. happy no matter what, happy as the birds that sing in the treetops, happy as she came shuffling down that lonely dirt road, stopping now and then to do a little dance (Villasenor 558).
However, it was obviously difficult to maintain such an optimistic sense of life in the face of the obstacles faced by the immigrants. Villasenor, in the Foreword to his book, makes clear that he believes it was the peoples' faith in God that enabled them to sustain their sense of self, family, community and culture.
Villasenor writes that "my parents and relatives kept telling me how they'd . . . spoken to [God] on a daily basis as one would speak to a friend and how . . . God had actually spoken back to them in the form of miracles" (Villasenor xii). It is difficult for Villasenor to believe this at first, because he is a member of a later generation which is much more worldly and cynical and distant from that fundamental state of faith in God than were members of the generation which fled Mexico after the Revolution. However, his study of his family's history exposes him to the vitality, versatility, determination and, especially, the faith of his parents' and grandparents' generations. These qualities enabled those generations to not only survive life in the United States, but to discover ways to maintain and strengthen their culture and community.
Fleeing the poverty, suffering, hunger and then the bloody Revolution of 1910, the Mexican migrants had unrealistically high expectations with respect to life in the United States: "Once we get across the Rio Grande, everything's going to be fine. . . . Oh, I tell you, all we have to do is get on the train, Juan, and get shipped up north, and then everything will be paradise" (Villasenor 112-113). It did not turn out to be such a paradise, however.
Assimilation is on the minds of the migrants almost immediately after crossing into the United States. They know they will have to fit in in o...