Her Name was Doña Nana

My Abuela Nana’s apartment smelled of tea tree oil, Agua Florida, and Chango Macho cologne – a trio of strong, crisp, sweet, herbal scents that permeated the nostrils, making you slightly lightheaded, and that to this day brings me back there. I remember it was filled with light and seemingly big, with infinite places to hide from my horde of cousins. With three bedrooms and one small but efficient bathroom, it once housed three generations and fourteen people, but somehow never felt overcrowded. Family meant you loved each other no matter what, at least that’s what Mom said. So we did, through happy days to holidays to horror and around again, even when the love took its toll.

Abuela Nana ran the underground numbers game in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for nearly thirty years. No one expected this little old lady to be the brainchild behind a successful but illegal gambling enterprise, but that’s part of why she flew under the radar the entire time. Society didn’t expect much from women back then – and definitely not from a loud Puerto Rican one. If you add to that her deep ebony skin and Spanish accent (if she even spoke English at all), she was ignored, inconsequential even. She used their underestimation to her advantage.  

Abuelo Julio worked long hours in maintenance for the New York City Criminal Court, but with five children, one income wasn’t cutting it. He marveled at Nana’s ability to stretch a dollar. We couldn’t believe he didn’t know she was a badass hustler, supplementing his income with her own, so there was always more than enough food, school supplies, and clothes to go around. He seemed oblivious, but now I think he didn’t want to know. Admitting she was really the primary breadwinner would emasculate him, and he worked very hard to take care of his familia. Nana knew her husband adored her and would do anything for them. So would she, in her own way. Part of that way was letting him believe he had it covered. He needed that, and she needed her anonymity.  

Being a housewife gave her the freedom she wanted to move about the world unquestioned, going from store to store, apartment to apartment, visiting friends, collecting bets, and delivering winnings. No one questioned her coche (a little supermarket cart) filled with so-called groceries, because an older woman with a house dress on probably didn’t have ten thousand dollars in cash in a brown bag on her, right? And it was still that time and age – the ’60s,’70s, and ’80s – when everyone in the neighborhood knew each other. You don’t mess with Doña Nana, or the guys you would be afraid of running into in the middle of the night, would come after you in the middle of the day if you fucked with the most beloved woman in their ‘Hood.  She was a community builder and could sit down with even the hardest gangster, make him cry, and go apologize to his mother.

I often wished I loved her as much as everyone else did. Before I was old enough to understand her full story, I just saw Nana as a reluctant mother and grandmother. A woman who had five kids because that was what you were supposed to do. Mom was her youngest. The “unwanted, unloved, mistake child” who came as a surprise after Nana had been told she could no longer have children, much to her relief. It took her 30 days to give Mom a name – Ana – so angry she was to have yet another kid. Making it clear she wanted nothing to do with her, Nana offloaded Ana onto the eldest, Sasa, to raise.

When Nana was nurturing, she seemed to have eyes only for two of her five children – PiaPia, her second-eldest daughter, and Black Julio, her middle child and only son. I don’t really know what the dynamic was in their childhood and young adult years, but by the time I was around to clock it, I understood a bit why. It was the ’80s, and they were IV drug users. Nana was worried. She doted on Black Julio, who still lived at home in his 30s and eventually took in PiaPia’s four children: Kenny, Darren, Nilsa, and Farro. Nana made Black Julio’s favorite meal – arroz blanco, habichuelas rojo, y pollo frito – almost daily, regardless of what else she was cooking for the familia. It pissed Ana off. A free spirit, PiaPia came and went as she pleased, seemingly unbothered by the kids that needed her, knowing her mother would provide.  

When I was nine, after much begging, Mom agreed to let me spend a few weeks during the summer at Nana’s apartment, visiting with my cousins. Kenny and Darren were much older, so what I really wanted was to stay with Nilsa, who was only a year ahead of me and the closest thing I had to a sister. Like most latch-key kids, we were left on our own to navigate the neighborhood and fill our days, so long as we did what Nana asked. 

“Cuida de Farro. Asegúrate de que no sea malo,” and so we kept an eye on the youngest cousin.   

Nana was rarely ever home. We’d occasionally see her out and about, talking to people and going in and out of storefronts. There were only two times a day we knew we’d always see her. At five o’clock p. m., she’d holler down to the playground from the fifth-floor window, “Nietas!  La comida está lista. ¡Ven a comer!” 

It was time for dinner. She had an evening to get to, and nothing was going to get in the way of her schedule. Like clockwork, we’d hear her come in around three o’clock a. m. after a night out with friends, listening to live music, or playing dominoes with Diñora upstairs. She’d wake us up promptly at seven o’clock a. m. We’d protest and groan, crust in our eyes, as she’d thrust what must have been a gazillion little papers at us. 

“Copia los números,” she’d say, handing us pens and sheets of paper.  

We didn’t yet know what these numbers were or why we were copying them in neat little rows. Grandma was strange. Depending on how long we took, by eight or nine o’clock a. m., she was out the door. 

“Te veo mas tarde. Ten cuidado.” There was always a warning to be careful, and then the summer day was ours to figure out.

