I Don’t Cry, but I Remember: A Mexican Immigrant’s Story of Endurance by Joyce Lackie (review)

Joyce Lackie’s I Don’t Cry, But I Remember broadens our understanding of history and oral history in three key ways. As its title suggests, the book is most obviously an immigrant’s story. It tells the harrowing, often depressing, and sometimes heroic life story of Viviana Salguero, a pseudonym for a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border with her husband and children in 1946, all of whom then worked as agricultural laborers in Texas and Colorado. But Lackie’s work is also about this woman’s story of perseverance in the face of entrenched patriarchy. Viviana grew up poor in rural Mexico; she endured a mostly miserable sixty-five-year marriage to Jorge, a physically and psychologically abusive spouse; and she had sixteen pregnancies and twelve children. Additionally, this book engages readers as witness to the dynamic interactions between the interviewer, Lackie, and her narrator, Viviana. Lackie first met Viviana in 1988 in Greeley, Colorado. After years of informal conversation with her, Lackie sat down in 1994 and 1995 to record Viviana’s oral history in a more systematic fashion; the book is the outcome of those twenty-seven [!] taped interviews.

Lackie opens with an introduction in which she discusses how her relationship with Viviana transitioned over six years from friendship (they met as part of a program offering companionship to the elderly) to an interviewer-narrator arrangement when Lackie began to record Viviana’s life story. Nine chapters follow, tracing Viviana’s history chronologically and thematically. Chapters one and two focus on her early life in Durango, Mexico, where Viviana was born in 1911. She married Jorge mostly against her will at age sixteen. These chapters set up key themes in the oral history: poverty, isolation, lack of education, and a highly restrictive patriarchy that condoned the physical and psychological abuse she suffered from her husband, a violent philanderer. Chapter four discusses their challenging crossing of the Mexico-Texas border as undocumented immigrants; this trip Viviana remembers mostly as a long walk in stealth with a baby at her breast.

Once in the United States, the growing family found work in low-wage agricultural jobs in Texas. Jorge’s sister led them to better wages in Colorado’s sugar-beet industry, where they settled permanently after 1950 and sent for the children they had left behind in Mexico. The home they made there was not a happy one, however. The family endured intense poverty in the United States, and Viviana continued to give birth to more children. Then there was the continual abuse Jorge aimed at her and their children. But still, she never left him and, in her retrospective conversations with Lackie, took great pride in her endurance. Chapter five, focused on the 1950s, addresses the family’s gradual adaptation to the United States. Jorge learned English, as did some of her children, a few of whom graduated from high school. The mostly homebound Viviana, however, demonstrated only limited assimilation. She did not learn English, nor did she obtain an education. Instead, she lamented the loss of community she experienced in Mexico. Chapters six through eight move Viviana’s story forward chronologically, but do so mostly through the thematic lenses of motherhood, religious faith, and citizenship. Readers learn more about Viviana’s children—some of whom lived tragic lives—her eventual turn from Catholicism to Pentecostalism (where she followed the lead of her husband), and her successful pursuit of US citizenship in the 1970s. In the concluding chapter, Lackie tries to make sense of Viviana’s life and her relationship with her, one that lasted until Viviana’s death in 2000. As Lackie details, narrating her life offered Viviana important therapeutic benefits. But still, her life and its many inconsistencies and contradictions mean that she remains an enigma.

Viviana’s story has much to offer readers interested in immigrant and women’s history; her...