456 years ago Spanish missionaries arrived in this valley; a year later, on June 24, 1555, the conquistadors arrived and named the valley San Juan, being that date's name day, or feast day. In 1563 the first haciendas appear and in 1592 the town was founded. The river that runs through this valley is also the San Juan, but the "del Rio" in the town name was in honor of Rodrigo del Rio de Loza, a conquistador who arrived with Francisco de Ibarra and apparently stayed in the valley. Ibarra went on from there to establish Nueva Viscaya which became Durango, the capital.
The 1790 census records: 2,236 Spanish; 2,789 indigenous; 1,875 mestizo (like me); and 4,000 other. Today, of the less than 14,000 people in the municipality, more than half live in San Juan del Rio; and 17 of those people spoke an indigenous language. A part of the history of the state of Durango is the rebellion of the area's indegenous people against the Spanish invaders; there were two or three tribes that caused the most trouble, but on occasion, the Comanche would wander down and join the "party".
There are no records, written or oral, to indicate that either of my grandparents families came to live in San Juan from somewhere else, which tells me that their roots must run deep in this valley. The
narrow streets in San Juan are cobblestone, but you have to leave town and the cobblestones, walk a quarter-mile north on a gravel road flanked by four-foot high walls made of stacked stone to get to my grandparent's hacienda. It is an agricultural community and livestock is often penned in with that same stacked stone or adobe walls; sometimes barbed wire is placed on top of the stone. My grandparents home is made of adobe walls that are a foot thick; the walls of the house have been stuccoed, but the ones around the corral, which are 10 feet high, are not. When i began to visit this house i was nine, and there was no plumbing, you went out to the corral with the chickens and the pigs and you did business with them. The river is about 100 yards from the back door, and there is where we bathed, washed clothes, and got our drinking water, but for that you dug a hole on the bank after you had cleared a space of stones, some as big as bowling balls; it filled up with water and when it settled, you drank it or collected it to take home.
Going to the river was a daily thing for the women, because this was primarily women's work back then; what am i saying? in Mexico it still is. In the interest of getting as much done in one trip they had adopted the practice of carrying buckets or large clay pots filled with water on their heads. My first experience of seeing this spectacle, as you might imagine, was pure awe; but, i was not prepared to see my own mother arrive one day from the river with a bucket of clean dishes on her head and carrying a bucket of laundry in each hand; that just blew my mind. As far as the coolness factor for a kid today, compare it to, let's say, seeing your mom kick ass at beer pong, but maybe that's just me.
As i have explained before, my grandmother died of cancer when mom was 18; when mom was 32 my grandfather became ill. Mom was living in California at the time and my older sister was two when they went to live in San Juan to help take care of him even though, at the time, she had seven living brothers and sisters. She helped take care of her father for over a year before he died; they never found out exactly what he died of.
My aunt Socorro and her two daughters lived in the house for many years and then it was divided in half and uncle Jose and his wife moved in, they had nine children.
One of the first things that come to mind about my mom is that she preferred to go barefoot; she said she grew up barefoot in San Juan. When she had to start school, grandma made her put on some shoes before she left the house to go into town. Up the road, she would climb over the stone wall, into one of her father's fields, and hide her shoes there. One of her sister, and i want to say it was aunt Socorro because it sounds like something she would do, would, if she found them, take them back inside the house; so, mom would have to try and sneak into the house without her mom seeing her. This was before the television, they used their imaginations to create their own entertainment.
In the pictures, my oldest, Jorge, when he was five in San Juan.
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