BELOVED LAND. AN ORAL HISTORY OF MEXICAN AMERICANS IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA

First edition. 8vo. Inked inscription & dated in the year of publication by the editor and the photographer on the title page. Burnt orange cloth, titles stamped in gilt on the spine, green front and rear endpapers, xxiii [blank], 150 [1] pp. contents, photographs, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrated from photographs. Photographs by Jose Galvez. "Dona Ramona Benitez 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. Dona Ramona witnessed many changes in the intervening years, but her memories of the land and customs she knew as a child are indelible. For Dona 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." Fine bright copy in a bright fresh dust jacket.…