Bert Corona - Family Background

Family Background

Corona's father Noé Corona was a commander in Francisco Villa's División del Norte during the Mexican Revolution, which he joined after members of his family were killed in a massacre at Tomochic, Chihuahua. Noé Corona was an anarcho-syndicalist and member of Partido Liberal Mexicano.

His mother, Margarita Escápite Salayandía, was a Chihuahua schoolteacher educated at Protestant missionary schools. His maternal grandmother was a physician. The family emigrated to El Paso, Texas in 1914 or 1915, marrying at about the same time. His parents married in the Juarez customs house under Villa's sponsorship. They settled into a home in the predominantly Mexican Segundo Barrio neighborhood where their four children Aurora, Humberto, Orlando, and Horacio were born.

In El Paso, his father worked in the logging and rock cutting industries, while simultaneously continuing clandestine revolutionary activities. He longed to return to Mexico, however, and in 1922, when the Obregón government granted the family's petition for amnesty, they returned to Chihuahua. After several months, Noé Corona secured a position with the federal government as a forest ranger in Texcoco. There he and several other Villistas were murdered while attempting to extinguish a forest fire. According to Corona, "We believed the assassins were agents of President Obregón, who feared that the villistas were planning to reorganize and overthrow the government." After his father's death, the Corona family returned to El Paso, where young Humberto grew up surrounded by tales of the Revolution and the Protestant social networks of his mother and grandmother. "Religion, specifically Protestantism, was also very significant in my socialization and in influencing my own later political activity."