The story of Chihuahua Hill
Author: Kurt Johnson
Published by Desert Exposure Friday, May 29, 2026 1:10 pm
The hillside neighborhood rises above Silver City overlooking the town, crowned by La Capilla, the small chapel that has watched generations come and go from its perch above the streets below. For more than 150 years, people in Silver City have looked toward Chihuahua Hill and known it was there.
But for much of that time, far fewer people truly understood its story.
Years before historian Javier Marrufo ever finished writing the chapter “Chihuahua Hill: Silver City’s First Neighborhood” for “Unpacking Silver City,” he found himself sitting in the living room of a woman named Sinovia Ray, listening.
Marrufo had just begun what would become the Chihuahua Hill History Project, an oral history effort through the Silver City Museum focused on preserving the voices and lived experiences of residents whose stories had often remained outside the traditional historical narrative. Ray was one of the first people he called.
Within minutes of their first conversation, Marrufo was sitting inside her house, recording memories. Ray, then in her 90s, spoke openly about her life, her family and the neighborhood that shaped her. Before he left, she showed him an old family photograph paired with a poem written in Spanish. Then, as he prepared to walk out the door, she pulled him close.
“Mijo,” she told him, “Please remember me when I’m gone.”
The moment stayed with him long after he left the house. Years later, when the museum opened its Chihuahua Hill exhibit, Ray had already passed away. But her photograph hung on the wall. Visitors could scan a QR code and hear her telling her own story in her own voice. Marrufo remembers standing there thinking about that request — remember me — and realizing that, in many ways, the entire project had become an answer to it.
Because Chihuahua Hill was never simply a neighborhood. It was generations of voices that Silver City history had too often left in the background.
For decades, the dominant narrative surrounding Silver City focused on mining booms, American expansion and the arrival of Anglo entrepreneurs who transformed the town into a bustling mining center during the late 1800s. But the deeper Marrufo dug into Chihuahua Hill’s history, the more he found evidence of a community that existed before many of those familiar stories even began.
Long before Silver City emerged as an American mining town, Mexican and Hispanic families were already living in the region surrounding what became Chihuahua Hill. Oral histories gathered through the project trace roots back to San Vicente, a settlement tied to earlier Spanish and Mexican ranching communities in the area. Families raised livestock, built homes and established lives on the land before the silver boom transformed the region.
That realization reshaped the way Marrufo viewed both Chihuahua Hill and history itself.
“One of the most important parts about that project is that it’s a community-based history,” Marrufo said. “For a long time, a lot of Mexican American history wasn’t portrayed in historical institutions throughout Grant County.”
Traditional history often centered on politicians, bankers and prominent businessmen, the people whose names appeared most often in newspapers and public records. But Marrufo found himself increasingly drawn to something else: the stories carried by ordinary residents whose lives rarely made it into official histories at all.
“History only gains any kind of importance when it’s connected with human lives and lived experiences,” he said. “If you’re not viewing history with the understanding of different perspectives, then it just kind of seems like the history is neutral to me.”
Those perspectives reveal a neighborhood that became essential to Silver City’s growth while simultaneously pushed to its margins. As mining operations expanded during the late 19th century, Mexican laborers became indispensable to the town’s economy. Residents of Chihuahua Hill worked in mines and smelters, hauled freight, cut wood, cooked meals and built homes and businesses that helped fuel Silver City’s rapid growth.
But while the town depended heavily on Mexican labor, Mexican families were often treated as outsiders within the very place they helped build. Newspapers and public commentary from the era routinely portrayed Mexican residents through racist stereotypes, describing them as inferior or useful primarily for cheap labor.
Even as Chihuahua Hill became one of the central working-class neighborhoods of Silver City, its residents were frequently excluded from positions of power and from the broader story the town told about itself.
The contradiction shaped nearly every aspect of life there.
Families built homes from adobe, stone, and salvaged lumber along the rocky hillside south of downtown. Extended families often crowded into small spaces together. Many residents lived for decades without paved roads, plumbing or other basic infrastructure available elsewhere in town.
Yet what emerges most powerfully from the oral histories is not bitterness alone, but community. Again and again, former residents describe Chihuahua Hill as a place where neighbors survived by taking care of one another. Families shared food. People extended credit at neighborhood stores knowing repayment might never come. Residents looked after one another’s children, gathered at churches and community events and moved freely between homes in a neighborhood that often functioned like a giant extended family.
Marrufo said one of the most striking themes repeated throughout the interviews was the way hardship produced deeper interconnectedness.
