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If you are missing a part of the Fernando Eros
Caro Case series, don't hesitate and drop us a line...
Elsie

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Online petition asking for a new trial at:
<http://kola-hq.hypermart.net/actcaro.htm>
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The FERNANDO EROS CARO Case
PART 2 - BACKGROUND

ANCESTRAL / CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Fernando Eros Caro was the second generation of Caros
born in the rural town of Brawley in the Imperial Valley of
southeast California. He is a Yaqui Indian of Mexican heritage.
Family lore offers a dramatic story of how the family first came
to Brawley from their ancestral homelands in the early 1900s.

According to Alejandro Eros, Mr. Caro's maternal uncle, all children
in the Caro and Eros families heard the tale of this journey over
and over again:

"I told all the children in my family and in my brothers' and sisters'
families about my grandfather, General Varela. He was a Yaqui
Indian in Sonora who joined Pancho Villa's army to fight for
democracy. The Yaqui were very good soldiers and he soon
became a general. He was a very proud man who stood for the
Yaqui way of life and told me all about it. When I was just a baby,
he took me from my mother and raised me in his own house so I
could learn about him and our history. Fernando heard this story
over and over when he was a little boy. The children always asked
to hear the story about their great-grand father."

Juan Varela came to the United States when he followed his
wife-to-be to Arizona Territory. She fled their Indian village in Sonora,
Mexico, in the early 1900s when word came to the village that a
Mexican general in the Federalis planned to kidnap the most
beautiful of the young women to use as a concubine. Fearing that
her daughter, who was then 16 years old, would be chosen by the
general, Mr. Caro's great- grandmother waited until nightfall and
took her beautiful daughter and two of the other children away from
the village to search for safety They walked all night and hid during
the days until they reached Arizona Territory.

The Yaqui Indian community in Arizona had originally migrated north
from Sonora, Mexico, during years of cruel treatment and systematic
oppression by the Mexican government aimed at eliminating them
as a people. First encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in the
early 1600s, the Yaqui people lived in highly structured agricultural
villages along the Yaqui River. The Yaqui people resisted colonization
by the Spaniards and formed small bands to fight the invaders.
Spanish troops far outnumbered the Yaquis and had sophisticated
military equipment for waging war. The Yaquis fell within a few years,
but small bands continued to live in the mountains and attempted
periodically to reclaim their homelands. By the mid-1800s the Mexican
government had an official policy of dispersing any and all Yaqui Indians,
forcing them to relocate away from their homelands. By the turn of the
century, Yaqui men were forced into service as laborers to build railroads
in the Yucatan. Hundreds were shot or hanged by government troops.
A small number escaped to the Arizona Territory and were subsequently
recognized as an American Indian nation by the United States
government. The small reservation exists today outside Phoenix,
Arizona. Their very existence is a tribute to their determination to survive
their constant battle against assimiliation and virtual annihiliation.

Mr. Caro's great-grandmother, Isabel Varela, and grandmother, Santo
Varela Eros joined the Yaqui people of Arizona and immediately learned
that to support themselves they would have to work as contract labor in
the Arizona cotton fields. They worked in the fields, picking, hoeing, and
chopping cotton for over a year. During the late 1910s, General Varela
and his beautiful bride joined the stream of Mexican workers drawn to
the Imperial Valley in California by the promise of work in agricultural fields
created by flooding the Colorado River. They married and began to rear
their family in dirt grinding poverty, despite their hours of toil in the fields.
Mr. Caro's mother, Isabel, was born December 28, 1926, and her lot was
to care for the six boys and two other sisters in the family while her parents
worked in the fields. She, like other Native American and Mexican American
children in the community, attended school only through the eight grade in
racially segregated Hidalgo School. She inherited her mother's beauty.

Isabel's life was harsh; her mother hit the child frequently for little or no
reason, and her father beat her at will. Even as a young child, she was
servant to the entire family and performed her chores as expected with
little hope for a different life. She knew no other. After leaving school, she
was courted by Fernando Caro, Sr., a handsome young man sought after
by other girls in the East Side, Brawley's Mexican district. He was a
descendant of the Aztecs.

When World War II broke out, Fernando Sr. joined the Army and served in
Japan, where he pined for the familiarity of his family and his community,
swearing never to leave again if allowed to return. Upon his return, he
and Isabel were married. Within months, Isabel was pregnant with her
first child, Fernando Jr.

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