What a DNA test revealed about my long-lost abuela — and her secret life

Los Angeles Times

5 days ago

In 1969, when my mom was an infant, her mother, Amanda, disappeared one day and was never heard from again.
'I spent my entire childhood wondering what happened to her,' my mom, Zoyda, explained to me in Spanish.
My mom and her sister, Juana, grew up without the love of a mother. As children, they would fantasize and imagine what Amanda was like, crying themselves to sleep every night wondering why she was gone. The family never found an answer, but many theories about Amanda's whereabouts emerged in their small town of Ensenada, a port city in the coastal Mexican state of Baja California.
'Some people said she ran away with a lover, an army guy,' my mom told me. 'Others said she must have been killed and that's why she never came back for us, because who would abandon and leave two little girls behind like that?'
That theory seemed the most plausible to me. I spent the majority of my life believing that my grandmother, or abuela, was dead.
In Mexican culture, and most Latin American cultures, grandmothers are powerful matriarchal figures at the center of every family. They are the glue that holds households together. This archetype is well-represented in popular culture, in Disney films like 'Coco' and 'Encanto,' and in the modern-day reboot of the hit TV show 'One Day at a Time.'
Beyond the big screen, Latina grandmothers are often the subject of cultural appreciation — in 2020, Syracuse University's La Casita Cultural Center installed an exhibit titled 'Abuelas,' and in 2023, NBC News anchor Tom Llamas did a segment celebrating abuelas for 'Today.'
Even though the role of a grandmother has always been emphasized in my culture, not having a grandmother never bothered me or afflicted me. Yet as I got older, the journalist in me began to have questions about my roots and heritage on my maternal side.
Curious to unravel this long-lost history, I bought an Ancestry DNA testing kit. Strangely, the results linked me to the state of Sonora: a place my mom has neither visited nor knew she had any family from.
I was also matched with a person named Bernie (his real name withheld for privacy purposes), whom Ancestry determined was my first cousin on my mom's side — our DNA had a match of '667 cM across 21 segments.' I didn't know what that meant, but I messaged this mysterious match to see if he could provide me with any intel about our connection.
'Hi Bernie, are we related?' I asked while revealing my mom's name. Bernie said he didn't know her. I then mentioned the full names of my mom's parents and asked, 'Do either of those names sound familiar?'
'Omg,' he wrote.
After some back and forth, Bernie revealed that Amanda was his grandmother, and she was happily living in Arizona as the matriarch of her extended family.
I was in shock. Could my grandmother, who I believed had been dead for more than 50 years, really still be alive?
Bernie asked if we could FaceTime. Minutes later, I nervously dialed his number. My hands were shaking, and my heartbeat was racing.
'You look exactly like my Nana,' Bernie said to me during our call.
Bernie was friendly and animated throughout our entire conversation. He said he lived in Tucson and was really close to Amanda. Because of their close relationship, he was eager to get to the bottom of his grandmother's sordid past.
'In our family, we know there is a period of a few years where my grandma left Sonora, but no one knows where she lived or what she did during that time. She doesn't talk about it, and it's a mystery in our family,' Bernie told me.
'What is Amanda like?' I asked.
'My grandma is a huge family person,' he said. 'Family is number one to her, there's nothing she wouldn't do for us.'
The words stung. How could this be the same person who abandoned her two daughters in Ensenada and never looked back? I didn't say anything and continued to listen as he revealed that despite a traumatic childhood in Sonora, Amanda went on to achieve the American dream in Arizona. She ran a successful daycare for kids, got her college degree in something related to child development, and was beloved by her community as an advocate for women and children. Everything that Bernie shared with me seemed to be disconnected from the reality of what Amanda did to my mom and her sister.
I asked how he could help facilitate a meeting between Amanda and her daughters to reunite them. 'They've been waiting their entire lives to meet their mother,' I said.
'My Nana suffers from high blood pressure,' he said. 'I want to do this in a way that won't stress her out or make her condition worse, but I do want to confront her and get to the bottom of this.'
We spoke for more than two hours in what seemed like a positive and productive conversation, and he excitedly told me he would ultimately strategize the best way to talk to his grandma. I called my mom immediately to tell her the news.
