LA FAMILIA MENDEZ
[this is a work-in-progress; updated 4/5/24]
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. Theirs 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 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, their situation had worsened. They now had eight kids and were living in Lares where he worked as a laborer and in another ten years, the family would grow even more so, now to include eleven kids and with no one but Mario working, now growing fruit.
By 1935, everyone in the family was pitching in; Mario, an agricultor, worked on a tobacco farm, Porfiria and Virginia worked at home as seamstresses. Twenty five year old Sixto worked as a store clerk and Jose, Rosa and Gonzalo were laborers on a tobacco farm. The older children would soon leave. Of the four that remained at home, Blanca and Celina worked as bordaderas in a textile workshop. Their world would collapse fully in 1942 with the death of Porfiria, the watershed moment that marks the beginning of their odyssey.
On January 11, 1944, preceding by only a few months the Allied invasion of Normandy, Celina, one of Mario’s younger daughters. along with her four-month-old infant, would board a seaplane at Isla Grande and head to NY. She would be the tip of the spear. On October 21, 1946, as seemingly a counterpoint to the European theater, Vina, his oldest, along with her husband and their teen, would also leave San Juan for the Big Apple. So, too, Irma, the youngest daughter; she with a baby forty days old. They were followed a short time later by Estrella, the wife of one of his sons. She would travel with baby Blanca, six-year-old Mario, and infant Jose to rendezvous with her husband Orestes. Sixto, the oldest male, had preceded them in getting to New York a few months earlier. Their siege of New York City had begun. They would ultimately merge with others and in the process forge a tightly knit vibrant tribe.
Virginia and Moises Perez
When Virginia “Viña” Mendez-Velez de Perez was born on June 11, 1909, in Utuado, Puerto Rico, her father, Mario, was 29, and her mother, Maria, was 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 pass 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.
Moises, to whom she had always been married - 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 - was her perfect counterfoil; quiet and meek. She was the strong one in their family, as is true of every one 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 was the superintendent of a tenant building. Forced out by urban renewal, The moved to Rockaway Beach, and then back to the fatherland where they both now rest in peace. She died on October 29, 1993, at the age of 84.
Sixto and Angelina ("Chela") Rios
Sixto Mendez-Velez, born in Utuado in 1910, was Mario incarnate. He bore his father’s physical features of blonde hair and blue eyes - and also, his temperament. Like Virginia, 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. Nephew Noel, born in 1941 and niece Iraida, 1937, also joined the family as full members. 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. The birth of Pedro, along with the inclusion of his sister-in-law Janda, completed their tidy little tribe.
They would eventually land in Newark where the kids spent their formative years and Sixto worked as a carpenter. Sara, the youngest of the brood 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 again to Florida where his other siblings now lived. He died in 1992 and while his death spared him the anguish of his youngest dying of cancer the following year, he never got closure concerning Noel’s death. So, also, Chela, who in death would follow him 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 those tragedies, the siblings that followed embraced folly. And it would be the remaining males that perfected it as art, pushing life almost to its bacchanalian limits. Fifth-born "Berna"(1914) was, like the two brothers who would follow him, hard-living, 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.
