Choices of The Chosen: The Story of Adela Morales Gutierrez
Photo: Adela Morales Gutierrez, c. 1963
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University | Bonita M. Cox Award for Creative Nonfiction (2011)
Adela Gutierrez bounds off the bus half an hour late and dashes up the stairs of her eldest daughter’s seaside inn, where we’ve arranged to meet. As might be expected of a seventy-seven-year-old woman who walks five miles every day, stands on her head to compete with her grandchildren, and climbs trees, she’s dressed rather sportily in a black and blue warm-up jacket and teal velour sweats. There’s a thin gold chain around her slender neck, and a pair of beige moccasins on what look like size five feet. Her short hair is thin but dark, and there’s not a trace of makeup on her smooth brown skin.
Maria, the innkeeper daughter, brings her a glass of tamarind juice. Adela hops up on the barstool as if she were several decades younger, puts an elbow on the pub table, and angles her body and face away from me. She seems flustered, but then, she’s used to being in charge. It’s disconcerting to her to be interviewed, especially by a stranger who’s intrigued by her traumatic past. She quizzes Stephanie, who will be our translator, about my intentions, adamant that she’s always looked upon her life with joy, and doesn’t want to dwell on things gone wrong. Both daughters reassure her that the focus will be on her resilience, not her troubles, and after a few moments she nods and flutters a hand in my direction. “Go on, then,” she says in Spanish. “Ask a question.” But her arms and legs and chin all point away, toward the door, and her answers are clipped and dismissive. It’s not until she’s asked about her love of music that she starts to warm. Her eyebrows arch, her dark eyes sparkle, and a small twist of a smile appears.
“Singing is my passion!” she says, raising her hands and crossing them over her neck like a devotee. “Music replaces all bad thoughts!” Adela sings to alleviate pain, to enhance joy, to dispel boredom, to celebrate existence. She knows more than four thousand songs, and awakens at five o’clock every morning singing several in a row. Manuel, her husband of fifty-two years, shushes her; he wants his sleep -- but she’s like a bird; she won’t be silenced by anyone’s command. Surely he must have been more appreciative in the beginning -- wasn’t her voice one of the reasons he was attracted to her? She shakes her head vehemently. “Ha!” she says, raising her eyebrows. She uses both forefingers to point at her breasts. “These are what he was attracted to!”
Love songs, traditional songs, patriotic songs, contemporary songs, stage songs – Adela won’t admit to any favorites. “All are my passion!” she exclaims, flinging her arms outward, palms up, as if to embrace every one . Her daughters laugh, delighted that she’s beginning to enjoy herself. Now Adela leans forward confidentially, puts her hand across her heart, and broaches the loaded subject of her mother. “You know, my mother used to let me sing with her,” she says, and gives a quick nod as if that said it all. She sits up straight and puts her shoulders back. “Out of all six daughters, I was the chosen one.” Then her head tips to the side, her chin tilts up so that her gaze passes over our heads, and she begins to solo their duet:
Cuando más tranquila estaba sin pensar en tu cariño
I was at peace even before I had your tender love
quiso dios que te quisiera
but God wanted me to love you
y te quiero con delirio.
And now I love you passionately.
Not a single warble gives away her age. She sings as if she’s twenty-seven, as if she’s alone in the room with the man of her dreams, as if her future still lies at the end of a long red carpet. Maria and Stephanie keep their eyes on her face, their expressions tender and respectful, full of admiration, devoid of bemusement. Her voice is one of clarity and strength, and when she sings it’s easy to forget that she has ever known tragedy.
And that’s exactly why Adela sings.
News of the first murder reached her childhood home in Copandaro, Michoachan when Adela, the third daughter of eight children born to Isabele and Eduardo Morales, was seven years old. Isabele, a green-eyed, blonde-haired Spanish beauty, and Eduardo, a tall, dark and handsome descendent of those few Aztecs who had survived conquistadors and smallpox, were very much in love. During the Mexican Revolution, Eduardo had been a resistance organizer under Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa’s leader in the south, and afterward was revered in the municipality for his even-handed redistribution of property. On the day Adela tries not to remember – “but of course I remember,” she says – someone shot her cherished father in the back.
