A una anciana

Venga, madre— 
         su rebozo arrastra telaraña negra
         y sus enaguas le enredan los tobillos;
apoya el peso de sus años
en trémulo bastón y sus manos temblorosas
empujan sobre el mostrador centavos sudados.
¿Aún todavía ve, viejecita,
la jara de su aguja arrastrando colores?
         Las flores que borda
         con hilazas de a tres-por-diez
no se marchitan tan pronto como las hojas del tiempo.
         ¿Qué cosas recuerda?
Su boca parece constantemente saborear
los restos de años rellenos de miel.
         ¿Dónde están los hijos que parió?
¿Hablan ahora solamente inglés
y dicen que son hispanos?
         Sé que un día no vendrá
         a pedirme que le que escoja
         los matices que ya no puede ver.
Sé que esperaré en vano
         su bendición desdentada.
Miraré hacia la calle polvorienta
refrescada por alas de paloma
hasta que un chiquillo mugroso me jale de la manga
y me pregunte:
                                    — Señor, jau mach is dis? --

To an Old Woman

Come, mother— 
         your rebozo trails a black web
         and your hem catches on your heels,
you lean the burden of your years
on shaky cane, and palsied hand pushes
sweat-grimed pennies on the counter.
Can you still see, old woman,
the darting color-trailed needle of your trade?
         The flowers you embroider
         with three-for-a-dime threads
cannot fade as quickly as the leaves of time.
         What things do you remember?
Your mouth seems to be forever tasting
the residue of nectar hearted years.
Where are the sons you bore?
         Do they speak only English now
         and say they’re Spanish?
One day I know you will not come
and ask for me to pick
the colors you can no longer see.
         I know I’ll wait in vain
for your toothless benediction.
         I’ll look into the dusty street
         made cool by pigeons’ wings
until a dirty kid will nudge me and say:
                  “Señor, how mach ees thees?”
 
 — RAFAEL JESÚS GONZÁLEZ
© 2022 BY RAFAEL JESÚS GONZÁLEZ

Nací y me creé en El Paso, Texas con familia a través del Río Bravo en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua y la identidad se convertía cada vez más en un problema. El español era mi primera lengua y hasta los mediados de los 1960s cuando me convertí en chicano, era simplemente mexicano aunque sabía que era ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América. Aun hoy en día cuando se me pregunta, “¿Qué eres?” mi respuesta inmediata es “mexicano” aunque cuando estoy más alerta digo, “Chicano.” Aunque cuando se me pregunta, “Cual es tu ciudadanía” no titubeo en absoluto.
 
No aprendí inglés hasta los siete en la escuela pública Lamar y a principio no fue fácil. Ya leía y escribía básicamente en español y el sonido impredecible de las mismas letras en inglés me confundía. Estuve en la oscuridad la mayor parte del tiempo. Un día mi madre con mi hermanito me acompañó a la escuela y se fueron a casa de mis abuelos a unas cuadras de distancia. Me encontré en un patio de recreo totalmente vacío, las puertas de la escuela cerradas. Estuve aterrorizado. Caminé de regreso a una casa vacía. Me senté en el portal confundido, asustado, sólo hasta que mi madre y abuela vinieron con mi hermanito y me cubrieron de abrazos y besos. La maestra había anunciado un día de fiesta pero yo no había entendido.
 
No ayudaba que fuéramos castigados si se nos escuchaba hablar español en la aula, los corredores o el patio de recreo. Si le preguntábamos a un compañero de clase, “¿Qué dijo la maestra?” se nos hacía pararnos en un rincón o nos mantenían después de clase. Tengo la distinción de haber reprobado el primer grado. Sobresalía en dibujo y pintura y recuerdo a una amable maestra, la Sra. Hall en cuarto grado, que me elogió y animó. Pero el director recomendó que mis padres nos llevaran a mí y a mi hermano Arturo (dos años menor que yo) a la Escuela Bailey para niños “retrasados.”
 
Mi padre lo hizo y el director de la Escuela Bailey que no pudo habernos tenido allí más de treinta minutos, le dijo a mi padre que no pertenecíamos allí y recomendó que nos cambiara de escuela. Mis padres se endeudaron y compraron su primera y única casa para que pudiéramos cambiar de distritos e ir a la escuela pública Morehead donde nuestros problemas desaparecieron. (Dos maestras se destacan: la Sra. Patricia Robinson, maestra de arte que hablaba excelente español e invitaba a algunos estudiantes a su casa para dibujar y pintar. Y la Srta. Mary Hignett, maestra de inglés, con quien hice amigos en mis años universitarios hasta su muerte.)

Para entonces en 1950 me había ajustado, aculturado si quiere; no fui asimilado (lo que para mí tiene la connotación de ser masticado, tragado y digerido). Para mí, el lenguaje ha sido una piedra de toque de asimilación. El indio mexicano yo había sido asimilado hacía mucho tiempo; mi abuelo materno Papanito, don Diego González Sosa a excepción por su color y facciones y su decir que éramos indio no hablaba lengua indígena para indicarlo sino solo un castellano formal. El mexicano mestizo yo, no así. Fui bendecido con padres, Jesús Fidel González de Coahuila y Carmen González Prieto de Durango, (traídos a los EE.UU. a los 13 y 12 años respetivamente) quienes siempre insistieron en que habláramos y escribiéramos tanto en español como en inglés. Tomé cursos en español durante la escuela secundaria y me gradué de la universidad con un bachillerato en literatura inglesa con suficientes horas en literatura española para una doble especialización. En una ironía del destino, he pasado la mayor parte de mi vida como profesor de inglés en universidades y colegios.
 
Resistir la asimilación es una lucha, especialmente en un imperio que impone su hegemonía (militar, económica, política, lingüística, cultural) en el mundo. Toda mi vida he tenido que defender aun mi nombre. Personas que deberían saber más insisten en escribir Rafael, Raphael (la ph no existe en español), omitir los acentos en Jesús y González y escribir González con S. Y algunos han tenido el descaro de dirigirse a mí como Ralph, entre ellos S. I. Hayakawa, un lingüista japonés-canadiense, firme oponente a la educación bilingüe y fundador del movimiento “Solo Inglés” para hacer el inglés el idioma oficial de los Estados Unidos.
 
Por supuesto que la asimilación implica mucho más que el nombre y la lengua materna de uno. Las presiones para asimilarse son grandes en los EE.UU. y se logra grado a grado por lo que sea que uno emprenda: educación, profesión, activismo político, participación social. Pero, como con la conquista de las Américas, se debe resistir. La pregunta es, ¿en que medida? Para mí una línea de identidad que se debe respetar es mi nombre y mi lengua materna aunque reconozco que algunos de mis compatriotas chicanos que más se resisten a la asimilación se les dieron nombres en inglés al nacer y se les enseñó sólo inglés por padres ansiosos por asimilarse para tratar de salvar a sus hijos de la discriminación virulenta, el racismo, endémico de los EE.UU.
 
Dos razones principales por las que vine a la Bahía de San Francisco fueron su sistema de colegios comunitarios. En el Colegio Laney, Oakland donde enseñe durante treinta años, muchos de mis estudiantes hablaban español, ebonics (dialecto africano-estadounidense), cantonés, japonés, tagalo, pachuco, náhuatl, quechua, un idioma maya y otras lenguas demasiadas para listar. En mis clases siempre enfaticé que enseñaría inglés estándar, no como un sustituto del idioma o idiomas que ya conocían sino simplemente como uno más para agregar. En muchos lugares y situaciones, como en su hogar, barrios, iglesia, su lengua materna serviría excelentemente bien. Al mismo tiempo, en otros lugares como la academia, el trabajo, la política, el banco, el inglés estándar sería un instrumento para abrir puertas que de otro modo estarían cerradas para ell@s. Cuídense y eviten los falso dilemas, les decía a mis alumn@s. Cuando se me pregunta si quiero helado de vainilla o de chocolate, respondo que sí, por favor, tomaré de los dos.
 
La resistencia terca, a veces vehemente, a la educación bilingüe en los EE.UU. solía desconcertarme. Cada idioma es un mundo en una Tierra compartida, una forma particular de formar una realidad, una aventura de la consciencia humana. ¿Por qué negar a l@s niñ@s un segundo idioma a una edad en la que pueden aprenderlo tan fácilmente? ¿Por qué insistir en la ignorancia?
 
Ahora me desconcierta menos. El excepcionalismo, como el narcisismo, es una identidad frágil que no tolera la variedad, las comparaciones. Prefiere un mundo en su imagen, su propia marca de realidad, su hegemonía. El excepcionalismo insiste en la “pureza” de raza, de política, de religión, de cultura, de idioma, etc. Celoso de sus propias fronteras, el excepcionalismo no vacila en violar las de los demás. Insiste en la asimilación, o si no . . . Se podría decir que el idioma es el aspecto más importante de la identidad, no solo de la nación, sino a menudo de la clase social. El objetivo de impartir clases sólo en inglés estándar en las escuelas públicas es, por supuesto, la estandarización, la homogeneización y la asimilación que son requisitos del estado nación en el que el angloamericano se considera el estándar étnico.
 
No soy partidario del estado nación; prefiero mucho más el estado multinacional, y por mucho que haya resistencia a él, históricamente violenta y genocida, los Estados Unidos es en hecho tal. No soy nacionalista. Cuando se me pregunta mi ciudadanía, lo más probable es que ahora responda, “del mundo”. O Berkeley (destinado a fronteras, la línea divisora entre la ciudad de Berkeley y la ciudad de Oakland pasa justo por el medio de mi casa así que preparo el desayuno en Berkeley y lo como en Oakland.)
 
Soy habitante de frontera; crecí sin creer en las fronteras. Me gustan las diferencias, soy tolerante con la contradicción, cómodo con la paradoja. Me gustan las distinciones pero también me gusta la mezcla, la difusión, las sombras y los matices. Entendí cuando mi cliente la viejita me pedía hilaza matizada para sus bordados.
 
En cuanto a mi escritura, negarme a sacrificar mi español no menos que mi nombre, me hace heredero de dos musas, hermanas congeniales, y no abandonaré la una por la otra. Nunca sé cual me hablará primero pero en cuanto una me da un verso, una frase, la otra inmediatamente me da su equivalente en la otra lengua, un diálogo, una discusión que afecta a cada versión tal que casi todos mis poemas son piezas únicas en dos lenguas, ninguna versión de la otra. Los editores a menudo no entienden el bilingüismo y preguntan que versión es la traducción de la otra, cual debe estar en cursiva. Parece desconcertarlos cuando digo que ni la una o la otra. Y aun más cuando insisto en que tampoco las palabras solas en el cuerpo del texto.
 
También podría notar que aunque respeto la mezcla, también me gustan las distinciones y que escribo tanto en inglés estadounidense bastante estándar como en español mexicano bastante estándar, cada uno por separado y distinto. Temo que esto no solo habla de mi identidad sino también de mi enseñanza y quizás de mi clase. Así sea el chicano que soy.
 
Pero hay que responderle a la pregunta del chiquillo en mi poema: Demasiado mijo, mucho muy demasiado; too much, much, much too much. ​

by Rafael Jesús González

From my experience working there came my poem “A una anciana/To an Old Woman” in 1959. I had formed a bond with a regular customer, a very elderly woman who often consulted me about embroidery floss to match or complement the colors of her exquisite embroidery. Beyond that, the poem is a work of my imagination. She did not trail a rebozo nor trip on her hems, nor did she pay for her purchases with “sweat-grimed pennies.” She could see well enough and our discussions of colors were purely aesthetic. I embellished her image for my own purposes as a writer and imagined a situation which might or might not have been hers to present a problem that had (has) always concerned me: assimilation.
 
I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, with family across the Río Bravo in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and identity increasingly became a problem. Spanish was my first language and, until about the mid 1960s when I became Chicano, I was simply Mexican though I knew that I was a citizen of the United States of America. Even today, when I am asked, “What are you?” my immediate response is “Mexican” though when I am more alert, I will say, “Chicano.” Though when I am asked, “What is your citizenship?” I do not hesitate at all.
 
I did not learn English until I was seven at Lamar Public School and at first it was not easy. I was already doing some basic reading and writing in Spanish and the unpredictable sound of the same letters in English confused me. I was in the dark most of the time. One day my mother with my little brother walked me to school and went on to my grandparents’ house a few blocks away. I found myself in a totally empty playground, doors of the school closed. I was terrified. I walked back home to an empty house. I sat on the porch confused, afraid, lonely until my mother and grandmother came with my little brother and covered me with abrazos and kisses. A holiday had been announced by the teacher, but I had not understood.
 
It did not help that we were punished if we were heard speaking Spanish in the classroom, the halls, or the playground. If we asked a classmate, “¿Qué dijo la maestra?” we were made to stand in a corner or kept after school. I have the distinction of having failed first grade. I did excel in drawing and coloring and I recall a kind teacher Mrs. Hall in fourth grade who praised and encouraged me. But the principal recommended that my parents take me and my brother Arturo (two years younger that I) to Bailey School for “retarded” children.
 
My father did so and the principal at Bailey School who could not have kept us there more than thirty minutes or so, told my father that we did not belong there, and recommended that we change schools. My parents went into debt and bought their first and only house so that we could change districts and go to Morehead Public School where our problems vanished. (Two teachers stand out: Mrs. Patricia Robinson, art teacher, who spoke excellent Spanish and would invite a few students to her home on weekends to draw and paint. And Miss Mary Hignett, English teacher, with whom I became friends in my college years until her death.)

