![]() My least favorite job was picking lemons because at the end of the day your face and arms would be completely scratched up by the thorny branches. I also worked as a sorter at a citrus packing house in Arlington Heights in Riverside, and worked for a time packing carrots near Perris. Back then that part of Anaheim was full of fields, if you can imagine it. I picked grapes in Pomona and strawberries in Anaheim. After that I picked chile peppers and onions in Temecula. I got a job picking lemons, oranges and grapefruit in the groves around Riverside, Hemet and San Jacinto with my dad and brothers. I was in my early 20s and there was a lot of tumult. Tell us about what you did when you arrived in Southern California in the late ‘60s. I walked my little sisters to school and we were regularly harassed by a group of neighborhood cholos who called us things like “dirty paisas” (“Paisa,” short for “paisano” or “paisana,” is slang for someone who is from your home country). What was it like to move to a new country? It took about four years to finally reunite all the family in California. I want you all to get your papers in order in case I’m not around soon.” My brothers got their papers processed first. He told us: “There is no way for women to make a living in Tepa. He came down with a painful ulcer and he thought he was going to die. He already had a visa and he wanted us to get our papers so we could also earn a living in the U.S. He was an agricultural worker and traveled back and forth between the two countries for many years. My dad was a bracero (one of the millions of Mexican guest workers in the U.S. ![]() He didn’t do that often, but I remember it well.Ĭan you tell us how you moved to the U.S.? I can’t explain how much joy it brought us to wake up to a fresh piece of bread. He would come into our room very early when we were still sleeping and left a fresh piece of pan on our pillow. ![]() Whenever business was good, he bought pan dulce. My dad had a funny habit he picked up from his own father. There were lots of days we went many hours without eating. It wasn’t like nowadays, where you can turn on a stove on a whim.Įverything got easier when my mom saved up money for a kerosene stove. My mom would send us out to gather twigs and bark, but we had to be careful because scorpions liked to nest in the tree bark. We had a wood-fire stove, so a lot would depend on whether we could find kindling. Tell us a little about the family kitchen. By the time I left Mexico, the mills were disappearing and they were being replaced by tortillerias. There were three molinos in town back then. That meant you had to wait for somebody to tear down the mill and replace the volcanic stone used to grind the masa. Some days you got to the molino and somebody would tell you: “Se quebro la piedra” (“the stone broke”). The first time I tasted prepackaged tortillas was when I came to the U.S. It was customary to only eat fresh tortillas, and that meant daily trips to the molino. to drop off their bucket of nixtamal and then go to the nearby market to buy meat and vegetables while they waited for the masa.Įvery day. ![]() Most women would get up sometime between 4 a.m. A large part of our days were spent taking the nixtamal (nixtamalized maize kernels) to the molino (stone mill) to have it ground into masa. ![]()
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