‘The Ballad of Suaqui’
Native yuma pens song telling a story of tragedy in displacement
Few of us live all our lives in one place. We move across town, out of town, even out of state to pursue new opportunities and new beginnings offered in a mobile society. But some people, particularly those of rural regions and other cultures, are fixed to the land they occupy. It’s part of them. They are part of it.
What becomes of them if a traumatic event uproots them, forcing them off familiar ground?
Yuma native Mary Lou Fulton explores that question in “The Ballad of Suaqui,” a just-released Mexican folk song that memorializes a rural Mexican community drowned nearly 60 years ago in the rising water of a lake created as part of an electrification project in south-central Sonora.
A former Los Angeles Times writer and editor, the singer-songwriter draws on her story-telling skills and on the perspective of her mother, Maria
Ruiz Fulton, who grew up in Suaqui, to write and sing the ballad that incorporates Spanish as well as English lyrics.
“This song is a personal story, a family story, but it is also a universal story about what happens when you’re separated from your home and can never go home again,” says Fulton, a Yuma High alumna who currently lives in Los Angeles.
The song is part of the debut album from Fulton, “We’ll Tell Stories,” slated to come out in October. The release of “The Ballad of Suaqui,” ahead of the album, coincides with the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, but that observance aside, Fulton believes it is timely.
“I do see so many connections – to climate change, to displacement due to war, like we’re seeing in Afghanistan, to all the ways people are being forced to leave their homes.”
Suaqui was one of three tiny town in south-central Sonora settled in the 1600s by Jesuit missionaries and inhabited with the Yaqui people indigenous to the region.
“Together they lived in the community and in harmony with the land. The community there was very connected to the land and to the river,” Fulton said.
Indeed, her maternal grandparents and others living there subsisted on both, raising cattle and crops and drawing water from the river for their needs, Fulton said. Her grandmother made tortillas by hand three times a day.
“It was your home, your community, your source of food, and when that is taken from you, what are you supposed to do? You are lost,” Fulton said.
“Our home (in modern society) is not our way of life, but for them it was, and that’s what I’m really trying to convey.”
In 1958, the Mexican government began work to build the Plutarco Elias Calles dam, a project that would expand electricity in the region, but also would displace several thousand people as El Novillo Reservoir filled up, submerging the three tiny settlements.
Among those forced out was Fulton’s mother. In later years, she taught elementary school in San Luis Rio Colorado, where she met Bill Fulton, a country musician from Yuma. Having married him and moved to Yuma, Maria Ruiz went on to teach many years in the Somerton and Gadsden elementary school districts.
Born after the dam was complete and Suaqui was gone, Mary Lou Fulton grew up in Yuma with a grounding in music, as the daughter of a musician and as a member of the Yuma High Choralairs and other choral groups.
She made the transition to music having had a two-decade career in print and digital journalism. In 2020, the Renaissance Artists and Writers Association awarded her first place in the nationwide Songs for Social Change contest for “Not Going Back (I Don’t Think So),” which she wrote as part of a songwriting course she was taking.
That plus the stories of Suaqui she heard in childhood helped inspire “The Ballad of Suaqui,” written in collaboration with her mother.
“We spent many hours talking together, and I wrote the song first in English, but I wanted the choruses to be in Spanish,” Fulton said. “The choruses are really the heart of the song, they speak to the emotions.”
Her mother helped with the lyrics. “The lyrics just poured out of her. It turns out she’s got a gift for words that I did not realize. She’s a rhyming genius.”
Accompanied by a four-member band playing traditional Mexican instruments, Fulton sings English and Spanish versions of the ballad in a video that intersperses images of her along the Colorado River near Yuma with footage from a home movie her father shot of Suaqui during a visit in 1961.
Her father passed away years ago, but Fulton’s mother is living temporarily with her in Los Angeles, with plans to return to Yuma.
“The Ballad of Saqui” and its Spanish version, “El Corrido de Suaqui,” can be found on Spotify and other streaming platforms. The full album is due to be released Oct. 15. Her videos and music can also be purchased on her website, maryloufulton.com.
Today Fulton is dividing her time between freelance writing and writing and recording music, a form of expression that allows her to tell personal stories she could not normally tell as a reporter.
“I think of this as an extension of story-telling. I’m telling stories through music. It gives me a way to communicate on a personal, deeper level,” she said.
“I’m hoping through music, I can have a deeper impact, a personal impact that is not available through journalism.”