“One thing that’s amazing about Chihuahua Hill is their resilience came in the form of them turning inward and just taking care of each other as a community,” he said. “That was one of the beautiful things to see over and over in that story.”
He heard versions of the same memory repeatedly while conducting interviews. Store owners gave food away when families could not afford to pay. Neighbors opened homes to relatives or struggling residents. Women turned kitchens, front rooms and small family businesses into lifelines for entire blocks.
“There’s a couple of people who owned stores, and you hear the same story over and over,” Marrufo said. “Eventually the store had to close down because they were more interested in helping out the community.”
Faith anchored much of that shared identity. La Capilla, the small chapel overlooking Chihuahua Hill, became deeply intertwined with neighborhood life through baptisms, feast days, funerals, and religious processions winding through the streets below. Oral histories describe generations of families tied closely to St. Vincent de Paul Church and to the traditions that shaped everyday life in the neighborhood.
At the same time, residents navigated the realities of segregation and discrimination that followed them into schools, workplaces and public life. Former residents recalled being punished for speaking Spanish in school. Some remembered being tracked away from academic opportunities or physically separated from Anglo students. Others described humiliating experiences that lingered long after childhood ended. For Marrufo, those stories became personal as he reflected on his own family history.
“I had this realization doing the project that obviously the life that I grew up living in Silver City was different than the life that my grandma grew up living,” he said. “She went to the segregated school. She had Spanish literally beaten out of her.”
But what struck him even more was what many residents did with those experiences afterward. As the oral histories unfolded, Marrufo began noticing how many former Chihuahua Hill residents who experienced segregation later became teachers, administrators, organizers and public officials who worked to improve opportunities for younger generations.
“A lot of the people who went on to become teachers, administrators, even local politicians were people from Chihuahua Hill who lived through that,” he said. “Because of their experience there, they went and tried to turn around and seek betterment for following generations.”
Organizations such as La Alianza Hispano-Americana, El Grito Headstart, and LULAC chapters became important forces for advocacy, education. and mutual support throughout the 20th century. Residents fought for bilingual education, greater educational access and broader representation in public life.
Over time, Chihuahua Hill itself also changed. Old adobe homes disappeared. Streets modernized. Families moved away while newcomers arrived. What was once viewed by outsiders primarily as a poor Mexican neighborhood increasingly became recognized as one of the historic and cultural centers of Silver City.
Today, Marrufo said, the neighborhood carries a very different reputation than it once did.
“In the last couple of years, it’s become a very desirable place to live for a lot of people,” he said. “There’s this renewed sense of history focused on it in the current moment.”
That change has created complicated conversations about preservation, identity and gentrification. Yet Marrufo said many newer residents also recognize the emotional weight embedded in the old homes and streets.
“I talked to one person who said she wants the soul of the house to be saved,” Marrufo said. “She wants it to retain its character even though there’s new people, new voices living in it.”
For him, one of the most meaningful changes has been watching Chihuahua Hill move from the margins of local history toward the center of it.
“If you look at the earliest records of Silver City, they always name Chihuahua Hill as kind of an afterthought,” Marrufo said. “Like Silver City and there’s those people over there.”
He paused for a moment before continuing.
“I’m glad to say that’s not really the sentiment anymore these days,” he said. “Chihuahua Hill is really viewed as one of those pillars of the town within its history and within its modern day.”
Still, Marrufo understands how fragile memory can be. That is why the interviews mattered so deeply to him. Why the recordings mattered. Why the voices mattered. Every conversation became another piece of a community trying to preserve itself before more stories disappeared.
Marrufo often says he may have gotten more out of the project than anyone else because of the people he met and the lives he encountered through their memories. Listening to residents speak about segregation, poverty, church life, neighborhood dances, grocery stores, gardens, schools, and family traditions slowly changed the way he understood his own hometown.
“It feels like every person I talked to, little by little I was becoming more of a complete human being,” he said.
And through those conversations, Chihuahua Hill slowly became something more than a historical subject. It became a living archive of people asking not to be forgotten. Which is why Sinovia Ray’s words still echo through the project years later.
“Mijo,” she told Marrufo. “Please remember me when I’m gone.”
“Chihuahua Hill: Silver City’s First Neighborhood,” written by Javier Marrufo, is Chapter 3 in the Silver City Museum’s history collection, “Unpacking Silver City.”
Read the article here: https://www.desertexposure.com/stories/please-remember-me,170413