ANCESTORS AND IMMIGRANTS

* * *

My father was born and grew up in a small fishing village near the tip of the Mexican state of Baja California, called San José del Cabo. He was of Basque-Mexican origin, and most of the Basque male inhabitants were over six feet tall and came from Spain, so they had the unique characteristic of being taller than most Mexicans. Like the other Basques, my father was tall, about six foot two, and weighed about two hundred and forty pounds. He was a big man; not fat, but husky, and all muscle. He was a good swimmer, and as a young man he worked as a pearl diver for companies, retrieving pearls from oysters. As a result, he never went to school.

When he was a young man he moved about halfway up the Baja peninsula to the little town of Santa Rosalía, which is across from Guaymas on the mainland. There he met my mother, Rosario Acosta, who, like most Mexican women in the area, had a good deal of Indian blood in her. They fell in love and were married. My mother only made it through the third grade, but with that she was able to teach my father to read.

My father's name in Mexico was Francisco Castro Dominguez. As is the custom in Spanish-speaking countries, Francisco was his given name, Castro was his father's surname, and Dominguez was his mother's surname. In Mexico people called him Señor Castro or Señor Castro Dominguez. But later, when he immigrated to the United States, the family adopted the American custom of placing the father's surname last, and his name became Francisco D. Castro. When I was born, my name became Raúl Castro. However, when I graduated from high school in Douglas, Arizona, a line formed in the principal's office so he could get the correct full name of each graduate to put on the diplomas. All of the Anglo students had middle names. I had no middle name, and I wanted to be like them, so I chose the first name of a local basketball player in Douglas whom I admired, Hector Miranda. I told the principal my full name was Raúl Hector Castro. I just made it up, and since then it has always been with me. I often wish I had chosen a better name.

The French influence from the days of Maximilian I and his intervention in Mexico (1864–1867) persisted in Santa Rosalía. French was the second language used among the citizenry, and more than a few elites remained in the community. In fact, the French dominated the local economy; they owned and operated the local smelter, El Boleo, which was the major employer. As it turned out, Santa Rosalía provided few economic opportunities for my parents. Even though my mother was born there, the family decided to move to the mainland—to Guaymas, Sonora. They sailed across the Gulf of California, a trip that took seven days due to storms and rough seas. My mother claimed she feared for her life, but the family needed to broaden their economic horizons.

The move to the port city of Guaymas proved temporary. Soon my father and mother heard that new jobs were available to the north in the smelter and mines of an emerging mining empire in Cananea, Sonora. Colonel William Cornell Greene—a powerful and colorful cattle baron, copper mine owner, and self-promoter in Cochise County on the Arizona side of the border—owned the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, or the "Four Cs." Cananea lies thirty miles south of the Arizona border, about halfway between Nogales, Arizona, and Douglas, Arizona. Not surprisingly, Greene exploited the Mexican workforce. Conditions and wages were terrible, but fortunately my father, who now had eight children to feed, found jobs in both the smelter and in the American owned mines in 1914.

Due to the exploitation and dreadful employment practices, my father became involved in the miners' union, called Sindicato Sesenta y Cinco (Union Sixty-Five). My father became a union leader and took part in setting up an unsuccessful strike. Greene responded by labeling my father a "rabble-rouser," and he convinced the Mexican authorities to arrest and jail him at the capital in Hermosillo.

My father spent six months in prison, and after several efforts to free him my sister, Enriqueta, smuggled crucial information to him. As an upshot of this and other entreaties, the Mexican government agreed to an amnesty and political asylum. Ironically they released my father from prison on the condition that he left Mexico. The entire family immigrated to the United States, to the little town of Pirtleville, Arizona, about four miles northwest of Douglas.

In early 1918 my family crossed the border at Naco, about fifteen miles south of Bisbee, in Cochise County, Arizona. By now my parents had eleven children, and we entered a new country with different customs and a different language. The immigration officer looked at us and said, "Castro family, you are now in the United States of America. The rest is up to you." It was up to us. So we went to work.

My father found work in the smelter in Douglas. The town was named after mining pioneer James Douglas and was founded as a smelter town to treat the copper ores of nearby Bisbee, Arizona. Two copper smelters operated at the site: the Calumet and Arizona Company Smelter, built in 1902, and the Copper Queen operated in Douglas from 1904–1931, when Phelps Dodge Corporation purchased the Calumet and Arizona Company and took over their smelter. The Calumet and Arizona smelter became the Douglas Reduction Works.

My father, upon bringing his family to the United States, enabled us to make an important choice. The leaders of the small but growing Mexican community in Pirtleville wanted him to register all of us as Mexican citizens. He refused and added that we deserved to make our own choices as to whether we wanted to register as either Mexican or American citizens. Ten Castro children lived to adulthood, nine boys and one girl. The birth order was Ramón, Enriqueta, Isidoro, Francisco, Angel, Ignacio, Alfonso, myself, Ernesto, and Romero. I was born on June 12, 1916, in Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. While Pirtleville framed my childhood memories, on occasion my mother took us for extended visits to Cananea, Mexico, so I grew up in an international and border-regional context.

Anglo American mine owners established Pirtleville as a company town for the Mexican smelter workers. About two thousand people lived in the town, and only three Anglo families lived among us. The Balich and Herolich families hailed from Yugoslavia and the Corvallos were Italian. All worked, attended school, played together and, not surprisingly, spoke Spanish like natives of Mexico. Schools in Pirtleville and Douglas was segregated; Mexican children went to the Fifteenth Street School or...