#i'm how her story is 1000% more interesting than santi's entire life yet here it is broadened and encapsulated in one single post

[briteboy]

Marisol Sandoval, presently age 82

Indigenous and Afro-Mexican, natural mother to Gabriel Wallace—finally reunited— and grandmother to Audrey and Rooney. Born in Oaxaca, went to San Bernardino for a better life. At the age of 18 became involved in radical justice at the turn of the Cold War, helping Japanese Americans (and others racially targeted) find peace after World War II. Was forced to escape back to Mexico with a group of rebels, one of whom was Okumara Tetsuya, a first generation Japanese-American and recovering prisoner of the Manzanar Internment Camp in California. Enveloped in a whirlwind romance, the two spent years fighting passionately together until they married and conceived their only son. Tetsuya never knew his wife was pregnant when he was untimely summoned back to America and drafted into the Vietnam War, where he would meet his demise with a bullet to the spine. Marisol, despite being heavily pregnant, did not falter in her efforts as a member of the People’s Guerrilla Group. She was arrested in a plot to aid Mexican women seeking refuge in America, assisting them in crossing the border illegally; she delivered Gabriel in prison, where he was taken from her without a single official record of the birth except the name she had given him: the name of her own father.

Her son’s orphanage trajectory ended in San Diego, where an American couple, Ted and June Wallace, adopted him as an infant. He took their surname in exchange for a blessed life, unbeknownst to all the turmoil his birth parents had faced. At the age of 21, Gabriel traveled abroad to teach English to children in Spain. There, he met Amelia (Mia) Clement, a French girl traveling all of Europe to study each country’s cuisines and baking techniques so as to someday achieve her dream of becoming an astute baker at her own patisserie. The two started a quiet, ideal life together in the Spanish desert of Lanjarón, often traveling back and forth with their two daughters between their arid home and Mia’s childhood home in the French countryside. At this time, Gabriel began his search for his birth parents, but would not find their identities and eventually meet his mother until many years later.