Mariana’s Legacy of Names and Faces

 

“Mariana, Benito, Carlos Santayana
en Songorrongo”
Songorrongo was the name of her parent's ranch.
She often wrote the names so when you pinched the name
and turned the photo over, your finger would be over the face.

Mariana Martinez Prats (her Americanized name, she was Mariana Martinez Rodriguez de Prats in Cuba) left a legacy that at first look seems trivial, but becomes more and more of a treasure with each passing year. It’s a legacy of names and other information written lightly on the back of countless photographs.

It was just before the turn of the century, around 1995 that, when you visited the condominium at Mayfair Manor, you would see boxes and boxes of photographs on the floor in the living room around the sofa. They had been secreted out of Communist Cuba in the 1960s. Her mother and her sisters—still in Cuba then—would include a few in each letter they wrote to Mariana and to their and Mariana’s many friends now in the U.S. who would then forward them to Mariana in Maryland. In twos and threes per envelope, over time Mariana collected more than a thousand photographs she and Benito had originally pasted into albums over the years before and after they were married, while they lived in Camaguey. Now they were in disordered piles jumbled into different sized boxes.

“Flor de María Alvarez, prima de Dulce María”
Flor de Maria Alvarez, Dulce Maria’s cousin

Those Kinney shoe boxes and Garfinkel’s department store boxes, and one Woodward & Lothrop hat box—maybe a dozen in total—lived forgotten on the top shelf of closets and moved house to house until they got to Mayfair Manor. Now they were stacked on the floor surrounding the sofa and under the round glass-and-chrome coffee table.

She must have sensed that something was not quite right with her mind—that she might have inherited the slow but relentlessly progressive dementia that plagued the majority of the paternal side of her family in their last years—that it was now her turn. If so, she was right—it would progress and she would die of it much later, in 2014. But in 1995 the signs were not evident to anyone except herself.

“Mariana y Josefina (Fina) en el tejado
de la casa de Republica”
Mariana and her cousin Fina on the roof tiles
of the Republica Street house

I believe that she must have wanted to do something to preserve a little bit of what she excelled at: her surprisingly sharp memory, and her surprisingly large circle of extended family and friends that she kept up with by letter and phone calls—before it was too late. When you asked her why she was doing this, she would say that it had to be done and this was a fine time as any to do it.

It was a way for her to preserve her connections to family and friends, living and dead, while she still could. So she picked up a box of photos and sat down on the sofa with it, took the lid off, took up a pencil, picked up the first photograph, turned it over, and began to pencil in the names of the people it depicted. When she finished, she put it aside, picked up the next one and did the same.

She spent a few minutes here, an hour there, between tasks and between visitors and for more than a year—examining, remembering, reminiscing, and annotating each and every photo in her neat, elegant, and very readable handwriting. She would engage whoever was in the room—Benito mostly, but also with visitors—announcing the people she was seeing anew, and what she and they had been doing with them then. Often very brief bits of this reminiscing would be added to the names she was writing on the back in the form of wheres and whens.   

“Joaquín V, Martínez, KKC 4th Grade
Caballero de Colón”
Joaquin Ventura Martínez,
KofC 4th Degree
Knights of Columbus

When she was looking at photos Benito took before they were married, and those he took on business trips out of town, she would quiz him. He was very bad with names, so his photos got a lot of “Benito and two friends from university” annotations, and “Benito and a girl he knew before me,” but she tried to pencil something on each one.

Day after day, photo after photo, they all got annotated. She did not always name all of the faces, but she named the lion’s share. As she finished each box it went back on the closet shelf. The boxes around the sofa got fewer and fewer until one day there were all gone. It took her months to finish, but finish she did.

I first came across her annotations early in 2001 when some of my siblings and I were working on a collage for their 50^th wedding anniversary. Still no clue that she was losing her memory. It was a wonderful celebration, complete with the collage, a poster-sized family tree, their large extended family, and many of her and Benito’s friends.

“Angelita en San Calletano con José Joaquín,
Margarita, Benitico y Lola”
Angela Rodríguez de las Casas at her San
Calletano Ranch holding Lola with
(right to left) José Joaquín,
Benitico and Margarita Prats

And then in their move to assisted living, the photos—and boxes and boxes of Benito’s 35mm Kodachrome and Ektachrome transparencies—went to their son Benny’s house, where I went to mine them to illustrate many of the stories I’ve written for this archive. And now you know how I was able caption the many photographs you find here!

Names and Faces! What a wonderful legacy Mariana left us! 

— ### —

Take a lesson from her. You might get run over by a bus next week, for all you know! Before that happens, pull down those boxes of film-era snapshots from your closet and pile them around your sofa. Spend just a few minutes each day scribbling names. Don’t put them back—even if you have company coming—until you’ve scribbled names on the back of each one.

Don’t stop there. Get all your digital photos off your phones and camera cards in one place and annotate them too. Do it on the file name. That way it will never get separated.  Rename the file from “IMG-1232” to “Lola and Fred in the kitchen.” Rename each and every one. Then copy them out on thumb drives. Don’t delay! Your children and their children will be forever grateful.