At her birth in 1885, some outside observers might have thought of Vidala Parra Zárate as an ordinary female born to a humble family in the then relatively isolated village of Tezontlale, Hidalgo.[1] The village had a population of around seven hundred souls[2] whose life’s options had not changed much in a hundred years. As customary for girls of her age group, Vidala entered the family labor force by age four or five, never attended school, and married young at age sixteen when in 1902 she joined her life with Trinidad Hernández Javier. It is doubtful that before her marriage she had ever traveled more than twenty-five miles from her village. She and Trinidad expected to put down agrarian roots in their village, just as their parents had done in their generation, and their grandparents and great-grandparents before them.

Within the first year of her marriage, Vidala had her first child,[3] and about every couple of years thereafter she birthed another, until she had thirteen. Large families were the norm among rural families; Vidala met the cultural expectations of her time, and she had reason to be happy about it.

Aside from any notions about the lack of or cultural acceptance of contraceptive measures, rural folk desired large families to meet the needs of the family labor economy and to hedge against the likely loss of up to 50 percent of their children by age five. In 1900 life expectancy at birth was only thirty years for Mexico as a whole. In the villages it was about twenty-five years or less owing to issues of food sanitation, disposal of human waste, epidemics, and sundry rampant diseases and accidents that afflicted the young with abandon.[4]

Vidala was fortunate to have lost only two children from her large progeny—José, who died as an infant sometime in 1904 following his birth on March 19, and his namesake, who was born in 1910 and who died at age two. One has the impression that Vidala must have been an exceptionally vigilant mother who applied every aspect of folk medicine to her family’s benefit in order to have logged such an achievement.

Before his retirement from employment in Pachuca, Vidala’s husband, Trinidad (see preceding vignette), was home less often than he wanted. In the meantime, Vidala cared for the couple’s large brood of children, teaching, nurturing, nursing, and educating them in the art and practice of living. She must have done a good job even while apparently holding an outside job of some kind for a time at the Mexican Light and Power Company in Pachuca.[5] After all, her descendants are found all over Mexico as well as in the United States. In both countries, scores upon scores of them have served missions and lent their hands in leadership and teaching positions in the Church as well as excelled in their own life’s ambitions.

Vidala Parra (right, standing) with two of her daughters and member sisters from the Santiago Tezontlale Branch working on handicrafts to help fund the construction of their new stone meetinghouse, ca. mid-1930s.

In 1912 one of Vidala’s great-grandsons, Abraham Wise Hernández, born and educated in the United States, returned to Mexico as an employee of the US State Department at its embassy in Mexico City. The State Department takes in bright, talented, and prepared US citizens in its overseas missions. Abraham was all these things, thereby doing justice to his extraordinary Hernández and Parra forebears. Like many others of the Hernández and Parra kin groups, he was committed to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, a value his great-grandparents had nurtured in the lives of their children and therefore helped pass down to him. After a three-generation absence from his ancestral homeland, in 2012 Abraham was looking up his roots in the remote reaches of the state of Hidalgo. One of his first efforts was to visit the grave of his great-grandmother Vidala.

Aside from nourishing her family of thirteen children with the spiritual and physical sustenance of life, Vidala Parra Zárate helped prepare three generations of Relief Society sisters in Santiago Tezontlale in the art of giving, fundraising for their stone church, fostering maternal health education, and giving service. For example, while her husband, together with the couple’s older sons and other men and boys from their branch, worked to cut volcanic stone and make bricks to erect the walls of their new church, Vidala, her daughters, and other branch sisters and their daughters were engaged in making handicrafts and preparing food sales in order to raise money for windows, doors, and other store-bought materials for their building. Moreover, while the men and boys did the heavy volunteer construction work, the sisters fed them hearty meals so they could carry on.

Although she remained unschooled to the end of her days, Vidala Parra nevertheless made an impact that is still felt by the sixth generation of her descendants in Santiago Tezontlale and abroad. One has the feeling that her influence will reach into several more generations through the genes that carry her legacy.

Notes

[1] Family group sheet provided by Florencio Hernández, Vidala’s grandson. Vidala’s parents were J. Dolores Parra and Ignacia Zárate. The village’s name was later changed to Santiago Tezontlale, located in the municipality of Tula in the state of Hidalgo.

[2] This is an extrapolation. The population in 1900 was 1,068; in 1975 it was around 2,400. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Santiago Tezontlale,” https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantiagoTezontlale.

[3] A daughter whom they named Jacinta, born on August 12, 1902, according to the Florencio Hernández genealogy sheet.

[4] See M. Mier y Teran, “Population Dynamics in Mexico: 1895–1990. The Great Demographic Change” [Spanish], Demos, no. 4 (1991): 4–5. Mier y Teran is a prolific writer on population dynamics in Mexico.

[5] Vidala’s grandson Florencio Hernández suggested this connection. Interview with LaMond Tullis, Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico, January 23, 2011.