I just spent a little time with my grandma. She told me of my grandpa's family's trials and tribulations in the the early thirties.
After my great-great-grandfather Max Lopez died, his wife Benedicta, who didn't speak English, was worried she wouldn't be able to hold her own with the bolios. So, although her son, my great-grandfather Emmanuel and his wife Maria were well-suited to continue the family's sharecropping business out in Rotan, Texas, Benedicta decided instead totake the advice of her husband's brother Francisco. Francisco had heard they were giving good land to people to entice them back across the border. So Benedicta and all her children, including Emmanuel, his wife Maria, and their three children, followed his advice all the way back to Mexico to seize opportunity.
Well, Francisco was half right.
They were giving away land, but it was not good.
It was totally un-farmable. Rocks and dust. And after a short time there,the monsoon rains came and flooded their homestead. The whole family had to scramble to the top of a hill with all the belongings they could carry in order to avoid being washed away.
It was around this time that Maria became pregnant with my grandfather Manuel. Maria, a US citizen who already had three children with Emmanuel: Beatrice, Alex, and Max -- all US-born -- looked around and saw that things were not great and were not getting any better. She decided she'd head back across the border when it was time to have my grandpa. Mexico was not a long-term plan as far as she was concerned.
She set out, forced to leave her husband and children behind, and went to stay with a friend of the family, who, like many during the thirties didn't have much to offer. The woman slept on a mattress placed in the bed of a covered waggon, off its wheels. She offered it to Maria during her labor. And that's how my grandfather, Manuel Lopez, was born in Del Rio, Texas, in a covered wagon.