Isabele’s grief hardened her, reduced her to a brittle carapace. Had she known her loss would triple within two years, she might have saved some softness for her sons. The youngest, Manuel, was murdered at fifteen; the eldest, seventeen-year-old Luis, only months behind. Both were killed to preclude the revenge their father’s death demanded. Having lost every man in her heart and home, Isabele froze up, sharp and rigid and cold, an anomalous icicle in the Mexican desert.
“I would tell her that I loved her, and she would push me away,” says Adela, shoving her hands against the air, reenacting her rejection. Her eyes dart back and forth beneath her half-closed lids, as if she’s watching a movie in her mind. “But that didn’t stop me. I kept telling her I loved her, day after day.” Adela never heard those words herself, at least not from her devastated mother. After his death, Isabele saw her beloved Eduardo in their little girl’s dark face and shunned her, even struck her, for that resemblance. Only for baby Elizabeth, who had inherited her mother’s blonde hair and green eyes, was any maternal affection reserved. “My little dove among the crows,” crooned Isabele. If Adela felt wounded by these slights, she’s never admitted it. And nothing could, or can, stop her from singing.
“I’ve always been full of joy,” she says, looking up. There’s a touch of defiance in her voice. “I know it frustrated my mother, but that’s just who I was.”
Adela’s joy and songs sustained her through deep sorrow and hard labor. By the time she was nine years old, all the men in her family had been buried, and with them went the means to work the ranch, the family’s only source of income. Isabele, unable to find any hands willing to toil for a woman, sent her six daughters into the fields to work their father’s land. Adela remembers tucking her pleated skirts into her waistband and wading through the dust and mud to tend the crops of lentils, wheat, and corn, but she insists it was no hardship. “I only remember being happy,” she says, stroking her cheek. Though one might wonder what truths she’s repressed, she insists she doesn’t resent her mother. Nor does she tolerate women who blame their disappointments on imperfect relationships with their mothers. “Excuses!” she scoffs, frowning. “Why dwell on what might have been? Instead of going off into the corner to cry, I’d rather dress up like it’s my wedding day!”
She’s been dressing up to feel good for as long as she can remember. As a teenager, she idolized and emulated the beautiful singer Maria Victoria, known for her hourglass figure. Adela, with the help of her seamstress sister Gabriele, created bright, swirling, taffeta skirts that accented her eighteen-inch waist and swirled outward to fill a room. When she competed in a singing contest at a local carnival and won, even besting the recording star Maria del Lourdes, “The Voice of Mexico,” the hosting radio station offered her the opportunity to develop professionally in Mexico City, six hours away. Her mother, however, put her foot down. “Si te vas, nada bueno saldrá de ello,” said Isabele firmly. “If you go, no good will come of it.” It was a strong phrase that implied ostracism if the line were crossed, and fifteen-year-old Adela acquiesced.
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University | Bonita M. Cox Award for Creative Nonfiction (2011)
Adela Gutierrez bounds off the bus half an hour late and dashes up the stairs of her eldest daughter’s seaside inn, where we’ve arranged to meet. As might be expected of a seventy-seven-year-old woman who walks five miles every day, stands on her head to compete with her grandchildren, and climbs trees, she’s dressed rather sportily in a black and blue warm-up jacket and teal velour sweats. There’s a thin gold chain around her slender neck, and a pair of beige moccasins on what look like size five feet. Her short hair is thin but dark, and there’s not a trace of makeup on her smooth brown skin.
