Community

I helped my grandma chop wood and stack it up at her house. They were older people and sometimes they didn’t have any wood so I would go out to the riverbeds and get the wood in a little wagon and charge them 25 cents. Then I would split the 25 cents with my brother. I would take a dime, I would give him a dime, and then there was a nickel left so I would give that to my mother. But then my mother said to me, “Give that to your grandma.” My grandma, they used to call her Doña Maria. She went out of her way doing things for people and the little neighborhood we had there.

—Robert Jacquez

We lived in a small area [in Menlo Park], so everybody knew everybody, and everybody was friends. We’d play baseball in a vacant lot, and we played tag at night a lot. Have you ever heard of the game kick-the-can? It’s kind of a tag game. There wasn’t any traffic, so we’d put a can out in the center of the street, and then one person would be “it” for the tag game, and the rest [would] go hide. If you could, you beat him back to kick the can before he beat you. We had a lot of fun.

—John Henkel

I used to have a paper route. I used to deliver the morning paper to Tucson Terrace on my bike. There was no street pavement, so when it rained I used to get stuck on my bike, and I had to pull it out. I was up about four o’clock in the morning before I went to school.

—Salvador Andrade

I was seven when we moved here from Wilcox. I just knew that I was not going to like it here. I missed all my friends. A couple of days after moving into our new home my Mom was making me sweep the front pathway when a girl my age was skipping by. She asked me if I was new and I said, “No. I am seven years old.” We both started laughing. That was the day I met my best friend. I didn’t miss Wilcox anymore. Maria has been my best friend for 51 years. We had lots of fun going to Menlo Park.

—Nana Ida, Conrad Garcia’s grandmother