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Revolution, migration changed lives of generations
By Steve Bennett : December 14, 2012 : Updated: December 15, 2012 3:28pm
Photo By Courtesy Lionel Sosa
A 1930 boyhood photo of Papi Beto Ramirez (left) was used on the cover of "The Children of the Revolución."
Photo By Courtesy Lionel Sosa
The families of this group of children found refuge in San Antonio from the Mexican Revolution.
Marketing and political consultant Lionel Sosa is the driving force behind "The Children of the Revolución," the public TV series that has now spawned a companion book.
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata enter Mexico City triumphantly after the defeat of President Victoriano Huerta in December 1914.
Pancho Villa's (right) surrender to Gen. Eugenio Martinez on July 23, 1920 was suprisingly cordial, ending almost 10 years of civil war.
Zapata's troops gather on a main street in Mexico City.
Zapata takes a cigarette break from battle.
Lionel Sosa's public television series "Children of the Revolucion" has spawned a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book.
Jose Heberto Ramirez posed for this patriotic photo with an American flag in 1930.
Lionel Sosa's grandmothers on both sides of his family were a part of the great migration north of more than 1 million people during the Mexican Revolution to escape the blood and dust of civil war in their homeland. Many women came on foot with young children in tow - and without their husbands.
As Kathy Sosa, Lionel's wife, points out: "If both Lionel's grandmothers made this journey, then surely almost everyone we know of Mexican descent would have an ancestor who repatriated during the Revolución, and each of them would have a story."
That was the seed that grew into the award-winning "The Children of the Revolución: How the Mexican Revolution Changed America," a Ken Burns-style, 20-episode public television series that aired earlier this year on KLRN. The series has now spawned a beautiful companion coffee-table book of the same title.
Sosa, the 73-year-old marketing and political consultant named one of the "25 most influential Hispanics in America" by Time magazine, discusses and signs copies of the book Tuesday evening at the Twig Book Shop at Pearl.
"These are the stories of families that came to Texas 100 years ago to escape the Mexican Revolution," Lionel Sosa said during an interview at his historic home in the shadow of Tower of the Americas. "What's interesting is these stories have never really been documented. As far as Texas and U.S. history goes, these people never existed."
Their legacy lives on, however, as the TV series and book project makes clear.
To paraphrase author Sandra Cisneros in "Revolución": If you don't tell your own story, it won't get told, or worse, it will be written for you.
In addition to a retelling of the events of the revolution by scholar Neftalí García, a map of major battles, a timeline of events and some 180 historic photographs, the book features the testimonials of many prominent San Antonians.
"I became a history teacher because somewhere in college I discovered the Mexican Revolution formed a connection to my community and my people," said University of Texas at San Antonio President Romo, whose grandparents came to San Antonio in 1913. He tells their story in a chapter provocatively titled "If I Have Another Child I'm Having It In a Hotel."
"Those who came here had a love/hate relationship with Mexico," said Sosa, who titled a chapter on the Cisneros family "Don't Go Home, You'll Be Killed." "They loved their country, they loved being Mexican, but they were very resentful of the politics that started the Revolution and forced them out."
"To Hell With You, Mexico!" is the title of the chapter on Sosa's own family story, that of his maternal grandmother Leonila Barrios Ortiz and paternal grandmother Cristina Jimenez Sosa: "When she arrived in San Antonio, Cristina and her young children set up a home laundry in an affordable black and Mexican neighborhood where they washed and ironed clothes for the neighbors."
One son would go on to found a cleaners, which he ran for more than 40 years.
Spotlighted sections of the book range from "The Women of the Revolution" to "Learning to be American and Chicano."
"It's multilayered," Sosa says of the book. "First, we tell the history of the revolution, then stories are layered in, along with sidebars on important issues. We have 181 photos, I'll bet from more than 100 different sources."
Sosa says he knew just a little Mexican history before throwing himself into the "Revolución" project three years ago.
"I mean, I knew Pancho Villa and Zapata," he said. "But I went to El Mirador for lunch and started asking people questions about their families, and they would say, 'Oh, my grandmother was Pancho Villa's nurse.' Everyone had a story. I started studying and learning as we went along."
San Antonio, where Francisco Madero launched the Plan of San Luis Potosí, sparking the Mexican Revolution, played a key role in historic events.
"San Antonio was the capital-in-exile for Mexico," says poet and scholar Tafolla, writer-in-residence at UTSA. "In 1917, there were five ex-presidents and 28 ex-cabinet members from Mexico living in San Antonio."
In his narrative in "Children of the Revolución," Romo ponders the questions many of the children of the Revolución have undoubtedly considered many times over the years: "What would life be like today if my grandparents hadn't made the decision to come to America?"
Would he have become a respected academic and administrator? Would he even have gone to college?
He doesn't know.
What Romo does know about his grandparents' flight north is this: "It turned out to be a very, very good thing. And generations of Romos are thankful to them."
Adds Sosa: "I can't imagine what this great country would be like if the Mexican Revolution hadn't happened."