Maria, the innkeeper daughter, brings her a glass of tamarind juice. Adela hops up on the barstool as if she were several decades younger, puts an elbow on the pub table, and angles her body and face away from me. She seems flustered, but then, she’s used to being in charge. It’s disconcerting to her to be interviewed, especially by a stranger who’s intrigued by her traumatic past. She quizzes Stephanie, who will be our translator, about my intentions, adamant that she’s always looked upon her life with joy, and doesn’t want to dwell on things gone wrong. Both daughters reassure her that the focus will be on her resilience, not her troubles, and after a few moments she nods and flutters a hand in my direction. “Go on, then,” she says in Spanish. “Ask a question.” But her arms and legs and chin all point away, toward the door, and her answers are clipped and dismissive. It’s not until she’s asked about her love of music that she starts to warm. Her eyebrows arch, her dark eyes sparkle, and a small twist of a smile appears.
“Singing is my passion!” she says, raising her hands and crossing them over her neck like a devotee. “Music replaces all bad thoughts!” Adela sings to alleviate pain, to enhance joy, to dispel boredom, to celebrate existence. She knows more than four thousand songs, and awakens at five o’clock every morning singing several in a row. Manuel, her husband of fifty-two years, shushes her; he wants his sleep -- but she’s like a bird; she won’t be silenced by anyone’s command. Surely he must have been more appreciative in the beginning -- wasn’t her voice one of the reasons he was attracted to her? She shakes her head vehemently. “Ha!” she says, raising her eyebrows. She uses both forefingers to point at her breasts. “These are what he was attracted to!”
Love songs, traditional songs, patriotic songs, contemporary songs, stage songs – Adela won’t admit to any favorites. “All are my passion!” she exclaims, flinging her arms outward, palms up, as if to embrace every one . Her daughters laugh, delighted that she’s beginning to enjoy herself. Now Adela leans forward confidentially, puts her hand across her heart, and broaches the loaded subject of her mother. “You know, my mother used to let me sing with her,” she says, and gives a quick nod as if that said it all. She sits up straight and puts her shoulders back. “Out of all six daughters, I was the chosen one.” Then her head tips to the side, her chin tilts up so that her gaze passes over our heads, and she begins to solo their duet:
Cuando más tranquila estaba sin pensar en tu cariño
I was at peace even before I had your tender love
quiso dios que te quisiera
but God wanted me to love you
y te quiero con delirio.
And now I love you passionately.
Not a single warble gives away her age. She sings as if she’s twenty-seven, as if she’s alone in the room with the man of her dreams, as if her future still lies at the end of a long red carpet. Maria and Stephanie keep their eyes on her face, their expressions tender and respectful, full of admiration, devoid of bemusement. Her voice is one of clarity and strength, and when she sings it’s easy to forget that she has ever known tragedy.
And that’s exactly why Adela sings.
News of the first murder reached her childhood home in Copandaro, Michoachan when Adela, the third daughter of eight children born to Isabele and Eduardo Morales, was seven years old. Isabele, a green-eyed, blonde-haired Spanish beauty, and Eduardo, a tall, dark and handsome descendent of those few Aztecs who had survived conquistadors and smallpox, were very much in love. During the Mexican Revolution, Eduardo had been a resistance organizer under Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa’s leader in the south, and afterward was revered in the municipality for his even-handed redistribution of property. On the day Adela tries not to remember – “but of course I remember,” she says – someone shot her cherished father in the back.
Isabele’s grief hardened her, reduced her to a brittle carapace. Had she known her loss would triple within two years, she might have saved some softness for her sons. The youngest, Manuel, was murdered at fifteen; the eldest, seventeen-year-old Luis, only months behind. Both were killed to preclude the revenge their father’s death demanded. Having lost every man in her heart and home, Isabele froze up, sharp and rigid and cold, an anomalous icicle in the Mexican desert.
“I would tell her that I loved her, and she would push me away,” says Adela, shoving her hands against the air, reenacting her rejection. Her eyes dart back and forth beneath her half-closed lids, as if she’s watching a movie in her mind. “But that didn’t stop me. I kept telling her I loved her, day after day.” Adela never heard those words herself, at least not from her devastated mother. After his death, Isabele saw her beloved Eduardo in their little girl’s dark face and shunned her, even struck her, for that resemblance. Only for baby Elizabeth, who had inherited her mother’s blonde hair and green eyes, was any maternal affection reserved. “My little dove among the crows,” crooned Isabele. If Adela felt wounded by these slights, she’s never admitted it. And nothing could, or can, stop her from singing.
