Aleida Rodriguez

In the 1960s, a wave of Cuban immigrants moved into the United States to escape their ruthless dictator, Fidel Castro. Aleida Rodriguez and her siblings were some of those immigrants. In her reflection, she looks at photographs of her childhood while she reflects upon the impact of emigration within her family during the sixties. In the excerpt from “my Mother in Two Photographs, Among Other Things,” author Aleida Rodriguez reveals the cultural rifts caused by relocation.

Rodriguez’s mother is left in a state of misery and isolation after her family leaves her. Left in Cuba without her children, Rodriguez’s mother has only her mother and husband. However, she suddenly finds a kitchen towel “smeared with another woman’s lipstick” and quickly

flings it. As Rodriguez describes, the towel lands on her father’s boots “like an open book” as if it were telling a story of lies.

Initially relieved that she and her husband are alone, Rodriguez’s mother is quickly disappointed, as her husband has left her for another woman. Later in a photograph, Rodriguez sees her mother with a coffee-dark V in the collar area of her neck, proof of hard labor during the Cuban Revolution. Above her head in the photo lies a painting of a saint with no head. After sending her children away in hopes of giving them a better life, Rodriguez’s mother is left working in the hot and sunny cane fields, which marks her with a coffee-colored tan. Rodriguez reveals her family’s Catholic religion through the painting of the saint, but without a head, the painting reveals her mother’s loss in faith due to the its failure to address her and other suffering laborers. With a loss of her faith, husband, and children, Rodriguez’s mother is left with one last person: her mother. However, while Rodriguez looks at the photograph, her

grandmother quickly “[turns] and [leaves] with the shadow.” She exclaims “alone, [her mother] collapsed into her mother’s absence like a slave into bed at the end of the day.” Rodriguez’s grandmother originally filled the hole that opened when her daughter’s family left her, but once she dies, the hole expands and her daughter collapses into the hole in the most agonizing way, just as a slave collapses after countless beatings. Thus, emigration leaves the family in isolation.
While her mother suffers by herself in Cuba, Rodriguez and her siblings lose their Cuban identities when they immigrate to the United States.

Two years after immigrating to America, Rodriguez explains that her brother has dropped out of school and currently “[sports] long sideburns” and saves his money to “[reward] himself with a round-backed two-toned Chevy, then a series of garish Mustangs.” However, she quickly reveals that each car is quickly left “wrapped like a wedding ring around a pole.” With his sideburns and trail of cars, Rodriguez’s brother acts like a greaser from the sixties, an era in which Elvis Presley was the most followed celebrity. Just two short years after migrating, the brother has married the American culture while he forgets his parents’ motive for sending him off, to learn in school in hopes of having a better future. While the brother continues to buy and wreck cars, the oldest daughter in the family regrets not being born into a TV family. Described as a “glossy ad of the ideal American living room,” the daughter forgets her Cuban roots as she plunges into her perception of a “perfect family.” Commonly experienced by immigrants, the difficulty to hold onto cultural roots and customs causes many to lose their

identities.
When the family gathers for the first time since the children immigrated to the United States, Rodriguez feels her family has been fragmented. In a family photo the visit to America, Rodriguez finds herself to be the only one gazing at the camera while she realizes that “two years on [her] own had only taught [her] to be one.” So distant from her own nation, Rodriguez learns that as she no longer feels a connection to her own parents, she becomes detached from the United States and Cuba. During the visit, Rodriguez sees her mother as inferior due to the differences in culture. She describes her mother’s appearance using sentence fragments such as “The dark flag of her mustache” and “Their sour smell, like clothes trapped in a hamper.” Rodriguez cleverly uses fragments to illustrate her the fragment in her family. Accustomed to seeing Americans, she sees her mother’s mustache as outlandish and classifies her mother’s smell as an “emblem of exile.” Left in a nation by herself with no Cuban relatives aside from her siblings, Rodriguez notices the differences between herself and her Cuban mother and realizes that they are no longer one. As her mother pulls Rodriguez towards her, Rodriguez illustrates that her mother had only “scooped water as her body had long since drifted downriver.” As her body and identity is left behind in Cuba, she realizes that she is empty in her new world of strangers.
Just like the thousands of Cubans that immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, Rodriguez and her family were faced with loss and isolation. In contrast to the new and better life that humans hope to obtain by immigrating, Rodriguez proves that the difficulties trump all.