Episode 5 - Lula Martinez
Lula Martinez, photo credit: montanawomenshistory.org
Welcome to Mining City Reflections, illuminating the history of Butte, Montana through the stories and observations of 20th century women who lived there. I’m your host, Marian Jensen. The oral history collection in the Butte Archives has preserved the recollections of women who bring to life the challenges and achievements of the boom to bust town. In this episode, we hear the story of Lula Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who arrived with her family in Butte in 1925 at age three.
“In my heart, I never thought I would never fail. I really didn’t ever think that I could fail at anything that I set out to do.”
That’s Lula’s voice from the oral history that she made in 1987 with Laurie Mercier for the Montana Historical Society Project, Women as Community Builders.
Adding to a host of other immigrant groups, Hispanics came to Butte as early as the 1880s with the majority arriving in the 1920s and 30s. Experienced in mining in Mexico, they made excellent copper miners, and were often assigned to work in the hottest mines, such as the Belmont. Lula and her eleven siblings grew up on East Galena Street where the sounds of the mines, which operated night and day, were among her earliest memories.
“The ore bins were a little ways down from where we used to live, where a little car used to come from the Belmont mine and dump the waste, or the ore, into the bis. We could hear that at night! And I can remember sleeping upstairs and I could hear that at night, when the ore went down into the bins.”
Non-English speaking immigrants gravitated to the east side of town where dozens of languages were heard, but the miners and their families managed to find ways to communicate.
“We were surrounded by different nationalities. We had Vankoviches and Josiviches and Byviches and we had Serbians and we had Chinese. We had Italianos, Españolas and Mexican people. We had the whole United Nations around on the East Side.”
Although Butte was a melting pot of ethnic diversities, racial and class hierarchy made life difficult, particularly for children at school where their early experiences, sadly, would leave lasting impressions.
“As children, we didn’t know there was a difference, so we got along fine. It was when you’re already between the ages of 10-11 and going to school, when the teachers started to say, “Well you gotta sit over there. All the Mexicans sit on that side.” In those days, they did. Then we found out that there was difference. And also, it was grownups that taught, and teach you that there is class. That there’s different classes, but not children. Children don’t know that. We didn’t really know that there was any difference at all when I was a child. But when I grew up in butte and was going to school, there was a lot of discrimination. The attitudes of people, the attitudes of white people, they were bad.”
Lula’s home life became even more complicated when their mother, twice married to Mexican miners, was widowed both times. Because Petra Ortega spoke no English, her children had to assume the responsibility of communicating with the larger, often unforgiving, society.
“As a girl, an eleven-year old girl going into a place and talking to a lady about how your mother couldn’t pay the whole bill, and the lady saying, well she has to or the light will go off. When you gotta go home and tell your mother, who hasn’t got any more money to pay, and tell her that she’s gotta sit in the dark with a whole room full of children, you just don’t tell you mother those things. And they’re very sadistic because they didn’t turn the light off, but you sat there wondering when they were going to come and turn it off, and not being able to tell your mother because you didn’t wanna tell her that.”
Despite their poverty, Petra Ortega, with her emphasis on la familia, drew on survival skills that inspired her children for a lifetime. With generosity, and a richness of spirit that precluded judgment and defied their circumstances, she taught Lula how to respond in ways that could elevate people’s attitudes.
“She never gave up. My mother, at the time that my dad got killed in the mine, she got a pension from the mines because of the death of my father. And even as bad as they treated her and everything, the people around her, because they thought that she was a snob because she couldn’t speak to them. She wasn’t; it was just that she couldn’t speak English. She fed all the children around her. It was during the Depression, during the year that my dad got killed, and she fed the children around her. Whenever there were any children around her, and there were blocks around where they’d come play with us, she’d feed everybody. She’d make big pots of stew and feed all the kids, so I guess the kids told their mothers and that. So, my mother influenced me by me seeing her - that she never judged. She never judged. She just went day by day.”
A second influence came in an unlikely fashion when a dedicated teacher took the time to teach Lula English. Looking back, she describes the complex psychological responses of her own mind that illustrates the confusion immigrant children face.
