"All the houses were made from wood. The wood was not good; I am going to tell you. There were some houses made of one by two boards and on the outside they layered them with narrow little boards to block the wind. There were houses that did not have foundations or anything. We lived en El Seis. There en El Seis there were many scorpions. Then some covered the house with a very thin cloth that they sold. It looked like what they call cheesecloth. There is not any of that any more. But it was a material that looked like cheesecloth. They covered the inside of the house with it and attached it with tacks. Then they bought five pound packages of powder that was called calcimine. That powder was put in a bucket of water, mixed, and it was paint. There were different colors of powder. Then with a brush the cloth inside the house was painted. That was how it was then.

There were no bathrooms like today. In the barrios there were, up on the hill above the houses. The company built bathrooms that had six doors, a door for each bathroom. They gave you that bathroom. "This is yours." If you wanted to, you bought a lock and put it on. Only your family used it. Then each neighbor had its own bathroom. The water used to run. There was a tank that filled with water and every twenty minutes or half an hour, it emptied and ran through the sewer line below the hill and passed through all the bathrooms and cleaned them. At the bottom there were some "canoas." Those canoas were from where Morenci was to where new Morenci is now. It was los "cales" where they dumped the dirt that came from the concentrator. They [water from the bathrooms] wound up there and mixed with the dirt and water that came from the concentrator. So everything wound up there. It just fell there. That was the way.

The water was outside the kitchen door of the house. On one side was the faucet. There was something they called a "resumillero" that was under the faucet. The water that fell into the "resumillero" went into the sewer line. It was connected to the sewer line. Not one house had a "cubadora" [sink]. One got water from there for the kitchen because that is why it was there. When a man got home from work that is where he washed his head. There were not any baths. He came and put his head under the faucet and opened it. The water came and he washed his head. On the wall was a little tin soap dish and there he had soap. He soaped up and then washed his head. The water would fall into el resumillero. There would be a mirror there on the wall and he would shave. Not with an electric shaver, the houses did not have electricity then, but with a straight edge razor. They shaved with cold water. That was it. They worked until Saturday and if they had family the man went to work.

They did not take baths all week. On Saturday they heated water inside the kitchen or put a "tina" outside and built a fire and there they heated water. There were women who had una tina to wash clothes. They had a tina outside where they heated the water. There they put the clothes and they washed them first in soap then rinsed them and hung them up to dry. On Saturday was the day the whole family bathed. They heated the water and inside the kitchen they put another tina. They put clean water into it, poured hot water in and mixed it in la tina. They gave one a bath on Saturdays. When the man came home from work, he bathed inside in la tina. So on Sunday, they were freshly bathed. They bathed only one day a week. I tell people that and some have asked me, "Did not the people stink?" I tell them, "One did not notice, because everybody stunk!" (laughs) Not until they put showers in the mine, did many of them start bathing. That is how life was then.

In 1918 they started to put power poles to all the company toilets of Morenci. They began to put up poles and hang lines. From there they began to put lights in the houses. When they started to put in the electricity, nobody had irons to iron with electricity. They had irons they heated on the stove. So they only put lights but no outlets. Then later as people started buying electric irons, they put in outlets. That was in 1920. Everything was changing. A dollar per month is what they charged. A dollar was a lot then. But nobody ironed; they used it [electricity] only for lights."