Memories of an Anglo-Mexican Childhood : A BEAUTIFUL CRUEL COUNTRY<i> by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce (University of Arizona Press: $19.95; 318 pp.) </i>

“A Beautiful Cruel Country” is the work of a woman in her 80s, the memoirs of Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, who grew up on a ranch on the border of Arizona and Mexico just after the turn of the century. Her father was Anglo, her mother Mexican, and encamped all around their ranch, at the foot of Pesqueira Hill in the Arivaca Valley, were the Indians--neighbors, visitors, and friends.

The book sits on the cusp of culture and time, straddling the years between when Indians and Mexicans still had a partnership with the whites on this land and later when the alliance shifted. Today, one culture is indisputably dominant--but it was not always so, and it’s interesting to be reminded just how recently this cultural shift occurred.

Part of the enormous appeal of Wilbur-Cruce’s fine book is that she restores the feeling of living in an age of cooperation, where each culture contributed strengths peculiar to its people and pernicious racism had not yet taken root. Perhaps conditions on the Wilbur ranch were also exceptional because of the racially mixed marriage.

But there are two other factors, I think, which can account for the tolerance and peaceful cohabitation of peoples in her story: Her Anglo grandfather was a Harvard Medical College graduate who brought his healing skills to the raw territory and dispensed his caring liberally; her Hispanic grandfather was a true Christian ( Catolico ) whose generosity and fellow-feeling were selfless and genuine and whose belief in the Scriptures became the antitoxin for racial hatred.

Begun as a series of stories written for her young nieces and nephews, Wilbur-Cruce’s account grew into a full-length book. It should be noted that she describes only the years between when she was 3 and 6. How, you might ask, can anyone remember anything that young?

Of her memory, she writes: “My memories of my childhood had always been sharp and clear, but as I wrote, more and more memory rushed to help me, from wherever it had been stored. . . . I do not think I had realized that my kind of clear, sensory memory was at all unusual until I was a young woman in my 20s. Until then, I assumed that everyone remembered his or her past in great detail as I knew I did.”

Here is an example of the richness of her recall:

“Once, several days before the start of a corrida (roundup), Don Julian had hired Zoquetosa, then known by her Indian name of Chona, to make corn tortillas. . . . She had been pleased and excited at the prospect of making some money and had immediately run down to the creek. She had parted her hair in the center and, laying the two halves of her long mane one on each shoulder, she had proceeded to plaster each hank of hair with thick handfuls of mud from the creek. Then she hurried back to her job of grinding the corn for the tortillas.

“ ‘Why did you get your hair full of mud?’ Don Julian had shouted at her. . . . Chona answered indignantly. ‘I grind corn, hair get on corn. I put mud on hair, hair no get on corn. Hair on corn dirty. Mud on hair not dirty.’

“Don Julian had been very impressed with this logic, and from that time on, Chona was known by the name he gave her-- La Zoquetosa , ‘the muddy one.’ She was very proud of it and used to tell people that Chona was only the name she had been given, but Zoquetosa was the name she had earned.”

From age 3, young Eva was in the saddle, helping her father with the livestock, riding the “rock horses” (a strain of the Spanish horse) which she so highly praises in this book. “I took to the trails at will. Diamante (her horse) my faithful companion, my playmate. But he was also my protector . . . I didn’t dare get down from the horse, for once on the ground I wouldn’t be able to get into the saddle again.

“Everything in nature fascinated me,” Wilbur-Cruce writes. One day she witnesses the migration of Monarch butterflies: “They took off from a log and they looked like lace in the sky”; then they landed on Diamante’s mane and her hat. Another time, she sees a deer with morning glories entangled in its antlers crossing the trail in front of her. “Always drink up and enjoy these little scenes,” her grandfather says, “these are the things that keep us sane--they are muscle-building and shock-absorbing, so watch them with a prayer.”

We learn about the more mundane everyday activities on the ranch: how food is prepared, the uses of herbs, the peculiarities of animal life--for instance, how dogs had to be guarded from chasing toads because when toads are bitten they excrete adrenaline and the dog absorbs the secretion, sometimes fatally. Babies are given “toys”--well-bleached bones. Newborn baby goats have to be handled carefully so as not to touch their tails; otherwise, their mothers will refuse them, and they become lepes (orphans). Jimson leaves are cured and smoked to relieve asthma. On and on the list could go of wonderfully illuminating details that emerge in this book.

How to explain how satisfying it is to read of life having this kind of organic wholeness and integration?

The text is full of Spanish words, which the author nearly always translates by either giving the English in parentheses or, in the case of speech, having the speaker repeat the words in the other languages. Thus an added benefit of the text is a nice little language course.

The book ends sadly, with little 6-year-old Eva witnessing a last, great feast prepared by her Grandfather Vilducea and her Grandmother Wilbur: The feast is to honor the Indians who are departing, having been bribed, enticed and driven to accept a reservation life. The land seems empty without them. Snows come. Roofs cave in. Grandfather takes sick and finally dies. And then everything is changed, as though that wonderfully described childhood has ended, and with it, the recuerdos (memories).

In 1933, Wilbur-Cruce inherited the ranch she’s written about. She still lives there, dividing her time between a home in Tucson and the land--her “beautiful cruel country.” We are lucky she has written something for her ancestors, a fascinating account of frontier life, illustrated with a half-dozen full-page wood engravings by Michael McCurdy.