"It pains me very much [about Morenci]. Now one goes and it is very sad, worse in Newtown because they closed it. Three or four years ago they had a reunion of Newtown and they let the people go into Newtown. They went where they lived to get things. They brought old twisted shoes. (laughs) They brought many things that they gathered. They had two or three tables there in the Morenci hall to exhibit everything they brought. They were going to take them to their houses so they could have them as mementos. Now they are going to have another reunion of Newtown in December.

[Morenci was special] because of the company, the work, the copper. That was the only thing there was. Of the people, I do not know because I was a woman who stayed inside with my mother, worked, came home, but I did not visit people. I went to church. There were many of us who got together, María, Tranquilina, and Petra. Many of them that I knew from Newtown. I was not the type that said, “We are going to a party.” I stayed there in Newtown. I f the girls went, I went but many times I did not go.

We were mostly family in Newtown, all of that [area] above. My grandparents lived there, my aunt, my mother and father. Below were mostly Italians that lived there. Then they started leaving Newtown and Mexicans started moving in. My aunt Juanita lived down below. Then the sons of my aunt Juanita started getting the houses. At the very bottom was the store of don Pancho, then the Nabores and the Acostas.

[We belonged to] Catholic organizations. We used to go on foot. I used to take my four children by the hand and one in my arms to the church. We walked from Newtown. They [the children] also walked to school. There was no bus there or anything from Newtown. Every Sunday we used to go to mass because before I was married I belonged to the Morenci church and la Santa Teresita. In la Santa Teresita, each month we had a day that we went to confession and communion together. We paid dues to collect money and every year they would take us on a picnic. They would rent a large truck and all of us would go in the back. The priest would go in the front with the person driving the truck and one of the altar boys. Those were the ones that went with us to the picnic. We used to take lunch. One would buy it and take it. The priest would bring us a box of apples or some other fruit. He would buy it to bring it for us. We would go all day over there at the edge of the river under the cottonwoods in Apache Grove [on the road to Duncan]. Afterwards, we would come back to Clifton and he [the priest] would let us go into La Cuava (The Cave). There was a piano and there were dances and there was beer. He let us go in so that we could dance for a while and he would buy us each a soda. We would converse for a while and if we had money, we bought potato chips and whatever they had there. He let us stay there for about an hour and then he took us back to Morenci. From there, we each went to our houses. Our dues were to help the church, to buy flowers for Santa Teresita. We always had flowers for her. We had a scapular. We had a book and everything. We went to meetings every month there in the church.

La Santa Teresita Club members outside Holy Cross Church.

Photo courtesy of Eduvigen Hernandez

Now I tell my son, Tranquilina died, María died, and recently, Sarquito’s wife died, Elvira. They were all there in that photo. They were all good friends of ours. When María got married, when Tranquilina got married, all of us got together and would go to their weddings. All of the children they had, now my son knows María’s children.

My brother Lencho worked with them [at “La Casa Verde,” the house of prostitution]. He used to go past and I do not know why they liked him to go to the post office for them. They taught him to take letters and they gave him a list to bring groceries. He would go and bring them the groceries but he did not know what it was about. He was a young boy and I do not know why they liked him. They paid him because he brought their mail. He passed on his way to school. That is when they spied him and gave him the letters to take and the list so that he could bring the groceries. He did not know who they were or anything. [La Casa Verde] was where you entered Newtown, close to the ball park. There was a house that belonged to some Germans above it. They had big cages with parrots. Later that house belonged to a cousin of ours, my cousin Celia who was my father’s niece. She was the daughter of my father’s sister. Then later, her sons started to get [houses] below. The Perus lived next door. Below there were houses of Chinese, stores and bars of Chinese. There were rooster fights in Newtown.

My father took things to the store of a Chinese in Morenci. Next to it was a shoe repair shop. There was a boarding house where there were many people who went to pick up their lunches and eat. I worked there in that house in Morenci. Later they made the stores down below, do you remember? I lived with my uncle when I had my first baby. We rented that house of my uncle, right above the bank of Morenci near the store. That is where the ambulance would go to pick me up. Above us was a house that had boarders also and that is where some Americanos stayed, I think. They would give me five or six sheets to wash almost every day.

We bought a house in Newtown so that we could move back to Newtown. It was half wood and half tent. I still had a wood stove. That was when they started to blast the hill above Newtown. They used to make the people leave because the rocks rolled down when they blasted. They used blasting powder and set it off. They used to make us go to the side where the ballpark was. We would see the blasts. A huge boulder, the size of that chair (points to a recliner), there were two or three of them, killed my chickens, broke my stove, and it was fortunate that they did not touch the bed. The company paid me for all of it. From there we moved to another house closer to the tanks in la Arizona. We rented a house. Then my husband bought another house in Newtown from a cousin of mine who had died. Her children sold the house. We bought it and we moved there. After my grandparents died, one of my aunts lived there [in their house]. My aunt moved to Safford and they sold the house so the brothers could split the money. We bought that house because my husband he liked to save money. We bought my grandmother’s house and that is where we moved. That is where we lived in Newtown. Then we had three houses there in Newtown. We rented them. We moved for a time to California. We lived in San Francisco and Oakland until the doctors sent me back because the climate was bad for me.

We had a good time in Newtown and we miss it a lot. Now I tell them, everything is by car. People do not know how to walk like we did, work or get groceries. I used to go to the store with my children to buy the groceries. When my husband got out of work, I would go after midday to get the groceries, then he would borrow a car from one of his friends and would go to pick me up. Until finally he saved enough to buy himself a car and learned how to fix it. "