A World of Strong Women
Emma Perez Martinez
8/12/1922-10/12/2010
Five beautiful sisters born into a poor Rio Grande family. Sisters that legends are made of.
When their father had good fortune hunting, the Perez girls ate deer or rabbit meat cooked in a metal bucket. When their mama could spare a dime, she bought orange tree leaves from a neighbor to make them tea. On special days, they went, barefoot, to watch a silent picture show.
Emma stands alongside a snow-covered roadside as the wind blows.
Emma Perez (left) with her sister Beda holding Beda’s baby (right).
One of the sisters, Emma Perez, began working as a maid at age 7 for a banker’s family. She left school after eighth grade. But she was resourceful; she taught herself English, and to drive.
Emma and her sisters all married soldiers and sailors. Periodically, the men misbehaved. But the sisters were a unit, a tapestry of resilience. Strength was their currency. They comforted and confided in one another. When they needed to track down an errant husband, they packed into Emma’s Ford “banana boat,” their kids piled in the back, and went for a ride.
Emma divorced her first husband after the birth of her oldest daughter, Evelyn, who was disabled, and all her life, she cared for Evelyn with deep devotion. She married again, and she and Pepe Martinez had three more daughters.
A domain dominated by formidable women. And Emma’s resilient spirit left a legacy that remains.
The house where Emma and her husband raised their four daughters. Though the house no longer exists, Araceli, the youngest of the four daughters, lives with her family right next door to where it once stood.
The conversations were golden, just like the color of her Ford Crown Victoria with the hot vinyl seats that burned my legs and the hot wind that hit my face.”
“I grew up thinking being strong was in my DNA,” recalls her granddaughter, Dr. Patricia Laurel, now Starr County’s only nutritionist.
“My grandmother taught me, yes you are going to cry, but you will also laugh. I was a single mother in medical school for almost ten years, and if anyone would have said ‘You can’t do it,’ I would have been like ‘Why not?’ Because there was someone before me who did it.”
Celebrated for her hand-embroidered wedding dresses – a skill she was taught at age eight by the banker’s wife – Emma was above all known for her passion for football, especially the Rattlers of Rio Grande City High School.
“She never missed a high school game,” recalls her youngest daughter, Araceli Martinez Barrientos. “In town, out of town, didn’t matter. Every Friday, we were there, with Mama cheering loudly.”
Even after her Alzheimer’s was advanced, “if she heard a football game on the TV,” Barrientos remembers, “she would open her eyes and put her finger behind her ear and say “oi, oi!” Like, ‘listen, listen.’”
Emma, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, points to the camera while wearing a shirt in support of her beloved football team, the Rio Grande City Rattlers.
Her family continues to grapple with the specter of Alzheimer’s, a disease that Dr. Laurel calls Diabetes Type 3. One of her surviving daughters have been diagnosed, and the other two are concerned. “At work, they tell me I’m repeating myself, and it makes me emotional,” Barrientos says. “We’re strong, yes. But I don’t want my family to have to face this.”
Confetti flies through the air after Araceli Martinez Barrientos “Cheli” has an easter egg cracked on her head by her niece.
Nelda celebrates alongside her grandson after wining a game of lotería.
Nelda runs her fingers across the gravestone of a relative buried on their family plot.
Emma dreamt of becoming a nurse, “but how could I be a nurse when I was not educated?” Instead, she began learning embroidery at age 7 and developed this skill over her lifetime. Her embroidered wedding dresses became a favorite of Rio Grande City brides.
*Full Recorded Oral History with Emma Martinez (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley)