PILLAR OF THE COMMUNITY

On a warm day, the grounds of the Elias-Rodriguez House in Tempe feel surprisingly cool. Surrounded by a forest of apartment buildings housing Arizona State University students, the property protects a hidden oasis of citrus, pomegranate, fig and olive trees. It’s also a time capsule preserving the last vestige of a thriving Hispanic pioneer community in one of the city’s earliest developments.

Visitors often picture a little adobe house in the middle of barren, windswept land, says Jen Sweeney, the Tempe History Museum’s historic house coordinator. But properties in this Eighth Street neighborhood, called the Sotelo Addition, were historically even more lush than they are today, thanks to the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch, which flowed behind them. Now underground, the ditch also irrigated crops and supplied power to the Hayden Flour Mill. The reality of that time was “very different from how people think it was,” Sweeney says.

That could also be said about Tempe’s early days in general. Between 1870 and 1900, about half of the area’s residents were Hispanic, but historical accounts have largely excluded them. These Spanish and Mexican settlers came to build canals, such as the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch, and stayed to establish farms, churches and businesses.

Among those settlers, Manuela Sánchez Sotelo was one of the most remarkable. Unable to read or write, she moved to the area in her 50s, as a widow with 10 children. And at a time when many Hispanic settlers filed homesteads but few succeeded in patenting them, she became a respected landowner and one of the few women to own water rights.

In 1890, Manuela subdivided this long, shallow strip of her homestead. She gave some of the parcels to family members but sold others to settlers such as Vicente and Inez Elias, making it possible for them to own land and build a home. By the time Manuela died in 1902, one scholar says, the list of those who had purchased property in the Sotelo Addition read like a who’s who of Hispanic Tempe.

Eventually, ASU displaced most of Tempe’s barrios and dramatically changed this one, and over time, the vibrant Hispanic communities faded from memory. But in recent years, the city has done more to recognize its Hispanic pioneers, including Manuela. Street banners now mark her homestead as Rancho de Sotelo. In 2023, the Tempe Historical Society recognized her as a “Tempe Legend.” And, most recently, descendants established a scholarship in her honor.
 

Built over the ruins of a substantial prehistoric community, Tempe’s modern history dates to the mid-1860s, when John Y.T. Smith organized a work camp along the banks of the Salt River, hiring Mexican workers to harvest hay for Fort McDowell.

In 1867, one of Smith’s wagon drivers, Jack Swilling — later credited as the founder of Phoenix — cut the Swilling Ditch, the first “American” canal in the area; he brought crops to harvest the next year. Inspired by his success, William Kirkland and James B. McKinney hired a team of Mexican laborers to excavate the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch, likely in the winter of 1869.

One of the area’s earliest Anglo residents, Kirkland used the water to irrigate a farm east of Tempe Butte. When it was combined with two subsequent canal projects, the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch became part of the Tempe Irrigating Canal Co. in 1871. Work on the canals attracted laborers from Mexico and Southern Arizona, including Manuela’s husband, Tiburcio, and their two oldest sons.

Tiburcio and Manuela grew up in turbulent times. An officer in the Spanish Army, Tiburcio’s father commanded Tubac Presidio during Mexico’s War of Independence. Born in 1810, the year the war broke out, Tiburcio probably arrived in Tubac at a very young age. His father and a brother died, likely of cholera, when Tiburcio was 6; he lost another brother and a sister a few years later.

Manuela was born in Tubac in 1820 and likely knew Tiburcio her whole life. But according to a family account, their union was the second marriage for both, after Apaches killed their first spouses. That seems reasonable, given that Tiburcio and Manuela would have been 36 and 26, respectively, when they’re thought to have married in 1846 — and that soldiers largely left Tubac unprotected after Mexico gained independence in 1821.
 

Manuela gave birth to their son José two years later. That year, residents fled Tubac after Apache raids, and the Sotelos retreated to the Altar River Valley in Sonora. Manuela remained there for 17 years, giving birth to eight more children.

According to a family account, in the early 1860s, Tiburcio took his teenage sons, José and Feliciano, into Arizona Territory to avoid the draft. On the heels of a civil war, Mexico was at war with France and the Mexican Army was conscripting boys as young as 12. The rest of the family followed in 1866 — the year Manuela gave birth to their 10th child — and settled in Tucson, where José and Feliciano were working.

Tiburcio and his sons arrived in the Salt River Valley around 1870. They helped Mexican farmers living near Phoenix’s South Mountain excavate the San Francisco Canal; they also worked on the Kirkland-McKinney Ditch. Workers on the ditch earned a share in the Tempe Irrigating Canal Co. for each 100 days of labor, giving them water rights they could use to irrigate land they cleared. Tiburcio subsequently acquired a homestead that ran along modern-day Rural Road from University Drive to Apache Boulevard.

