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Chapter 1: Field of deathA hard life, a hard land
Strong faith and strong backs created ArizonaStory by Carmen DuarteThe Arizona Daily Star Mama is preparing to die. This is nothing new. She started to make these preparations when I was in fourth grade, 34 years ago. Recently, she had me take her to the Jesus, Mary and Joseph Store on South 12th Avenue, where we picked out the rosary with the shimmering crystal beads she is to be buried with. While there, she also bought a picture of St. Thérèse, the Little Flower of Jesus, in a wooden frame, to add to her collection of santos. She ordered another santo — St. Teresa of Avila — that must be shipped from Spain. St. Teresa won’t arrive for months. Apparently, Mama is not thinking of dying anytime soon. In September, Mama celebrated her 83rd birthday with a visit to Desert Diamond Casino, where she lost money, but I came home $500 richer. Mama is in relatively good health and she doesn’t complain about being tired, but she has lived a long, hard life. And she is ready to die. Lately, she has begun praying that God will take her instead of my 13-year-old cousin, Brittany, who has thyroid cancer. She has her burial gown — a red-and-green replica of the clothing worn in depictions of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexico’s most revered Blessed Mother, the symbol of its war for independence from Spain. My cousin Mary Flora sewed the gown to Mama’s specifications.
My grandma Dolores was buried in a white gown and blue robe, modeled on the images you see of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Immaculate Conception. My uncle José Tellez of Safford was buried in his pajamas. Uncle Joe was a mail carrier and a plumber. He would spend a full day delivering the mail and then head off to fix somebody’s leaky pipes in the evening. When he finally arrived home, he would bathe, put on his pajamas and luxuriate in the home and good life that his hard work had built for him and his family. He now wears his pajamas in eternity — in a better place. We don’t just believe that in our family. We know it. So when my mother contemplates death, she does so almost wistfully. She will go to a place where existence is not so hard, where you don’t have to struggle to feed your family. It is a place where there are no family squabbles and there is no tragedy. It is a place where she will finally meet her beloved santos and her God. But before she goes, I want you to know about my Mama, who frankly doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in reading about her. She finds nothing unusual or heroic about a life spent picking cotton and cleaning miners’ dormitories and hotel rooms so her children, nieces, nephews and anyone else who needed her help would have a better life than hers. I do find that heroic. I hope you will, too.
It is appropriately a field that has witnessed the blending of three cultures — the ancient one, the Spanish/Mexican one and the North American. Mama is a U.S. citizen, born here. But her people are from Mexico. She is a mix of the Spanish and indigenous cultures of this region. She prefers to speak Spanish. Her paternal grandfather, we believe, was Apache. This field, now planted with pecan trees, was originally farmed by the Mogollon who, like the neighboring Hohokam, disappeared more than 1,000 years ago. This field belonged to Mexico until 1848, but in reality it belonged to no one. When my family first came here in the 1870s, the area was shared, tenuously, with the Apaches. This river, which flowed muddy, turbulent and undammed in the middle of the monsoon in the summer of 1916, was the border between Mexico and the United States until 1854. But lines on a map mean less here than cultural traditions and family stories. Lines between past and present are also unimportant. My Mama’s story is the story of her parents and their parents. It is my story and the story of my nieces who live with me and Mama and my brother. It is the story of my four cousins Mama raised and the numerous nieces and nephews she loved and guided when they called upon her. It is about la familia and the importance of family. And, most of all, it is about Mama’s love — that wonderful emotional glue that keeps us together, no matter what. She taught us to be faithful to one another and to have faith in God. So I will draw no lines between the natural world and the religious, or supernatural, one. These lines, too, don’t exist for my family. My Mama talks to her santos. She prays for miracles and has witnessed some. My Uncle Johnny saw la Virgen de Guadalupe while surrounded by German troops in a foxhole during World War II.
My cousins, the Ruíz family in Phoenix, talk to la Virgen regularly. La Virgen has appeared to Estela Ruíz. She and her husband, Reyes, and their sons have turned their home in South Phoenix into a shrine. The shrine has become a site of international pilgrimage and doing her work has become their life. So — no lines. I will let my mother tell this story, as much as possible, and in order to understand it you will have to get rid of some of your preconceptions. In the literature of Spanish-speaking people, there is a tradition called magical realism. It recognizes that what is real is often quite different from what is true in a literal sense. This is the real story of my mother and my family. If, at times, it does not ring true to you, you must remember how it begins, in a field along the Gila River, in a place with no physical boundaries, to a family that recognizes no lines between cultures, no lines between past and present, no lines between the natural and the supernatural. It begins with a bolt of lightning.
