Carmelita's Recollections of Stone Island

By Ruth Clarke

In Carmelita Ruvalcaba de Aguirre’s 90 years, she has raised 13 children and buried three of them. She lost two homes to hurricanes, suffered the consequences of lesser storms, and she has seen and experienced more than it would seem humanly possible. During our conversation, many of her comments were “off the record,” an obvious response from a very astute, informed, and opinionated woman.
She was happy to reminisce about days gone by, instead of development; she says that she is too old and won’t live long enough to see the development of Stone Island. So she shared her memories.
In 1919, Carmelita’s Mexican parents were living in Needles, California, when she was conceived, but her mother returned by train to Mexico for Carmelita’s birth. She was one month old when they traveled back to California, and stayed there for 14 years. She has maintained her command of English since then. In 1937, her family moved to Stone Island and started to make a home. The ejido—Stone Island’s communal governing body, had started building houses from the lumber of palm trees, and Carmelita says that her father looked for a little house to move into.“There weren’t many people here then,” she recalls. “A group of people lived on one of the first farms. Only my husband was on the beach.” But then, he wasn’t her husband. At the time, he and his father were working for an American company that was dredging the harbor, and he had his eye on her, she says. “I didn’t like him,” she says, then adds: “but like we say, ‘something fell in the well and changed the water’…and I married him.” According to Carmelita, her husband built a palapa on the beach, but the mosquitoes were ferocious, and he said it would be better to move away from the ocean. Luckily, they

did, for that year a cyclone destroyed many homes. “That’s when we started building with bricks.” When the dredging company finished, they left behind a lot of lumber that we were able to scavenge for construction.
In the beginning, Carmelita’s husband started to sell sodas on the beach to the weekend tourists that came to Stone Island. “Back then, it cost five pesos to take the boat across from Mazatlán,” she says, and her husband made tips from the tourists and from his sales. “But I was having a baby every two years, and living on tips was not enough,” she says. All of her babies were born on the island with the aid of a partera—midwife. To supplement his sales, her husband first added coconuts to his inventory; then he got a permit to sell beer. The people came, they bought beer, sodas and coconuts, but they suggested he serve food, so they wouldn’t have to bring their picnic baskets. And so he did. “Our first restaurant didn’t have a name,” Carmelita recollects. “Then we named the second one “Alba Luz”—the Light at Dawn, and finally, the third one, Carmelita’s.” When her husband died 20 years ago, Carmelita says she had to be both man and woman, trying to pay off her husband’s many debts and to feed her children. Later, her daughter Lety opened a restaurant next to Carmelita’s, and in the early days, when Lety didn’t have a kitchen, Carmelita prepared the food orders. During her lifetime, she has lost her home twice to hurricanes— including all of her livestock and garden crops, but now she sits comfortably amid her flowers and trees outside her home on the main thoroughfare on Stone Island.
Her secret for living a long life is hard work, she says, though she also believes that she was given a mission to accomplish, and that’s why she is still around.