Finding Refugio
September 9, 2021
I spent the last week in the high and low California desert.
I wouldn’t call myself a desert person. I knew I would struggle through the hot and arid heat to connect with it’s life and beauty.
Beyond the topography, from a truly heart-centered place, I wasn’t prepared for how I would struggle with my family’s own footprint through Riverside County. If anything, I think it speaks to the living breathing dynamic between self, history and the land.
Left: Noemi at Joshua Tree National Park. Right: Noemi’s great-great grandmother Maria de Refugio
Between 1918 and 1931, my matrilineal family migrated between Santa Barbara, Chihuahua, Mexico, Yuma, Arizona, the “Banning Bench” and the Salton Sea.
Back and forth as it seemed. They picked cotton, pulled nectarines, built a railway…ran a pool hall. All in the span of unsettling times between the Mexican Revolution, and the US Depression and Mexican Repatriation Acts.
Somewhere along these pathways my great-great grandmother Maria de Refugio (Muella) Rios passed away and remained. A final resting place undiscoverable to us in the archives of documented history. We were told it was Banning.
Over the years the women in my family searched, and now I search to find traces of her.
In the high desert of California, I felt a tug that a part of us is somewhere out there wanting to be found. And my heart ached a bit.
Left and Right: Joshua Tree National Park
Then came a shift, and with it a lighter heart. It took several days, but I reimagined bringing her forward, regardless of what material gaps in her story remained. I remembered, that she is connected within us, our lives, our joys, our love in present day. And in some way, perhaps this way, she is truly Found.
This was the most unexpected and surprising gift the desert offered me.
