I.  A Trail of Rosaries: Meeting My Great Grandmother on the Other Side of the World

The Azores is a tiny archipelago in the heart of the Atlantic, about which most North Americans know nothing. Typically, folks with whom we spoke about our pilgrimage responded, “You’re going where?” One couple who didn’t—instead they immediately exclaimed, “We’ve always wanted to go there!”—was Carl Duerksen of Winnipeg and Cheryl Dyck (Elaine’s bestie going back 35 years). Their enthusiasm hatched a plot to take this trip together, a stroke of fortune for us, as they proved to be great traveling companions along a sometimes-challenging itinerary (all trip photos below by Elaine, Carl, Cheryl or Ched).

So we were surprised and relieved when we discovered that one can fly directly to tiny Ponta Delgada airport from a few northeast cities like New York; not going via Lisbon saved us 1800 miles! [An Autonomous Region of the Portuguese Republic, the Azores has political and administrative autonomy, but is an integral part of Portugal and the European Union.]

It was still, however, a long haul from California: three flights across 6,000 miles, 48 hours and multiple airport delays, which was hard on my very compromised lower back. Nor did Elaine and I metabolize the jetlag well (in both directions). Fortunately, on the way there we were invited by our dear friends Cynthia & Mauricio Salgado to spend the night between flights at their place in Manhattan. Which is where the theme of this reflection commences.

****

A few years ago Mauricio, a former BCM intern and now professor at NYU, called to tell me he was going to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain with some close friends. After reflecting on how we might support him in his pilgrimage, I decided to give him a rosary with which to pray along the journey. After my dad died in 1991, I had discovered among his few items of family memorabilia two rosaries, and have kept both as precious artifacts of a woman I never met: his grandmother, Maria Rosario Guerena. Unlike Mauricio, I wasn’t raised Catholic, so I gifted him the less aged rosary, which was in reasonably good shape for being more than 100 years old. He told me after his adventure that it helped enrich a remarkable Camino.

Over a lovely breakfast in the East Village before the second leg of our flight, Mauricio pulled out a contemporary wooden rosary, explaining that he’d received it from a fellow caminante in Spain. He wanted to reciprocate by offering this rosary for my pilgrimage to ancestral places. I was very grateful, as I’d thought about bringing Maria’s older rosary with me to the Azores, but as it is tarnished, brittle and held together by a safety pin, I decided to leave it draped around a picture of Maria on our wall at home (pic above).

We finally landed in Santa Cruz das Flores on October 1^st, just before sunset, the SATA Bombardier turboprop touching down like a hawk on the small airstrip clinging to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Feeling quite emotional, I was the last person off the plane, then stopped on the runway to touch the ground in reverence (slowly bending down as far as my bad back would allow). An airport official immediately hollered at me to keep moving; I turned and retorted: “This is where my great-great grandfather was born, and I am the first of his descendants to come back. Let me offer a prayer!” He backed off, nodding solemnly and muttering: “OK, be quick… But you should be touching the soil.” “De acuerdo, my friend,” I smiled, and bowed my head for a few seconds before moving on.

All four of us (driver Carl included) gripped our seats during the half hour it took to navigate the 11 miles of the narrow, windy “main” road to Lajes, on the southeastern tip of Flores. It was here that Francisco was born two hundred years ago. We had to park a hundred meters away from our Air BnB (Cheryl found one even here, on an island with only one hotel), and carry our luggage up a narrow, crumbling alleyway too steep to risk in the car. Below us lay a small port, and even through dusk and drizzle, I could make out an industrial landscape of cranes and cargo containers (they were still, we learned, rebuilding the tiny harbor from a 2019 storm that destroyed its breakwater). This “unpostcard view” was initially disappointing, but over the week became strangely relieving, as I realized that Flores’ minuscule sea- and airport were the extent of modern transportation infrastructure on this island, assuring that life here remains slow and barely integrated into the modern world.

