Rita Rivas (1879-1958)

OK, while I'm into it, here is some more family history.

Rita Rivas is my great grandmother on my dad's side. She was the mother of my Gram Toni. Rita Rivas was born in 1879 in Pitiquito, Sonora, Mexico. Her family was from the Mayo tribe. When she was three years old, she came with her parents Francisco Rivas and Antonia Flores Callioux to Anaheim, California. There, her family had some problem with a Catholic priest who wanted to charge them for performing one of the sacraments, so they left the Catholic Church. There was pride in my grandmother's voice when she told me these were the first Protestants in our family (my grandmother was a Missouri Synod Lutheran).

The picture above is from about 1903, when Rita Rivas graduated from a business college in Santa Ana or Anaheim to become the first bilingual female professional secretary in California.

In the anti-immigrant climate of the States, I always said that my family has been in California since the 1750s, which is when Colonel Juan Osuna arrived with Father Junipero Serra. But now that I look at the family tree, I see that almost every generation has somebody from Mexico in it too. Amado Amadisto, Rita Rivas, and Benjamin Gallegos all came to California from Mexico when the border wasn't as militarized as it is now. In fact, for much of that time there was hardly a border at all and families like mine went back and forth as they pleased. That's back when the people and land of California and Northern Mexico were one. It's something I will have to tell my child about.