'Mami, your mother is still alive, I just talked to her grandson, I found him on Ancestry,' I nervously told her on the phone.
My mom was in shock and silently listened as I filled her in on my discovery. I left out what Bernie said about Amanda being a loving matriarch to her large family — I didn't want my mom to feel hurt.
'I doubt she will want to meet us,' my mom said. 'She's had a lifetime to look for us and she hasn't. She doesn't care about us, but I guess we'll see what Bernie can deliver.'
She wasn't relieved about the discovery of her mother's confirmed existence. She was hurt to find out that Amanda had been alive this entire time and had not returned for the two daughters who intensely missed a woman they never knew. It pained my mom to know that Amanda started fresh with a new life hundreds of miles away.
In the days that followed this revelation, my mom's hopes unexpectedly emerged to the surface. She tried playing coy, but whenever we would talk on the phone she would casually ask, 'So … any update from Bernie?'
A few weeks passed and I hadn't heard back from him. I sent him a friendly text asking if he had talked to Amanda yet.
'No update as of now … I haven't had the opportunity and still figuring out how to even bring it up,' he wrote.
Months went by without any communication from Bernie until I reached out again for an update. The next day, he responded to my text.
'Hi,' read the message. 'I feel terrible for giving any hope on this to your mom/fam, I just honestly don't know if I can have that conversation with her. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but the timing lately hasn't been the best. It is something I would like to do just no idea of when or how … but I'll definitely keep you posted!'
I never heard from him again.
'I knew he wasn't going to do anything,' my mom said when I revealed what had happened — or rather, what hadn't. 'And I knew there was no reason to get my hopes up. This was a waste of everyone's time.'
She began sobbing as she said this. Her hurt was loudly palpitating through the telephone, and I began to feel hurt too, not for myself, but for the little girl in my mom who was still crying for her mother's love all these years later.
I tried my best to comfort her, but nothing I said could stop the flow of tears.
'It was a waste of time,' she said again.
My mom may have thought that the entire experience with Bernie was a 'waste,' however, something else happened in the aftermath — my mom began opening up about her childhood to me, and I began asking more questions.
I asked her what happened immediately after Amanda went missing. 'What did her family do?'
According to family lore, Amanda left her two young daughters with a babysitter, saying she would return later. When she never came back, the babysitter notified my mom's relatives, who were confused and alarmed by her disappearance. At the time, my mom lived with her 2-year-old sister Juana, their father, Jose, and Amanda. Jose was a fisherman who would be gone for months at a time; he was out at sea when Amanda went missing.
Jose spiraled into alcoholism not long after. For most of my mom's life, he was an absent father who left Juana and my mom under the care of any distant relative willing to house them. My mom and her sister were severely neglected and forced to provide for themselves by working jobs as young children, often subjected to abuse by men who were supposed to look after them. They were failed by all the adults in their lives. Their father, Jose, died in 1987.
I realized, after she told me this, that her childhood was very similar to Amanda's.
'My grandma had a hard life, she was abandoned by her mom and forced to work as a kid to provide for her siblings,' Bernie told me during our FaceTime call. 'She was abused and assaulted by men she knew — it was very traumatic.'
My mom, of course, knew none of this growing up; but she inevitably inherited Amanda's generational trauma, and it made its way into my childhood too. But in learning more about my mom's abandonment, the trajectory of her life became clear to me. I understood the pain she endured her entire life. Even though it led to difficulties in my own upbringing, I felt more connected to her; and then I felt myself becoming more protective of her.
Because of this trauma, my mom faced many personal struggles, including failed toxic relationships with men, especially with my father. But unlike Amanda, my mom never gave up on her family and never abandoned my two siblings and me. She tried her best to overcome the challenges and move forward, even if she made mistakes along the way.
And my mom is still persevering now, even if it's without the love of a mother who left everything behind and never looked back.
'Everything about Amanda hurts, but what will I do?' My mom told me recently. '[I] continue to move forward. It's all I can do.'