In her acceptance speech for the 2021 Academy Award for best director of the best picture winner “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao said, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how I keep going when things get hard.”
She recalled a poem she recited with her father as a child. The first line was: “People at birth are inherently good.”
Zhao added: “I have always found goodness in the people I’ve met everywhere I went in the world. So this is for anyone who had the faith and the courage to hold onto the goodness in themselves and to hold onto the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that.”
I, too, have always admired people with that worldview, who will not surrender to pessimism when times are hard. There is no question that times are hard for many reasons, among them the ongoing pandemic, divisiveness among our leaders and violence by police against people of color.
But all the problems cannot obscure the great truth in the poem Zhao read with her father: that people at birth are inherently good and that most of them are able to nourish it and build on it throughout their lives.
My mother was one of those, and that is the main reason I write today. On Mother’s Day, I want to celebrate her faith, her steadfast hope through the hard times we lived, not least the Great Depression of the 1930s.
She had an immense love of learning but little opportunity to achieve it. In the high desert foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, where the families of both my parents lived, there were few schools when she was young.
My grandfather, Enrique Perea, taught himself how to read, built a one-room school on his own farm and then persuaded the state authorities to provide a teacher. My mother graduated there from the eighth grade, and that was the end of her formal education. I attended that school through the third grade.
My mother taught each one of her children to read and write in Spanish before kindergarten. She composed songs I heard as I was growing up. She wrote poems. I was surprised recently to read one of them on the Facebook account of a cousin, about the tragic auto accident that took the life of one of her nephews.
We moved to Colorado so that our education could continue beyond the eighth grade. My mother would not stand for any talk of being incapable, but college was terra incognita for her and Dad, who did not go beyond the fifth grade.
The brother who lit the way was Tony, second in age to me. He loved chemistry and enrolled at Regis College in Denver. To support himself, he worked a full evening shift as an orderly at a Catholic hospital, where he got a free meal.
He graduated with honors and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Kansas State University. He taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and rose to the rank of full professor in seven years, publishing 17 academic papers. Usually just gaining tenure takes that long.
Nine of the 10 of us earned at least one degree or more. We have a dentist, a journalist, a sister who worked in university public relations, another sister who is a certified public accountant, a brother with a master’s degree in linguistics, several college professors and high school teachers. All of us except the younger sister had to earn our own way.
When all had finished, Mom decided it was not too late for her. She studied for her high school GED certificate and passed all parts except math.
Moises Sandoval writes the Catholic News Service column “Buscando Vida/Seeking Life.”