A Story of Stories

One afternoon in fall 2015 Cristina Devereaux Ramirez's mother called and, with a tone of urgency in her voice, asked her to come to the house and take a look at something she had discovered when she was sorting through boxes in the attic. When Ramirez arrived, she found her family sifting through papers in an old vegetable box, reading some of the more than 750 pages of Spanish language poems, short stories, fables, and dichos Ramirez's maternal grandmother, Ramona Gonzalez, had written. Some pieces were works in progress, complete with word and phrase strikethroughs and handwritten notes in the margins, while others were neatly typed prose or what might have been final drafts. None of Gonzalez's writings had seen the outside of that box for decades, at least since 1995 when the family matriarch passed away.

Gonzalez-or Dona Ramona, as she was often called-was born in 1906 in the El Paso border barrio of Chihuahuita, sometimes referred to as the Ellis Island of the Southwest. Her writing celebrates the rich Mexican American culture of Chihuahuita, a neighborhood the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified in 2016 as one of America's most endangered historic places. A mother, corner grocery store owner, published writer, and community activist, Gonzalez was one of the few Tejanas profiled in Worthy Mothers of Texas, 1776-1976

A Story of Stories from a Texas Border Barrio, Ramirez chronicles the life of her abuela with the care of a granddaughter and, with the eye of a scholar, analyzes selections from Gonzalez's work and its significance to El Paso history, Chicano literature, border barrio folklore, and cross-border civic movements in the mid-twentieth century.