Pat Taub
GUEST POST by LISA SAVAGE
In this pandemic we’ve witnessed a devolution of autonomy for working mothers scrambling to accommodate the loss of daycare while holding down their jobs. As moms still on average earn less than dads — even for the same work — it’s the moms who often reduced their hours to fill the childcare gap in the family.
A frantic mother working under lockdown (The New York Times)
In this context, I read the memoir of working artist Cecile Pineda, Entry Without Inspection: A Writer’s Life In El Norte (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Pineda as the child of immigrants expertly weaves her own memoir with accounts from Holocaust survivor Jean Blum who, at 75, began advocating for the rights of immigrants detained indefinitely in the USA. It’s an interesting structure for a memoir. And, it works.
Previously a best-selling novelist (Face, Love Queen of the Amazon) Pineda currently creates non-fiction experimenting successfully with narrative structures (Three Tides, Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World , Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step By Step).
Pineda writes, “The story of suppressed histories is one I find compelling.”
Her own father concealed his family history, and perhaps his homosexuality, by marrying her Swiss mother to escape mass deportations of Mexicans from the USA in the 1930’s — another suppressed history. Pineda’s sleuthing revealed both a matrilineal line necessitated by an out of wedlock birth and indigenous roots unacknowledged by her father. This delighted her as a woman long interested in “the cataclysmic encounter between the indigenous world of myth, magic, and living in close harmony with Earth, and the European world of domination and dominion over nature.”
Much of Entry concerns Pineda’s first career as an experimental theater director in the SF Bay Area during the 1970’s. “Making art while raising small children and sustaining a middle-class marriage is hardly a prescription for sanity, neither of the self nor of other family members, and the long history of women artists suggests there are plenty of risks. Historically, to make art women were forced to find adaptive and often marginal accommodations…or they went mad.” Pineda, by her own account, did a little of both.
A 1970s experimental theater company around the time Pineda was directing her own theater company
I spoke with her at her home in Berkeley, and asked what price she paid for founding the Theater of Man while raising children with her doctor husband.
“The price is a marriage. The truth is that my marriage was an exceptional one. He was an extremely well-educated European, not an American man. It was ironic because, in my cockeyed way of thinking, the marriage made the work possible. The marriage gave me some kind of legitimacy.”
Pineda and the author in Pineda’s home
Pineda thought for a time that she had proven wrong her own mother’s “repeated admonishments to me when I turned thirteen: ‘You don’t have to show every boy how smart you are.’” Although she managed the household so that dinner was on the table promptly every night, she was nightly in rehearsal and not home to serve it — an arrangement her husband found less than ideal.
Devastated by the collapse of both her marriage and her theater company, Pineda regrouped and began moving in the direction of her second career: “I was still learning to exchange loneliness for the solitude I needed to write.”
Pineda in her writing space
She continued to nurture her sons to adulthood, and I was curious if she had managed to raise feminists. “There is so much peer pressure that the power of the home and nuclear family is really drowned by the peer pressure all around. It’s possible that young men can give feminism some kind of lip service but deeply? Subconsciously? I don’t think so.”
I also asked if she thinks gender equity has improved. “No, quite the contrary. Women are more and more reluctant to marry because they understand the price of it. Men are feeling very pushed out of shape.
A working mother in lockdown helps her daughter go to the bathroom while on a call for work. Her husband works from the office next door.
I don’t know where one would have to go to find a free person, a person in her own right, who happens to be a woman.”
I suspect the moms of the pandemic would agree.
Lisa Savage is a semi-retired teacher and longtime organizer around climate and militarism. She blogs at https://wordpress.com/view/went2thebridge.wordpress.com.