By then in 1950 I was adjusted, acculturated if you will; I was not assimilated (which to me has connoted being chewed, swallowed, and digested). For me, language has been a touchstone of assimilation. Mexican Indian me had long been assimilated; my maternal grandfather Papanito, don Diego González Sosa except for his color and features and his saying that we were indio spoke no indigenous language to indicate it, but only a formal castellano. Mexican mestizo me not so. I was blessed with parents, Jesús Fidel González of Coahuila and Carmen González Prieto of Durango (brought to the U.S. at 13 and 12, respectively), who always insisted that we speak and write both Spanish and English. I took Spanish courses throughout high school and graduated from college with a degree in English literature with enough hours in Spanish literature for a double major. In an irony of fate, I have spent most of my life as a professor of English in universities and colleges.
 
Resisting assimilation is a struggle, especially in an empire that imposes its hegemony (military, economic, political, linguistic, cultural) on the world. All my life I’ve had to defend even my name. Folk who should know better insist on spelling Rafael, Raphael (the ph does not exist in Spanish), leaving out the accents in Jesús and González, and spelling González with an S. And some have had the effrontery to address me as Ralph, among them S. I. Hayakawa, a Japanese-Canadian immigrant linguist, adamant opponent of bi-lingual education and founder of the English-only “U.S. English” movement to make English the official language of the United States.
 
Of course, assimilation involves much more than one’s name and one’s native tongue. The pressures to assimilate are great in the U.S. and it is accomplished by and to degrees by whatever one undertakes: schooling, profession, political activism—social involvement. But, as with the conquest of the Americas, it is to be resisted. The question is, to what degree. For me a line of identity to be respected is my name and my mother tongue though I recognize that some of my Chicanx compatriots most resisting assimilation were given English names at birth and taught only English by parents eager to assimilate to try to save their children from the virulent discrimination, racism, endemic to the U.S.
 
Two major reasons for my coming to San Francisco Bay were its community college system and the rich racial and ethnic variety of its people. At Laney College, Oakland where I taught for thirty years, many of my students spoke Spanish, Ebonics, Cantonese, Japanese, Tagalog, Pachuco, Nahuatl, Quechua, a Maya language, and other tongues too many to list. In my classes, I always emphasized that I would teach Standard English, not as a substitute for the language or languages they already knew but simply as another one to be added. In many places and situations such as in their home, ‘hoods, church, their native tongue would serve most excellently well. At the same time, in other places such as academia, work, politics, the bank, Standard English would be a tool to open doors otherwise closed to them. Beware of and avoid false dilemmas, I would say to my students. When asked if I wanted vanilla or chocolate ice-cream, I would reply, yes, please, I will have both.  
 
The mulish, sometimes vehement, resistance to bilingual education in the U.S. used to puzzle me. Each language is a world in a shared Earth, a particular way of shaping a reality, an adventure of human consciousness. Why deny children a second language at an age when they could so easily learn it? Why insist upon ignorance?
 
It now puzzles me less. Exceptionalism, like narcissism, is a fragile identity intolerant of variety, of comparisons. It prefers one world in its image, its own brand of reality, its hegemony. Exceptionalism insists on “purity” of race, politics, religion, culture, language, and so on. Jealous of its own borders, exceptionalism does not hesitate violating those of others. It insists on assimilation—or else. Language is arguably the single most important aspect of identity not only of nation but often of social class. The goal of teaching classes only in Standard English in public schools is of course standardization, homogenization, assimilation which are prerequisites of the nation state in which the Anglo-American is viewed as the ethnic standard.
 
I am not partisan of the nation state; I much prefer the multinational state, and much as there is resistance to it, historically violent and genocidal, the U.S. is in fact such. I am not a nationalist. When asked my citizenship, I would most likely now reply, “of the world.” Or Berkeley (destined to borders, the dividing line between the city of Berkeley and the city of Oakland runs right through the middle of my house so that I fix breakfast in Berkeley and eat it in Oakland).
 
I am a denizen of the border; I grew up disbelieving in borders. I like differences, am tolerant of contradiction, comfortable with paradox. I like distinctions but I also like the blending, the diffusion, shades and hues. I understood when my customer the old lady asked for hilaza matizada (variegated floss) for her embroidery.
 
As to my writing, my refusal to sacrifice my Spanish no less than my name, makes me heir to two muses, congenial sisters, and I will not forsake one for the other. I never know which will speak to me first, but as soon as one gives me a line, a phrase, a verse, the other will immediately give me its equivalent in the other tongue, a dialogue, a discussion that affects each version so that almost all of my poems are unique pieces in two tongues, neither version the translation of the other. Editors most often do not understand bilingualism and ask which version is the translation of the other, which should be set in italics. It seems to disconcert them when I say neither. And even more when I insist that neither should be individual words in the body of the text.
 
I might also note that though I respect blending, I also like distinctions and that I write in both fairly Standard U.S. English and fairly Standard Mexican Spanish, each separate and distinct. I am afraid that this not only speaks to my identity, but also to my schooling, and perhaps my class. Such be the Chicano I am.
 
But the kid in my poem “A una anciana/To an Old Woman” must be answered his question: Demasiado mijo, mucho muy demasiado; too much, much, much too much. ​

Previous publication credits:

To an Old Woman, González, Rafael Jesús. “To the Old Woman.” New Mexico Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, 1961
 
A una Anciana, González, Rafael Jesús, New Poets of the American West; Lowell Jaeger, Ed.; 2010, Many Voices Press.
 
Riffs on the Poem “A una anciana/To an Old Woman”, English Journal, Vol. III no. 5, May 2022, of the National Council of Teachers of English.
 
Riffs sobre el poema “A una anciana/To an Old Woman”, Uncommon Ground, Seigel, Shizue, Ed.; San Francisco, Pease Press, 2022​​

Rafael Jesús González, profesor de escritura creativa y literatura enseño en varias universidades antes de establecerse en el Colegio Laney en Oakland, California, donde fundó el Departamento de Estudios Mexicanos y Latinoamericanos en 1969. Cuatro veces postulado para el Premio Pushcart, Rafael fue honrado por sus escritos por el Concilio Nacional de Docentes de Inglés en 2003. Recibió un premio por logros de toda una vida César Chávez en 2013 y uno de la ciudad de Berkeley en 2015. Rafael es el primer Poeta Laureado de Berkeley. Visite rjgonzalez@mindspring.com. 

Rafael Jesús González, a professor of creative writing and literature, taught at several universities before he settled at Laney College in Oakland, California, where he founded the Department of Mexican and Latin American Studies in 1969. Four times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Rafael was honored for his writing by NCTE in 2003. He received a César Chávez Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 and one from the city of Berkeley, California, in 2015. Rafael is Berkeley’s first Poet Laureate. Visit rjgonzalez@mindspring.com.

by ​Elena Dolores Solano

Recently I made migas for breakfast.  I ripped the tortillas up and placed them in a cast iron pan of hot olive oil and cooked them until they were golden colored. There are a myriad of ways to make migas, a traditional Mexican dish. While the tortillas fried, I chopped onion, garlic and green pepper on an old cutting board mi mamá bought for me years ago.

After the tortillas were crispy, I added the vegetables. I sautéed them for a minute and then gently folded in the eggs and waited for them to cook, stirring the dish occasionally. The best corn tortillas are made from three ingredients, corn, lime and water, but when the lime is fried it lets off a peculiar smell of bitter tones. Eventually the smells of the green pepper and garlic catch up, and the mezcla, the mixture of flavors fills the air.

My mother taught me to cook that dish and many others. When we made migas, she handed me the bag of corn tortillas wrapped in paper and told me to rip them up. If the pieces were too big, she told me to rip them up smaller. If I cut them into pieces with a knife, she said, “No, no, no,” and shook her head. I eventually figured out what size she wanted for them. For some reason I was always determined to learn how to cook from her, so I let her tell me again and again what to do in the kitchen.

She believed in my ability to become a good cook. For her, being a “buena cocinera,” a “good cook,” as I often teased her, was important for many reasons. It meant you could take care of yourself. You could stock a pantry and fill your kitchen with homemade food.  

But her cooking was also tied to being a traditional Mejicana, where culture, faith, identity and being a woman, were also a mezcla. She was renowned for her cooking in our small barrio in Detroit. She constantly offered food to anyone who walked through her doors or sat on the stoop. I recall her making me take a full plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and corn to a homeless man who was sitting outside on the stairs to our building. At that moment I learned, not by words but by action, to serve others, to give freely, even when you have a large brood of your own to feed.
 
She cooked with her comadres, making menudo to sell after mass. They sold the menudo to raise money for flowers for the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. To her, cooking was second nature.  When I use her recipes, I sometimes look around the kitchen, as if she is here, waiting with a toalla, a kitchen towel, draped over her shoulder, waiting to eat. Cooking was a gift of love you gave to yourself and others.
 
I am eternally grateful that I learned to cook from her—and that she had the patience to put up with me. I remember being five years old, making tortillas with her. She let me roll small tortillas on her wooden board. She put them on the comal for me. I always let them burn. I loved the smell of the burnt masa. But more so, I loved her turning to me, saying, “You're fired, vayase.” I feigned resignation.

When I was in my twenties, she gave me several of her molcajetes, a tool made of smoothened volcanic stone. In English it is called a mortar and pestle, but there is so much more. It is a touchstone, a memory stone, a portal to the past. When I grind garlic, tomatoes or peppino in the heavy bowl, I feel deep calls to tradition and culture. 

I feel my mamá, her comadres, my abuela and tías when I use those molcajetes.  I am filled with memories that cause me to yearn for arms that are no longer here, to dial a phone number that no longer exists. I strain to hear a voice that has passed to the other side.  I yearn for the smell of her comal, fire—hot, ready for tortillas.

This longing is the hardest to bear. It is the call from the deep that causes such surprise. I know it well. I have seen it in the face of friends as they talk about husbands and wives, abuelos and abuelas, and friends now gone. I have heard that yearning in the voice of my siblings.

​Elena Dolores Solano was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.  She is one of fifteen children. Her parents were migrant workers who moved north in the 1940s.  She is a certified school counselor and works with Latino/a students in the public school system of Detroit.  She is also a Licensed Professional Counselor.   Ms. Solano  has written for many years of her experience growing up in a large Mexican American family in Detroit.  In her spare time Ms. Solano enjoys collecting anything old, a Solano family tradition, cooking Mexican food and spending time with her children, her family and friends.  

by Ricardo Romo

The seventies are remembered as a monumental decade for most Americans. In the early years of the decade President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade dominated the news. Earth Day, Godfather movies, and disco music fascinated young people. The advent of the computer revolution marked a major change in society.​

For Latinos, the decade included significant events as cities across the Southwest experienced school walkouts, and California farmworkers won important union and legislative policy victories. Talented youth introduced Chicano poetry, plays, and film, and universities developed Chicano Studies classes and programs. 
 
Chicano artists who grew up during the seventies witnessed great transformations as they saw for the first time a flowering of their own artistic cultural creations. Jacinto Guevara of San Antonio emerged as one of the fortunate individuals who rode the early waves of this artistic movement. His story provides some important insights into one of the most significant eras of Chicano artistic creativity.
 
From an early age Jacinto Guevara discovered that art represented an important means of communicating. Guevara came of age artistically during the early 1970s while attending Belmont High School in East Los Angeles. At the time, few Latinos went to museums but most grew up surrounded by commercial art, usually in the form of billboards and posters. Significantly the early expressions of Arte de La Raza appeared in public art. ​

Chicano art originated with the mural movement in California. Art historians place the birth of Chicano art between 1968-1973. Guevara was a teenager when Chicano artists painted a mural at the headquarters of Cesar Chavez’ United Farm Workers Union in Del Rey, California. Some of the earliest Chicano murals originated in the heart of East Los Angeles, in close proximity to Guevara’s home.
 
When Joe and John Gonzalez decided to convert an abandoned meat market into an art gallery, they recruited two future Chicano art stars, David Botello and their brother-in-law Ignacio Gomez, to paint what UCLA art historians have identified as the first public Chicano mural in East Los Angeles. Muralism became the most prominent creative development of Chicano art.
 
Guevara enrolled at California State University Northridge [CSUN] in 1975, a time when colleges throughout Southern California were reaching out to East Los Angeles students. Guevara had seldom gone to the San Fernando Valley, home of the Northridge campus, but he liked CSUN’s Chicano Studies Program which was in its sixth year. He majored in Ethnic Studies and took classes with famed Chicano historian Dr. Rudy Acuña. Guevara loved music and joined the mariachi band headed by Professor Beto Ruiz. Guevara became a frequent art and cartoon contributor to El Popo, the Chicano student newspaper founded in 1970. 

In 2016 Lewis Fisher published Saving San Antonio: The Preservation of a Heritage. It told a story of the San Antonio Conservation Society’s organized efforts to save historical houses from destruction. Guevara is also “saving San Antonio” through his paintings. His work captures the essence of the city, areas where not all the houses and buildings are spectacular, but they contain meaning and beauty for their owners. Guevara’s structural portraits, such as that of the 1880s building, “Liberty Bar,” which became a hangout for many Chicano artists, capture a heritage that makes San Antonio unique. ​

Ricardo Romo is an author, educator, and Latino Art connoisseur. He has degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (BA) and UCLA (PhD).

by Daniel Acosta, Jr.
  
