Cambridge Seniors: Ana Mejia — Coyneworks Illustration

My former landlord Cathy recommended her neighbor, Ana Mejia, as a subject for my project. When I phoned Ana to gauge her willingness to participate, within minutes she proved to be funny, lively and familiar. She’s petite, and sports a crown of curls that caught the morning sunlight as she crossed Dana Park to meet me for our first interview. We sat in dappled sunlight under the flowering trellis as we settled into our talk.

Hear Ana Mejia’s voice here.

Ana was born in the Dominican Republic, the oldest of five children born to well-off parents. Her father came from an illustrious family. There were four boys and two girls, but one of the two boys born succumbed as a toddler to meningitis. It was an unusual tragedy, Ana told me, in a family that had money.

Ana has a quick wit and smile. As her family’s matriarch, she is used to helping manage everybody with good humor and warmth. Within an hour of my meeting her, she was giving me the names of relatives of hers I should visit in Washington Heights (where her mother spent the later decades of her life), and in SoHo, next time I was back in my hometown. Less than two hours into our first interview, and I was touring her beautiful home, with walls painted the colors of the tropics, stuffed to the gills with books and art – her own, and many works she’s brought back from overseas.

She told me that in cultures like the Dominican Republic’s, being the eldest child means being a surrogate mother to the other children, with responsibilities taken on early and almost no moment to rest. She was assigned a variety of duties, from sweeping the house to watching and bathing her siblings. She couldn’t help but notice that if she’d been born a boy, she would have been “the man of the house,” living in relative luxury. By her early teens, she knew she totally objected to the different social roles for men and women. She watched as her father was allowed to dance with whomever he wanted at parties, but her mother had to sit out any dances during which her husband wasn’t available to dance with her. As Ana entered her teen years, she begged off from some of her chores when she could, citing schoolwork to do.

Her dad, a loving and steady presence, instilled in her a love of classical music. Sundays were for listening to operas from start to finish – Verdi, Puccini. To make sure she was paying attention, her father made her recite to him what was coming up in the next act from the liner notes. She despised it then, but is grateful now to be a lover of classical music.

Ana’s lush garden in the summer. In the winter, she moves much of it inside.

Ana remembers her father catching her playing baseball with the neighborhood boys as a girl. He didn’t often beat her, but when he caught her that day, “I got the beating of my life!”

Her father died of an illness when she was sixteen. The family was plunged into grief and disarray. Her mother had to wait two years for his life insurance to come through, and since she had never worked outside of the home in her life, it fell to Ana to help the family make ends meet. Ana worked in a lawyer’s office to ensure that her siblings would still be able to continue their education uninterrupted. But the commute into work was treacherous in a way she had little intimation of at the time. She had to cross a canal to get there, and she did that by riding in a boat that was sometimes far past its capacity, and by a man who was sometimes drunk. No one ever learned to swim on the islands, she told me. It was considered too dangerous. But you rarely notice the dangers around you at that age.

Sweet, discerning, and firm, with a slightly shy, distantly-appraising manner, she was scouted by the local chapter of the American Peace Corps to be a cultural instructor and liaison, serving for a few years. She ended up falling in love with an American Jewish boy who returned from the Dominican Republic to Cambridge to wrap up his studies at Harvard Law School, and in 1969, she came with him. They were the first-ever married couple between a Peace Corps volunteer and a local, and their marriage served was something of a watershed.

When her husband embarked on his law career, she moved with him to Rochester, New York. Her mom arrived from the Dominican Republic to join them, but she couldn’t bear the upstate New York winters or the lack of a community for long; she moved to Washington Heights, where there was a Hispanic population, and she spent the rest of her life there. While Ana’s husband made headway professionally, Ana did political work, establishing their house as a stopover point for political refugees from Chile escaping the Pinochet regime.

Ana pursued academic work, getting a fellowship to trace the lineage of her surname, Mejía, in Spain. She was paired with an older woman with whom she was expected to conduct frequent interviews. When Ana arrived, she quickly realized that the woman didn’t speak Spanish – only another Romance language, Galician. Still, it was a wonderful year abroad and Ana was able to trace the name of Mejía to a conquistador in the [sixteenth] century.

Ana moved to Cambridge, where she initially meant to pursue a career in Social Work. After a relatively brief stint, she shifted gears and received a Masters in Education. She taught History in Boston public schools for nearly three decades. Respect for education was one of the central tenets of her family of origin, and she carried on the legacy at public school and by establishing two other educational institutions. One was a Boston-based school intended to be used by students who’d been expelled from their own schools, and kids who’d served time in juvenile detention.

Ana remarried in Boston, and she and her second husband, Gary, also established a school in the Dominican Republic. They often ship boxes of books and supplies to the school and visit whenever they can, although they’re shy of the fanfare they receive every time.

These days, Ana maintains a number of close family and neighborhood ties. Her older son moved to Boston to be close to her, and Ana is close with him and with her grandchildren. Her other son is doing well as a college girls’ soccer coach in upstate New York. She also nurtures a fantastically beautiful garden at her home. She’s constantly making things by hand, whether it’s macramé (she’s working on a macramé curtain for one of her sons), or hollowed-out painted gourds, or adding her touch to “found objects,” like this plant she brought back to the Dominican Republic. She tends to spend a month every winter in her home country.

She’s read all of the hundreds of books on her shelves, and is always devouring more. She also tends to her cats. She’s an avid collector of masks, and her home is adorned with too many to count – each seeming to have a soul of its own.

She also spends time with her much-beloved second husband. And she entertains wayward illustrators by welcoming them into her home and regaling them with stories.