The 1900 census shows twenty-nine Mexican immigrants living in Iowa, none in Muscatine. The 1910 census lists six single men in Muscatine, plus—apparently—the first and only family household: John and Anna Sanchez and their three children. Anna and her thirteen-year-old daughter were the only Mexican females listed in the entire city in 1910.
In late 1906 the Journal reported 300 Mexican rail workers arrived from Colorado, lived in “boarding cars,” and moved up and down the line where needed. The Muscatine News-Tribune told of the Rock Island Railroad’s experiment in replacing Italian laborers with Mexicans.
Those earliest migrants who came to build and maintain railroads were glad to escape the violence, chaos, and economic upheaval of the times leading to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921). They usually left their wives and families behind.
Anna and John were an anomaly because they came as a family so early.
Happily for Muscatine, Anna told her life story to one of her granddaughters who wrote it down.
Born to Apache parents in the Chiricahua Mountains (now Arizona) on January 20, 1875, she never knew her birth name, but family members called her Rose Little Heart.
When she was a young girl, her father left to fight and defend their tribal lands. As he left, he told her she must go to the mission if he does not return. That is what happens.
A Spanish couple adopted Rose Little Heart. On her eighth birthday she was baptized Sebastiana Gonzales Baldanado. When she was sixteen, her adopted mother died of influenza. The grieving widower let his wife’s brother adopt Anna, so she became Sebastiana Baldanado Moreno.
The young woman married Maximo Mora, and they had two children, Estafania (1898) and José (1901-2). Her husband died in 1901, and she found lodging and work at a monastery.
One day in 1906 she answered the monastery door to a deserter from the Mexican Army. Juan Tomas Contreras Sanchez was tired of constant fighting and wanted to enter the United States at the Rio Grande border.
When he was ready to leave the monastery, Juan kidnaped Sebastiana as she was walking to the school to pick up her daughter. He “grabbed her up and rode off with her,” her granddaughter wrote. Riding north for hours, he told her he intended to have her—marriage or not.
As John and Anna, they were married in May 1906. Their son Benjamin was born February 13, 1907, somewhere in what is now Arizona.
For years Anna pleaded with John to let her get her children, but he refused out of fear she would not return. Somehow, they were reunited because they are listed with Anna in the 1910 Muscatine, Iowa census.
The Sanchezes were reported living on Front Street (Mississippi Drive) in a boxcar. John and six Mexican male boarders aged between nineteen and thirty were listed as railroad laborers. The census lists Anna’s work as “none.”
Cooking, cleaning, and washing for three children (and several more to follow) plus seven railroad men would have been a lot of work. Doing it without electricity or running water made the work even harder. Anna spoke only Spanish so probably had no female friends to share her burdens with.
In November 1909, the Muscatine Journal told of young boys harassing a Mexican woman who did her laundry in the river every Monday, hanging it near the bank to dry, as was her native custom. The boys dragged the clean laundry in the dirt and mud and tied it in knots while she was absent. Life was not easy.
The 1920 census shows the Mexican population had grown. Muscatine had one family with children, three married couples, six households where a Mexican man was married to a U.S. citizen, and five single male boarders. Other households appeared in Fruitland, Grandview, Sweetland, West Liberty, and other communities along the railroad. By 1920 the Sanchez family had grown to a dozen and moved to Medora, Kansas—still on the Rock Island Line.
When families immigrate, it is the women who often form the backbone of the family unit and of the tight-knit ethnic neighborhoods. In the past it was usually the women working behind the scenes as volunteers who kept churches, schools, and community betterment projects going. Hard-working women have persistently worked to improve the lives of their families and our community but often receive very little recognition. The mothers and homemakers of this country are unsung women of inspiration.