Dona Ramona Benitez Franco was born in 1902 on her parents' Arizona ranch and celebrated her hundredth birthday with family and friends in 2002, still living in her family's century-old adobe house. Dona Ramona witnessed many changes in the intervening years, but her memories of the land and customs she knew as a child are indelible.

For Dona Ramona as well as for countless generations of Mexican Americans, memories of rural life recall la querida tierra, the beloved land. Through good times and bad, the land provided sustenance. Today, many of those homesteads and ranches...