Her sisters, all born exactly three years apart from each other, had each gone out into the world and had all eventually returned to their mother’s home. Esperanza had been the only one to get through college. She had gotten her B.A. in Chicano Studies. During that time, she had lived with her boyfriend, Rubén (who, during the height of his Chicano cosmic consciousness, renamed himself Cuauhtemoc). This, despite her mother’s opposition, who said of her eldest daughter’s nonsanctified union: “Why should a man buy the cow when he can have the milk for free?” “I am not a cow,” Esperanza responded, but despite this, right after graduation Cuauhtemoc dumped her for a middle-class gabacha with a Corvette; they bought a house in the Northeast Heights in Albuquerque right after their wedding.

Esperanza always had a lot of “spunk,” as they say, but she did have a bad year after Cuauhtemoc, who was Rubén again before she recovered and decided to go back to the university for an M.A. in communications. Upon receiving her degree, she landed a job at the local T.V. station as a news broadcaster. These were transitional years where she felt like a woman with brains was as good as dead for all the happiness it brought her in the love department.

Caridad tried a year of college, but school was not for her and never had been, for that matter. She was the sister of the porcelain complexion, not meaning white, but as smooth as glazed clay. She had perfect teeth and round, apple-shaped breasts. Unlike the rest of the women in her family who, despite her grandmother’s insistence that they were Spanish, descendants of pure Spanish blood, all shared the flat butt of the Pueblo blood undeniably circulating through their veins, Caridad had a somewhat pronounced ass that men were inclined to show their unappreciated appreciation for everywhere she went.

She fell in love with Memo, her high school sweetheart, got pregnant, and they married the day after graduation. But two weeks had not passed before Caridad got wind that Memo was still seeing his ex-girlfriend, Domitila, who lived in Belen; and Caridad went back home.

All in all, Caridad had three abortions. La Loca had performed each one. Their mother had only known about the first. They didn’t tell anyone else about it but said to Memo and his family that Caridad had miscarried from being so upset about Memo’s cheating on her. It was agreed by all that the marriage be annulled. It would have been a terrible thing to let anyone find out that La Loca had “cured” her sister of her pregnancy, a cause for excommunication for both, not to mention that someone would have surely had La Loca arrested. A crime against man if not a sin against God.