That first night in Flores I walked out alone on the porch and gazed into the gloom, suddenly fearing that perhaps my quest to “connect to something here” was Quixotic. So I raised my head to speak to the ancestors on whose behalf I’d come (I confess this as I write on the eve of the All Saints/Souls Triduum).

****

Friday, our first full day of exploration, keyed on an appointment with Luis Vieira, director of the Museu das Flores. Of the many cultural guides I’d identified and attempted to correspond with prior to the trip, Luis was the only one who indicated he would be available during our stay. So I put this meeting before all else, suspecting it would make or break my aspirations for the week; after all, Luis is the chief curator of the island’s history and culture. But I feared I might only get 15 minutes with him. Our crew headed back to Santa Cruz in the rain, found the museum, and to my relief Luis was waiting for us. He greeted us warmly, and after pleasantries, I nervously asked if he might have a bit of time to spend with us to answer my many questions. Recognizing I was serious about this encounter, he summoned his colleague Sylvia to translate, and invited us to sit down together.

This included: how the Azores were the first place west of Europe to be colonized, by Spanish and Portuguese maritime empires, inaugurating the “Age of Discovery/Conquest” in the 15^th century; aspects of mid-19^th century life on Flores; and my genealogical potsherds. (I’ll write more about all of these in future episodes.)

It was a beautiful conversation, and we departed calling each other “cousin.” And I happened to have the perfect gift to symbolize this new connection with Luis. This was thanks to artist-theologian Ted Lyddon Hatten of Dovecote Studios in Iowa, with whom we often collaborate. Upon hearing of our Azores pilgrimage, Ted had texted me that he would send me a bird carved from an oak branch to take with me and leave there. It would become part of his Bird2Bird art installation, which he explains below, “spans the four hemispheres of this troubled planet”:

“Give it to whoever needs it there,” Ted wrote me. The bird arrived just before our departure to New York, and was lovingly received by “cousin” Vieira. It now resides at Flores Museum.

As we were leaving, two thoughts suddenly occurred to Luis: “Hey, did you know that starting tonight is the annual weekend festa at the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, right near where you are staying in Lajes, and where your Francisco would have been baptized? It is a central cultural event that you really shouldn’t miss.” Dumb luck? I wondered; probably not. “Oh, and you should look up Ron da Silva, who lives on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. He’s a Californian, like you, and is a genealogical sleuth who loves helping people find their people. He’s helped me find a distant relative.” In true island style, Luis had neither an address or contact number, but insisted we “couldn’t miss” Ron’s place on our way back to Lajes.

Luis was right—on all counts. Over the next 24 hours, Ron would confirm, correct and expand my genealogical information about Francisco’s family—including his baptismal record from Lajes church—and offer to introduce me to a third cousin living in town. (That’s a story for the next episode; I’ll focus here instead on my revelation at the festa.) Luis’s “afterthoughts” made it clear to me that Francisco had heard my desperate petition for help in the dark of night. Because they opened up our week on Flores like a magical book.

****

The road from Santa Cruz to Lajes ran right by the church, and as we returned from the museum that afternoon, we could see activity for the festa ramping up, with tents, stalls selling traditional food, and folk milling around. We grabbed some fried dough from one of the stands and inquired about the schedule (since this commemoration was something only villagers would attend, there was no publicity). I ducked into the church for the first time, where a handful of older women were scattered across the pews, chanting the rosary. I couldn’t wait for Sunday’s traditional procession.

That evening I walked down to the sea from our lodging, and turned to gaze up at the steep bluffs above. The church near sat the cliff, facing eastward, keeping vigil across the vast Atlantic like a sentinel. In 1587 the original church, located where the cemetery now is, was burned down by English privateers, who sacked the town and countryside. The sanctuary wasn’t rebuilt for another two centuries, and then continually refurbished over another two, completed in 1960. The festa was now in full swing; light, music and the smells of barbecue wafted down through the thick night air.

