Lucía's Borderlands World

Lucía was born around 1854 in the Rio Yaqui valley of Sonora, Mexico. The borderlands traffic in Mexican and Indigenous slaves made Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable, and by 1864, Apache slavers had abductedLucía into the Black River region of central Arizona. Remarkably, the 10 year-old girl escaped, but she was then found by King S. Woolsey, a renowned Indian killer, who was leading an anti-Apache and gold-scouting expedition in the vicinity. Woolsey held Lucía on his Agua Fria and Aqua Caliente ranches for the next seven years, where she worked with other Indigenous and Mexican laborers caught up in the coercive labor market that characterized Arizona in the Reconstruction Era. By 1871, Lucía aged out of indenture and moved to Yuma, Arizona, where she joined a global community of refugees and upstarts attracted to the Colorado River town that linked Arizona and California, Mexico and the United States in a multilingual and multiracial exchange.