She would have two more children by a second husband who tied railroad tracks in the United States just before the Depression, and they enjoyed a brief life of fine clothes and a brand new Studebaker. Then they lost everything when they were deported back to Mexico in cattlecars along with the rest of the Mexicans who had been brought in as laborers during the days of prosperity. That husband also died, he was not shot in the head as Juan was before her eyes, but rather died of tuberculosis, the only thing that the United States had allowed him to bring back to his country.

As a bracera during World War II, doña Felicia ended up joining the U.S. Army rather than letting herself get deported again and trained as a nurse. She took her two youngest children (the two eldest were grown by then and on their own) with her to Europe when she was sent to mend soldiers in the frontlines.

She married a French soldier and had two more children. But when the war was over she discovered that her husband was already married to a woman in Lyon and he went back to his first family and doña Felicia (by then she could be considered a “doña”) returned to America alone, and made her home in the United States.

And while she did not marry officially again, she had one more true though brief love and bore her last two children during the era when families throughout the United States were rushing out to buy television sets. If those two youngest children had lived, the rest of doña Felicia’s long life might not have been absorbed by her role as devoted community servant. But at the age of ten, her boy was kidnapped and found dead months later facedown in a riverbank and later her daughter at nineteen was found raped and murdered—and from that point on, doña Felicia lived alone.

The six older children had gone their own ways, away from the land she finally decided to settle in; sometimes they wrote and less frequently visited her with their own families and even their families’ families and doña Felicia, who as a child was said to have no faith, had nothing but faith left and devoted herself to healing with the consent and power of God, Tatita Dios en Sus cielos, the only lasting caretaker of her life.

Caridad observed and assisted doña Felicia for several months before she was even asked to diagnose a “patient.” At first it was all too confusing and scary to Caridad, who tended to drift off into her own thoughts and did not know if she could truly decipher the symptoms and complaints of other people, nor could she determine which were based on physical ailments, which were spiritual factors, and which were “psychological”—and therefore to be treated solely with generous doses of compassion.