and whip up local vigilante hysteria to round them up and force them out.
My maternal grandmother, Antonia, was born in Metcalf, Arizona, on the thirteenth of June, 1895. Metcalf was a mining camp founded in the late 1800s and abandoned in 1936. It now lies buried under the ore waste from the larger Morenci mine. We can trace the family on her mother’s side to 1878, when the family lore says that her grandmother Isabel Luna and her two grown sons, Jose Maria and Estanislao, rode into Clifton, Arizona, on an oxcart from Chihuahua. We know the name of my father’s grandfather, Fidel Samudio, but little else. How the family name came to be Gutierrez remains a mystery. Antonia and my grandfather Samuel Gutierrez were married in Miami in 1914. My father was born a year after the marriage of Antonia and Samuel.
Antonia remarried a few years later and had three more children with her second husband. This man, Fortunato Vega, was living proof of how wild and wide-open the boom years had been in Miami. Fortunato was a professional gambler. Apparently a pretty good one—he supported a wife and five children playing cards in local saloons. Unfortunately, however, he had never bothered to become a citizen. He soon became the target of the Gila County Welfare Association, and the family was subjected to immense pressure from the Welfare Association to voluntarily deport. In the midst of the depression, gambling had come to an end. Food donations and the occasional day job depended on the Association, and there were to be none for an illegal family. It was only a matter of time before the family was forced from Miami.
And so it was that in March of 1932, my father, then seventeen years old, and the rest of the family—except for Fortunato, all citizens of the United States—boarded a train in the Miami town depot and began their journey to Fortunato’s rural ranchería at El Fuerte, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The Arizona Silver Belt celebrated the deportations:
Mexicans were scurrying for seats in the passenger coaches Saturday afternoon, happy and excited in the thought that they were returning to their native Mexico. Hundreds of friends were at the siding to bid them farewell. All Aboard! There was a final exchange of salutations. Harried handclasps were made through the window. The train began to move. “Vamos! Adios! Adios!”7
Even forty years later my father’s eyes would well up with tears as he recalled that day. He carried that memory of betrayal throughout his life.
In less than two years Fortunato would be dead. My grandmother Antonia decided that immediately after his burial they would return to Miami. But my father stayed in Mexico another eight years. He and his brother José, neither of them the children of Fortunato, had been unwelcome mouths to feed in the Vega ranchería, and José had quickly made his way back to Arizona. My father also left El Fuerte, but he stayed in Sinaloa. He got a job in Culiacan, Sinaloa’s capital, as a clerk for the Mexican government, became involved with local politicians, worked the railroad, and along the way met a woman he fell in love with.
This woman would endanger his relationships with his family for years. He and his mother were never close again. The problem was that Julia, my mother, was an older, “experienced” woman, divorced with two children, and, perhaps most hurtful to a devoutly Catholic family, a Protestant—and as if that weren’t enough, she was greeted when they returned to Miami with suspicious murmurings that she was secretly a Jew. The rabidly anti-Catholic policies of the Calles Administration in Mexico had resulted in the bloody rebellion known as the Cristero War (1926–29). There were rumors among devout Catholics of secret cabals of conversos and the complicity of cristianos, as Evangelical Christians are called, in the Calles Administration. The term “conversos” denoted Jews who were forced to publicly convert to Catholicism by the Holy Inquisition in fourteenth-century Spain but continued to practice their religion in secret. Historians believe that a large percentage of Spanish conversos escaped to the New World and continued their secret practices. My father’s maternal grandfather, José Carbajal—an important union organizer in the Morenci-Clifton mining area—was himself suspected by Antonia to have been a converso. My grandmother described how he would gather with other men on Friday evening and sing a kind of prayer in an unknown language, and light candles.
And in 1944, when he finally decided to come back to Miami, my father revived all those rumors by bringing, well, a harlot, a Protestant, and possibly a Jewess home from exile.
I was born in 1945 in a wooden house that sat at the very edge of a hill half ripped apart to make room for the railroad line that carried the copper to market and had only a decade earlier carried the Mexicans into exile. World War II created a shortage of both copper and the laborers who excavate it. Recruiters began roaming northern Mexico seeking men to work the mines, especially among those who had been deported. These were experienced at piercing deep into the earth, needed no training, and, equally importantly, most of them spoke English.
Each time I meet with students of Mexican extraction, I implore them to go home and ask their parents about the crossing. The stories of our parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice should never be forgotten. Unfortunately, I was never able to persuade my father to talk much about it. He was, I think, ashamed to have come back to the town that had feted his exile only a few years before. But when he made the decision to return he was older, and responsible for four children: two were my mother’s from her earlier marriage, and two more were born in Los Mochis, Mexico. The wages at Ferrocarriles de México, the nationalized Mexican railroad where he was a freight agent in their Culiacán, Sinaloa depot, could never compare to what the Miami Copper Company promised him. My mother begged him to go back. The future for the children in Mexico was bleak at best. So he accepted the offer. They went by train to the border and took a bus from Nogales to Miami. They entered the country illegally. The two youngest children were citizens by virtue of their father’s status … but he had been expelled without regard to his citizenship.
All he told me was that he just didn’t trust the government any longer, so they walked across, following a well-beaten path that skirted the port of entry and the requirement for papers. They were shown the way by a fellow miner who had taken the path many times. His name was Alfredo Horcasitas. That’s how I came to be named Alfredo. My mother, probably at my father’s request, would also talk little about the trip. In answer to my inquiries she would only say, “Sí, sí, era muy duro pero era un sacrificio que tuvimos que hacer.” Yes, it was very hard, but it was a sacrifice we had to make. And when I questioned further, “Why?” her answer was always the same: “Por tí, tontito.” For you, little dummy.
My mother and father have passed away. My two sisters have as well; my brother who was born in Los Mochis was only two when he crossed and has few memories of the trip. My oldest brother is very ill, and frankly, he too resists discussing the experience. I will never know, and I will never share with my children those sacrifices in the rich detail they deserve, explaining exactly what it cost so that they might enjoy lives of middle-class comfort, extraordinary educations, and a future.
My birth certificate says that I was born in the company hospital. Family lore says I was born in that house on top of Depot Hill with the help of a partera, a midwife. The Union had yet to wrest health care from the company in 1945, so the likelihood is that I was taken to the hospital afterwards for the birth certificate. Health care was a decade away, but the Union had already accomplished significant victories. The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers was sometimes called the Mexican Union, because unlike other unions it actively recruited Mexicans and fought vigorously against the practice of paying Mexican workers less for a day’s work than white workers would earn. It did not matter to the company if a person was just off the boat from Italy, Serbia, Hungary, or Finland: they still got paid $1.15 more per shift than a Mexican. And it did not matter to the
