"I remember [when Pearl Harbor was bombed]. We were planning on going to the movies I think. It was a Sunday. Every Sunday we went to the movies. I think I was washing dishes and thinking about going to the movies when they said [on the radio], "Pearl Harbor." I told the guys, "That's part of the United States!" (laughs) It was on the radio that we heard.

[My husband] he was all over. He was in France, in England. I didn't know him then. [Jim, my brother] was in the armor division and Chelo [my other brother] was in the infantry. [Jim was in] Germany, in France, in England and Chelo was most of the time in the Aleutian Islands. Yeah, [they sent letters but] not very often. I remember one time I even had to call the Red Cross because I didn't hear from Chelo. I was so scared. I didn't hear from him, I didn't hear from him. It was always that scary feeling in you, that awful feeling in your stomach. You knew that they were out there.

I remember my Tía [Teresa] going outside and praying to this side and then to that side and all the different sides. She said, "Wherever they are, we will pray." She didn't know which way so she would pray to this side, she would turn to this side and turn to that side. She would pray. I would just pray for my brothers; hope for the best. Thank God [they all came back].

[Jim] was drafted. I have a picture where all the men are outside the bus and there's a lot of guys from Morenci. [Chelo] he had gone out [of school], it was summer vacation. Well we were poor; we had to go find a job. He got a job in PD but he was planning after the summer was over to go back to school. They got him and they took him. He took a GED test [later]. They took him to war, pobrecito. (poor guy)

Forty-two, I graduated and was working, praying, and crying. Especially when I would hear somebody died. Some people that I know got killed over there. I remember when they sent me all the things in a duffle bag that Tago [my brother Jim had] and I thought that he had gotten killed. Oh, I started screaming and crying, and all that. No, he had just sent the things he didn't want to carry around. It came in a duffle bag to the house.

[During the war, life in Morenci changed] like we had to have a lot of food stamps, rationing. There was a lot of rationing. When we bought our toothpaste, we had to take our empty tube because it was made out of some kind of material they needed or something. The rationing, when I was at work at the grocery store, I had a lot of problems. People couldn't understand why they couldn't get something. "You already used that stamp. You can't have it." They would be angry with me. Like coffee. "You've already had your stamp. It's right here. You can't have no more coffee." I remember I used to give all my coffee stamps to my Tía because she liked coffee. My brothers and my sister, we never drank coffee. Maybe they [other people] did [trade stamps] but the only thing I did was give them to my Tía because I didn't use coffee. If you didn't have a stamp for this thing, you couldn't buy it. They were little stamps together in a little book. They would give change tokens. I [still] have one token. I used to have two of them. I have one token; a red one and the other one was blue. It was sort of a thick cardboard thing. I think red was for the meat and blue was for things like coffee or sugar or things like that. I don't remember if shoes were rationed, but I remember the groceries because I had a lot of problems. [Some people didn't understand] why they couldn't get it. They had the money. Why couldn't I sell them this thing?

We went to the movies [for entertainment during the war]. I remember blackouts but I don't think we did any [in Morenci]. I remember when the war was over, we could hear the bells of the church and other bells, ringing, ringing, ringing. I was working at Madero's then. I could see people going to church. A lot of people running down there by the store, all on their way to church to pray. [My brothers] were still there [in the service].

[What I remember the most during the war] was having that scary feeling. It's kind of sad because it was quite a few people that got killed. The very first one from my classroom was Frankie Rodriguez. I think he got it in Pearl Harbor, right at the beginning. He was one in my grade, senior year. It was a lot of them that we knew, the Tellez, quien sabe que tantos (who knows how many). It wasn't a good feeling being there during the war."