Do.a Teodora offered me yet another cup of strong, black coffee. The aroma of the big, paper-thin Sonoran tortillas filled the small, linoleum-covered kitchen, and I knew that with the coffee I would receive a buttered tortilla straight from the round, homemade comal (a flat, earthenware cooking pan) balanced on the gasburning stove. For three days, from ten in the morning until early evening, I had been sitting in the same comfortable wooden chair, taking cup after cup of black coffee and consuming hot tortillas. Do.a Teodora was ninety years old, and although she would take occasional breaks from patting, extending, and turning over tortillas to let her cat in or out, it appeared that I was the only one exhausted at the end of the day. But once out, as I went over the notes, filed and organized the tape cassettes, exhilaration would set in. The intellectual and emotional excitement I had previously experienced when a pertinent document would suddenly appear now waned in comparison to the gestures and words, the joy and anger do.a Teodora offered. She had not written down her thoughts; but the ideas, recollections, and images evoked by her lively oral expression were jewels for anyone who wanted to know about the life of Mexicanas* in booming mining towns on both sides of the Mexico-United States border in the early twentieth century. She never kept a diary. The thought of writing a memoir would have been put aside as presumptuous. But all her life do.a Teodora had lived amidst the telling and retelling of family stories. Genealogies of her own family as well as complete and up-to-date information of the marriages, births, and deaths of numerous families that made up her community were all well-kept memories. These chains of generations were fleshed out with recollections of the many events and tribulations of these families. Oral history had proven to be a fertile field for my research on the history of Mexicanas.Line35 My search had begun in libraries and archives—repositories of conventional history. The available sources were to be found in census reports, church records, directories, and other such statistical information. These, however, as important as they are, cannot provide one of the essential dimensions of history, the full narrative of the human experience that defies quantification and classification. In certain social groups this gap can be filled with diaries, memoirs, letters, or even reports from others. In the case of Mexicanas in the United States, one of the many devastating consequences of defeat and conquest has been that the traditional institutions that preserve and transfer culture (the documentation of the past) have ignored these personal written sources. The letters, writings, and documents of Mexican people have rarely, if ever, been included in archives, special collections, or libraries. At best, some centers have attempted to collect newspapers published by Mexicans, but the effort was started late. The historian who tries to reconstruct the past from newspapers is constantly frustrated because, although titles abound, collections are scarce and often incomplete. Although many hours of previous study and preparation had taken me to do.a Teodora's kitchen, I was initially unsure of my place. Was I really an insider or were the experiences that had made the lives of my interviewees such that, although I could speak Spanish and am Mexicana, I was still an outsider? I realized, nonetheless, that the richness and depth of the spoken word challenges the comforting theories and models of the social sciences. Mexican history challenges socialscience models derived solely from victorious imperialistic experiences. Our history cannot be written without new sources. These sources will determine which concepts are needed to illuminate and interpret the past, and these concepts will emerge from the people themselves. This will permit the description of events and structures to assume a culturally relevant perspective, thus emphasizing the point of view of the Mexican people. The use of theoretical constructs must follow the voices of the people who live the reality, consciously or not. For too long the experiences of women have been studied according to male-oriented sources and constructs. These must be questioned. For the history of Mexican people, the sources primarily exist in our own worlds. And it is here where we must begin. I often found that as the memory awakened, other sources would emerge. Boxes of letters, photographs, and even manuscripts and diaries would appear. Long-standing assumptions of illiteracy were shattered and had to be reexamined. I saw that constant reevaluation became the rule rather than the exception. I entered women's worlds created on the margin —not only of Anglo life, but of, and outside of, the lives of their own fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, or priests, bosses, and bureaucrats.