Portrait of My Grandfather

 My 88-year-old grandfather only has two pictures from his childhood. Both are with his older cousin Carlos, who he affectionately calls his brother. Born in Mexico in 1930, my grandfather never met his father and, when he was still very young, his mother left him in the care of her sister. His Aunt Margarita acted as his mother in name, but it was Carlos who made sure he stayed in school and out of trouble. It was also Carlos who my grandfather followed to the United States in 1954 at the age of 24. Both of them were looking for a better life and the opportunities provided in America.

My grandfather has always been a hardworking man. Shortly after immigrating to San Antonio, Texas, where he met my grandmother, he moved to Chicago in search of better jobs. She would join him a few months later right before he was drafted into the Navy. He didn’t speak English when he first started working, but taught himself by watching American movies on the ship. Following his tour, he continued his education while working full-time in the Fisher Body Plant for General Motors in Willow Springs to support his family. My mother is one of nine children and all of them were put through private school to ensure them the best chance at success as adults. This meant seven day work weeks at the factory were the norm for my grandfather. He was always working. Just work, work, work.

My mother says that I know my grandfather better than my aunts and uncles that grew up with him. With his work schedule, he just didn’t have the time and my grandmother was always the talkative one. She was the one who shared his history with my mom and her siblings, but now that she has passed there is so much about him that we still don’t know. Any time I ask him to tell me about his life he typically starts with how he was always working. “I’m a simple guy. Just work that’s it,” he said. Just work, work, work. I’m unsure if he said this because he thinks his life is uninteresting or if he just doesn’t remember.

I started living with my grandfather when I moved to Chicago in 2011 to study photography. I left my home in North Carolina to stay in the house where my mother was born in Bridgeport. It felt strange to live in a house with so much history, to hang out around the same places my mother did when she was my age, and to live with a man who I knew very little about. I remember when I first moved in, it felt at times that we were more like roommates than family. It had been a long time since his kids had moved out and after my grandmother passed he grew accustomed to living on his own. That quickly changed as we began having late night talks over wine and regular weekend brunches. Brunch was a tradition that I made sure to maintain no matter how busy school got so we could have time to really connect over the past week. As semesters went by I learned about the man who my grandfather is today. Still, much of his past remains a mystery.

My grandfather was a model for a few technical photo assignments in school, but it was not until I graduated that I pointed my camera at him in an intentional way. He was always a willing subject and his gaze seemed to pierce through each image effortlessly. Most of our shoots were impromptu and shot quickly on my phone before being uploaded to my Instagram with the title “Portrait of My Grandfather” with a sequence number. Recently I have been trying to record his audio stories, but he is a quiet man. He seems to be aging more rapidly each year. I worry when I visit and he tells me about how he gets dizzy walking to the bus or how he can’t sleep through the night anymore. I’m scared of the inevitable, but also I’m afraid that I’ll never finish this work. I want him to see it and realize what an incredible life he has lived.

My grandfather has only two pictures of himself from childhood. At 88, he now has hundreds. Looking through these pictures I have come to realize I will probably never truly understand the life my grandfather has led, but I am happy to know the man he has become.