Probably sometime in 1871, Apaches killed Feliciano near Mission San Xavier del Bac while he was carrying the mail. According to a family story, Tiburcio used a voucher the family received upon Feliciano’s death to move the family to his homestead. He never made it — before reaching Florence, he became sick and died. Pausing to bury her husband, Manuela continued on with the rest of her family, arriving in Tempe in 1872. José drowned soon after while trying to cross the Salt River on horseback. That left Manuela to prove up the homestead while raising the younger children.

Manuela’s granddaughter Helen Rodriguez wrote years later, “The Sotelos brought with them lots of vegetable seeds and herbs. When they could, they cleared some ground and they started planting.” Taking advantage of the water rights she’d inherited, Manuela planted wheat as a cash crop and started a truck garden. In an oral history, a later descendant said, “Farmers in Tempe were growing cotton … [but] Manuela went the opposite way. She grew vegetables because these people needed to have something else to eat.”

And in 1873, she gained a powerful ally when her oldest daughter, Maria, married Winchester Miller. The former Confederate soldier had recently become president of the Tempe Irrigating Canal Co. — and would become one of the most influential and prosperous farmers in the area.
 

Family accounts say Manuela was known as “Nanita” to everyone. And that she was generous, sharing seeds and knowledge with newly arriving settlers — both Mexican and Anglo. As her daughters married, she gave them land. But she could also be tough. Because her youngest child, Antonio, loved his liquor, Manuela refused him land, according to Manuela’s great-granddaughter Manuela “Nell” Ryder: “He would get drunk, climb on his wagon and drive from sister to sister, yelling, ‘Yo soy Antonio Sotelo, and I am the true owner of all this property. I am Mama’s only son and the rightful heir.’ ”

At a daughter’s urging, Manuela eventually gave in, but her instincts were sound: It’s said that Antonio sold part of the deed and spent it on a “glorious drunk for himself and every man in Tempe who was willing.”

Manuela perfected her homestead on July 3, 1890, and that August, Winchester Miller filed the plat for the Sotelo Addition on her behalf. In a 1958 letter, then-
Senator Carl Hayden recalled that Manuela lived in an adobe house between the Tempe-Mesa Road (now Eighth Street) and the canal. “From time to time,” he wrote, “she sold parcels of land upon which other adobe houses were built, so that by about 1890 Spanish-American families had their homes in a row of houses extending for about a half-mile.”

In doing so, Manuela enabled land ownership by people who might not otherwise have qualified. Mexicans were considered high insurance risks, historian Christine Marin says: “Developers, banks and real estate persons were not giving loans to Mexicans, because they would usually default.”

Over time, Manuela also bought and sold property in Mesa, Gilbert and Queen Creek. And she may have contributed to ASU’s founding. Manuela’s great-great-granddaughter Esther Canchola spent a decade collecting family stories and researching her genealogy. She says that according to Ryder, the Millers donated land for Territorial Normal School, which later became ASU; another version has them contributing money to repay George and Martha Wilson for land the Wilsons donated. “I’d rather think they donated land,” Canchola says. “I never heard that they were wealthy. … But there wasn’t any proof.”

Neither Canchola nor Marin could find any documentation. What’s beyond dispute, though, is that two of the Millers’ daughters were among the school’s earliest Hispanic graduates. Manuela’s other descendants include Sonia Corella, who first learned about Manuela 10 or 15 years ago. An ASU graduate with degrees in engineering, Corella earned a full tuition scholarship from ASU’s Latino alumni association, Los Diablos, but struggled with other expenses.

“I’ve got to go and pay $100 for a new scientific calculator,” she recalls, “and I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s great to have full tuition, but there’s other things to pay for, [such as] books and supplies.’ You’ve got to handle all that as well.” So, Corella and three other descendants created a $1,500 scholarship to cover incidental expenses for a Los Diablos scholarship recipient. Corella says the first scholarship will be awarded this fall. And while she’s been told she can’t attach Manuela’s name to the award, she is permitted to ask the recipient to make a presentation about Manuela to the other scholars.

“That’s really all I care about,” she says. “Because I think, especially if you’re a Hispanic student, by the time you graduate from [ASU], you should know her name.” In time, she hopes to find more descendants and honor Manuela on a larger scale.

After working in the semiconductor industry, Corella now owns rental properties all over the state. She knew nothing about Manuela when she started buying real estate, and when people asked how she did it, she never knew how to answer. Now she says, “Literally, it’s in my blood.”

True to her giving nature, by the time she died in 1902, Manuela had sold or given away most of her property. Marin, the president of the Tempe Historical Society, nominated her as a Tempe Legend in 2023. “She was a very good person,” she says. “A very kind woman. A very enterprising woman. And she wasn’t selfish. … She wanted to help people.”