Joey Quintana

Some of the characters in Stones from the Creek are actual figures from history, however little known even in their own day.  Others, like Joey Quintana in the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly," are more composites.  Names popped up in my reading that caught my imagination, but -- in the absence of full-length biographies -- I was left to flesh them out in my imagination.  Then characters like Joey became stand-ins for one or more of those figures.

I think I first encountered the name Abrán Salcido in the late seventies when I first read Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.  Here was a young guy who was already a leader of the Mexican community in Clifton, Arizona when the copper miners struck in 1903.  He became a leader of the strike and served two years in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma.  As soon as he came out he went to the huge mines at Cananea, Sonora and soon was among the leaders of the 1906 strike there.  He was again imprisoned, this time at San Juan de Ulúa.  The conditions there were truly horrific and less than 100 of the 300 strikers who were incarcerated survived.

That's really all I know about Salcido.  When I read Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction his name popped up again.  That book is about class and race and religion and the border and what childhood and orphanhood meant at the turn of the twentieth century.  The Clifton strike was a year before the orphan abduction and in the same town.  Linda Gordon includes all the relevant events of that time in Clifton, including the presence of la santa de Cabora, Teresa Urrea.

Salcido seems to have been a member of the Partido Liberal and a Magonista.  Ricardo Flores Magón was an inmate of the Territorial Prison at Yuma around the same time as Salcido.  In my mind, stories like that of Salcido's are begging to be told.  But he is just one source of Joey Quintana.  And Joey has a different history, born on this side of the border.

Today I discovered the photo above.  It is from the archives at Yuma.  I don't know how to interpret Abrán's expression.  What I do know is that he looks across 110 years demanding to be seen.  I end up feeling that I am going to have to return to his story.