My mother
It has been more than 41 years since my mother died and I find it so hard to think where I can begin in telling you about her. My feelings I’ll have to set aside until the end as they will be difficult to express.
My mother was born in Watsonville, California to immigrant parents born in Macotera, Salamanca, Spain. At the time she has two older siblings, a brother Frank and the oldest, a sister, Mary. The family worked as pickers of a variety of crops and then they moved to Monterey where the eventually were able to purchase a small house on Van Buren Street where she lived until she married my father when she was 22. Marie, Angie and Pauline followed as sisters. My great grandfather, my grandma’s father, Blasquez also lived with them for a time.
I don’t know too much about her early life. I do know she attended school until high school although she never completed it as it was needed for her to work in the sardine factories of Cannery Row. Sometime during this period my grandfather, Manuel, began working as a gardener for some of the weal5hy families in Carmel.
My mom and dad met through various Spanish gatherings. Both the Hernandez family, the Blasquez family ( my mother’s mother) and Salinero’s were from Macotera although my dad’s family had settled in Hayward, Ca.
My mom and dad were married on November 1, 1936 and she then moved to Hayward because of my father’s job. On May 2, 1938 she gave birth to my brother, Frank in Monterey. On My 22, 1942 she gave birth to my sister, Joyce, who died the following year on May 6, 1943. I’m not sure what she died of although I’ve heard it might have had something to do with Rh factors. My sister was blind and was never able to stand or crawl. I came into the world on December 9, 1945 after a relatively difficult pregnancy. I became much loved, as my brother was, but much spoiled as a result of my sister’s death.
Both my mom and dad sacrificed a lot for their children, encouraged them in their educations, supported them in their dreams. After I began school my mother worked for a time in the local Hayward canneries supplementing my fathers income to pay off our home and helped to save money to build a rental home. Our mother was the caregiver, our angel. And she was proud and loving of her two grandchildren, Stephen and Carolyn, my brother Frank’s children. Our father became our rock, my mother’s caregiver preceding my mother’s premature death in 1982 from cancer. Her death, to this day, is difficult to speak of.
Judy Joy Salinero Dillon 
