So it may be said she had a full life. Maybe not one reserved for a lady, but then, neither had the rest of the women in her family.

“How come those jeans fit you that way ¿y qué pasó with the label and back pocket?” Sofi finally asked out of exasperation one day, seeing Loca’s jeans getting looser. Since Loca wore the same jeans until they could almost walk themselves over to the washer, a week after she first noticed them on Loca, Loca still had them on. She even slept in the same clothes, but since she slept half the time in the stall with the horses instead of in her bed, it was just as well.

“They were la Caridad’s. She was bigger ’an me, remember?” Loca replied to the first part of Sofi’s two-part interrogation. To the second, she said, “I saw on the T.V. that some people in a factory are boycotting the company that makes these jeans …”

Before Sofi could say nothing about Loca’s sudden social consciousness, Loca went on. “You know. Mom. Una factory that is unfair to its workers, just like where le Fe worked at. The woman on the T.V. that was saying it reminded me of la Esperanza, like the way she took the microphone off the lady that was asking her the questions.”

Sofia stared at her daughter in amazement, although that might sound hard to believe after everything Sofi had experienced with her youngest. But it made sense that even if Loca never left her home and seemed to have no use for society, some of her own sisters’ experiences had affected her. “So is that why you ripped off the label? ’Cause you were mad about your sisters?” Sofi asked, underestimating La Loca at that moment like everybody else always did.

“Uh-uh. They said on the T.V. that if you already have a pair of those jeans, then tear off the label to protest. They said it would make people ask why.”

“But who ever sees your jeans?” Sofi asked.

“You, Mom. You asked. You’ll tell somebody, ¿qué no?” Loca answered and of course she was right since that very evening—in her tireless quest to convince the world (or perhaps herself) that her daughter was not a “pobrecriatura” as she was so often called behind her back, but in her own way a very responsible young woman—Sofi proudly relayed the boycott information via the jean story about Loca at a meeting she was attending at the local high school about the noise pollution coming from nearby Kirtland Air Force Base.

But the boycotted jeans got baggier before they got dirty enough for Loca to discard and Sofi, more concerned about Loca’s health than the boycotted jeans, called in the family doctor.

Doctor Tolentino was one of those old-fashioned general-family-practice-type doctors, the kind people only find in rural areas nowadays, and not always there no more, really, since women in labor in such places can be helicoptered to hospitals during snowstorms, and very sick people don’t die peacefully at home no more but are forced to a strange bed in a hospital, days and even weeks before their time.