Her life has been a hard one. She raises the children, walks half a mile to a well in rural Mexico to fetch water every day. When she leaves three days a week to serve as a domestic in a nearby motel, her oldest daughter, 11, looks after the children.
Maria makes tortillas every morning and boils the water for purification. Her hands are strong, her skin is leathery, the result of a lifetime of hard work and painful experiences. Her husband is working in the fields in California so she doesn't see him very often, but he sends her money through Western Union so she can pay the rent on their little home. He knows a baby is expected but the grape crops in California must be picked when they are ready, so he can't leave to come home and be with his wife. His back is permanently painful from bending over to harvest crops.
The cultural experience that Maria has lived her whole adult life teaches her that when the contractions...
She summons her sister (by sending her oldest daughter nearly two miles to alert the sister) to come and serve as a midwife. They boil water and use freshly cleaned towels (dried in the hot Mexican afternoons on a rope clothesline) to prepare Maria for the birth. She is in great pain as the baby moves closer to the uterus, and the stretching of her vagina and cervix causes sharp pain. But she doesn't scream, she just closes her eyes, grits her teeth, and weeps quietly.
Maria is not impervious to pain; she just knows how to accept it because it brings a new child into the world. Maria is a devout Roman Catholic and having more children is what the Church and the culture expect her to do. She will not use birth control because the Pope has said Catholics should not use birth control, but rather they should bring many children into the world.
