The Guadalajara Reporter

Teenage girl takes on adult-sized challenges

Late in her fifteenth year, when it was noticeable that Concha Rosales was beginning to get her growth, she saw the man she called tio slap the woman she believed to be her aunt hard enough to knock the woman down. Concha threw herself in front of her tia and got hit too. Her uncle swore at her for getting in the way, making him strike her, too. But Concha had grabbed a split piece of log and stood in front of Chela Rosales with that hefty piece of kindling raised, ready to hit back. The man, Guicho Rosales, was astonished: This strange girl that everyone in the Rosales extended family had taken in was threatening him with a guage limb large enough that he was surprised Concha could heft it. And just because he’d hit his wife. Guicho didn’t consider such a thing any of Concha’s business, except as a warning.

Mexican women were still considered expendable beings in the early 1960s If not that, then they certainly were considered subordinate in every way to men, most particularly husbands and fathers.
Concha, as an infant, was the only survivor of a rattling, home-made bus that had gone off a narrow mountainside dirt road. Its tumbling, twisting venture into the morning fog killed everyone else. Concha didn’t know this. But among the the Rosales family and its many branches, it was believed that the infant Concha’s fall through space, and explosive landing that tore the bus to pieces, accounted for her “peculiar” behavior. She was a loving child...except for certain moments that no one understood.

From an early age she had learned a fledgling housekeeper’s duties with swift concentration. Yet it was livestock, the corral, the potril (horset pasture), and even that hard chore, stringing and repairing the ranch’s fencing — a stone base that shored up posts supporting barbed wire laced with long-spined huisache branches — that drew her attention. “She must have landed on her head,” said other Rosales children, along with not a few adults.

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