                                               
Prologue

I grew up calling my grandmother—Cuca-- and my aunt--Babe--by their first names; I don't know why but Louie (Babe’s son) and I always did.  Babe was my mother's younger sister and Cuca was their mother.  Babe, Cuca, and my mother were very close.  They seemed like sisters.  Louie was named after our grandfather, Luís.  Louie was five years older than me and was the one who taught me about life.  My maternal grandparents did not have any sons; Louie and I were the boys in the family.  A good part of my early childhood was split between my parents' run-down rental home and Cuca's house, which seemed like a palace to me because it had a bathroom with a tub.  My parent's home finally got a stand-up shower when I started first grade because there was not enough room for a tub with a shower.  When I started first grade in the fall of 1951and until I completed the 4th grade, I remember spending many days and nights with Babe, Louie, and Cuca.  Papa Luís had died when I was very young, and I do not remember him. 

 
Cuca’s House

I really liked staying over at Cuca's house on Piedras Street.  From her front door we could see the dirt-brown Franklin Mountains looming in the distance.  Her house had a small front yard with a white picket fence and vines growing on the enclosed screen of the front porch.  There was an unpaved driveway to park the car and further down the driveway was a detached garage, which was used mainly for storage of old furniture.  Next to the garage was a wobbly gate that led to a tiny backyard with a peach tree and some scrubby bushes. The backyard was mostly dirt with a few, scattered patches of grass.  The house next to hers had a large backyard; a rickety wooden fence separated Cuca's house from the neighbor's yard. 
 
Over the fence I could see my parents' rental home on Hamilton Street, which was essentially two houses away if I wanted to take a shortcut by jumping over two fences.  Instead, I ran up the rocky alley between Hamilton and Idalia, which dead-ended on Piedras.  One could enter the house from the back by entering a half-door that that connected the unfinished part of the basement to another area with a locked door that was finished into a bedroom for Babe.  Outside of Babe's bedroom door was a small area where an old-time washer was located.  It had a wringer attached to the washer and once the clothes were washed, they were placed through the wringer and were wrung dry by physically rotating the handle of the wringer.  The clothes were sun-dried in the backyard on a small clothesline.  Right above the washer was a small basement window just small enough for a small boy like me to squeeze through, which I did a couple of times to get into the house.    
 
The other way to get into the house through the back was to walk up some shaky wooden steps to a door that opened into a small breakfast room and then to the kitchen.  At the top of the stairway was a small landing with a window on the side of the house where Cuca's bedroom could be seen.  Next to the breakfast room, off from the kitchen, was the bathroom, directly opposite Cuca's bedroom.  Leaving the kitchen there was an area I guess one would call the formal dining room, which had a dark mahogany table with six matching chairs.  From the dining area there was an arched opening which immediately became the living room, where there was an upright piano under the north window and a sofa next to the piano.  Later when I was older a large black and white television was purchased by Babe and Cuca.  We spent many nights watching professional wrestling and boxing matches.  I learned to recognize many of the fighters from Babe and one of my favorites was Sugar Ray Robinson.  We would keep the front door opened so a nice breeze from the west came through the screened front porch into the living room.   One could reach Babe's basement bedroom by going down a very narrow staircase which came off from the dining room.
 
During the winter months, Louie and I often slept together on the sofa in the living room; a large gas heater was in the dining area which was turned on in the early morning by Cuca so Louie and I could get warm before we had breakfast.  During the warmer months we slept downstairs with Babe in her large queen-size bed.  In the summer the basement was always much cooler than the rest of the house, and I liked the dampness and darkness of the basement, where I could read my comic books under a small lamp. 
 

Babe and Louie

What I remember most about Babe is the way she treated me, as if I were much older.  Babe, Louie, and I often watched the soap operas on TV during the summer months, and she would explain things to us about why so and so was divorcing her husband and who was stealing money from the company.  We all laughed when Babe got it right and gasped in horror when someone was killed in an accident without any warning.  When there was time in between the shows, I jumped up from the couch and ran down Piedras to Beacon’s grocery store to get her favorite drink--not the stubby Coke bottle but the long, thin Pepsi which was sold cold.  I also remember watching "A Tale of Two Cities" with Babe, and when the novel was required for my ninth-grade English class, I already had a good idea of the plot. Through Babe and TV, I learned much about how white people lived in America. I instinctively knew that we were different from the Anglos, but it was Babe who taught me to be proud of my Mexican heritage. 
 
With Louie’s guidance, I learned to play all the sports, especially baseball.  I was able to play with boys 4 or 5 years older than me and picked up many tricks on how to become a skilled ballplayer.   I became interested in organized Little League and Pony League baseball, playing first string as a centerfielder and shortstop for two different teams.  Babe, Louie, and her long-time boyfriend, Johnny, were the only ones in my family who saw me play baseball during the summer months.  Cuca called Johnny El Árabe; there was a large contingency of Lebanese families (but not really Arabians) living in El Paso.  I was not much of a hitter, but I played first string because I was the best defensive outfielder and shortstop on the team and made several outstanding plays each game.  They would be in the stands each night rooting for me.  After the games, we often walked down Piedras to eat out at two greasy spoons which were near Beacon's.  There were two bars directly opposite each other on Piedras—Jimmy's and Pike's--and both had small kitchens.  When we were in the mood for good tacos we ate at Pike's Bar and when we wanted great hamburgers we ate at Jimmy's.  We leisurely ate and listened to songs on the juke box that the bar customers had selected.  
 


Babe and the Authorities
 
One summer Babe decided to paint the interior of the house and she said let's go, Danny, and get some paint on Paisano Street, the supposedly dividing line between the Mexican and Anglo neighborhoods in El Paso.  Cuca's house was in Manhattan Heights where there were mixed neighborhoods of whites and Chicanos.  We got into her old 1950-something Ford Fairlane and took off.  Along the way she pointed out the differences in the neighborhoods and the types of people.  We both laughed when we saw a man turning left using both his blinking turn signal and sticking his arm straight out with fingers extended; Babe said he wanted us to know where he was really going.  On the way to the paint store, we were pulled over by a cop for not coming to a complete stop at an intersection.  Babe was very polite and smiled nicely at the policeman, who eventually gave her only a warning ticket.  Babe told me that it pays to be always friendly!
 
When my cousin Louie and I were both going to Rusk Elementary School in El Paso during the 1950s, I remember seeing Babe talking fast and excitedly about her son, Louie, to the principal and some teachers after school.  He had been reprimanded for speaking Spanish on school grounds during recess; it was a school rule that only English could be spoken at school.  It is a cliche to say now that Babe was a woman before her time.  I only wished I could have heard her take down the authorities for what they did to Louie.  A few days later she told me what happened, and broadly smiled that Louie would have no demerits on his school record. 
 
One night, when all three of us were sleeping in the basement bedroom of Cuca's house, I heard someone jump over the back gate and look through the bedroom window next to the gate entrance.  I nudged Babe and told her that I saw a man outside.  She jumped out of bed and took Louie and me to Cuca's back bedroom upstairs.  We sat on her bed while Babe called the police and made sure the doors were all locked.  It was fortunate that were two locked doors in the basement which made it difficult for the intruder to get into Babe’s bedroom.  However, while Babe and Cuca were in the front of the house, Louie and I heard steps on the back stairs.  When he reached the back door, we saw his profile against the moon light through the thin curtain of the window.  He banged on the back door to make it open but was unsuccessful.  He then ran down the steps because police sirens were now getting louder.  We heard him yell when he slipped and fell.  It was on that same bed that Cuca would often tell us stories of her life and family in Mexico.  We learned from her that David Siqueiros, the famous Mexican muralist, was a distant relative.  She smiled wickedly that he was a Comunista!
 
The last thing I remembered seeing was Babe in the living room calmly talking to the police about the intruder, who had fled the scene.  A few years later Louie told me that the intruder had recently been paroled from prison and made the mistake to try to break into Cuca's house. He had to go to jail again when he was caught by the police.  I also learned much later in life that he was Babe's former boyfriend. 
 
When I was in my fourth-grade class later that same year, our teacher, Mrs. Shlanta, gave an in-class assignment to write a personal story about our family, all within an hour of class time.  I thought quickly and decided to write about the intruder.  I titled the story, "The Burglar", to make it more interesting and which I could write about without much difficulty in one hour.  I left out the part of seeing the intruder a second time on the back stairs.  She was very impressed and asked if I was scared.  No, I said.  It was because Aunt Babe knew exactly what to do to keep the burglar out of the house.   Louie and I were really scared to see the intruder so close to us and to hear the banging on the door.  I guess we were so lucky that he did not get in. But I couldn't tell Mrs. Shlanta that.  I was given an A for the story.
 


Louie and Danny

Two years later our family had moved to another rental house, still on Hamilton Street, directly across from our first house.  Louie was now in high school and was driving a cool, light green Studebaker.  I did not spend as much time at Cuca's house as I used to, but I still went over to see Babe and Cuca after school.  Having a car and being a teenager, I did not see Louie as often.  But one evening around 10 PM my mother and I heard Louie knocking at our front door.  He was out of breath, and he told us that a Mexican gang from Chivas Town (several blocks west of Piedras near Alabama Street) was chasing after him.  He had left his car up the block on the corner of Piedras and Hamilton, next to Mr. Wicks' house.  We called Babe and she said for Louie to sneak over to the back yard, just a few houses from ours.  She would be waiting for him at the small basement half-door.  About an hour later, we heard police sirens and saw police cars parked near Mr. Wicks' side lawn.  My mother and I walked up the street and saw that Louie's old Studebaker front windshield had been completely smashed in with rocks and bricks.  Again, I saw Babe calmly talking to the police and asking them what would have happened to Louie if he had been in the car?  Louie was not at fault; the police had to go after the gang members.  That was my Tía Babe. 
 
The only gangs near my neighborhood were Mexican.  There were two Mexican gangs who fought mainly among themselves over territory and if you did not belong to either gang, you had to be careful about showing any preference for one gang over the other.  There were no white gangs at my school, and I never saw any whites trying to beat up Mexicans in my neighborhood.  Louie taught me to avoid any interactions with the Mexican gangs, unlike his run-ins with some of the gang members.  Seeing his front car window completely smashed on that summer night made a deep impression on me.  I kept a low profile at school and stayed away from gang members. It didn't hurt that I was known for being an A student, who academically outperformed many Anglos in the classroom.  The word in the street was to not hassle Danny.  However, there was a time when I had to intercede when some female Mexican gang members were trying to beat up an Anglo girl, who I knew in one of my classes.  This incident occurred as I was walking home after school down Piedras about a mile from Cuca's house.  Luckily for me none of the male gang members were around and I was able to convince the Mexican girls from hurting the white girl."
 
I was friendly with many of my Mexican classmates, and several of them advised me to not associate with the gringos and to keep my Mexican identity untainted.  But I wanted to be accepted by the more popular whites at school.   I tried out for the 8th grade football team and started as the first-string end, offensively and defensively, which gave me status with some of the white elites.  I began to walk a fine line between my white and Mexican classmates by trying to please both groups.  In the end, I had problems with my ability to accept my Mexican heritage and my desire to be part of the elite whites in school.  It was later in high school that I became proud of my Mexican background.  My deficiency in speaking fluent Spanish, like the rest of my Mexican friends, was beginning to be more difficult to hide from everyone
 
In my 8th grade Spanish class, our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Curry, complimented several of the Mexican students for their excellent pronunciation of Spanish words.  Because I was the straight A student in all my classes and recognized openly by many of my teachers, it became noticeable to several of the Anglo students that I was not highlighted for my proficiency in speaking Spanish.  An Anglo member of the football team in the class jokingly asked Mrs. Curry about my Spanish abilities.  There was dead silence in the class, except for a few giggles.  Mrs. Curry quickly started a new topic, and that started my decision to be less sociable with my classmates. Throughout my years at home and school I refused to speak Spanish.  I thought by being less Mexican I would be more accepted by my white classmates.  Of course, when I spoke in Spanish to my Mexican friends, it was terrible, and I was mocked for trying to be more Anglo.  Still, I had some good Mexican friends.  Many of my Anglo classmates attended Austin High School and were cordial and somewhat friendly, but I knew my secret was out and that I really did not belong entirely to any one group at school. 
 


Epilogue
 
By the time I was three, I had decided on my own to not speak Spanish at home or at school; I thought that I would be more accepted by my white neighborhood friends and classmates and by my teachers.  My parents would talk to me in Spanish and English and did not force me to respond in Spanish.  Babe never made me feel ashamed when she spoke Spanish to me and did not care if I responded in English.  She mainly spoke Spanish with me when she wanted to make an important point about some matter. 
 
I learned a lot from Babe:  she was a forthright woman, who was proud of her Mexican heritage and spoke out when confronted with discrimination and racism.  She had a long and good life, passing away when she was in her late eighties.  Louie became a captain in the El Paso Police Department. and later in his career, Chief of Police at El Paso Community College.  He received a letter of reference from Mr. Wicks when he first joined the department.

Daniel Acosta is a Mexican American born and raised in El Paso.  His grandparents emigrated to the US in the early 1900s. Daniel's parents never completed high school, and he was the first in his family to graduate from college.  He has a professional degree in pharmacy and a doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology.  Daniel's career spanned 45 years as an educator, scientist, and administrator in academia and the federal government.  He recently retired in Austin, and plans to write about his experiences with discrimination and bias during his career.   He hopes that he can help young minorities with their careers by writing about the barriers he encountered in academia, professional societies, and the federal government.  ​

​By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca and Iris D. Ruiz

My mama, Rosa Castillo-Diaz, was born in central Texas, in a small town called Penelope, nestled in Hill County, squarely between Waco and Dallas. Although she lived in Detroit most of her adult life, her heart belonged to Texas. She spoke of it in endearing terms, and proudly called herself a Tejana—a native Texan of Mexican descent. She visited family there regularly. When we shared a cup of coffee or went on long drives, she described Texas in great detail, the curves of the land, the scorching sun and the fields that stretched on forever.

