La Marcha Adelante Es También La Marcha Fuera by Jacob Tan

My grandmother’s favorite food is tortilla soup, but I’ve learned not to order it for her. My family has searched far and wide, from fine-dining restaurants, Americanized “Mexican” restaurant chains, to the local joints that are the best kept secrets of families in LA. But every time, she claims the soup is too runny, doesn’t have enough of its namesake topping, or usually, lacks salt. So instead of trying to find the miraculous tortilla soup, we take her to the one place that meets her standards: an El Torito hidden on the dock of a small wharf in Marina Del Rey. We walk inside, and are greeted by papel picado banners hanging from the roof, the sound of old Mexican boleros intermingled with new latin pop playing faintly in the background. A tired teenage hostess walks us to our booth with a view of the marina, where a plastic-encased advertisement for $5 margaritas rests on the tabletop. The restaurant is usually empty, only frequented by Mexican wharf workers who perhaps, like my grandmother, want a taste of home. Her home was a small farm in California’s San Gabriel Valley, where she was born to the sound of morning roosters and the beating, dry sun. It took her parents two days to take her to the nearest hospital to get a birth certificate, which is why she has two birthdays—one for the government, and another for the farm. Mary Montes was raised on sweet strawberries and nopales, freshly ground chili from the molcajete, the calloused fingertips of her mother, and the protective embrace of the San Gabriel valley—the beating heart of California. 

I flip through the plastic menu, bordered in stock images of colorful Mexican talavera tiles, there to assure white restaurant-goers of the authenticity of this place. My grandmother orders her tortilla soup with extra tortilla chips in forgotten Spanish, her native accent coming through for split seconds. We snack on the chips and salsa provided to us, and she tells me tales from her life, as she often does. Perhaps it’s the music, or the stranger sitting at the counter with a familiar face, but today she remembers her childhood on the farm. One of eight siblings, she tells me of the busy house she grew up in and the work the entire family did to feed ten mouths. In the growing season, her parents grew strawberries to be sold at local markets, which makes me think of her particular taste when it comes to fruit. “So sour!” She once said about the strawberries my dad bought at the store, wrinkling her nose with disapproval. “Strawberries used to be much smaller and sweeter,” she told us, leaving the plump strawberry half bitten on her plate. During off seasons, her family packed up their bags, and drove north to Bakersfield for migrant farm work, where the cotton grows fast and the days grow long, the sun beating upon their leathery necks. There, the whole family picked cotton, and lived in a one-room house just outside the fields. But after a few years, the schools caught onto this affair, seeing that their desks were emptied when picking season came around. Soon, my grandmother and her 7 siblings were plucked from the fields and placed in a classroom by truancy officers, and her parents were forced to find other work. But my grandmother was happy to be in the classroom, and made the most of her days spent in school. She graduated high school, and enrolled in a junior college nearby, despite her parent’s best efforts to corral her scholarly desires. And after a year at junior college, she left the valley—and the only life she’d ever known—to attend college at UCLA.

I watch my grandmother salt the already salty tortilla soup, and dip unnaturally bright green and red tortilla chips into the stew of avocado and cheese and tomato that brings her halfway home. She lifts the steaming spoon to her lips and smiles, her sun spots folding beneath her wrinkles. My grandmother used to confuse me—she was never Mexican in the way that I wanted her to be. As a child, I wondered why my supposedly Mexican grandmother didn’t speak Spanish, couldn’t cook any good Mexican dishes, and much preferred El Torito to eating authentic Mexican food. But clues from her past were surfaced every once in a while: in the story she told me about when she was gassed while marching with Cesar Chavez, in the traditional Mexican tapestry frozen in glass above her sofa, in her distaste for the bloated strawberries that the rest of our family happily consumes. But as time passed, memories and objects were lost as she moved from one place to the next, migrating southward from Pomona to the beach town where her daughter settled. Now, vases full of shells she collects on the beach sit atop her dining room table, starfish are pinned to the walls, and every inch of her home is dressed in an overwhelmingly blue color palette that mimics the sea which she visits at least three times a week. Once a fierce activist for latino rights, she announces to us one day that she has decided to shift her focus to tackling climate change, because it is more important. The latest issues of Scientific American litter her coffee table, which she reads to learn about her new undertaking, reporting back to me with statistics and quotes about the impending doom we are facing; and I sometimes forget that the tapestries now trapped behind glass were once alive, their colorful threads flowing in the dusty air of the farm on which she was raised.

When she finishes eating, we drive her home, to her house just down the street from mine. I recognize it from a distance by its flourishing garden, which she tends to every morning and afternoon, plucking and trimming on her knees once again. I think my grandmother is much like that El Torito, bits of culture pasted together on the backdrop of a New American Life. Mary put up her pruning shears and walked out of the farm gates, into the halls of UCLA and next to Cesar Chavez, betting on the promise of a different future. But in marching forward, she marched away too, from the valley and its small strawberries, from the familia and the beating, hot sun. But to have lived two lives; to have been plucked from the endlessly needy fields and be transplanted to white picket fences and simple pleasures; to have lived across a chasm, and yet, to still be whole. I wave her goodbye as she walks up the steps to her home, pausing to check on her hydrangeas before she smiles at me and steps inside. And even though the map tells me we are only fifty miles from that farm in Pomona with its strawberries and roosters and farmworkers toiling under the beating, hot sun—I know that we are an entire life’s journey away. 

Jacob Tan is a student at Stanford University majoring in English. He is currently studying to become a doctor and is particularly interested in how literature and art might inform the practice of medicine. Jacob spends his time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

5 March 2026