“We Hid in the Walls”
Incredibly, Mercedes Murguia began life during the days of the infamous Pancho Villa. She was born on October 4, 1909 in Mexico to Vincent Munoz and Josephine Hildago. According to Mercedes, her great grandparents were Spaniards who controlled huge tracts of land in what is now Mexico. Her immediate grandparents were thus landowners who controlled the government, the school, the shops, the church, and put on all of the town’s holiday celebrations. They had beautiful adobe homes and orchards of fruit trees and lived a privileged existence.
Unfortunately, for them, however, it was also the time of the Mexican revolution, and Pancho Villa often raided the villages in the north of Mexico where Mercedes’ family lived. The men of the villages would go out to fight Pancho and his revolutionaries while the women and children hid in secret hiding places covered by wallpaper in the walls of the houses.
Mercedes says that she witnessed much violence and atrocities committed by Pancho and his men, including the hanging of two of her cousins. The worst incident involved the owner of an inn where Mercedes’ family happened to be hiding. Pancho Villa took the innkeeper, hung him by his feet and shot him in the head, then called dogs over to eat his brains. Mercedes says it is an image that will haunt her all her days.
Mercedes’ father, Vincent, was also man with a fiery temper who had spent a little time in the U.S. as a teenager working odd jobs, but returned to Mexico at some point and married Josephine Hildago. Despite the fact that Vincent was from a “well-to-do” family, he and Josephine and their nine children lived a life on the run, as it were, constantly moving throughout Mexico from town to town. Mercedes thinks that their nomadic life may have begun when Vincent killed his brother-in-law in front of his sister because he was “insanely” jealous of him. Mercedes says that Vincent was an alcoholic and smoked marijuana constantly and routinely beat Josephine and the children. Once he even beat the nine-month old Mercedes into unconsciousness.
But her father was not the only one Mercedes had to worry about. Because they were always working in factories in various towns they traveled through, Vincent and Josephine put their oldest daughter, Maria, in charge of the rest of the children and did not care what she did with them. Mercedes says she was every bit as bad as their father and cut switches from lemon trees to beat them until they bled.
When Mercedes was about ten years old, the family immigrated to Chicago, where Vincent and Josephine again found work in factories. Life seemed to get worse for Mercedes, however, as she grew older and began to look like the beautiful young woman her mother had once been. Josephine became extremely jealous and began being cruel to Mercedes as well. She was apparently the cause of many horrible fights between Vincent and Josephine, which resulted in Vincent beating Mercedes all the more.
Needless to say, Mercedes never really went to school and began working in factories until she met James Murguia, who convinced her to live with him with the promise of marrying her. She lived with James for five years, however, with no prospect of marriage in sight. One day, however, out of the blue, he offered to drive her to her factory job. This was unusual, but Mercedes agreed. Instead of driving her to the factory, however, he drove her to the courthouse to be married. Mercedes wasn’t sure she really wanted to marry him, but she was afraid to make a scene and humiliate him, so, in her words, “ I allowed myself to marry him because he was nice enough to ask me.”
Mercedes told him early on that she would not endure any beatings, which James agreed to and never attempted. Only once did he raise his hand to her, but she slapped him first. He never tried again. Together they had four children, but two of them died of cancer. James, too, died in 1954, leaving Mercedes alone to raise the kids. She worked as a housekeeper in a nursing home for 16 years to support them. Once the two surviving children left, Mercedes was alone for several years before she went to live with her brother, Jacob, with whom she became very close.
Mercedes was admitted to a nursing home after a fall in the hospital, where she had been admitted with an infected toe. Mercedes seems very accepting of her fate and is neither excited nor depressed by her admission. She does become distressed, however, when she hears other residents cry out as she is afraid they are somehow being beaten or abused by the staff. She says she has no hobbies except what other people “allow me to do.”
Despite being a victim of violence all of her life, or perhaps because of it, Mercedes Murguia remains a very submissive, forgiving person. She harbors no bitterness or anger towards the many people who have abused her over the years and says “I don’t let things bother me.”
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