Doña Ramona Benítez Franco was born in 1902 on her parents' Arizona ranch and celebrated her hundredth birthday with family and friends in 2002, still living in her family's century-old adobe house. Doña Ramona witnessed many changes in the intervening years, but her memories of the land and customs she knew as a child are indelible. For Doña Ramona as well as for countless generations of Mexican Americans, memories of rural life recall la querida tierra, the beloved land. Through good times and bad, the land provided sustenance. Today, many of those homesteads and ranches have succumbed to bulldozers that have brought housing projects and strip malls in their wake. Now a writer and a photographer who have long been intimately involved with Arizona's Hispanic community have preserved the voices and images of men and women who are descendants of pioneer ranching and farming families in southern Arizona. Ranging from Tucson to the San Rafael Valley and points in between, this book documents the contributions of Mexican American families whose history and culture are intertwined with the lifestyle of the contemporary Southwest. These were hardy, self-reliant pioneers who settled in what were then remote areas. Their stories tell of love affairs with the land and a way of life that is rapidly disappearing. Through oral histories and a captivating array of historic and contemporary photos, Beloved Land records a vibrant and resourceful way of life that has contributed so much to the region. Individuals like Doña Ramona tell stories about rural life, farming, ranching, and vaquero culture that enrich our knowledge of settlement, culinary practices, religious traditions, arts, and education of Hispanic settlers of Arizona. They talk frankly about how the land changed hands—not always by legal means—and tell how they feel about modern society and the disappearance of the rural lifestyle. "Our ranch homes and fields, our chapels and corrals may have been bulldozed by progress or renovated into spas and guest ranches that never whisper our ancestors' names," writes Patricia Preciado Martin. "The story of our beautiful and resilient heritage will never be silenced . . . as long as we always remember to run our fingers through the nourishing and nurturing soil of our history." Beloved Land works that soil as it revitalizes that history for the generations to come.
My photography feels organic to me, arising from my very blood. From the moment I
bought my first pawn-store camera as a teenager, I pivoted to capture my barrio, my
familia, and our everyday lives. Other subject matter, even for the years I worked as a
newspaper photographer covering all sorts of stories, never much interested me.
These photographs only, of Latinos in America, are the true extension of my self.
My approach is simple. I seek to honor the moment. I want to capture it without
disturbing it, altering it, or embellishing it. I use spare amounts of film. I have to react
quickly while blending into the background. I rely on the largess of the people I
photograph to allow me to enter their private moments. I respect that by not drawing
attention to myself.
Doing this exclusively over the past 40 years has also given me a purpose beyond
my own life span. I am creating an historical record: the long view of what Latino life
has been like across the United States across the decades. Through photographs
taken at various times in a multitude of places, but all here in this country, I have been
studying our behavior. How do new immigrants adapt? How do their children
navigate a bilingual, bicultural existence? How do their grandchildren display their
American-ness with a tense mixture of social savvy and longing for the past?
All of these realities exist in the same space and time. I am a third or fourth generation
Mexican American (depending on which ancestor you choose) and when I
was a kid, my father took me out to the fields to help him pick cotton. So this man I
am photographing amidst the tobacco is not me, nor is he my father or my
grandfather, but he could have been. He and I are not so far removed from each
other. We are essentially made of the same material and woven into the same cloth.
Thus, the responsibility not to say anything false about the lives of everyone I
photograph reverberates within me. Instead, my work almost defiantly shows regular,
mundane life. I like how people naturally arrange themselves against their
environment. I am attentive to posture, dress, interaction, and the lines on faces that
speak of difficulties and joy.
Ultimately when I place my work before the viewer, I am not in control of his or her
reaction, nor do I seek to be. At best, I hope only to create more conversations:
conversations between Latino parents and children about the past and future;
conversations between neighbors of disparate backgrounds filled with a shared
hope; conversations that transcend the shallow political rhetoric that passes for
domestic policy debate; conversations that inspire young people to empower
themselves.
I hope too that the viewer as well as the viewed can sense the respect and love that
underscores my commitment to this documentary work. I hope I have done justice to
who we as Latinos really are, have been, and are becoming. - Jose Galvez
