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“My child, you’re going to be shocked,” Margarita Galicia said. “I got married when I was 14 years old.”

That was 50 years ago, and her husband, Marcos Enrique Franco, was 26. Two of their 9 children live in Teton Valley—Margarita and Lucho Galicia Franco. Margarita is active in the Hispanic Resource Center and Lucho helps recreate Mexican fiestas at Good Shepard Catholic Church in Driggs. He’s usually the one tending the barbeque or serving the fermented pineapple juice he made in a method similar to the way his father turns the juice of the maguey plant juice into thick, alcoholic pulque.

The Galicia Franco’s story is steeped in the history of Mexico.

“My grandfather was a Spaniard,” Galicia said.

She heard from her grandmother about how the tall fair-skinned, blue-eyed European was conscripted into the army, fought in the “last war,” and then took the indigenous woman as his wife when she was 12 years old. Which war may have been last, she admits she cannot say. She never went to school.

“I can’t read but if you give me a thousand pesos I can count them,” she said.

She’s certainly counted more than a thousand pesos in her life. By selling tamales and tacos on the side of the road, she earned the money that bought the materials to continue to add onto the house room by room.

 “We were in the street every day for thirty years,” she said.

Her husband built the house, grew the corn and raised the animals. Franco, she said, is a campesino who inherited land from his father. The land surrounding Hueyotlipan was largely in the haciendas of Spaniards until the revolution. Many families have stories of the uncles and grandfathers who worked on the large farms. Several around Hueyotlipan are well-preserved still giving evidence of the miserable living quarters of the workers. In the decades following the revolution, the land attached to the haciendas was gradually repartitioned to the residents of Hueyotlipan, according to historian Alex Perez Olvera. Technically, this land cannot be bought or sold, it remains the inheritance of the family and the “property of the nation,” though sales arrangements are made that evade the technicalities of the law. Like the Galicia Franco children, younger generations have chosen to find work elsewhere instead of eking out a living on a few hectares. To pay a coyote to help them cross the border, many lease their land in an agreement that is effectively a sale.

Franco, though, still works the land he inherited. Galicia jokes about needing a bigger kitchen and cooking the pears because they don’t have the teeth left to eat them raw while Franco sips a hot breakfast drink of atole a thick, sweet corn concoction accompanied by corn gorditas—substantial pancakes flavored with guava.

“I can work at the ranch until one in the afternoon with this,” he said.

It’s a ten-minute walk out of town to the parcel where he’s building a house for his son. He passes the fields of his cousins and runs into his godson herding sheep. At the “rancho Escondido,” or hidden ranch, there is Lucho’s half-finished concrete block house and behind it a couple of ramshackle sheds and piles of dried beans. One shed has a bed where Franco slept to guard the building materials and where he keeps a bike to ride to another parcel further out of town. The other shed shelters bales of dried cornhusks and stalks. He’s saving it as food for the cow he wants to buy so Lucho has a source of milk when he returns.

“He has to have a cow to milk,” Franco said.

Then he places a chair in front of the shed, sits down and takes out his harmonica. Here he can also relax, make music and drink pulque.

TVN reporter Bridget Ryder is spending two weeks in Mexico on a special editorial project, reporting on the Hispanic community and their Teton Valley connections. Ryder was the recipient of the Don Watkins Mid-Career Scholarship awarded through the Idaho Press Club last spring to help fund this project.

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