had yet to begin. He became a pastry chef at the prestigious Waldorf Astoria, eventually returning to Puerto Rico where he would work at the equally well-known Americana Hotel for more than thirty years. He died in 1992 of a cerebral vascular incident.
