Anne Elise Urrutia reflects on how exploring and writing about her Mexican family history adds to a broader understanding of a vibrant cultural heritage.

Since my late childhood, I have been collecting threads of family stories.
My paternal great-grandfather was born into a modest household of aunts. Early in the last century, he rose to great success as the preeminent physician in Mexico’s national medical and governmental hierarchy. During the ensuing and violent civil war, the doctor, his wife, and eleven children escaped to San Antonio, Texas. As la familia assimilated through the next three generations, the past diminished with the unraveling ties to the homeland, leaving only incomplete remnants.
One such story was that he, an accomplished surgeon, was the first person to separate conjoined twins, right here in San Antonio. But if true, where were the details of this amazing achievement? In time, my father passed down some family photos and other papers. Among them were two girls in a picture, standing chest to chest, identical siblings, not smiling, but the clinical notes sat mute on my desk. When finally, after years, I regained enough Spanish to understand them, the words and images of the early 20th century swept me into a mixture of knowledge, science, art, and spirit that felt at once strangely familiar and yet new. The thoughts of my ancestors were resurfacing from a place I had lost long ago.
I expanded my search. A 100-year-old newspaper article was the only press I could find on the matter of the twins. Then, a genealogical journey added birthdays, family names, and their small rural town in northeastern Mexico, in the hills near a river, among herds of cattle, horses, and sheep. A quiet comment in a record revealed the young family’s border crossing into the United States; the twins’ father was seeking work as a showman in a California circus.
The travelers came alive for me as I imagined the young parents sitting around the campfire near the train tracks of the sideshow caravan, the mother’s face illuminated in the flickering light, revealing to the mesmerized circus family the dark plight of the conjoined girls. What began as a simple declaration of an ancestor’s accomplishment had become the tale of an itinerant Mexican family whose fate would change with the inventiveness of my bisabuelo, the surgeon who took their case.
There are other tales like this in my family. An adept physician touches many lives. And those lives touch the lives of others.
These threads of stories far too often disappear, but ironically, their vibrancy and impact strike me more deeply than any history lesson. I feel compelled to uncover them from the depths. They are colorful, complex, and human. And I don’t feel alone in this task, as I see others with their own ways of doing this work. I hope that finding and reconstructing these scenes of family life adds clarity and cultural understanding to stories that were disregarded, erased, and nearly forgotten. I think of myself as a forager of words, and a sifter of photographs. I hope that somehow they help.



