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Chapter 3: Trapped By FireBuilding lives, growing families
In 1882, Mama’s Tata Florentino brought his wife, Leonarda, and daughter, Petra, to settle along the Gila River in New Mexico in the new community of San Antonio. It would be called “Mexican Town” by a later wave of Anglo immigrants. San Antonio had been founded in 1876 by Cándido Telles. Telles arrived in the area from Mesilla, N.M., about 1860 to open a freighting business to supply the new mining town of Morenci.
By 1872, he had established the first water rights in the valley, building irrigation ditches to carry water from the Gila to his fields. Cándido Telles was the grandfather of Don Juanito Tellez, (the spelling of the name changed) who would become Mama’s stepfather, the second husband to her mother, Dolores. In San Antonio, along the Gila River, Tata Florentino bought about 10 acres and cleared it of immense cottonwoods — pulling the trunks and stumps with a team of horses. He built a two-room adobe home. He planted orchards of pears, peaches and plums. He bought cows for milk, cheese and butter. He bought pigs for breeding and slaughter. Nana Leonarda gave birth to Andrés, Dolores (my grandmother), Juana and Pablo. Another daughter, María, died at 16. In all, the couple lost nine children in El Norte. It was a time when women just gritted their teeth and gave birth with the help of their mothers or the neighborhood midwife. Complications brought death at birth to babies and the women who bore them. Small children succumbed easily to typhoid, scarlet fever and influenza epidemics. The strongest of the women and babies survived with herbal remedies and lots of prayers to God and the santos. A deep, unquestioning Roman Catholic faith sustained the 24 families in San Antonio, where an adobe chapel was built not long after Cándido founded the community. Its foundation is still visible, next to the family cemetery where Cándido and my other ancestors are buried. Cándido Telles had not come just to farm. He saw an opportunity to haul wagons and trailers packed with goods to the miners in Clifton and Morenci. He returned with copper ore, in wagons pulled by his teams of oxen, headed for Silver City, N.M., a major distribution point. The railroads would soon make his business obsolete, just as cash crops of potatoes and cotton would later make my family’s barter-based subsistence farming a relic of the past. The freighters put in long hours, day after day, hauling goods on winding dirt roads in the valley and up into the mountains, through hot summers, snowy winters and the blessed seasonal rains. They traveled lands that were home to Apaches, who weren’t totally herded onto reservations or shipped off to Florida and Oklahoma until 1886. Apache blood may have run in the veins of my maternal grandfather, Ambrosio Bejarano, whose father, Gorgonio, is believed to have been a Chiricahua Apache. So while my ancestral roots are in Chihuahua, my family long ago transplanted itself in El Norte, in this land that recently belonged to Mexico. Prosperity was promised to my family and equality was guaranteed, but promises are not always fulfilled and guarantees not always honored. Two years after my Mama’s birth, her widowed mother met and was courted by Juan Tellez, the grandson of San Antonio’s founder, Cándido Telles. Juan was fondly called Don Juanito. He was a respected, hard-working man whose heart softened when he was around young ones. His love for Dolores was sincere and large enough to encompass her five children and stepson, Dimas. When the couple married in 1918, they moved to Duncan, Ariz., about 12 miles downstream from San Antonio. The family lived close to the Gila River, in a wooden house flanked by farms owned by Sam Foster and the other patrones. They hired Mexican laborers to dig potatoes and pick fruit, vegetables and especially cotton, which required immense labor. The demand for cotton seemed insatiable during World War I. Arizona growers had to compete with mine owners for scarce labor.
Don Juanito was given the house and a share of the crops for his labor in the fields. On a winter morning soon after the family had moved to Duncan, my Mama’s oldest sister, Gumesinda, 11, began her daily chores at 4 a.m. First she placed logs into the heater to warm up the house. As all slept, Gumesinda entered the kitchen and began preparing breakfast for the family members who would make their way to the fields by 6. As Gumesinda prepared masa for tortillas, sparks from the overloaded heater set a corner of the house on fire. “Lumbre! Lumbre!” yelled Gumesinda. Dolores and Don Juanito jumped out of bed, gathered their children and ran outdoors. As flames quickly engulfed the sunbaked wood of the house, they realized that 2-year-old Nala, as my mother was nicknamed, was not among them. Don Juanito grabbed a blanket and ran inside the burning home, crying out Nala’s name. News of the fire traveled quickly to Virden where Nana Leonarda and Tata Florentino hitched horses to the buggy and rode furiously toward Duncan, a 12-mile trip that normally took about an hour and a half on the rutted dirt road. This time they whipped the horses. Nana Leonarda heard Nala was trapped in the fire. Next: Chapter 4: Faith takes root
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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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Ambrosio Bejarano