LosViejitos: Oldsters, heritage and pandemic
I became a storyteller because of my abuelita, Doña Dolores Rivero. She grew up during the Mexican Revolution as a teenager. Family lore was that she had shot and killed two men who attempted to rape her during the social chaos in Chihuahua. Her stories captivated me, and my maternal grandmother was the essence of my Mexican heritage. But now so many oldsters are being forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their stories are being lost forever. Many countries revere their elders and learn from their experiences, but here in the United States, old people have become expendable as a matter of public policy.
As a writer, the first story I ever wrote was about my grandmother, or a version of her, “The Abuelita” in “The Last Tortilla and Other Stories.” Doña Lola ran her household with an iron fist and a kind heart, at least toward me. I went to Harvard College in the early ’80s, and I wanted to quit because Mexican Americans were few and far between in the Ivy League. But my abuelita scolded me over the phone, “Sergio, don’t come back with your tail between your legs. This is what you wanted. Show them who you are!” My grandmother didn’t know what Harvard was, but she did know how to fight. That grit and determination gave me the backbone to succeed against all odds. “Te pareces a tu abuelita,” many have said, including my mother. “You remind me of your grandmother.” I could never receive a better compliment.
Not long ago, I posted a 21-second video of my 85-year-old mother, Bertha, on Facebook and Instagram after I recently won a prize for my latest book. I had texted my brother Rudy in El Paso with
the news, and he immediately recorded my mother’s reaction. In a warbling but clear Spanish she called me “Chejo,” my childhood nickname, and congratulated me for winning the prize. She said, somewhat bewildered, that she always knew I was “very studious.” My mother also warned me about “that virus” and said in the border-region Spanish that always finds my heart, “Tell Laura that I love her very much, and the boys too.” My mother shook slightly and stared off-camera, at probably the wrong side of my brother’s iPhone. But she was genuine and heartfelt. She is undeniably old. And more importantly, she bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother, Doña Lola. Thousands saw that video.
As I sawthe many reactions on Facebook and Instagram to my mother’s video, I realized how rarely we see family members who are very old people on the Internet. In an effort to sell our idealized lives online, we do not often show whom we may look like if we reach old age. Our oldsters are not TikTok sexy. To some degree, we all participate in the fabricated world of the Internet where no one gets old.
And during the nightmare of 2020, we have too easily forgotten how this year has been a particularly annus horribilis for old people: according to the CDC, 75to 84-year-olds have accounted for 26 percent of COVID-19 deaths, and 85-yearolds and older have accounted for 32 percent. Those are 116,000 deaths and counting: grandmas and grandpas, beloved oldsters, abuelitas, abuelitos, nanas and poppas. Los viejitos.
If you are 85 years old or older, you are 630 times more likely to die from coronavirus than an 18-to-29 year-old. Those numbers should not become even more mind-numbing because oldsters are nearly invisible in our techie culture.
I think about that every time I am on the phone with my mother. Will this be the last call I ever have with her? Will one of my brothers visiting her at home — where she still lives by herself — unwittingly infect her with COVID-19? When will I get to see her again? How will she get to vote? Do people like her still matter in this country? She is the storyteller now, the one with great stories of grit and perseverance that give me a glimpse of how I became who I am today. Just like my grandmother. Their history is our history. Our present becomes more meaningful when we have our viejitos to tell us their stories. If this presidential election is about anything, it should be about why they should always matter to us.
Troncoso is most recently the author of “A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son” (Cinco Puntos Press), which recently won Best Collection of Short Stories from the International Latino Book Awards. He teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop and is president of the Texas Institute of Letters.