Generational wealth

I spent my senior year of high school annoyed with my abuelita’s inability to throw out rotting food. Similarly, she had a hard time throwing out clothes and shoes even when they were well beyond repair. I also noticed she kept bags in her room of items that could only be considered trash.

However, my greatest annoyance, was that after every meal, she would take the leftover tortillas and stuff them in the left side cabinet of the fridge. I’d often open the fridge only to be met by an avalanche of hard and inedible tortillas flying at me. When I tried to throw them out, my abuelita would insist that they were still good. To dissuade her hoarding, I’d point to the bags of fresh tortillas in the fridge. She remained adamant that we needed to save the leftovers.

My abuelita is a formidable woman. She moved permanently to the United States from Mexico after my grandfather, her partner of forty-three years, passed away. She survived being the child bride of her first husband who kidnapped her and forced her into marriage, much in the tradition of rural Mexican villages. She endured the untimely death of two of her children. She has weathered the storms of her remaining children with an unflinching conviction that all turbulence eventually passes. She is the matriarch of our family, a steading presence who at 80 years old, has known more pain than any one lifetime should allow.

As the only grandparent I have ever known intimately, I love her deeply.

But at seventeen, I certainly did not understand her. She seemed far away, a representative of a different time and nation with allegiances to notions of womanhood that I did not care to replicate.

I eventually voiced my frustrations about her hoarding to my mom. My mom told me that my grandmother was still saving for a rainy day. She explained that in Mexico, when there had been no food for her to feed her children with, my abuelita would add salt to tortillas and they would eat them with hot water.

I realized that day that I have never, and will likely never, know hunger like my abuelita has.

Even my mom cannot recall a time when there weren’t at least tortillas with salt to eat.

I find that much in the words of Lucy Barton from "Oh William!" by Elizabeth Stout when you come “from the very bottom of it [poverty]…it never really leaves you.”

I’ve seen similar behavior in my mom, although not related to food.

Last week I arrived home for Thanksgiving wearing my favorite pair of boots. The boots had recently given out from overuse with the sole detaching from the base. I did not care to stop wearing them.

However, my mom immediately took notice of the boot and told me I could not walk around like that. I assured her it was fine and that I’d get new ones when I had some time.

But she doubled down and insisted I go to the store immediately. I did not.

The next day, I had a zelle deposit from my parents to buy new boots. I was stunned. Why was this so important?

Eventually, at my mom’s continuing insistence, I allowed her to drag me to five different stores looking for boots. When I found a pair I liked, she told me to grab two, one for now and one for when those wear out. While I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, I laughed. She was not amused.

It was in her desperation that I finally realized I was shopping from leisure while my mom was shopping from survival.

I grew up hearing the stories of how she often did not have shoes and would walk the muddy terrain around her house barefoot. My mom insisted my whole life that I wear sandals in the house. She also has an extensive shoe collection, with each pair kept neatly in their original boxes.

In my family, I actively see the ways the past manifests itself in the present. There is no running from the dark places even after the cease being quite so prevalent.

While I grew up poor by United States' standards, it certainly does not compare to the poverty of my family. And yet, I am prone to excessive spending. When I had an income, I would squander it quickly, uncomfortable with having money in the bank. I did not save. I did not invest. I resist financial literacy because it feels so foreign and selfish to keep anything just for myself.

More pertinently though, I haven’t completely outrun the scarcity of my lineage. Despite having much more than my ancestors, I worry it won’t be enough. My abuelita and my mom’s worries were legitimate. I have never not had enough.

And perhaps that is the curse of upward mobility and what JD Vance meant in "Hillbilly Elegy" when he said, "I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us."

However, I am not running from the difficult truths of generational trauma. I am embracing the dark crevices in hopes of healing. I resist the American Dream rooted entirely on meritocracy. I’m hopeful for an abundant life in the ways that matter: spiritually, communally, and familial. I will remind myself of this wealth, which my generations have always had.