“I’ve always been full of joy,” she says, looking up. There’s a touch of defiance in her voice. “I know it frustrated my mother, but that’s just who I was.”
Adela’s joy and songs sustained her through deep sorrow and hard labor. By the time she was nine years old, all the men in her family had been buried, and with them went the means to work the ranch, the family’s only source of income. Isabele, unable to find any hands willing to toil for a woman, sent her six daughters into the fields to work their father’s land. Adela remembers tucking her pleated skirts into her waistband and wading through the dust and mud to tend the crops of lentils, wheat, and corn, but she insists it was no hardship. “I only remember being happy,” she says, stroking her cheek. Though one might wonder what truths she’s repressed, she insists she doesn’t resent her mother. Nor does she tolerate women who blame their disappointments on imperfect relationships with their mothers. “Excuses!” she scoffs, frowning. “Why dwell on what might have been? Instead of going off into the corner to cry, I’d rather dress up like it’s my wedding day!”
She’s been dressing up to feel good for as long as she can remember. As a teenager, she idolized and emulated the beautiful singer Maria Victoria, known for her hourglass figure. Adela, with the help of her seamstress sister Gabriele, created bright, swirling, taffeta skirts that accented her eighteen-inch waist and swirled outward to fill a room. When she competed in a singing contest at a local carnival and won, even besting the recording star Maria del Lourdes, “The Voice of Mexico,” the hosting radio station offered her the opportunity to develop professionally in Mexico City, six hours away. Her mother, however, put her foot down. “Si te vas, nada bueno saldrá de ello,” said Isabele firmly. “If you go, no good will come of it.” It was a strong phrase that implied ostracism if the line were crossed, and fifteen-year-old Adela acquiesced.
Still, the stage was where Adela yearned to be. There she could get the attention she lacked at home, where she was the odd sister, more interested in being a glamorous celebrity than an adept domestic. In school she was a promising drama and music student, and upon graduation her teachers urged her mother to allow Adela to attend college. Isabele opposed this opportunity as well, perhaps because all hands were needed to work the ranch, perhaps because she was being overprotective, perhaps because she saw no reason why one of her daughters should get to dress up and perform while the rest of them picked lentils, threshed wheat, and shucked corn. Regardless, Adela claims it was her own choice not to go. “It wasn’t that my mother wouldn’t let me,” she maintains. “I thought about all she’d been through, and I didn’t want to add to her troubles by leaving.” Adela seems a little wary, as if guarding these long-preserved images of suffering mother and self-determining daughter.
However, “the restless bird in the cage,” as Isabele called her, would not allow the cage to contain her joy. In contrast to her feminine pursuit of glamor, high-spirited Adela turned her energies toward nature, climbing trees, running twenty minutes to the Cuitzeo Lagoon, and swimming through its mineral-red waters as often as she could get away. Because of her tomboyish behavior, and the fact that she and her sisters worked on the ranch, the local girls would sometimes taunt them with the term “Las Coronelas” – the nickname for the women warriors of the Revolution. It was meant to be a slanderous term denoting a sort of butch feminism, and Adela would punch or slap those girls who said it (she slams her right fist into her left palm with gusto, now). Her mother told her to take the term as a compliment, that it honored strength and courage. Still, Isabele didn’t like her daughter climbing trees and swimming lagoons. “Who will love a girl who acts like that?” Isabele would say. And Adela would answer with confidence, “When someone falls for me, he’ll love me like I am.”
