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Chapter 23: Coming to TucsonNala quickly feels at home in Tucson
Young Florentino Bejarano would, years later, drive his sister Leonarda Bejarano - Nala - from Greenlee County to a new life in that city of opportunity, Tucson. By Carmen Duarte The Arizona Daily Star When Nala, my Mama, left Duncan, she packed enough clothing to fill one suitcase and said her goodbyes to her sister Angela and her family. She said goodbye to Don Juanito, her loving stepfather. Even with graying hair, he was still the picture of a vaquero, sitting tall in the saddle on his horse, Filly.
Luckily, he had a good horse, which carried him safely home when he stumbled out of the bar of Duncan's Bonnie Heather Inn and climbed onto her back. It was tough for Nala to leave the Gila River. She had played in its waters and grown up toiling in the fields it watered. In this valley, she had cooked and cleaned and prayed and danced under the stars. Here she had buried her beloved Nana Leonarda and Tata Florentino. She would return for a couple of short visits and, more than a decade later, for the funeral of Don Juanito, whose body was found lying in the horse corral in 1965.
Nala stepped into her brother Florentino's Chevy and watched the fields of Greenlee County disappear in the rear-view mirror. A few hours later, she arrived in Tucson, where Florentino, an Army veteran, worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital on South Sixth Avenue. He hoped to get his sister on the hospital's payroll. It's the family story - lured by a dream again - this time the promise of a government job with a decent salary, benefits and pension. Nala believed what her brother told her without question. Tucson was a city of opportunity, a good life away from the fields. Florentino had just moved his family from a trailer into an adobe house that he'd built on the southern outskirts of town, east of South Sixth Avenue and north of the county fairgrounds, now the rodeo arena. The home had indoor plumbing - no more showering in tin tubs, no more sitting in an outhouse. Tucson in the early '50s was a dusty, sprawling little city on the move. The county population would double in this first decade after the war. The city, through growth and annexation of areas such as the one where my family lived, would more than quadruple its size, from 45,000 to 212,000 residents. My family lived among Mexican and Mexican-American families who also dreamed of better lives for themselves and their children. Most of the newer immigrants were from Sonora, but quite a few, like my family, hailed from Chihuahua. And there were a great many Tucsonenses, who could trace their families to a time when Arizona was a part of Mexico or even Spain.
Families slept outside on cots during the summer. Women washed clothing in tinas with boiling water and scrub boards. Many homes had outhouses. Adobes baked in the sun for future building projects. The aroma of tortillas rose from woodburning stoves in the back yards. Everybody spoke Spanish. Chickens cackled, roosters crowed and lively música ranchera filled the warm nights. Nala settled in among her relatives and neighbors - cotton pickers, miners and the blue-collar labor force of the local, state and federal governments. She felt instantly at home and began praying to God and Santa Elena de la Cruz, patron saint of workers, for a job, any job. Nala stayed with Florentino and his family for months. She helped her brother's wife, Mary, with her four children and two of Florentino's children from previous marriages, whose mothers had died. Nala filled her days making sure dishes were washed, the house was cleaned and the children were fed and bathed. She did not understand why Mary's children were treated better than the stepchildren. She was heartsick when she saw her young nephew, Rudy Bejarano, (who, decades later, would become a Tucson city councilman) eating from a garbage can. There was no need for that, and it ended when she was there. Florentino picked up applications for his sister from the veterans hospital and the Pima County General Hospital, both on South Sixth Avenue, and filled them out for her. Nala was admitted into a training program to become a dishwasher at the old county hospital. She was good at it, of course, and very fast. Her supervisor put her to work cleaning floors and the medical staff's lounge when she was done with her own duties. Another worker told her: ``You are doing too much, and they are taking advantage of you. Don't do it.'' ``I don't mind, because I like to stay busy,'' Nala replied. After a week's tryout, Nala went for a physical examination and waited to be hired. Weeks passed and Nala received no word. She returned to the cotton fields, where Florentino also labored when he was not working at the hospital.
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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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Arizona Historical Society photo