I visited Penelope many times in my dreams. I flew there con mi mamasita. Hand in hand we went over rivers and streams, when the sun was shining and the moon was beaming. We never stopped flying, even when the wind blew, and rain came down hard and lightning bolts flashed around us. Our hands became one, and all the while she told me cuentitos, little stories of her motherland, stories of her childhood.

We finally arrived at the ranchito where she was born. We hovered over it, we were still in time and space, taking in the land that held her heart. She pointed out the details she talked about over the years.

There was the church where she was baptized, but it had been rebuilt since she was a child. There was the one road that ran through the center of town. Offshoots of the main road led to dirt roads that ran in various directions. There were fields and farms and row upon row of neatly planted crops. Gentle hills that were more like slopes rose from the earth, as if they were mountains that forgot to keep growing. And all around us was an endless blue sky and a sun that burned forever.

But this was all in my mind’s eye, in my heart, where I kept it hidden for years. I made a vow I would go to Penelope someday. Someday.

I visited Penelope several years ago. But I didn’t fly there as I had in my dreams. I was visiting friends in Austin and decided to take a daytrip to make this long awaited pilgrimage. My heart fluttered as I got into the rental car and studied a map of the area. I felt solemn. I didn’t know what I would find or what I was looking for; I only knew I needed to see this storied place.

I headed north on the freeway, and eventually passed Waco. We visited Waco regularly when I was a child. My parents packed us tight into a station wagon and made the trip to see my abuelo and tías and tios, and myriad of cousins. My abuelos took their children and settled there after leaving Mexico. I remember the thick heat of the air and old, clapboard houses, running in the sun and walking down to the river. As I drove past Waco, I felt my heart lurch, I wanted to stop and visit my cousins, but I was on a mission that day.

I followed the map and finally turned off the freeway. I drove down what felt like an eternity of long, endless roads. After what seemed hours of driving, I noticed a lonely sign on the side of the road that simply said ‘Penelope’, pointing in the direction of the town. Seeing the sign made my heart jump. This place that captured my mother’s heart was suddenly real. I pulled over and looked at that sign long and hard as if it were a message from Diosito or my mother. I continued driving and a few miles later another sign appeared. It simply said, Penelope 2.
​

My heart leapt again. I stopped the car and got out and stepped into what felt like an oven. The heat was suffocating, and my lungs felt like they were on fire. I took picture after picture, as if I were afraid the sign and the stories from my mother would somehow disappear, like fantasmas, ghosts, or a mean trick of my eyes.
The two miles stretched on forever.

But Penelope suddenly appeared, and it was indeed a ranchito, a small town, a spit town, a blink your eyes and it’s gone town. I drove slowly as I entered the outskirts of town. There appeared to be a main road that made a loop connecting back to the thoroughfare, which led in or out of town. I noticed the casitas, little houses, spread out through meandering streets. The yards were large and dry and spoke of hard work. Cars were propped on bricks and work rags hung on open hoods. Cactus and scrub brush grew everywhere, and just like my mother, everything here was neat and tidy.
I drove back around to the main road and out of town, and when I came to the end of it, I turned the car around and drove through it again. I can’t tell you how many times because I stopped counting.

My abuela, Nicasia, and my mother, Rosa, left Penelope shortly after her younger sisters died from diphtheria. My mother was six or seven at that time. We have one family photo of my mother’s sisters, my tías. It is a sepia tinted portrait of them in their wooden coffin. Their two small bodies are dressed in white, lace bonnets adorn their heads, tiny bows tied neatly under their chins. They rest side by side. They have the same cherub cheeks as my mother. Their angelic faces appear asleep when I look at them.

There was little to hold my abuela in Penelope after her daughters died. Other voices called her south and west. There was too much grief here, and the land too hard. There was cotton to be picked, fields to be harvested and pecans to be shelled, all outside of this ranchito.

The main pecan shelling factories were in or around San Antonio, and fields of cotton and farm work waited in the Waco area. But I still looked with hunger for any sign of her and my mama.

I took countless pictures of the roads, and as I headed out of town for the umpteenth time, I noticed several lonely abandoned buildings. I parked my car and stared at them, even after years of being forgotten, they were still tidy and impossibly sweet. I held my breath as I got out of the car and crossed the road. The hot air still took me by surprise.

There were two buildings and in between them was what might have been a courtyard, or another building. It was hard to know. The space now held a wild array of scrub brush and pines, reaching up between the buildings for the blue sky above. An old picket fence, long worn of any paint, held up a massive trumpet flower vine. Their orange color popped against the faded fence.

​One of the buildings was made from red brick, its bones still strong and in place. A large white sign painted on the facade gave away its lineage. It said, “Penelope Grocery.” Another building, short and squat, bustled up to the lot, it was whitewashed and padlocked, layers of white paint made for thick flakes from the bright sun.​

A wooden bench sat forlorn in front of the buildings, as if it was waiting for company. The head of a lion decorated the cast iron arms of each end. Clay flower pots full of cactus sat at attention in the mid-day heat. I walked up and down the swatch of sidewalk in front of the buildings, searching for my mama and abuela. Tenacious prickly pear cactus grew out of the concrete, bright yellow blossoms adorned them like golden crowns. The intense color of the flowers added to this already surreal scene.

My mother was always a surprise, while other parts of her were a mystery. Walking on the sidewalk where she may have walked with her mother, I should not have been surprised by the bright orange trumpet vines, the yellow flowers of the prickly pear cactus, the faded sign that said Penelope Grocery, and the lion’s head adorned bench—but I was. Somehow, all these details were her.

The day wore on. I spoke with the church secretary where my mother was baptized. She answered so many questions I had, as if she had the keys I had been looking for to open the doors of my mother’s past. She helped me to see my mother’s truth, and she told me where to look for the past.

I have a habit of taking rocks, large and small from trips I take. I picked up a rock as I left the church and put it in my pocket. It was late afternoon, and I decided to visit the cemetery the secretary talked about in detail. I got in the car and began to drive again. In front of me was another endless road, but just as I got to what felt like the edge of town, there on a cerrito, a gentle hill, was the cemetery.

I pulled in and sat in the car. I thought about how I had dreamed about this moment for so long. I closed my eyes and remembered the stories she told me about this place. I listened for her voice. Finally I got out slowly and walked to the edge of the cemetery, and the sun swallowed me whole.

I stood there and looked around me. There was sun everywhere, but this was not the kind, gentle Michigan sun that bows down and kisses the north during the summer months. This sun knew no kindness. It scorched the land around it. The blinding light and a cloudless baby blue sky went on for eternity.

Light gusts of wind came and went, but they too were filled with what I can only call an inferno. When I took a breath, I felt there was more fire than oxygen in the air. The burning heat penetrated my clothing, my skin, my soul. I thought surely this light must purge all sin, all darkness, all wrongness, and nothing can live here that is not true, or pure, because everything else has burned away.

A deep truth settled in my soul as I stood there looking out at this land that claimed my mother’s heart. I realized that every story, every word she ever told me was true, and that realization filled my bones, my marrow, my being. That truth felt like a convergence of angels, all meeting at the same time, in this ranchito where she was born.

This was the land she longed for, the quiet and stillness she craved filled the air around me. En la tierra que ella no puede olvidar. In the land she could not forget. I found her.

Stories swirled at my feet. There was no bitterness in her stories. There was only her truth. She and her mother and her sisters and brother ate lard, sprinkled with sugar or a pinch of salt to make it more palatable. Her mother spread the concoction on tortillas, there was no other food to eat.

Her mother, Nicasia, loved coffee. She sweetened it with a little sugar and watered down milk. Nicasia deliberately spilled it onto her saucer, so my mother could have a sip of that watered down, sweetened coffee.

Together they shelled pecans to perfection, because the pecans that were whole and unbroken sold for a higher price. They burned the shells to heat their one room shack. They boiled vats of water to do other people’s laundry. My abuela was a skilled artisan, she tatted and crocheted complex patterns from sight, it was one more way to earn money.

But it was the indignities or racism and poverty that hurt my mother the most. She was slapped for speaking Spanish, her mother tongue. She learned to swallow her voice. She never yelled or spoke loudly and she spoke English without a trace of Spanish. She never, ever, sang above a whisper. She was left handed, but that was also not allowed. There was the teacher who would not touch her hair, but used a stick off the ground to look for piojos, the dreaded lice on her head.

She longed for her sisters who died from diphtheria. Their small bodies dressed in white, were laid in a simple wood casket. But the Mexicans were not allowed to be buried in the cemetery, according to the church secretary. The Mexicans buried their dead in fields, close to their homes, alone and unmarked, on the rancho.

As I stood there and looked at that sky and felt that harsh sun, I could see all the stories come down at once to where I stood, like a communion of saints. All those ghosts and echoes from the past were all there in town, going about their lives as best they could. I could see them, cooking and cleaning, picking cotton, going to la misa, mass, boiling water for laundry and sewing, and looking for a way to stave off the hunger that haunted them at times. It was all there.

Standing in the scorching air that seemed void of any oxygen, I felt a mixture of emotions. Parts of me felt gears that had been missing were suddenly in place, while other parts felt devastated by the truths of my mother’s words. I felt a loss for my tías and abuela, but also I felt whole and filled up. I felt anger for the shame my mother carried for being Mejicana and poor. But I also felt an incredible pride to be the daughter of a Tejana, that odd breed of toughness, hard-work, and sweetness. I felt proud of this little ranchito where prickly pear cactus and trumpet vines blossomed in the most random places, and the neatness of a community prevailed.

I felt a deep gratitude for my abuela y mama. Adversity was a given, but tenacity and grace were a gift. My mother loved flowers and anything that was beautiful. My abuela was an artisan whose incredible tatting and lace-work were worthy of being framed. Both of these women were smart and resourceful. They didn’t just make do, they made beauty where there was none. They brought life to the darkest of corners, and created a legacy that continues to grow and blossom. I come from strong Mejicana-Tejana women.

We are drawn to our pasts planted by our antepasados, our ancestors. Their words and stories are passed on generation after generation. Our abuelos and abuelas call out to us over time and space to listen to stories told and untold. Their stories become our story, embedded in who we are, their traits become our traits. What draws us home are those people who didn’t give up, their ghosts follow us now, cheering us on.
​
I looked at that cloudless baby blue sky and knew every word mi mamacita told me was true and I smiled. My heart was glad with a bittersweetness that tasted of her cafecito--con un tantito de leche, y un poquito de azúcar--her strong coffee, softened with a drop of milk and sweetened with a bit of sugar. ​

​Elena Dolores Solano was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She is one of fifteen children. Her parents were migrant workers who moved north in the 1940s. She is a certified school counselor and works with Latino/a students in the public school system of Detroit. She is also a Licensed Professional Counselor. Ms. Solano has written for many years of her experience growing up in a large Mexican American family in Detroit. In her spare time Ms. Solano enjoys collecting anything old, a Solano family tradition, cooking Mexican food and spending time with her children, her family and friends.  

​PREFACE
From page 3

Joaquín Murrieta was a typical young man who had ridden up from Sonora, Mexico, in 1850 to join friends and family already in the Sierra foothills searching for gold in their streams and rivers. When the clamor arose because Americanos had found nuggets up near Sacramento, his life and those of other Mexicanos changed radically, in fact, the history of the west took a hard turn toward violence and greed because of the yellow metal.

Mexicano men and women, who were already experienced placer miners from their home state of Sonora, were attacked, forced off their claims, and either run off or killed. Murrieta’s wife, Carmelita, was violated and murdered by White marauders; his brother also killed. Joaquín, a peaceful man swore to avenge these deaths; further, he vowed to return control of California to Mexico -the state had also been stolen in the U.S. war against Mexico between 1846 and 1848.

Murrieta did not succeed, but he neither surrendered nor fell victim to White posses assembled by the state government to hunt him and his followers to ground. This book tells the story as his descendants have known it and passed it down through several generations. This is the story of the Murrieta as much as of Joaquín, their standard bearer.

Herein, they set out their oral history backed up by evidence from a few records that have survived and physical places that remain despite the ravages of time, which are known to Murrieta’s descendants. Together, they show that, rather than the self-serving legend promoted by newspapers and story-tellers in behalf of the people who had feared and hated him, Joaquín Murrieta died peacefully and in one piece in Cucurpe near his ancestral home in Sonora.

¡Que viva Joaquín Murrieta!
                                                            Armando Rendón, Author of Chicano Manifesto
 
FOREWORD
From page 4 

Joaquín  Murrieta is a man whose story has deeply influenced the conscience of those who are fighting for social justice. It was first told in the 1850s by a Cherokee Indian writing as John Rollins Ridge. He wrote about a Mexican immigrant miner who came to California during the gold rush only to encounter a racist violence that killed his brother and his wife.

In revenge he along with a small band of compatriots set out to punish the aggressors and in the process he became a symbol of the resistance of Mexicanos against the Anglo American takeover of their lands and the attacks on their culture. The first Chicano film in 1969 was entitled "I Am Joaquín" drawn from a poem inspired by Joaquín 's resistance movement. The Chicano movement drew from the iconic story of Joaquín  to inspire young people to value their history and draw from it a spirit of resistance. Outside the U.S. revolutionary thinkers took Joaquín  Murrieta as a symbol of their struggle against American imperialism. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote an epic poem about Joaquín  portraying him as a countryman.

