quito - part 9 - historia familiar

This post has nothing to do with Emilia, really, other than it's about part of her family history.

Monday we went to visit Tio Andres' new house in Los Chillos (about 20 minutes from the city). On our way, we took a small detour to go and see San Francisco. If our family (the Velasco/Jijon side) can be said to come from somewhere, if there's an "ancestral home", it is San Francisco. This place is so special my Tia Marcela (the closest thing I have to a grandparent - my grandmother's sister) hasn't been able to come back to this place since they left it when she was very young. We had no idea the state it would be in and frankly were pleasantly surprised to see it's been really well maintained...

This is a picture that has always been in my house. It's so old that we don't dare take it out of it's original frame to scan it, so I had to just take a picture of it. This is my maternal grandmother who, in this picture, is about 15 or 16 years old. (I'm guessing it's the late 20s, early 1930s?) My mom doesn't remember why she's dressed like an indigenous woman, but there's another picture of her sister Elena, in a similar outfit. Maybe they were going to a party or something. In any case she's standing on the semi-circle steps shown at the far end of the porch in this picture (they're actually in the middle of the porch).

Pretty cool, i must say. My mom says my grandma lived here for several years on her own, managing the farm, properties, and the employees when she was a very young girl.