World of Our Mothers

Mexican Revolution–Era Immigrants and Their Stories

Miguel Montiel, Yvonne de la Torre Montiel

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780816546657
  9780816546664
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816546671
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

World of Our Mothers captures the largely forgotten history of courage and heartbreak of forty-five women who immigrated to the United States during the era of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The book reveals how these women in the early twentieth century reconciled their lives with their circumstances—enduring the violence of the Revolution, experiencing forced labor and lost childhoods, encountering enganchadores (labor contractors), and living in barrios, mining towns, and industrial areas of the Midwest, and what they saw as their primary task: caring for their families.

While the women share a historic immigration journey, each story provides unique details and circumstances that testify to the diversity of the immigrant experience. The oral histories, a project more than forty years in the making, let these women speak for themselves, while historical information is added to support and illuminate the women's voices.

The book, which includes a foreword by Irasema Coronado, director of the School of Transborder Studies, and Chris Marin, professor emeritus, both at Arizona State University, is divided into four parts. Part 1 highlights the salient events of the Revolution; part 2 presents an overview of what immigrants inherited upon their arrival to the United States; part 3 identifies challenges faced by immigrant families; and part 4 focuses on stories by location—Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and Midwestern colonias—all communities that immigrant women helped create. The book concludes with ideas on how readers can examine their own family histories. Readers are invited to engage with one another to uncover alternative interpretations of the immigrant experience and through the process connect one generation with another.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Irasema Coronado and Christine Marin
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Mexican Revolution of 1910
• 2. Reenganche: The Promise of Well-Paying Jobs
• 3. Linking One Country with Another: Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1960
• 4. Family: Shifting Views
• 5. Arizona Mining Towns
• 6. Barrio Life in Phoenix: Stay in Your Corner
• 7. Midwestern Catholic Refugees
• Epilogue
• Appendix A. Summaries of the Women Interviewed
• Appendix B. Conducting a Community Resolana
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index