La Negativa
By Christine Marin, Ph.D.
BARRIOZONA
“La Negativa,” they called her: “la mujer de las calles”, the streetwalker.
Men would buy her name for an hour, or a night, maybe two.
She lived up in our cañon. And when I was a little girl, I used to see her as she walked to town. And when we were kids,
out at night, playing games like “kick the can,” or “hide-the-belt”, or “Johnny ride the white horse,” we would see her
walking back home from town.
Sometimes she wore her western clothes: levis, concho belt, boots. The turquoise bracelets looked huge, as they
wrapped themselves around her long arms or wrist. She’d wear a scarf around the collar of her western shirt, the scarf
hiding the wrinkles of her neck. But she always looked stylish, and neat, and most importantly, clean.
We used to think that she was La Llorona because she kept her long hair down, and she looked very tall. Sometimes the
light of her cigarette in the night gave her an eerie and earthy look: her dark brown features glowed behind white smoke.
“La Negativa”, la prieta, the dark one. Dark on the outside but beautiful on the inside. Because she was the one who
cared for her elderly and ailing mother. Because she bathed her and fed her and groomed her, and tenderly stroked her
hair.
“La Negativa”, who looked foreign, and evil on the outside.
One day I asked her, “Why do they call you ‘Negativa’”? Because the child in me couldn’t understand the meaning of the
word, “negative”. I wondered why people thought she was a negative person. But she was “Negativa” because her dark,
coffee-colored Yaqui-ness gave her the name, “Negativa”.
She said to me: “They call me that because they are afraid of the night, because I hide the real “Negativa” inside of me:
the me they cannot see. All they see is the outside of “Negativa”.”.
But I saw the real Negativa. The woman who loved her mother, even in death, as much as in life.
“La Negativa” walks down my cañon, and when she sees me now, she speaks not. Because “La Negativa” speaks to no
one on the outside.
“La Negativa”: the real mother of my cousin Ramon.
Copyright © 2006 by Christine Marin
Copyright © 2006 Hispanic Institute of Social Issues
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