Alfredo Acosta Figueroa has written an entirely new history of Joaquín , one that draws on the memories and documents of his family and Joaquín 's descendants. This history is deeply personal. We learn details that have never before been published. Joaquín 's birthplace, family, home in Trincheras Sonora, his returns to Mexico and death from old age in his homeland are all well documented. We have proof that he passed through San Juan Capistrano in 1865 and lived in Tecate in the 1870's. Murrieta was not killed by the California Rangers as claimed in the histories. His story continued to inspire. Don Alfredo documents how Mexicanos and Chicanos have been jailed just for daring to sing the Corrido of Joaquín  Murrieta. The legacy and truth of Joaquín  continues through the International Association of Descendants of Joaquín  Murrieta. Annually they commemorate Joaquín  at events in Mexico and the U.S.

This book tells the truth about Joaquín  Murrieta as recalled by his family and descendants. As such it is an important contribution to the struggles of Chicanos to be liberated from a colonial past that has been manufactured by films, novels, and textbooks. We all owe Don Alfredo a debt for having the energy and spirit to continue La Lucha.

Ricardo Griswold del Castillo , Professor Emeritus, Chicana and Chicano Studies, San Diego State University, Author of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo A Legacy of Conflict
 
CALIFORNIA RANGERS IN PURSUIT OF JOAQUÍN MURRIETA
From pages 19-21

The California Rangers’ main purpose was to capture Joaquín Murrieta dead or alive and offered a reward of $1,000 to anyone who would bring them his head. Joaquín Murrieta was never identified by the authorities, arrested or jailed, but he was tried in absentia, however, and sentenced to death.   

Recruited to lead the California Rangers was the notorious Captain Harry Love, a veteran of the U.S.-Mexican war. His hostility toward Mexicans was well known. The respected newspaper, Alta Californian, commented that a license for mayhem had just been issued to Love’s Rangers, an opportunity to plunder into Mexico. Many people who knew Love, considered him to be nothing more than a treacherous, cruel murderer. Love’s motto was, “A good Mexican is a dead Mexican.” No Mexican was safe at the placer mine or on the lonely roads. It was open season on Mexicans. Most atrocities committed against Mexicans were done so by mobs of angry and hostile Anglo miners, escalated by the Rangers. Most of the California Rangers who were recruited were veterans of the Mexico-United States War and were regarded as adventurers and anti-Mexican. Ranger Bill Byrnes admitted that he allegedly joined a company that went hunting for Apache scalps in Chihuahua for a $50 bounty. Most Mexicans were indigenous and there was very little, if any distinction made by the Rangers.

The California Rangers ended up committing a crime spree of their own, illegally confiscating property from Mexicans and Californios, shooting them or hanging them in their pursuit. “The California Rangers were killers, and professional bounty hunters who had a history of violence.” (The Real Joaquín  Murrieta Robin Hood Hero or Gold Rush Gangster? by Remi Nadeau, 1992).

After three months of pursuing Joaquín Murrieta, Harry Love and his Rangers came upon a group of Mexican vaqueros at Arroyo Cantua. By then, Love’s Rangers were getting restless and discouraged with their $150 monthly pay. They were tired, hot and frustrated because they could not find Joaquín Murrieta. Harry Love, feared that because their three- month contract was nearly up, his Rangers would quit on him, so he decided to make his move on the Mexican vaqueros at Arroyo Cantua.

Eventually, each Ranger would give his own interpretation of what really took place during the ambush at Arroyo Cantua. Harry Love and his Rangers came upon Arroyo Cantua, a wash at the base of what is called Joaquín Rocks on Joaquín Ridge, which had three boulders overlooking the vast Western San Joaquín Valley. One version is that when Love and his men came upon the Mexicans, they presumed the men belonged to Murrieta’s band, led by Jesús Feliz, Joaquín’s brother-in-law.

Love’s version is that he and his men found 70-80 Mexicans tending a herd of 700-800 horses and when they approached the group, the Mexicans made no objections. Love, seeing that he was outnumbered, did not attempt to risk their lives in pursuing his investigation. Love and his men left.

​
In the San Joaquín  Valley, in Northern Calfornia, the Joaquín Murrieta Cavalcade is held annually at Three Rocks and Arroyo Cantua, to remember the atrocities committed by the California Rangers led by Harry Love's ambush on the four horsemen at Arroyo Cantua on July 25, 1853; presumably one of them being Joaquín Murrieta.

According to the Stockton newspaper, the Mexicans and horses left camp overnight and when the Rangers arrived the following day, the camp had been deserted.
At the crack of dawn, approximately three miles east of Arroyo Cantua, they saw a plume of smoke. There were 6-8 Mexicans that had just arrived at the camps. Love saw he had the upper hand. Love and his men ambushed the Mexican camp. Most of the Mexicans were sleeping. A Mexican reached for his gun on his horse but was stopped by a ranger’s shotgun. They gathered the Mexicans and Bill Byrnes who was the only Ranger to have presumably known Murrieta rode up and shouted, “This is Joaquín Murrieta, boys! We got him at last.” The Mexicans threw back their sarapes and fired their revolvers, shooting as they ran. Two Mexicans fell dead and a three-fingered man was shot 9 times.

Finally, Bill Byrnes rode up and gave him the coup de grâce with a shot to his head.
During the melee, the leader of the band leaped bareback onto his horse and galloped onto the banks of Cantua Creek’s dry bed, a drop of approximately 14 or more feet. The rider was knocked down, but he leaped again onto his horse and kept going down the creek bed. According to William T. Henderson, he also jumped the bank of the creek and pursued the horseman, shooting the leg of the horse.

Another Ranger was following along the bank and was able to shoot the Mexican that was running down the creek. When the Rangers got close to the Mexican, the Mexican began to plead with them, in Spanish, “Don’t shoot me anymore.” When the other Rangers arrived at the scene, they immediately riddled his body with bullets.

It is said that after the ambush by the Rangers at Arroyo Cantua, they cut the head of whom they presumed to be Joaquín  Murrieta. The Rangers also cut the hand off of the three-fingered man, called El Yaqui Tres Dedos. Again, the head was falsely identified as that of Joaquín Murrieta. Antonio Lopez and Jose Maria Ochoa were apprehended and taken prisoners to Fort Miller, northeast of Fresno. According to the newspapers who speculated about the information on Joaquín  Murrieta, Antonio Lopez drowned when they were crossing a slough. The olla with El Yaqui Tres Dedos, the three-fingered hand, was thrown away because it was quickly deteriorating. The head was put in an olla of whiskey. Jose Maria Ochoa betrayed his countrymen when he identified the head as being that of Joaquín Murrieta.

After the State paid Love a $1,000 reward, he was given an additional $5,000 for his patriotic duty. After the rangers presented their trophies to the authorities, the question arose: Was it the head of Joaquín Murrieta or was it the head of a Mexican who happened to be at Arroyo Cantua? The Alta California reported a group of Mexicans in Los Angeles who claimed they were attacked by a group of “gringos,” but they had escaped.

Four were killed, one of them being Joaquín Valenzuela. His head had been cut off for a trophy. Joaquín Valenzuela was one of the five Joaquín 's active at the time. It was not the head of Joaquín Murrieta. Bill Byrnes, the Ranger that presumably knew Joaquín Murrieta, said: “One pickled head is as good as any other, if there was a scar on the face and no one knew the difference.”
​

​Alfredo Acosta Figueroa was born in Blythe, California, in 1934 and still lives there He represents five generations of Indigenous-Xicano heritage from the Colorado River Reservation, which encompasses the Palo Verde/Parker Valleys. At one time, his family was the only one around with origins in mining during the La Paz, Arizona-Colorado River Gold Rush in 1862. Growing up, he heard stories of his great, great grandmother, Teodosia Martinez, a cousin of Joaquín Murrieta. At family gatherings, they would play “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta;” Alfredo learned the song and when he took up the guitar at 12 years of age, learned to play it. In 1986, Murrieta’s descendants met in Blythe to found the International Association of Descendants of Joaquín Murrieta. On October 23, 1988, Alfredo organized the first Caravana del Recuerdo in Murrieta’s honor in Trincheras, Sonora, Joaquín’s birthplace.
 

Last month I turned 77 or as a friend put it, I got another chance to go around the sun.
I remember when at a younger age, I used to downplay the importance of birthdays calling them “just like any other day” until I heard someone say “maybe to you is just like any other day but tell that to your mom who carried you for 9 months and see how she feels.” 

As a man, I will never know the pain or experience of life conception or delivery but as a personal reflection, I know the excruciating pain of coming back to life after a ten-day coma due to an open-heart surgery I underwent in 2012.  

I remember how, after coming out of a 10-day coma my entire body was in shock and frankly I couldn’t tell what hurt and what didn’t, what parts of my body work and what didn’t, but as time went on, my body started to react to the intervention and pain and discomfort set in big time. My mouth felt totally destroyed due to the tube inserted in my throat to keep me alive. My torso had very limited ability to move if at all, my left hand was swollen due to a blood-clot, my restroom necessities were regulated by machines I didn’t even know I was plugged to. Frankly I do not remember ever feeling so vulnerable and afraid as the week I spent in the hospital after the operation. As the pain and discomfort grew so did the realization of the state I was in.

This enlightening came to me one night during dinner when my wife said it was my anniversary. I didn’t know what she was referring to so she went on to say “a day like today is when you went through the operation.” To which I responded, “so today is my birthday.” She replied “no, that’s in January.” My reasoning was that if I died and came back to life in February 7th, on that day I should celebrate my second birthday.

​Coronel was an older man severely traumatized due to his imprisonment and being far away from his family and in a strange place where he was hardly able to communicate didn’t make things any easier. We became good friends, took him out for drinks and tours, treated him with respect, and asked for his input in the radio project. That seemed to be an effective therapy since soon enough he’d be singing, telling jokes and so on. This one time the whole radio team was invited to attend a community radio broadcasters conference in New Mexico so we drove from Bakersfield to Albuquerque. After a long trip we decided to go out and celebrate so we got ready for a long night out. I remember going by Coronel’s room to pick him up but he said he didn’t want to go. I insisted every way I could and he finally said he couldn’t go because that day was his birthday to which I exclaimed “What? the better the reason brother, it’s time to party.”

Constantino replied “No, you don’t understand, it’s my second birthday,” and with tears in his eyes he said that during his imprisonment he was tortured and regularly beaten by several guards, and when he passed out, they would wake him up with a bucket of water and continue with the beatings.

This one day, he said, he was being tortured by two guards, naked and soaking wet on the floor and he just wanted to die. When the guards went out of the room for a smoke break, he reached out for a metal wire that looked like a large paper clip and with his feet and hands tied he crawled towards an electricity outlet and with extreme difficulty he tried to insert the wires into the outlet in an effort to commit suicide. At that, the guards came back in and pulling him away continued with the beatings. “I should have died that day” he said “but I didn’t, that’s why I called it my second birthday.”

During our time together, we learned a lot from him. Perhaps the best lesson was that while there is life there is hope. Coronel eventually returned to his country where he enjoys his family and continues to inspire new generations of activists.  ​

​This memoir first appeared in Democracy Chronicles, February 14, 2021.

​—Josefa, in her own defense, Downieville, July 5, 1851

These words spoken by a Mexican woman on trial for murder at the height of the California Gold Rush jumped out at me when I first read them in a newspaper dated 1851. Who was this woman who spoke in public so calmly yet forcefully, and for whom the only name we have is Josefa? The tragic circumstances of her death obsessed me for weeks, till finally, one summer day I drove out from San Francisco to visit the Mother Lode country, La Veta Madre, as the mexicanos called it, the site of this story. I crossed over the San Mateo Bridge and over the Altamont pass, then through Tracy, headed for Stockton. But way before driving out of San Francisco, I too, in my own way, had become obsessed with gold. What role does it play in my memory? All the history books praise the forty-niners, but I don’t like them or their history (I don’t even like the football team named after them). I am a victim of their arrival: the forty-niners displaced and murdered those who were already here—the Native Americans and the Californios. My Gold Rush heritage is that Chicanos are now foreigners in their own land. Yet at the start of the Gold Rush we claimed the land with our names: Hornitos, Sonora, Mariposa—names that still survive, especially in the heart of gold country.

As I drive east, I think of the events of that day in 1851, in a now insignificant town at the end of Highway 49. Of all the stories of the Gold Rush, of incredible fortunes made and lost overnight, of violent deaths that occurred in the goldfields with boring repetition, Josefa’s is the one that matters most to me, the one I choose to recover from the dustbins of history. It is a story of drunken vigilantes and ignoble patriots, and of men who stood by while a woman was lynched, and those stories are never pretty. I often ask myself what I might have done that day in Downieville. I sometimes imagine myself the hero, rushing to Josefa’s rescue wielding a shotgun, and then taking her away on my horse. But I don’t know for sure; I might have just closed my eyes, not wanting to see. Her violent death is an open wound in my memory, and yet I cannot right the wrong done to her. Perhaps the only thing I can do is recover her story, restore to her a sense of human dignity. And by telling the story, vindicate all good women and men, including myself, because if good people allow evil to go unchallenged, even if it’s an incident a hundred and fifty years old, our perceptions and attitudes of race and gender, of right and wrong, become entrenched, sometimes forever.

