Re: [ranchos] Re: My Father's Immigration

[Alberto Duarte <albertodua@...>]

A sad story but a happy ending.
Our story is almost the same.  After my grandfather
Alberto Duarte Vasquez died in 1923, in Mapimi, my
grandmother Maria Luz Cuevas Luera gathered all of her
5 kids and headed for El Paso, Texas, where she lived
and eventually died after some 40 years.  The Mexican
civil war of 1915 and the flu epidemic devastated most
of the population of central Mexican states.  Over
half of my dad's family died because of the flu
epidemic, which led of my grandfather's heavy drinking
and eventual death.  

The good part of this story is that my grandmother saw
that there was no future for her kids in Mexico and
did something about it.

But can you imagine, my ancestors to come to the new
world about 1550 and prospered in Zacatecas and
Chihuahua, become ranchers, farmers, generals,
lawyers, governors, teachers, musicians, after a short
time in new Spain and Mexico, but eventually all this
was lost for most of them, and they came to this
country penniless but with hope. And again, we are
building a new generation of teachers, writers,
engineers, accountants, managers, officers, lawyers,
politicians, and farmers, all in this country called
the United States of America. We are lucky!

Alberto Duarte Prieto
Santa Maria, California



--- Emilie Garcia <auntyemfaustus@...> wrote:

> My father, Guadalupe Olague, born in Jerez, Zac. on
> January 28, 1903, immigrated to the US via Juarez-El
> Paso in 1913.  He had legal alien status.  His
> father and grandmother and sister settled in Brush,
> Morgan County, Colorado, where I was born in 1939. 
> In 1941 my father, at my mother's insistence (she
> was a native of New Mexico), became a Naturalized
> Citizen.  During WWII, my father and his uncle and
> cousins relocated to Northern California where they
> obtained jobs in defense plants.  He had sent my
> mother, my sister and myself to my mother's
> relatives in New Mexico. My father was a welder at
> the shipyards that were building the Liberty ships. 
> After the war, he went to work as a welder for
> Westinghouse in Sunnyvale, CA, and he sent for us
> around 1948 and they bought a house in San Jose near
> Willow Glen.  My husband's mother and siblings also
> moved to California around the same time from El
> Paso, TX.  My husband was a friend of one of my
> cousins.  We married in 1962 and lived in Silicon
> Valley until 1996 when we retired and moved to
> Washington State.  My sister and her sons have moved
> to Las Vegas, NV.  Our parents are buried in San
> Jose at Calvary Cemetery.
> 
> Emilie Garcia
> Port Orchard, WA.Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN
> Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
> 



		
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