Columns Columns Allyn Hunt Campesino girl’s career as a fearless eleven-year-old, beating up taunting male schoolmates while wrestling with mathematics
Campesino girl’s career as a fearless eleven-year-old, beating up taunting male schoolmates while wrestling with mathematics
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- Published on Friday, 31 January 2014 09:37
- Written by Allyn Hunt
Sixteen-year-old Concha Rosales was riding fence again. She got that hard job because when her father was attending to other chores, her cousin, Lalo, took his place.
Lalo clearly was still a bit in awe of Concha’s reputation for fearlessness, and her probing gaze seemed too forward for such a young female. Therefore his jealousy evidently won out over awe, for he always assigned her work that everyone else hated. Fixing fence, a perennial task, was shunned. It meant hard days of pulling out desiccated ramas — limbs — of spiny huisache bushes that were laced into barbed wire. That made for rows of bloody scratches down a fencer’s arms. After fixing torn apart wire and damaged posts, you had to cut green snap-back huisache ramas and carefully lace them vertically through four strands of alambre de puas. That meant thorn-grooved arms and spine-punctured hands.
But mostly, Concha’s young relatives remained gingerly curious regarding the child’s lack of traditional female humility, and wary of her abbreviated tolerance for harsh teasing and none at all for unadorned ridicule. In such circumstances, she was known to be “feisty.” That became apparent when she was just an eleven-year-old girl with a strange taste for what was conventionally called “men’s work.” Something that most males, being emphatically macho in those days, found not just brazen, but improper, even indecent.
My friends, Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, Concha’s (unofficial) parents, found her obedient, quick and complido concerning her house chores. This frustrated and stoked the poorly veiled ire of the Lalos of her world, for it undermined any macho criticism regarding her willingness and competence in performing her “women’s work.” Concha rose early and did such duties first, then headed for the corral to see what her father and her uncles were doing.