A casual conversation with a friend in a Mission District café, one of those conversations fueled by coffee and cigarettes, started me on this road. Had I ever heard of the Mexican woman who was lynched during the Gold Rush? I had always thought lynching occurred only in the South, to black people. I didn’t know that Mexicans were lynched in California, much less that it was a common occurrence during the Gold Rush. Our conversation drifted to other topics, and I forgot about the story. But in the coming days, at the oddest moments, I’d find myself thinking about this woman. Something about the incident infuriated me. Why was she just a mere footnote, even in Chicano history, especially when her courage is an example for all of us? Were the forty-niners really so immoral and ruthless as to have lynched a woman? Or was this just a myth, another made-up story, like the one about James Marshall’s first nugget, that had now passed into the realm of “history”? But the more I followed her trail, in microfilm newspaper accounts and journals written by eyewitnesses, the more her story seemed authentic, and not just authentic, it seemed to encapsulate the story of all Chicanos in the Gold Rush. How we were pushed aside, driven out, murdered, and lynched, and how then even our names and graves were erased from the face of the earth, so as to leave not a trace that we had been here.
​
As I drive out to the Sierras, with the back seat of my car stacked with books, pamphlets, and photocopied newspapers from 1851, I already know that killing a Mexican during the Gold Rush years was common enough, but what the forty-niners did to Josefa is the bone in the throat of California history.

​• • •

The Sierra Nevada, the matrix of the gold country, is an impressive range of burned-out volcanoes whose ice-fed streams carve the gorges and canyons of the foothills and, like a benevolent regent, nurture the San Joaquin Valley and all the main rivers in the state. It is in the Sierra Nevada that gold was created millions of years ago. The creation of gold is a metamorphic process: gold rises from deep in the earth in liquid form, usually mingled with quartz; as the gold cools it crystallizes, producing exotic filigrees embedded in the rock. The quartz, with the gold still in it, is grouted into the cracks of mountains, forming what are called veins. Some veins run for miles under the earth, others are mere pencil lines. If you know this about gold, you know where to find it. Find the quartz veins and the gold will be in it. The other place gold is found is in riverbeds. As erosion wears away the mountains, the gold, sometimes still in its quartz matrix, is washed into the gorges, where the quartz is pummeled and scraped off by the rushing rivers coming down from the mountains. Eventually, the river wears away the quartz, and what’s left is the gold, a heavy, dense metal that settles at the bottom of the creek or river. The metal has different forms: flake, nugget, sponge, wire—the latter being the rarest. Gold will not tarnish, fade, or wear out; it will lie in the heart of the mountain or in a creek bottom until a human hand picks it up.

Native Americans didn’t care for gold. It had no value to them. None. They valued gypsum and amethyst for jewelry, serpentine for charm stones. They adored abalone shell, polishing it to a bright mother of pearl, and feathers of different types of birds: condors, eagles, hawks, and hummingbirds. Once the forty-niners invaded the region, Native Americans did work in the goldfields, sometimes for wages; other times they bartered the gold for needed supplies. The Californios blew hot and cold about gold. It’s an old story in Chicano history that in 1842, in a canyon behind Mission San Fernando, Francisco López sat down to eat his lunch, pulled out a wild onion growing alongside the creek, and discovered clinging to the roots--¡Oro! Gold, compadre! His lucky find inspired some miners to trek north from Sonora, Mexico. They worked for a while around the area where López had found gold, now named Placerita Canyon, and then lost interest in the project and moved on, south to Los Angeles or north to Monterey. Another Mexicano, Pablo Gutiérrez, found gold in the Bear River of Northern California in March 1844, but he was unable to procure a batea for panning, so nothing came of it. The Californios who came to the goldfields in 1848 were casual miners; many were established rancheros, like Antonio Franco Coronel, who left as the troubles escalated, disgusted with the violence and the murders.

The forty-niners, on the other hand, hungered for gold with a sickness. They even described it as “gold fever.” They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, everything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky, smelly ships to reach California; others, captains and sailors, jumped ship at San Francisco, leaving a fleet of abandoned brigs, barks, and schooners to rot by the piers. They slaughtered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn’t survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer. The miners cheated and killed each other in the goldfields. The newspaper accounts of the day are filled with their bloody deeds and grizzly frontier justice, or maybe it should be called injustice. And in 1851, after an all-day celebration for the Fourth of July, a mob of forty-niners unleashed all their venom and hatred on a Mexican woman.

Several things disturbed me about this incident when I first read about it: the misogynist and racial implications, as well as the absence of a last name for Josefa. I, who was obsessed with names, who could spend days in sterile archives searching for even a minute reference to a Lugo, Olivas, or Murguía, suddenly found myself faced with one specific person who had no full name. In general, when writing about violence toward Amerindians or Mexicans, Western historiographers tend to use incomplete names, usually just the first name or a generic one, like “José,” as if the individual didn’t matter. It made me realize that it is not names and bloodlines that hold clans together, but rather their shared experience.

The eyewitness account published in The Steamer Pacific Star dated July 15, 1851, lists the full names of the judge, the jury, the witnesses—all of them white males—and four names for the victim, also white, a first name, a middle name, and two last names. Yet with Josefa, not even the reporter who was present records her last name, nor does it appear in any of the forty-niner journals that describe the event. Sure, no one takes notes at a lynching, but there was a pretense of a trial, with a judge and jury sworn in. All the accounts state that she testified in her own defense, and, therefore, must have been sworn in too. So what happened that her last name was never recorded, an important detail in any judicial hearing, even at a kangaroo court? Didn’t anyone ask “What’s your full name?”

Without a doubt, the California Gold Rush is the most written about event in the West. Yet not a single historian has questioned why Josefa has no last name. It seems that a Mexican woman in the goldfields was insignificant, not even worthy of a last name, just another “greaser.” And then, over the course of many decades, historians like Hubert Howe Bancroft changed her name to fit the stereotypical Mexican image: she is now referred to as “Juanita of Downieville,” which just adds insult to injury. In some accounts she’s even called “Juanita, the Spanish woman.” So even her single name and her nationality have been distorted.

At other times, Josefa is portrayed in all sorts of romantic images, including the ridiculous, such as she “cheerfully passed away.” But no one has ever stood up for her. No one has ever asked why she was given such a harsh sentence, carried out so brutally, or where she learned the poise to defend herself before a kangaroo court and a frenzied mob. Where did she find the corazón to stand on the gallows and show more bravery than any man that day?
​
These questions were what set me on the road to Downieville.

​• • •

In the history of Mexico and Latin America, gold has always been a double-edged sword. The Europeans, the Spaniards, and the North Americans invaded our lands, driven by their desire to acquire the precious metal. Latin Americans, Mexicans, and Californios have always, by a quirk of fate, occupied land rich in gold deposits, but we have never looked upon this metal with the obsessive avarice of Europeans. Gold might be decorative and beautiful, but in pre-Columbian America it was never the coin of the realm, and never something worth killing for.

As a young boy, I’d heard the stories of gold-crazed Spaniards: Cortés melting to ingots the intricate gifts Moctezuma had offered him, completely disregarding their beauty; his only concern was their monetary value. Or the story of the Inca, Atahualpa, who offered to fill one room with gold and one with silver if Pizarro would release him; but when the ransom was paid, Atahualpa was hung. And somewhere I have seen an old engraving of Indians pouring molten gold down a Spaniard’s throat in the belief that only that remedy would cure them of their gold sickness.

So for me, gold has always been suspicious. And in spite of its allure, within my lifetime, I’ve seen gold lose much of its luster. As I write this, an ounce of gold on the London market is worth much less than an ounce of Humboldt green on any barrio street. So gold has an arbitrary value that is relative, depending on the importance you put on it, much like the value of a human life in the Gold Rush. But how can we compare a human life to a fistful of gold dust? I can’t. I suspect few of us can. For the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, gold was precious, but with no monetary value. For others, it’s the engine that drives the wheel. And that wheel has always crushed us.

When I first started writing about Josefa, I too became obsessed with gold; it seemed that to understand what precipitated the events of that day in 1851, I had to know gold. I had to feel gold fever in my veins to understand what drove men to such frenzy over it. Is it that beautiful?

In terms of appearance, in its natural state gold is totally unimpressive. The nuggets on exhibit at the Oakland Museum as part of the California Gold Rush Sesquicentennial Project left me feeling a bit like the Native Americans. So what’s the big deal here? I was looking at the very same nugget that James Marshall supposedly found in Coloma and brought to John Sutter. The nondescript nugget was on loan from the Smithsonian and sat in a glass case. It was this nugget that had started the Gold Rush, but I was completely unfazed. First of all, I couldn’t see any beauty in the metal itself. It looked to me a bit like calcified dog turd that I might hose from my sidewalk on any given morning. Secondly, I was suspicious as to how this nugget on display could possibly be the same one that Marshall found that January morning in 1848. This business of the nugget sounded to me a bit like wishful thinking, much like the early Christians believing in slivers of the True Cross. Regardless of what the Smithsonian Institute claims, the chances of this glass-encased nugget being the first one that Marshall found are in the realm of a billion to one, in other words, nil. But 190,000 people went through the exhibit, and they all believed it was the true nugget. Gold, in the California imagination, can make people believe the implausible. It is the stuff that dreams are made of.

At the beginning of the Gold Rush, in 1848, the gold was literally lying about in the creeks and streams. A person didn’t even have to pan for it. You could walk along a stream and maybe pick up several nuggets wedged between the rocks. The biggest nugget found was the size of a cantaloupe, cubic in form, and nearly pure—a twenty-three-pound gold nugget just sitting in the riverbed waiting to be picked up.

At first, it was mostly locals who were in the goldfields, but by 1849 the word had spread and thousands started arriving from all over the world, from Chile and Peru, China, even Malaysia and points east. Soon, approximately one hundred thousand miners were roaming the Sierra foothills, and 7 million dollars’ worth of gold was coming out every month. The totals are staggering: in 1851, the year of this story, 75 million dollars’ worth of gold flowed out of California. By the end of the decade, 594 million dollars’ worth of gold had enriched the treasury of the United States. And the gold kept coming, year after year. During the Civil War, California gold poured into the financial center of New York at the rate of 5 to 6 million dollars’ worth a month, and thereby prevented a total collapse of Lincoln’s government. Without that gold to feed, clothe, and maintain the Northern armies, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation might not have been worth the paper it was written on. Heinrich Schliemann, a young German adventurer, made his fortune in the California goldfields and thus financed his childhood dream—to discover the site of ancient Troy. The list is endless. With California gold, dreams were possible. Without California gold, I wouldn’t be writing this, and life would be much different for all of us.

Nowadays, if you travel Highway 49, you will find the towns freshly painted, the main streets lined with boutiques and cafés, and tourists in khaki shorts drinking at hotel bars and paying with credit cards. But once upon a time, these same towns were ruthless, drinks were paid with gold dust, and life was worth less than an ounce of gold. Behind the present-day tourist-trap façade lies a history that is both ugly and violent.

East of Modesto, I take Highway 26 into the Sierra foothills, over Mokelumne Hill, into the town of Mokelumne, a thumb print of history, with its narrow winding streets and abandoned ruins. Here I hook up with Highway 49. The story goes that during the Gold Rush the trail from Mokelumne to Jackson was marked with empty bottles; perhaps it’s just a story, but the original name of Jackson is Botellas, Spanish for “bottles.”

When I reach Jackson, I stop to get a feel for the gold country towns. Jackson is typical of restored Gold Rush towns: bed and breakfast inns, antique stores—the tourist business is booming. It’s the past they are selling here, not the present. And like everything else that is sold to tourists, it must be squeaky clean. The foot-high sidewalks are spotless, hundred-year-old buildings are juxtaposed with modern storefronts, and history is kept behind a glass case. Garibaldi’s Camera Shop in the center of town features old photographs of Jackson in the 1880s. One photo shows Jackson in the 1930s, all lit up with Saturday night traffic. It’s like looking at photos of your grandmother when she was twenty—you know it’s her, but the resemblance is hard to see.

At the end of Main Street stands the National Hotel, built in 1863. The hotel bar is damp and smoky, with red globe Victorian lamps on the ceiling and the odor of spilled beer thick as a curtain. I imagine it looks much like it did in its heyday. An ornate mirror hangs behind the bar, the wooden floor is warped, and, though it is barely two in the afternoon, customers are sitting around drinking beers and shots of whisky. I’m still several hours from my destination, so I don’t stay long, but I take notice of a plaque behind the bar—fifty yards east of the hotel, Botilla’s (a misspelling of Botellas [Bottles]) Bordello flourished well into this century. Before leaving the National Hotel, the tattooed bartender tells me that Jackson had legalized prostitution, with several bordellos operating around Main Street until 1956, when Governor Pat Brown decided that enough was enough and outlawed the oldest game in town. This reminds me that Oscar Zeta Acosta, in his Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, recounts stories of himself as a teenager, driving into Jamestown, just down the road from Jackson, to hang out with the women at Ruby’s Banana Ranch. So with the last sip of my mineral water I toast the memory of the old Brown Buffalo. Here in the Sierra foothills the Old West died hard—and not too long ago.

After leaving Jackson, I head north. The landscape of the gold country is beautiful: rolling hills, majestic oaks, wildflowers bursting forth in bright colors from the red earth. The present Highway 49 follows the original stagecoach route carved out of the Sierra Nevada, and it runs for a hundred miles along the foothills in a north-south trajectory. It is known as the Gold Country Highway, and the string of small towns spaced along the route form the background of many stories. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Wells Fargo stagecoaches linked the towns of the Mother Lode, bringing newcomers to the rough-and-tumble world of the goldfields and collecting gold dust for shipment to the port of San Francisco. During the Gold Rush, each of these towns was a miniature booming city. Some of them, like Nevada City, were, in their heyday, the biggest and richest cities in California. But they were cities without substance, built to slake the thirst of miners, and when the rivers of gold dried up, or it became too expensive to operate the mines, the reason for their existence ceased, and these towns were abandoned almost overnight.