“Because of the English language - it was hard for me to talk English because I only spoke Spanish when I started school. But Mrs. Egen didn’t just say, well you have to learn English because' you’re in America, or you have to speak English because you’re in school. She took me aside and told me she was going to teach me how to speak correctly and to pronounce my words right, because I needed to know English for myself, for my education of myself, for the rest of my life I’d need it. And it was something that she could do, because it was her role in her life. It was something that she was educated to do and she knew that I needed to do it. She gave me the knowledge that I was smart enough to learn if I let her teach me. But at the time, I thought she was just laughing at me really, because I hated - so how could you believe that somebody really wanted to do something for you, because you’re you, if you hated everyone, you know? You just don’t say, well gee she’s really nice - she’s gonna - you just don’t do that. You say, well she’s coming on again with another lie. So I didn’t believe her. I just went to school because I had to, but everyday she’d take me aside and everyday she’d stand in front of a mirror and we’d pronounce the words and watch my mouth.”
Butte’s Hispanic community numbered more than 2000 at its height. While no barrio existed in the city, Mexican American families gathered together at holidays and other family events and celebrations to honor their culture, cuisine and music, and to preserve the Spanish language.
“We used to get together when they baptized. Families would have a dance or a party or a dinner, potlucks you call them. The quinceaneras, when the girls turned 15, we’d have quinceaneras. And when they got married of course, we’d have a dinner. And when they got engaged or things like that, we’d have a dinner. We’d call them, you know, the comida, like the caceras, because they were at home. They were home-parties. They weren’t parties like where we rented this bar or rented as studio or something like that. We just went ahead in casas, you know in the homes, and had baila-casero. And whoever played, played. And we had a phonograph or something like that. And that’s how we had our cultural things. We had our music, our music. We always kept our own food and we still do to this day. We always cook our own food and during the holidays we always have our traditional tamales and enchiladas.
Once Lula Martinez left Butte she raised a family, while working with migrant farm laborers, and became an activist in whatever community where she found herself. Often she spoke truths that others didn’t necessarily like to hear.
“Everywhere you go, people need someone. People need someone. And there’s not very many people that can give of themselves. People will share what they have. People will share money, but they’ll give money just to get rid of you, or get rid of the problem. They’ll say well here, here’s five dollars, take off. I did my share, you know, I feel that the church does that way a lot. They give on Christmas, here’s your share, here’s Christmas, here’s our Christmas donations - and that’s it for the year! OK, fine. That’s what they did. It’s easy to give like that. it’s easy to give a coat or a jacket or a pair of shoes, but it’s not easy to give of yourself, and that’s what we’re lacking. That’s what’s lacking is for people to give of themselves. That;’s the need that people have. People need to give of themselves. People need people.”
While her work often centered on confronting injustices, she valued the opportunities she had, and spoke eloquently about the mindful nature of work on the land.
“One of the greatest things that I’ve ever found, and I suppose a lot of people really should remember that - when you work in the fields, when you work out there, you have all this time to think. To plan. To pray, that it comes out. To hope, you know. To find this faith and this thing within you to go on, because of the time that you put out there. The things that you see around you, the things that you see because you’re out there at first light - you see the farmer putting those seeds in the ground, those tiny tiny seed. Have you ever seen an onion seed? They’re tiny right? They’re so tiny, yet look what we get from them. And then, to watch them grow from that tiny seed, this is what the children learn that work in the fields. They learn that if you sow and cultivate and take care, when you cherish those things that are growing, and the sun that heats them and the water that nourishes them. And you, the loving care you give them, to take care of them and keep the weeds from them, they produce and give you the life that you need. You see, all this they learn without even knowing that they’re learning it. All this, you learn when you’re working there in what you’re doing with your work that you put together in a context of what you need to give the people for what they need from you to go on in their life.”
After years organizing migrant farmers throughout the Pacific Northwest, Lula returned to Butte from 1984 to 1988 to work with the Butte Community Union, a non-profit which assisted low income families after the Anaconda Company closed the mine. Eventually, she returned to Portland, Oregon to be closer to family, and died there the next year. She left a legacy of courage, and dedication to helping the less fortunate.
“We’re all familia Laurie. We’re all one big family. Until people realize that, until people come to realize that we’re all one big family coming from the same tree of life - until they realize that, we’ll never be able to relate to each other or really love each other the way we should.”
Mining City Reflections is a production of KBMF-LP and has been funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Permission for these recordings has been granted by the Butte Silver Bow Archives, the Montana Historical Society and the University of Montana.