Volume 4, Number 2 - Spring 2006
Listening to a Participant
From Gente y Cuentos
Interview with Juana Torres
It is a long distance from Juana Torres’ birthplace of Cayey, Puerto Rico, to her current address in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Gente y Cuentos shortens the span. When Torres read “Nos Han Dado la Tierra,” a story by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, she felt transported back to Cayey. In the story, two dozen peasants are given the poorest land in the valley; they must walk each night for hours, only to arrive at a barren ground.
“I was reminded of when I was little, how much I had to walk to get from one place to another,” says Torres, 73. In Cayey, she lived among tobacco and coffee fields, orange and banana groves, horses and pigs and chickens. It was a long walk to school, and Torres stopped going after sixth grade. By 15, she was married to a boy from the same barrio.
When Torres was young, she says, “Nobody read me stories, but my mother told stories—about monsters that appeared, about what happened in the past. [In Gente y Cuentos], I listen. We talk about other places. The words [in the stories] are not the common words that you hear every day. I enjoy it because I also get to share with other people.”
On a chilly winter morning, Torres gathered with eight other women and one man at Families On the Move/Club You Belong, a center for Latino seniors in New Brunswick. Torres chuckled with coordinator Alma Concepción as she recalled the morning’s story, “Toco Madera,” by Jorge Asis, about a man so obsessed with growing a beard that he is willing to trade another man’s life for the privilege of facial hair.
“It showed me…that maybe you should not obsess yourself with something,” Torres said.
She also loved “No Era Bonita la Tia Cristina,” A story about Angeles Mastretta, about a woman who feels pressured to marry. One day the woman announces that she’s been given a proposal of marriage by a Spaniard. The woman leaves for Spain, and soon writes back to say that her husband has died. She returns home as a widow, but with new power and status.
“I liked it because you never knew if [the proposal, the marriage and the husband’s death] happened or didn’t happen…I think she invented everything.”
Sonia Dominguez, seniors’ program director at Families on the Move, has seen the impact of the group on Torres and others. “They open up their minds,” she says. “They get to share what’s going on with their lives.”
When Torres first came to the United States 20 years ago, she spoke no English, and few people in New Brunswick spoke Spanish. “Now there are many more Spanish-speaking people here,” including her co-participants in Gente y Cuentos, who hail from the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Ecuador and elsewhere.
Despite their varying backgrounds, these Gente y Cuentos participants share the experience of being old in America and the tug of two cultures. “We talk about how we were all brought up in olden times, compared with now,” Torres says. “We were brought up with respect. Before, you could not look people directly in their faces.” She glances away for a moment, then looks back, smiling.