I’d have to look at a map to check where Highway 49 begins—somewhere near Yosemite Valley, I suppose—but I know quite well where it ends: in the little town of Downieville. 

​• • •

When exactly Josefa arrives in the goldfields is unknown. Most likely she is from Sonora, one of 10,000 other Sonoran miners who worked and lived in the gold country. The Sonorans from northern Mexico, and other Latin Americans, had a long history of gold mining, and they brought with them the tools and techniques to extract the gold once the easy pickings were over. The Sonorans brought the wooden sluices called bateas for panning gold. And the Chileans introduced the arrastra, a heavy stone boulder that a mule drags over quartz to crush it and release the gold. They brought with them not just the culture of gold mining but the language as well; and as I’m driving down Highway 49, the Spanish names crop up like ghosts from the past—El Dorado, Placer, Campo Seco.

But the experience and success of the Sonoran miners were used against them. In 1849, the newcomers arriving from New England did not know the technique for panning or mining gold, and they felt envious of the Sonorans, who knew where to find the quartz veins. The United States had just taken California from Mexico, and the forty-niners believed they were the only ones who had a right to the gold—everyone else, especially nonwhites or those who spoke Spanish, was an interloper, a trespasser, an enemy. As it was, the camps were tense, tough, dirty places. Men survived the best they could, and the weak, those who couldn’t protect their claims, didn’t last long in the goldfields. Moreover, the laws were heavily stacked against foreigners, men and women. For instance, nonwhites could not testify in a court of law against whites. Then, adding further tension to the situation, California passed the Foreign Miners Tax of 1850, a monthly fee of twenty dollars levied on all nonwhite miners, with the explicit purpose of running the Sonorans, the Latinos, and the Chinese out of the goldfields.

The Sonorans were caught in an ironic situation. Many had been in California before the newly arrived forty-niners, and yet they were being taxed as foreigners. They were the founders of the town of Sonora, one of the richest in the gold country, and now they were being chased out. It wasn’t lost on them that other foreigners, the Irish or the English, for example, were not taxed. And if the Sonorans refused to pay the taxes, the forty-niners encouraged each other to jump their claims. The Chinese turned to vegetable growing to survive, while many of the Sonorans left the goldfields disillusioned, or were run out by mobs of forty-niners. Towns they had founded, like Sonora, were abandoned; others, like Columbia, were left with but a handful of miners. But other Sonorans stayed, out of pride perhaps or out of stubbornness. Some were killed; some became outlaws. Out of such conditions arose Joaquín Murieta, the legendary Robin Hood of the Gold Rush era, the hero of a tale so twisted it will take a determined scholar to unravel it.

With a typical mix of the multiple nationalities in the goldfields, Downieville, originally a camp, was founded in 1850 by a Major Downie, with his crew of ten black sailors, one Irishman, one Indian, and one Kanaka, a native Hawaiian. Although the Foreign Miners Tax was repealed in March of 1851, mostly because of complaints by merchants that they were losing business, the damage had been done. By mid-1851, the once plentiful Sonorans were rare in the Sierra foothills. So for Josefa, or any Mexican woman, to have reached the gold country, she had to be resilient, brave, and determined. The last fifty miles of the road to Downieville deteriorated into a winding mule trail cut out of steep ravines along the Yuba River. The journey was not only hard; it was dangerous, whether on foot or on horseback. It was not uncommon for travelers to lose their footing and plunge into the ravine, mules and all. The living conditions along the fork of the river where the camp had sprouted were primitive at best: tents, lean-tos, shanties, and ankle-deep mud everywhere. But Downieville also had two-story wooden buildings, fifteen hotels and gambling houses, butcher shops and bakeries, a theater, and plenty of saloons.

An Argentine miner named Ramón Gil Navarro came to the Gold Rush in 1849 and spent the following three years living and working in the Sierras, alternating with travels to Stockton and San Francisco. He kept a detailed diary that offers some interesting observations about the milieu in which Josefa lived. I quote Navarro because, as a Latin American, he gives a different perspective than the white-authored first-person narratives of that period, which tend to be prejudiced toward everyone of color. Navarro shows himself to be an astute observer, willing to change his own prejudices—about Indian women, for instance—if proven wrong. He also looks at the various races in the goldfields through a humanist lens; his description of black slaves in the goldfields is an example. The scarcity of women in the goldfields is mentioned by every writer in the field, and Navarro is no exception. He recounts in his diary the burial of a white woman, Miss Sheldon, whose horse-drawn casket is followed by well-dressed men because, as Navarro puts it: “The female sex around here sure has a lot of value.” Their value is not just emotional (for comfort, physical and otherwise) but also monetary, as he mentions later in his diary when he’s at Sonora: “In each one of them [the hotels] there is a beautiful girl at the bar and another one at the gambling table, attempting to attract people and crowds to the hotel. Without a girl there can be no hotel, without a beautiful one there can be no business, without a woman there can be no business or anything else.”

Navarro also recounts the rumors that abounded of how Yankee bandits, called “The Forty,” were planning to rally other miners to exterminate all Chileans, Mexicans, or Peruvians on July Fourth, 1849. He goes on to state that threats against foreigners are common on this day, causing many Mexicans to leave the towns and mines of the region. Considering the Foreign Miners Tax of 1850 and the open violence toward Mexicans and Latin Americans between 1849 and 1851, also detailed by Navarro, I’d suspect that the mood of the forty-niners two years later, on July 4, 1851, had become even more patriotically belligerent.

​For Josefa to have lived in Downieville during this unsettled period was an accomplishment in itself. But her courage in the face of an angry mob of forty-niners is the stuff of legend, in the same league with Joan of Arc or whatever woman warrior you want to compare her to. A hundred years from now, all the names involved in this story, including that of the writer, will be forgotten, but Josefa’s name will live on. In my eyes, Josefa is an amazing woman who, through great sacrifice and courage, claims her rights as a human being on the very edge of the goldfields, in a primitive camp twenty miles from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, a place where only the toughest arrived.

​• • •

After 1851, when the easy pickings were over, when the work of sluicing and panning, standing all day in frigid water, stopped being profitable, the gold business changed. More gold had to be produced to quench the thirst for wealth and profit. So hydraulic mining developed, and powerful hoses carved the mountains as if they were cakes. You can still see the sad shells of those washed-away mountains, the bleached boulders piled like dinosaur eggs along the rivers and streams near Highway 49. The debris from the hydraulic mining—mud, sand, and gravel—caused the tributaries flowing into the Sacramento River to turn into sludge channels that ruined the farmlands of the Sacramento Valley. In particular, just south of Grass Valley, the Malakoff Diggings make a lunar landscape look fertile. These operations so fouled the rivers that laws were enacted in 1884 to halt hydraulic mining, but other means of getting at the gold continued to flourish. The biggest and grandest operation was the Empire Mine, outside Nevada City, right on Highway 49.

About three in the afternoon I stop at the Empire Mine, an impressive network of mine tunnels that stretches for 367 miles under the earth. It’s now a park run by the state of California. You pay three bucks and get a tour of the mine. During the eighty years the mine was in operation, 5.8 million ounces of gold, worth over two billion dollars, were produced. The owners had a fancy house built by Willis Polk two hundred yards from the mouth of the mine; they also owned several residences in San Francisco and often traveled to Europe. The eighteen stamps, huge hydraulic pistons that crushed the ore, worked 24/7 and could be heard fifteen miles away. The crushed ore was then slaked with cyanide to release the gold. Four thousand Cornish miners from Wales, known as “Cousin Jacks,” worked the Empire Mine and its subsidiary, the North Star Mine. They were required to change clothes before entering the mines to prevent highgrading, the pilfering of a bit of gold dust, on their way out of the mines. One nugget was worth two weeks’ wages, so everyone highgraded a little.

The literature at the Empire Mine State Park claims that these miners loved their work, their six days a week at the mine, their three dollars a day, and their little pasty lunches of meat and vegetable pies. Romantic perhaps, but I don’t believe a word of it. Their lives were little better than those of the mules that were sedated, then lowered into the mine, where they spent the rest of their lives hauling ore carts in the darkness, without ever seeing the sun again. But even the mules refused to be abused; if they were hitched to more than seven ore carts, they would not budge. The miners, because they had families, had no choice. They descended into the bowels of the mine in train cars that carried sixty men at a time. They blasted and drilled through rock and hauled out the ore under clouds of black dust that filtered into their lungs. No one wore a mask. This is what they’d been raised to do in the coal mines of Wales, and that’s why they’d been brought to work at the Empire Mine. And they worked and kept on working. Throughout the nineteenth century half of these miners were struck with fatal lung diseases. When they mixed the mercury, then the cyanide, no one wore gloves or protective clothing. In those days no one thought of safety issues. During the life of the Empire Mine, before it was closed in 1954, twenty-six men were killed and countless others died of silicosis, their lungs scarred by the quartz dust. The average life span of a miner was forty years. When looked at from a distance, the head frame of the mine, towering hundreds of feet in the air, looks like a giant gallows suitable for men of mythic proportions.

What the Welsh miners have in common with Josefa is that no one recorded their names either. You can see their photographs on display at the Empire Mine, their eyes peering out of the dust that covered their roughhewn faces, but their names do not appear. The only names mentioned are those of the owners and the superintendent. The same is true throughout the gold country: you hear about the Chinese, about the blacks, the Swedes, the Indians, the Kanakas, but you seldom find their names.
I ponder the absence of names, what happens when they are left out of history, when they are erased or ignored, or worse, distorted and stereotyped. History needs names, the names of working people, the plebe as it were, those who are truly the backbone of history. Without names, history is as worthless as pyrite.

By the time I reach Nevada City, the queen of the Mother Lode, the sun is setting in the west, so I hurry on without stopping. This gaudy city, the pearl of the restored towns along Highway 49, epitomizes what the wealth of the Gold Rush bought: saloons, hotels, grand Victorian houses. But there are no colleges built with Gold Rush money, no hospitals, no significant public parks; the truth is that the incredible wealth produced by the Gold Rush didn’t benefit the average person. Wealth never trickles down that far. And once the gold stopped flowing, Nevada City and all the other Gold Rush towns were discarded like worn-out shoes, no longer useful to cover the feet of their owner.

Going through Nevada City, I (re)construct Josefa’s story. I am driving next to the Yuba River, and the road curves and seems to double back, twisting, drawing me into the past.

​There’s one point about which no one argues—in the gold country, perceived crimes were dealt with swiftly and seldom with mercy. The punishment was often a public flogging or whipping, or a branding on the face, or sometimes the clipping off of an ear, any of which was then followed by expulsion from the goldfields. Nearly all the crimes had to do with claim jumping, a very serious offense (unless it was a forty-niner jumping a Mexican’s claim, then it was acceptable), or sluice stealing or mule stealing. Occasionally the vigilante spirit demanded a hanging, in which case the accused were lynched and their bodies were left dangling from a tree or unceremoniously dumped in ravines. Lynching, especially of Mexicans, was quite common in Gold Rush days. At the crossing of Highway 49 and 50, in present-day Placerville—once known as Hangtown—a lifelike dummy swings from a noose outside a local saloon. This might be funny, until I discover that the first multiple lynching in California occurred right in that spot: three men, at least one or two of whom were Mexicanos or Latinos, were lynched here after being flogged to unconsciousness, based on an accusation by a total stranger that they had committed a robbery in another part of the Sierra.

• • •

In the early morning darkness of July 5, 1851, while the streets of Downieville were littered with red-white-and-blue trash and the fervor of patriotic speeches still hung thick as Sierra fog, a white man was stabbed to death for abusing a Mexican woman. The day before, Downieville had celebrated the Fourth of July with a massive patriotic orgy. Hundreds of miners, would-be miners, merchants, travelers, gamblers, politicians, and even a few lawyers and other denizens of the Sierras had come together in a raucous party in honor of California joining the Union. There’d been patriotic speeches, shooting of guns, heavy drinking, several fights, even a stabbing and a flogging. Except for the speeches, it had been a typical day.

Shortly after the murder, a Mexican couple fled to Craycroft’s Saloon, next to the Jersey Bridge. It is possible that the man worked there as a monte dealer, which may have been why they sought this as a place to hide. But the word had already spread like venom among the miners, many of whom now gathered in front of the saloon talking excitedly, many of them urging a quick hanging. When the accused Mexicans were brought out under guard, one of them was a quiet, timid man, the other, a woman named Josefa, whom many of the miners knew. She was small, about twenty-five years old, dark and attractive, with small white teeth and thick black hair that reached her shoulders.

The general attitude of the miners (and popular historians) toward women in the goldfields, unless they were married or merchants, was that they were morally suspect. But Mexican women were even more so. Antonia Castañeda, who has written extensively on gender in frontier California, points out that popular historians stereotyped Mexican women, casting them as “fandango dancing, monte dealing prostitutes, the consorts of Mexican bandits” and as “morally, sexually, and racially impure.” It would be logical that the forty-niners, who were less educated than popular historians, held the same biases.

Now let’s see how the broad generalities of race and gender, class and sexuality were brought to bear on a Mexican woman, alone, in the middle of nowhere.

