In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ chapter 3 crossing borders Rosalio Moisés Valenzuela and his older sister, Antonia, both of them Yaquis, were born in Colorada, Sonora, where their father worked as a miner in the mid-1890s. Their parents and grandparents had fled the Yaqui River to escape the ongoing war with the Mexican army. In his memoirs Rosalio recalled how “many friends and relatives from the Rio Yaqui worked in the Colorada and Suviete mines or at the Minas Prietas five miles away where they dug for graphite.” Most of the boys and men over the age of ten worked for eight pesos a day for eight-hour shifts, which was substantially more than they might earn working on the haciendas. Men and women with land, livestock, or special skills contributed to the family income in other ways. Some of Rosalio and Antonia’s relatives owned cattle, and their grandfather, Abelardo, was a full-time shoemaker. María, their grandmother, was a curandera, tending to the spiritual and physical health of the community. The Valenzuelas supported themselves in this way until 1900, when war between the Yaquis and the Mexican military erupted once again. Many men left the mine, returning to the Yaqui River to help defend the villages. “From this time on,” Rosalio recalled, “our lives changed.”1 The events of 1900 propelled Rosalio and Antonia toward a series of moves that would eventually take them across the border into Arizona. That year they moved with their grandparents and several other family members to an orchard in Hermosillo. Their mother, Cecilia, left their father , Miguel, during this tumultuous period, and both children lost contact with her. Miguel obtained a new job at the Sierrita mine, while Rosalio began to work in the orchard, and Antonia helped to support the family 72 border citizens by selling tortillas and taking in laundry. Soon, however, their lives were disrupted again. In 1903 Mexican soldiers searched Hermosillo for Yaqui insurgents. They captured and executed Rosalio’s baptismal padrino (godfather ) and rounded up their grandfather, Abelardo, and shipped him to the Yucatán to work as a peón. Miguel then temporarily returned to the Yaqui River to resume the fight against the Mexican army, but fearing for the lives of himself and his children, he soon crossed the border into Arizona. Rosalio and Antonia waited in a small house in Ranchito, Sonora, as their father looked for work north of the border. Finally, in 1905, having found a job at the Silver Bell mine near Tucson, Miguel called for his children to join him.2 After crossing the border, Rosalio and Antonia lived in a home constructed by their father in Barrio Anita, a multiethnic Tucson neighborhood . There, hundreds of ethnic Mexicans, Yaquis, and Tohono O’odham, among others, lived and worked together, attended the same churches and fiestas, and formed ties of kinship and culture. Miguel worked alongside other border crossers from Mexico on the railroads, on the farms in the Salt River valley, and in mines and smelters stretching from Arizona to California . Eventually, Rosalio followed the path of his father, earning wages in the mining towns and on the railroads and industrial farms. Antonia married Ignacio Villegas and soon gave birth to three children delivered by her grandmother, María.3 Throughout their years in Arizona the Valenzuelas retained close ties to Sonora. They had little sense of a national identity relative to either Mexico or the United States. Instead, their life histories are filled with references to kin and local communities scattered around both sides of the border. In Arizona they worked the same kinds of jobs and lived among a similar mix of ethnic groups as they had in Sonora, including mestizos and O’odham. Miguel occasionally supplied arms to Yaquis who fought against the Mexican army in Sonora. Antonia and Ignacio eventually moved to Chandler, where they worked in the cotton fields and had more children together. Rosalio continued to work a variety of jobs, while making personal visits to Mexico for events such as the feast day of San Francisco at Magdalena. Finally, in 1932, after the Yaqui wars died down and the Great Depression seriously disrupted Arizona’s extractive economy, he moved permanently back across the border to the Rio Yaqui. Neither Antonia nor Rosalio ever applied for U.S. citizenship.4 Rosalio and Antonia’s story illustrates several important themes concerning border crossing and border culture in Arizona and Sonora. First, it raises questions about the adequacy...

Share