Antonia Chavez Arvizu: Memoir of a California Gold Mining Family

Inspired by real historical events, this dramatization tells the true story of Antonia Chavez Arvizu, a gold miner's wife, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Antonia Chavez Arvizu's narrative is historically salient because she was the paternal aunt of Cesar Chavez, the United Farmworkers' founder and American civil rights leader. She was also the author's great-grandmother. This is the first written historical account of the Chavez family's challenges, struggles, and existential survival after they immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s. In 1919, the Chavez family became an American pioneer family when they homesteaded 118 acres in the North Gila Valley, Yuma, Arizona. This book also serves as a testimonial to the thousands of American and Mexican American wives of miners who have gotten little recognition for their grit, endurance, and dedication to preserving family life in a hostile environment.

Antonia recounts how the Chavez family men initially found employment in the late 1890s, working in the farm fields, railroads, and copper mines of Ajo and Gila Bend, Territory of Arizona. During that time, Antonia Chavez became the wife of Francisco S. Arvizu.

In their trajectory toward freedom and independence, Antonia describes how the Chavez-Arvizu family eventually settled in the gold mining pueblo of Picacho, California. There, the Chavez-Arvizu men found employment in the treacherous gold mines of the Picacho Basin.

Antonia Chavez Arvizu details the hardships encountered in living in the mining town of Picacho, the challenges of raising children in such a desolate area, and the daily angst of waiting for her husband and her brothers to return from the mines, alive and unbroken.

The mining town's societal, cultural, and personal events, which shaped Antonia Chavez Arvizu's Mexican American story, are told by her in a passionate, descriptive, and celebratory manner.