Guadalupe Gomez Villasenor; ‘Lupe’ in ‘Rain of Gold’

Guadalupe Gomez Villasenor, 89, the Mexican woman whose family history was chronicled by her son, Victor, in “Rain of Gold.” The 1991 epic, considered a Latino “Roots” describing how an ethnic family immigrated to the United States, made the Oceanside, Calif., woman known as “Lupe” famous. She appeared with her son the author to promote what became a series of books about the family and in 1992 was on national television with Charles Kuralt. “When he writes about where I was born, I have cried many times,” she told the CBS audience. According to the book, she was born in La Lluvia, a remote gold mining town in Mexico’s picturesque Copper Canyon, during the bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution. The author took his title from the folklore that the La Lluvia area had such abundant gold that it seemed to rain from the canyon walls. Lupe moved with her family to the U.S. in 1923 to work in the cotton and fruit fields of Arizona and California and married Juan Salvador Villasenor, who had taken a similar route, in 1929. The couple raised their family in Oceanside and Carlsbad. When her son began writing the family’s story, the matriarch said, “This is not any good. I’m an ordinary woman. I’m nothing special.” But later, she said, “I began to see that every person’s life is so important and so wonderful . . . If a person just takes the time to think about their life, they realize it is una cosa sagrada [a sacred thing].” On Friday in Oceanside.