A
The Mexican Revolution, civil war and the Cristero War
Family
of
Families
By Colleen Williamson
Near the beginning of the 20th century,
Mexican families traveled to Parsons
seeking work and stability, and eventually
settling into an area called the Wye. By the
21st century, the cultural landmarks have
all but vanished, as families passed on,
intermarried and moved away. Only a few
still carry the memories of the way things
once were, when families were like one.
Labette County Community Guide • 2021
in the first decades of the 20th century led many Mexi-
cans to leave behind land and homes and emigrate to the
United States, seeking safety, work, stability and well-being.
While the Great Depression in 1929 led hundreds of
thousands of rural workers to return to Mexico, most of
those families who had come to Parsons stayed, for it was
in Parsons they found what they sought and had estab-
lished a close-knit family of families in an area called The
Wye.
The area was so named because it sat just east of where
the Katy Railroad’s tracks created a Y, with one taking
trains to Kansas City and the other taking them to St.
Louis, said Delores Shaw, one of the few Mexicans to
still reside in the Wye. Her grandfather, Simon Cervantes,
came to Parsons in 1918 from Mexico to find work with
the railroad. He brought with him his wife, Maria, and two
children.
Within the Wye, the tiny houses quickly filled to over-
flowing, as families arrived and grew, filling the small two-
or three-bedroom homes.
Tony and Mary Muñoz’s grandfather, Higinio Cipriana,
came to Parsons in 1918, too. He raised his family in the
Wye and that’s where his grandchildren were born. Tony
said including his sister and him, they had 10 children in
their family.
Vincent and Juanita Yañez’s family had 11.
“We were at 1111 N. 21st. It was a small house,” said
Cindy (Yañez) Berndt, one of the 11. “It probably had two
bedrooms and an in-between room between the kitchen
and the living room and mom made that for the boys. I
had four brothers, then me, then two more boys. There
were three sets of bunk beds.”
The large families were all very close, and that was en-
hanced by the fact that life in the Wye was communal, with
families often sharing work, chores and resources.
Certain times of the year, the women would head out-
side of town to an area near the lake, or to fields, where
the landowners would let the women come and pick buck-
ets of prickly pear cactus.
Juanita Yañez remembered watching her mother-in-
law, Bernabe Yañez, who had come from Mexico, and
other ladies sit in a circle, hold the
cactus with a clothes pin and use
knives to clean the prickly spines
from the flesh.
“They would do that until they
were all clean and then they would
chop them up, cook them and then
can them,” Mrs. Yañez said. “Then
they had cactus to last all year.”
“They canned everything,” Shaw
added.
LEFT: Miscellaneous photos from the Munoz
family collection.
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