That someone, Manuel Gutierrez, spotted Adela across a crowded store in the late 1950s. She wouldn’t have been difficult to spot. In fact, she would have been impossible to miss. Beautiful, buxom, and buffed from all those laps in the lagoon, she dressed up for her Sunday strolls in the plaza wearing the decade’s conical bras and glamorous mermaid gowns. Did she get lots of attention? Adela breaks into laughter. “HoooooOoooo!” she says, and it’s easy to imagine her effect on Manuel’s heart. The attraction was mutual – he gave her “the sign,” she says, moving her eyebrows up and down to demonstrate -- but connecting wasn’t easy. Adela wasn’t allowed to date. Isabele was a proponent of parentally orchestrated, platonic courtship, and without any men around, she took her daughters’ chastity into her own hands. At town dances, if she thought a boy was getting too close, she would approach him from behind, smack him on the head, and curse. The threat of this embarrassment kept Adela in relative order. How did they mange to get to know each other? “I broke a lot of rules,” she says with a laugh.
Adela’s conscious memories, at least, are not of herself as a sufferer, but as a nonstop expression of energy and joy. In the absence of her mother’s affection, approval, and permission to develop her education and career, she adamantly maintained her own spirit. She has never stopped singing – “I’m a jukebox!” she beams with a giggle – but she wonders now if she should have pushed harder for freedom, if she might have accepted her mother’s forbiddance just to avoid failure – or purgatory, the Goya-like paintings of which were hung throughout her home. “Be good,” her mother had often said, pointing to them, “or you’ll end up there!”
“Maybe I was really a coward,” Adela says softly.
Though she never did stand in the big-city stage lights, Adela still loves to dress up and be glamorous, and is known for making a grand late entrance. I remember aloud how she impressed me at her granddaughter’s quinceanera a few years ago: a slender, regal woman in a silver sequined sheath who walked with elegance, stood with poise, and spoke with confidence. I hadn’t been at all surprised to learn, later, that her name means of the nobility. Adela shakes her head; she doesn’t remember meeting me. “All I remember is that my hair wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do,” she sighs. Stephanie and Maria shake their heads. “That’s so like you!” they say, smiling. “So vain you are!”
“Well, maybe that’s wrong,” she says airily, “but that’s just who I am.”
Are her four beautiful, compassionate daughters who she wanted them to be? She looks at the present two for a moment as they blush and avert their eyes, waiting with girlish hope for their mother’s approval. “Yes!” she decides. “Except that they don’t walk enough.” Maria and Stephanie laugh, relieved and not surprised. Adela has always been loudly conscious of health and the radiance it brings to one’s face and form. When she was raising her girls they were never allowed to be idle; if she came home and caught them watching television, she would take off a shoe and give them a look that made them leap up and find something to do.
However, “the restless bird in the cage,” as Isabele called her, would not allow the cage to contain her joy. In contrast to her feminine pursuit of glamor, high-spirited Adela turned her energies toward nature, climbing trees, running twenty minutes to the Cuitzeo Lagoon, and swimming through its mineral-red waters as often as she could get away. Because of her tomboyish behavior, and the fact that she and her sisters worked on the ranch, the local girls would sometimes taunt them with the term “Las Coronelas” – the nickname for the women warriors of the Revolution. It was meant to be a slanderous term denoting a sort of butch feminism, and Adela would punch or slap those girls who said it (she slams her right fist into her left palm with gusto, now). Her mother told her to take the term as a compliment, that it honored strength and courage. Still, Isabele didn’t like her daughter climbing trees and swimming lagoons. “Who will love a girl who acts like that?” Isabele would say. And Adela would answer with confidence, “When someone falls for me, he’ll love me like I am.”
That someone, Manuel Gutierrez, spotted Adela across a crowded store in the late 1950s. She wouldn’t have been difficult to spot. In fact, she would have been impossible to miss. Beautiful, buxom, and buffed from all those laps in the lagoon, she dressed up for her Sunday strolls in the plaza wearing the decade’s conical bras and glamorous mermaid gowns. Did she get lots of attention? Adela breaks into laughter. “HoooooOoooo!” she says, and it’s easy to imagine her effect on Manuel’s heart. The attraction was mutual – he gave her “the sign,” she says, moving her eyebrows up and down to demonstrate -- but connecting wasn’t easy. Adela wasn’t allowed to date. Isabele was a proponent of parentally orchestrated, platonic courtship, and without any men around, she took her daughters’ chastity into her own hands. At town dances, if she thought a boy was getting too close, she would approach him from behind, smack him on the head, and curse. The threat of this embarrassment kept Adela in relative order. How did they mange to get to know each other? “I broke a lot of rules,” she says with a laugh.