I have brought my Mama to this field to begin telling the story. It is a hot July afternoon in 1999, with the monsoon clouds in the distance and the air crackling with electricity. Standing by the Gila River, Mama, Leonarda Bejarano Duarte, looks out onto pecan groves that once were fields of maize her father irrigated two months before she was born, 83 years ago. Immense cottonwoods and willow trees stretching more than 100 feet high line the banks of the river, which flows muddy brown from summer rains. The field is in Virden, N.M., which borders Duncan, Ariz. — a fertile valley where my Mama grew up toiling in the cotton fields for the patrones. Mama’s cousin and childhood friend, Cruz “Tita” García, 86, is here with her. Tita lives about two miles from this pecan grove. Tita has never left the small farming community where she and Mama, nicknamed Nala, played, worked, worshiped God and prayed to their santos. Tita lives in an adobe home in Virden she moved into in 1948 — a house she herself renovated, adding three rooms of adobe brick. This is a woman tough as my Mama. She stopped chopping firewood at age 84, at the insistence of her children. Her blood pressure was too high, they said. She shouldn’t be picking up the ax to chop logs. Her granddaughter now chops her firewood. It is that time in her life when children sometimes overrule their parents. Nala’s and Tita’s wrinkled faces show wisdom, and their eyes are filled with unending love. The two stand by the Gila River and look onto the grove and beyond where wild grasses, milo, chile, cotton, watermelon and alfalfa grow. The two women were raised to meet hard work under the sun, in the midst of the four winds. It has been their life. Toiling in fields from sunup to sundown and raising children of their own and children of others has earned them the hearts of many. They gaze at the pecan trees, standing under a sky spotted with white and deep-purple clouds. More rain is on its way to cleanse and give new birth to the valley. It is under those clouds that my Mama speaks of her father, Ambrosio Bejarano.
“He built a two-room adobe house about two miles from this river, near where Tita lives. The front room was very, very large, and that is where the children played, the family slept and the stories were told. “He owned a number of horses and carriages. He made sure there always was plenty of food in the house. He loved children. My older brothers and sisters would tell me about him. All I have of my father is their memories. “You see, I was born Sept. 18, 1916, and my father was already dead. He died in July when my Mama (Dolores) was seven months pregnant with me. “On the day he died, there was a chubasco, a sudden, violent storm with harsh wind and rain. He and his oldest son, Dimas, a son from a previous marriage, were working the fields. “The sky turned black and it started thundering, and lightning was all around. My father told Dimas they had to run for cover. They were running to a nearby cottonwood tree, which had an immense trunk that hollowed out and resembled a cave. But they never made it. As he neared the tree, a big bolt of lightning struck and hit my father. He fell and died in the field. “The force from the lightning bolt knocked Dimas to the ground. He tried to get close to help my father, but the electrical field from the lightning strike kept him away. He walked full circle before he could get close to the body. The bolt entered at his shoulder and came out his forehead. “He saw that his father was dead, and picked himself up and ran the same dirt road we traveled to get to this spot. “Dimas ran home to get the horse-drawn wagon so he could return the body. When he went to get the wagon, my mother saw him and figured ‘algo pasa’ (something is happening). Dimas drove off in the wagon, led by a galloping horse. My mother followed running, and then walking, and then running some more. “Dimas loaded the body onto the wagon and headed home, met by Mama on the road. The susto, the emotional, sudden fright, overtook Mama when she saw Papa dead. “News of Papa’s death spread like the winds in the community of about 300 people. The women said the susto Mama received naturally would affect the baby in her womb. That’s what the women said. “People believed those wives’ tales. So, when I was born, people all assumed I was dumb, slow. They assumed I would grow up stupid. That’s what they said.”
It is a belief that ends with me, and my brother and my cousins and my brother’s children, who have come to know Mama, tía, abuela, as a woman of strength and, yes, of wisdom.
Next: My Mama begins the tale of her idyllic, brief childhood, which ended when she was yanked from school and sent into the fields to pick cotton at age 8. In the beginning of this series, Mama and I will tell you the story of how my family created the first settlement along the Upper Gila River since the Mogollon vanished. Then, we will follow my family from field to mining camp, through Depression and war, through tragedy and triumph, and eventually to our life here, today, in Tucson.
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Ch. 1: Field of death
Ch. 18: The New Deal
Ch. 24: Cotton pickers and copper miners Ch. 27: The family doubles its size
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This dressing up of the dead in the imitation of santos, the Christ Child and apparitions of the Blessed Mother is a disappearing tradition among Mexican Roman Catholics. Not many in our family have done it, and Mama will probably be the last.
So it was. Dolores Villalba Bejarano gave birth two months later to my Mama, Leonarda, a child stigmatized from birth by a wrong and cruel belief — one her own mother held. For much of her life, Mama herself would embrace this belief — that she was “la burra.”