This collection started as a whisper, a quiet mouth asking questions. Over the years it became a coherent voice that kept getting louder. Now it is a song, sprung from a yearning to fill in the missing parts, to understand my mother's story. Perhaps it's something that goes beyond what is experiential and real and moves into memory and imagination. Perhaps it is a book of magic, of synchronicity and colliding moments in time, too strange to be logical, too concise to be chance. Ultimately, it's a way of shedding light, in order to change the direction of a past. Sometimes, I think it has been formed by my imagined daughter, clearing the way ahead before her own birth. Or by whole generations of women, celebrating a future, formed from the heart of us.

Motivated by a love of her Mexican American heritage, Patricia Preciado Martin set out to document the lives and memories of the women of her mother's and grandmother's eras; for while the role of women in Southwest has begun to be chronicled, that of Hispanic women largely remains obscure. In Songs My Mother Sang to Me, she has preserved the oral histories of many of these women before they have been lost or forgotten. Martin's quest took her to ranches, mining towns, and cities throughout southern Arizona, for she sought to document as varied an experience of the contributions of Mexican American women as possible. The interviews covered family history and genealogy, childhood memories, secular and religious traditions, education, work and leisure, environment and living conditions, rites of passage, and personal values. Each of the ten oral histories reflects not only the spontaneity of the interview and personality of each individual, but also the friendship that grew between Martin and her subjects. Songs My Mother Sang to Me collects voices not often heard and brings to print accounts of social change never previously recorded. These women document more than the details of their own lives; in relating the histories of their ancestors and communities, they add to our knowledge of the culture and contributions of Mexican American people in the Southwest.