A sad story but a happy ending.
Our story is almost the same. After my grandfather
Alberto Duarte Vasquez died in 1923, in Mapimi, my
grandmother Maria Luz Cuevas Luera gathered all of her
5 kids and headed for El Paso, Texas, where she lived
and eventually died after some 40 years. The Mexican
civil war of 1915 and the flu epidemic devastated most
of the population of central Mexican states. Over
half of my dad's family died because of the flu
epidemic, which led of my grandfather's heavy drinking
and eventual death.
The good part of this story is that my grandmother saw
that there was no future for her kids in Mexico and
did something about it.
But can you imagine, my ancestors to come to the new
world about 1550 and prospered in Zacatecas and
Chihuahua, become ranchers, farmers, generals,
lawyers, governors, teachers, musicians, after a short
time in new Spain and Mexico, but eventually all this
was lost for most of them, and they came to this
country penniless but with hope