Adela’s conscious memories, at least, are not of herself as a sufferer, but as a nonstop expression of energy and joy. In the absence of her mother’s affection, approval, and permission to develop her education and career, she adamantly maintained her own spirit. She has never stopped singing – “I’m a jukebox!” she beams with a giggle – but she wonders now if she should have pushed harder for freedom, if she might have accepted her mother’s forbiddance just to avoid failure – or purgatory, the Goya-like paintings of which were hung throughout her home. “Be good,” her mother had often said, pointing to them, “or you’ll end up there!”
“Maybe I was really a coward,” Adela says softly.
Though she never did stand in the big-city stage lights, Adela still loves to dress up and be glamorous, and is known for making a grand late entrance. I remember aloud how she impressed me at her granddaughter’s quinceanera a few years ago: a slender, regal woman in a silver sequined sheath who walked with elegance, stood with poise, and spoke with confidence. I hadn’t been at all surprised to learn, later, that her name means of the nobility. Adela shakes her head; she doesn’t remember meeting me. “All I remember is that my hair wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do,” she sighs. Stephanie and Maria shake their heads. “That’s so like you!” they say, smiling. “So vain you are!”
“Well, maybe that’s wrong,” she says airily, “but that’s just who I am.”
Are her four beautiful, compassionate daughters who she wanted them to be? She looks at the present two for a moment as they blush and avert their eyes, waiting with girlish hope for their mother’s approval. “Yes!” she decides. “Except that they don’t walk enough.” Maria and Stephanie laugh, relieved and not surprised. Adela has always been loudly conscious of health and the radiance it brings to one’s face and form. When she was raising her girls they were never allowed to be idle; if she came home and caught them watching television, she would take off a shoe and give them a look that made them leap up and find something to do.
Adela herself walks five miles every day between her home and downtown Watsonville, California, where she and Manuel moved soon after they were married in 1958. “Our house was filled with music,” recalls Stephanie, born a year after Maria in 1962. “It was a happy place, always full of boys – just like the home she never had. That’s what she wanted for us.” Adela taught Maria, Stephanie, Caridad and Nancy that like her, they’re women of resilience and awareness. “She didn’t meddle in our lives, but she was tuned in to any unfolding dramas, and she’d give us broad advice like ‘You get up and you go on,’ and ‘Don’t make me tell you the right thing to do. You already know!’ It really empowered us.” Stephanie stops, then turns to her mother with a smile. “And she’s always been so full of joy and music!”
Adela hears that last word, and it needs no translation for her. A fragment of song leaves her lips, a couplet from the duet she once shared with her mother:
Y te seguiré queriendo
I will always love you
hasta después de mi muerte.
Even after my death.
“As long as I have life, I will sing,” says Adela quietly.
It’s a choice the chosen one made long ago.
Adela hears that last word, and it needs no translation for her. A fragment of song leaves her lips, a couplet from the duet she once shared with her mother:
Y te seguiré queriendo
I will always love you
hasta después de mi muerte.
Even after my death.
“As long as I have life, I will sing,” says Adela quietly.
It’s a choice the chosen one made long ago.
Above, Adela glowing at her granddaughter's wedding in 2021; below, her daughter, my friend Stephanie Gutierrez Aoun, and granddaughter, Feriel Aoun Healey. Adela's husband has passed away since I wrote this piece in 2010, but as you can see, nothing has daunted her joie de vivre. (My impressions of Adela on the day of her husband Manuel's funeral are described in Chapter 15 in my book, MINE: El Despojo de María Zacarías Bernal de Berreyesa, about a Spanish-Mexican matriarch of early California. There are many similarities between these two courageous women.)