Picture yourself as Josefa. You’re trying to make a living in this town, scraping by as best you can and staying out of people’s way. You live your life clean; you live with a man, therefore you’re not naïve sexually, but you’re not a prostitute. (It is important to note here that men who personally knew Josefa all state that she was not a prostitute, that her life—in the language of the time—was without the stain of moral turpitude.) Now picture your door being busted down in the middle of the night by a large intruder, a beefy man over six feet tall and weighing some 230 pounds. You yell at him, and he goes away. A few hours later there’s a knock on your door. Perhaps you shouldn’t answer, but you do. It’s the same Americano and his friends. It’s still dark outside, and the man who lives with you tells them to go away. The Americano insults you, calls you a whore. You tell him to repeat his insult inside your house. You believe he won’t do it, but he does. The Americano steps inside; he is belligerent and aggressive, and shouts a demeaning slur in your face. The word whore, puta, is a highly charged epithet.

Now stop for a moment and think—what does the word puta imply at this juncture? It is both racially (because she’s Mexican) and sexually (supposedly she’s a whore) charged, but also infused with class prejudice (a whore works for a living by selling her body) and gender prejudice (Mexican women are whores). Furthermore, the white man says the word in Spanish (puta) to make the insult intimate and clearly understood, therefore metaphorically if not physically (the threat of which was obvious) violating Josefa, verbally and emotionally.

I don’t believe Josefa thought in this way, nor did language exist then to describe violence of this sort, but I’m sure neither the implicit nor the explicit connotations of the word escaped her.

Josefa knew there was no man or law that would defend her if she was raped or even killed. It was just herself. Perhaps now you can explain why Josefa did what she did. 

​• • •

Before you judge Josefa, remember that in 1851, up and down California but especially in the gold country, a virtual war was being waged against Mexicans and Latin Americans. Josefa most certainly knew of the lynchings in Hangtown, most certainly had heard of the violence against Mexicanos, and perhaps even knew some of the Sonorans who’d been run out of the gold country with only a few hours’ warning, forced to leave everything behind. She’d maybe even seen a lynching or two, or known someone who’d been lynched. And the general ambience of the camp, with thousands of single men living in a lawless state, spewing lewd comments everywhere she went, surely generated the sense of injustice and fear that kept her door locked and a knife by her bed. Everything must have been building inside her, like a trip wire just waiting to set off an explosion.

Josefa’s trial unfolded like a bloody finale to the Fourth of July. When Josefa and her male friend emerged from Craycroft’s Saloon, a mob of some six hundred miners, fueled on patriotism and whisky, were ready to lynch them both right then and there. But others in the mob wanted more formality, so they named a judge and a prosecutor and selected a jury, all of them white males. When a lawyer who was present—one of the few times in history a lawyer appears in a favorable light—tried to talk the miners out of their rage, he was shouted down and pummeled by the mob. After these preliminaries, the trial commenced on the same platform where the day before the speakers had praised the United States for taking California from Mexico. The judge was seated, witnesses interrogated, and declarations duly noted. At least one reporter, from the Pacific Star, was present, and his is one of several eyewitness accounts of what happened at the so-called trial.

After several miners claimed the deceased was of good character and was just trying to make amends for earlier breaking down the couple’s door, Josefa’s companion testified. His version is somewhat different; he said the Americano was abusive, and that their door was knocked down with such force as to rip it from its hinges. He also stated that the Americano threatened him with violence, but since he was small, Josefa stepped in and told the Americano to strike her instead. Then the Americano heaped abuse on Josefa, first calling her a whore in English, then in Spanish. She told him to say that in her own house and left him in the street. When the Americano followed her and was about to enter, Josefa stabbed him.

Josefa, who’d laughed at some of the white men’s testimony, appears as the final witness. What happened in private and in the dark, she now declaims in public and in daylight.

Here’s her version of the incident: At about 4:00 a.m. on the morning of July 5, the Americano had arrived at the cabin that she shared with her man. The Americano was drunk and had no reason for disturbing them. He’d knocked down the door and, after an angry exchange of words, had gone away—only to return a few hours later. This time the Americano insulted her, calling her bad names.

Her own words have come down to us, describing that fateful moment: “I took the knife to defend myself. I had been told that some of the boys wanted to get into my room and sleep with me. A Mexican boy told me so and it frightened me so that I used to fasten the door and take a knife with me to bed. I told deceased that was no place to call me bad names, come in and call me so, and as he was coming in I stabbed him.” It was that simple. Josefa hadn’t gone out looking for trouble; trouble had come to her house. She felt threatened, sexually and otherwise, verbally abused, and her male companion wouldn’t help her, so she defended herself as best she could.

Josefa told the truth, and it didn’t go down well. After her testimony, the judge adjourned the trial till 1:30 p.m., and Josefa was taken away under guard to a log cabin behind the speaker’s platform. During the break, the mob grew to well over two thousand angry miners, whose sense of justice, as it was later explained by apologists,
demanded a hanging as some sort of revenge.

But more likely the miners were incensed to see a Mexican woman speak forcefully and openly, especially after having just taken the life of one of their own. In this sense, she speaks sin pelos en la lengua, holding nothing back, an attitude not unusual of Mexican women in pre- and post-1846 California, who, contrary to stereotypes, did act upon history, controlling their fate as much as possible within the confines of those times.

After the recess, a doctor came forth who stated that Josefa was enciente, pregnant, in other words, approximately three months along. By all moral standards, this should have prevented her hanging. Instead, what happens next is a symbolic rape of her by the miners via three white male doctors from Marysville who, in conjunction with the previous doctor, take Josefa into a makeshift shack and reexamine her for signs of pregnancy. Since it was pretty clear to everyone that the miners wanted revenge, from my point of view, this action was meant to humiliate her. How else to interpret this? Perhaps Josefa felt that if she submitted to this degrading body exam, her life might be saved. While the so-called doctors toyed with Josefa, the forty-niners grew more enraged and were about to storm the platform when the three doctors emerged and declared that, in their opinion, Josefa wasn’t pregnant. The jury retired and within minutes announced its verdict: Josefa was guilty of murder, and she should suffer death in two hours. Her male companion was acquitted but advised to leave town within twenty-four hours. It was about two in the afternoon when Josefa was led off under guard to the cabin. During the next two hours, Josefa received visitors and perhaps prayed or made her peace with God.

But why, if women were so rare, cherished, and valuable, would a mob of womanless men condemn Josefa to the gallows? Only by looking at the context of those times can we perhaps understand the reasons. Antonia Castañeda provides the framework: “The woman who is defined out of social legitimacy because of the abrogation of her primary value to patriarchal society, that of producing heirs, is therefore without value, without honor.” Josefa, as a Mexican woman living with a man, was outside the scope of patriarchal society, and as Castañeda goes on to say, “A woman (women) thus devalued may not lay claim to the rights and protection the society affords to the woman who does have socio-political and sexual value” (emphasis mine).

It goes without saying that the men who clamored for Josefa’s lynching were not thinking this way (if a mob can be said to think), but this is exactly how they behaved. A woman, Josefa (read valuable), who is Mexican (of no value) can be lynched, because without value (i.e., suitability for reproducing heirs), society (read men) would not grant her the rights and protection usually accorded women, thus they would not save her from the gallows.

Josefa is lynched because she is a Mexican and a woman considered “without value” to the white male patriarchal society. If all the doctors in the world had said she was pregnant, it would not have increased her value to white society, since she wasn’t pregnant with a white man’s child. The miners were not even obligated to follow a civilized code of moral conduct, since Josefa was considered outside “moral” society and therefore without any rights.

Around four o’clock, Josefa was escorted to the scaffold that had been slapped together over the river, an awkward affair of timbers strapped to the bridge with heavy rope. She was tastefully dressed, and her hair flowed freely over her neck and shoulders. She appeared calm and unrepentant. By then, two thousand miners had gathered around the Jersey Bridge and along the Yuba River, waiting impatiently for the finale, as if it was some patriotic celebration.

It’s hard to imagine this tiny woman walking toward the scaffold through the mob of jeering miners. What was she thinking about as she took her last walk—her home in Sonora, or the dogwoods along the river, or, if she was pregnant, that her child would also die? Perhaps she recalled the day she arrived in the gold country, her head filled with wild dreams of fortune. She might also have considered the weird fate that had brought her to this town by the river. Perhaps she cursed all the Americanos, or forgave them. But somewhere along that final walk she made peace with herself, and she strode through the mob showing no fear. Like other California women of the time (I’m thinking of María de las Angustias de la Guerra at Monterey, California, during the war of 1846), when confronted by white male violence, Josefa showed cool-headed grace under life-or-death pressure.

Once on the platform, she turned to the few Mexicans who’d gathered by her side and told them that she’d killed the man and expected to pay for it. She shook hands with each of them and offered them a few words of goodbye and asked her friends to take her body so that she might be decently buried.

It was perhaps here that she decided on the act of bravery and defiance that has immortalized her. Unassisted, without fear or hesitation, she walked up the little ladder to the scaffold, where two vigilantes stood beside the noose, hoping to intimidate her. To the astonishment of the mob, she took the thick rope knotted into an awkward noose and slipped it around her neck, then arranged her hair so it would flow over her shoulders. It was more than an unmistakable gesture of courage, something every man that day would remember as long as they lived. It was Josefa’s last defiant statement.
​
The two vigilantes pinioned her arms behind her back, which she protested. They ignored her. In their eyes, she had stopped being human the moment she stepped onto the scaffold—if indeed she’d ever been human in their eyes. They tied her dress down and slipped a hood over her head, then jumped free of the scaffold. At that point, two men axed the rope propping up the scaffold.

​• • •

I reach Downieville at dusk and check into the Sierra Shangri-La Motel along the river’s edge. The river cuts a deep ravine through the mountains that seem to rise up angrily out of the earth. There’s nothing unique about the town; it consists merely of a few cheap motels and bars and the usual shops along the main drag. There’s a bridge, and next to it a white brick building, which is the modern-day Craycroft’s Saloon. Here, a small bronze plaque marks the occasion of Josefa’s lynching with typical inaccuracy: “In memory of Juanita, the Spanish woman, lynched by mob from original bridge on this site, July 5, 1851.” Thank god there are no souvenir stands offering little scaffolds with dolls in Mexican dresses hanging from them.

I’ve driven for nearly eight hours, but I’m not tired, so I wander around town. I know where I’m going, but I pretend it’s an aimless walk. On Highway 49, the traffic is almost dead. There’s a tense quiet in Downieville, as if I am disturbing something. I know Josefa was originally buried behind the theater, and that later her body was reinterred, but I don’t know where. Tomorrow I will make inquiries, but I don’t have much hope of finding her final resting place. The story goes that when she was reinterred, her skull was removed and used by a local secret society in an initiation ritual of some sort. Though hard to believe, it’s not totally implausible, especially if one considers the fate of Joaquín Murieta’s own head. But I don’t believe in ghosts, so I’m not sure what I expect to find here in this mean little town. By now I despise not just the forty-niners, but the Fourth of July, patriotic speeches, the American flag, and that cursed gold. I will never wear gold jewelry; I will never own so much as a grain of it.

I’ve read so many accounts of lynchings in which the victims were nameless Mexicans, or blacks, or Chinese, even Anglos, that perhaps I merely want to pay homage to all the nameless dead of the Gold Rush, to all those who perished here in the majestic foothills of the Sierra Nevada, yes, even to the Cornish miners who died in the bowels of this red earth so that others could become rich. Perhaps I just don’t want Josefa to go into eternity so nameless, so insignificant, that not even her last name is recorded, because I despise the anonymity that is handed out to us like nooses with which to hang ourselves. Perhaps I just want to give one of these nameless dead a sense of closure. After all, every human being is worthy of at least that much. Every human life is more valuable than a mountain of gold.

In the quiet of the Sierra night, the Yuba River is rushing through the gorge. I come to the bridge, which looks dark, ominous. I know the original bridge where Josefa was lynched was washed away by the flood of 1852. I also know that this Craycroft’s Saloon is not the original, since the whole town was destroyed by a conflagration less than a year after Josefa’s lynching, as if the gods had brought down the divine hand of retribution on this place. It doesn’t matter. I stand on the bridge and look over the railing, and I can almost see her face in the water, surrounded by her long hair. I want to do the natural thing and give her a last name, my last name, make her part of my clan, so her spirit will always have a home. But she deserves the honor of her single name, because she represents all the nameless ones who lived and died here and never made it rich, all the nameless faces in the photographs. In some way, perhaps, she is the Saint of the Mother Lode, martyr and inspiration to all Mexicas, symbol of our courage. No matter how hard they have tried to erase our names from history, our stories have endured.

​There’s no place on the bridge for a cross of flowers with her name on it, but the river is eternal. I toss a sprig of wildflowers that I’ve picked along the road into the frothy currents. It floats for a moment before it disappears beneath the roiling water. I am finished. I have told her story. I have returned her name to the dark mountains, buried it in La Veta Madre, like ancient gold returned to its matrix, undisturbed. I say her name one last time—Josefa. And I walk away from the bridge.

​Alejandro Murguía is the author of ​Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book, ​​The Medicine of Memory, highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of the Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry from Central America. Currently, he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the streets of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems and Native Tongue. He was the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position.

​​Mapping Violence:
The Numbers Reveal More of the Truth

We share this link below as a public service to introduce our readers to a detailed mapping project that tracks death at the hands of police and provides graphic depictions of the date collected as well as breakdowns of the data by various factors.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
 
The section below, titled Police Violence Report, further breaks down the data, providing details of the victims by race or ethnicity (“Hispanic”).
https://policeviolencereport.org/


​CALL FOR MORE TESTIMONIES
We open the Somos en escrito pages to receive other writings on the history of violence experienced by Mexican Americans. We are interested in particular to hear testimony from individuals about incidents going back in their family history. If you have written declarations such as memoirs, even better. Send your information to editors@somosenscrito.com so we can respond.