Not until that moment did the obvious, simple echo finally penetrate my consciousness like a jolt of ancestral revelation. Francisco Mendosa had named his second of four daughters Maria Rosario after this church. Mary of the Rosary. He had been baptized there, and it was the center of village life where his family eked out a living. This was surely his way of hanging on to, and passing on, such an important piece of his soul, of easing his saudade. Yet I could not have known this except by coming here.

Of course, I still don’t know much about her. She was born in the mountain town of Sonora, CA on November 29^th, 1863, the third child of Francisco and Ynez. She married Mexican-born Louis Guerena in 1887 in a Catholic wedding at St. Patrick’s, and honeymooned in far-away San Francisco. Guerena, who was blind in his left eye and later suffered a leg amputated above the knee, ran a tobacco business and saloon in Sonora. They had two children: Ynez Belle (my grandmother, b. 1887) and Frank Louis Jr. (b. 1889). Maria and Louis built a house south of the Opera Hall in 1898, and later moved to Modesto, CA, where Guerena bought his own bar. He passed in 1919, a year after Francisco Mendosa.

While Ynez was not afforded opportunity for advanced education, her brother Frank went to Stanford, then law school, and became a prominent member of the state Attorney General’s office (he was involved in trying to mediate the famous west coast Longshoremen’s strike of 1934). Tragically, Frank’s promising political career was cut short when he was accidently shot and killed by his young son while hunting in 1937. This trauma was witnessed by my father, who never got over it; the one time he told me the story I saw him cry for the first time. Undoubtedly, dad’s mother and grandmother endured this further loss by leaning on their Catholic faith (something my dad left behind).  As a child I witnessed how Grandma Ynez loyally attended mass at the local Holy Family church in suburban L.A., and I assume that Maria was equally devout, as suggested by those two rosaries. After Frank’s death, as noted in my Introduction, Maria moved in with Ynez and family, sharing a room with a teenaged Edward, insisting on speaking only Spanish with him (which inspired dad to study in Mexico City between high school and colleage).

Maria Rosario died in 1942, and is buried in the family plot in Sonora, which we visit and tend every couple of years. Like her illiterate father Francisco, she left no journals or accounts of her life. My grandmother never spoke of her to us kids, and my father only rarely. There is no one left to tell her story. Yet a trail of rosaries brought me into her presence.

****

With all this stirring in me, I couldn’t sleep Saturday night, so got up and journaled for hours. I reflected on the fragmentation and silences that ran through the Mendosa family system: from Francisco’s forced abandonment of everything he knew; to Maria’s and my grandmother’s early losses of husbands and Sonora homes, and resulting dependence on their children; to my dad’s distance from all of us five kids—not to mention their respective alienation of assimilation into whiteness. I have been shaped and mis-shaped by such erasures and heavy doses of saudade. There is so much to metabolize from this pilgrimage!

****

Postscript. When Elaine and I moved to Oak View in 2005, the yard hosted only weeds, with the exception of two invasive exotic plants: a giant Robinia tree in the middle, and hundreds of Pink Ladies around the perimeter.

We were zealous converts to a native plants-only orthodoxy, and set about “cleansing” and relandscaping. Within a year the tree collapsed of its own weight (thankfully not while we were praying under it), and we used its firewood for years; native oaks and sycamores now flourish around the garden. The flowers, however, took years to remove, survivors always popping back up. (We did note that whenever we put boxes of bulbs we’d dug up out on the street for the taking, they disappeared in a day). This year we laughed at how twenty years later a few stragglers still persist.

I’m not sure how I will make sense of my epiphany of Maria Rosario in the Azores. But for now, it is enough to have placed her picture and rosary at the center of our Dia de Los Muertos altar. And next year, after we salvage and restore those few bulbs, she’ll be accompanied here by Pink Ladies.

Note: This is the second in a series of reflections on Ched & Elaine’s ancestral pilgrimage to the Azores. It first appeared in the Sept-Oct 2026 BCM Enews.