Nana was raised by her uncle, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, a leader in the Puerto Rican Independence movement. He was well-educated, had means, and she was taught to always put familia, comunidad y la patria first. That’s precisely how I think of Nana’s loyalties – family, community, country. I just wish we were the part of the familia she cherished most. But I realize now she was never a cuddle type of woman. She knew what she wanted and went for it, even if that meant disappointing those around her. She left relative wealth and the familia who raised her to be with Abuelo Julio – a poor, white, uneducated, mostly Puerto Rican (there is some Mexican in his lineage) man from the campo. It didn't please her uncle, and she ran away with him, penniless, to the promise of New York City and the dreams that could be made there. However, Nana saw quickly that access to those dreams wasn't equal for everyone. She found herself discriminated against for the first time in her life, and then over and over afterwards. “Your wife is too dark,” a potential landlord said to her now husband, Julio, and the tables had been turned on her. 

They eventually settled in the new Lillian Wald housing projects in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she lived and raised her children and grandchildren for the next fifty-odd years. Thinking about her now, I realize how brave she was to leave her homeland and follow the man she loved. Abuelo Julio was a gentle and kind-hearted soul with pale skin and blue-green eyes who loved to laugh and bonchinche. Nana felt she needed his light, and they evened each other out like two cirque hand-balancers holding each other in a float.  

It was a marriage I idolized until it was cut short by a massive heart attack with no warning on Christmas Eve, 1986. Abuelo Julio was gone in a split second, and the entire familia was left in shock. He had just retired at sixty-two and was too young to go so unceremoniously. We’d lost our joyous patriarch. The holidays would never again have the same magic, and for Nana and Mom, it became a time of mourning. No one would have blamed Nana if she just lay down and stayed there a while. But it was as if she was kicked into overdrive, and we never quite saw her really sleep again, especially not in their bedroom. We’d find Nana napping while sitting up on the couch occasionally or in a chair at the kitchen table, but I never saw her lie down until the late ’90s. By then, Mom, aka Ana, had become a home health aide and took in Nana to take care of her. Once she worsened, we put her in a nursing home, a 10-minute walk from our apartment so that Ana could still cook for her and visit daily.

How did the unloved, unwanted, mistake child end up taking care of Nana? I thought that after Abuelo Julio died, Nana’s heart couldn’t break any further. But it was only the beginning of a horror that plagued our familia for years to come. Sasa, the eldest, was the first of the siblings to die of AIDS. We’re not sure if it was the blood transfusion or the boyfriend, but she succumbed quickly, and it nearly broke Ana. Nana reacted by not reacting and leaning in harder on PiaPia, Black Julio, and even Milagro, the fourth and fiercely independent but sensitive daughter. 

A few years later, Black Julio was the next to succumb to the disease, and then PiaPia suffered the same fate a little while after that. The epidemic ravaged our familia and comunidad in the ’80s and ’90s, as it did many poor neighborhoods, as the “War on Drugs” continued to criminalize the sick. By the time Nana began to succumb to her age and bone cancer, there were only two kids left.  Milagro took care of Nana for quite some time, but in that last year, she didn’t have the temperament to provide full-time care. Ana was the only and last choice. Hell, Mom relished the opportunity to do something for Nana, for the woman whom she longed to have love her like she did the others.  

Maybe it was that she’d hardened over time, that so much loss left her no room to love anew, but Nana never acknowledged Ana’s sacrifice. On a twin bed in her daughter’s one-bedroom apartment, she called for the children who were no longer there. In the nursing home, she’d eat the food Mom brought and talk to me about the novelas but I never once heard what I was hoping to hear her say. I love you, Ana. In late 2001, Nana would pass away in her sleep; old, maybe bitter, still funny, and finicky. The two days of viewing for her funeral were packed to capacity, a line out the door, full of people waiting to pay their respects. Mom and Milagro sat together, crying as they received the blessings and condolences from each community member. This was Doña Nana – the woman everyone respected and who would give to everyone around her.  

Nana didn’t let anyone go hungry or unclothed. She was biting but fair. To her friends, she knew how to have fun and make fun. She was beloved and admired. For everyone, she made sure to know the local assemblymen and congresswomen, and lobbied on behalf of those in the Projects. She’d cut the ribbon, with me by her side, when they opened the Don Pedro Albizu Campos Community Center in Campos Plaza to honor her uncle and hosted Las Fiestas de Cruz for the neighborhood each year for nine days in May, just like how he’d taught her. She kept his legacy in her own way.

Nana loved her familia – blood and chosen. How she loved us varied. How she showed it, if she showed it, left a lot to be desired. Some will judge that. I did. But she kept a roof over our heads, food in the refrigerator, taught us the value of the hustle, that being a part of the community and contributing to it was life’s goal, and being a proud Puerto Rican was tantamount. “Eres Boricua. Ser orgullosa.”  I think about her words as I light the Virgen de Guadalupe candle, her patron saint, and say a prayer. I imagine her sitting on Diñora’s couch with Abuelo Julio, holding hands, as the salseros play their favorite bolero, Sin Ti. The lyrics piercing as they sing in Spanish, “Without you, I won't be able to live and to think that never more you will be next to me.” I see Sasa, Black Julio, and PiaPia dancing and smiling at them. And I whisper a thank you.

About the Author

Jasmine Vallejo-Love is an HR exec, poet, & writer raised in the South Bronx and living in Los Angeles. She writes about her queer, disabled, Afro-Latinx/Boricua experiences as a Xennial growing up in NYC, her ancestors, chosen familia, challenges and triumphs in corporate America, and social issues such as mental illness, domestic violence, addiction, and sexual assault. Her latest essay, Breaking the Comb Ceiling, recently published in Lunch Ticket, was a Diana Woods Memorial Award finalist. She tries to find the lesson and the joy in the dark and experiences life’s nuances daily with her husband Toby and their dog, Friday. She can be found on Instagram @CafecitowithJas.