Once the family had settled on Rancho San Andrés, they dedicated themselves to the work at hand. Indeed, they produced all the basics that they needed with their own labor. On their ranch they grew their own food, sewed their own clothes, and created their own music and entertainment. As a very self-reliant family, they subsisted on their garden products and raised cash crops and livestock for market as well. All their relatives and neighbors were also farmers.

Besides working the land, the family earned money in other ways. Natalia remembers that around 1919 or 1920, some members of their family worked to help clear a road from Santa Cruz towards San Diego. Each family was given a mile of road to clear. They cleared the high areas and removed the rocks from the road. Eustorgio,Natalia, and Flaviaall worked for a while. About 1921 Praxedis, Eugenio,and Eleuterio worked with a land scraper pulled by mules called a fresno. This family also earned money with their music. Praxedis, the oldest, even operated a barbershop on weekends for neighbors, saving them a trip into town. Later Eustorgio learned how to cut hair and continued with the barbershop on Rancho San Andrés.

Working the land was their major occupation, however. The field crops at the time consisted of corn, cotton, beans, cane for feed, and a few rows of watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, and a small row of peanuts. The family also tended a small garden close to the house, where they raised tomatoes, onions, garlic, green peppers, and cucumbers.

They did not sell any of the garden produce at market but consumed each crop as it matured. Each vegetable or fruit-watermelons; corn on the cob, or elotes; pumpkins, or calavazas; green beans, or ejotes; cantaloupes, or melones; and tomatoes and onions-had a particular planting and harvest time. The sugarcane they planted was very sweet. In the afternoons, they brought home a few small cuts of sugarcane to chew, squeezing out the sweet juice. Anastacia remembered parties where the family served cuts of sugarcane, watermelons, and cantaloupes, but all was not fun. Every member of the family had to work.

Natalia recalled working with her brothers in the field planting corn. She carried a small sack hanging from her shoulders. One of the older brothers made a row. She would count two steps and drop one grain of corn; then count two more steps, and drop two grains of corn, and follow the routine row after row. Later, corn was mechanically planted. Mules pulled a machine that had a rotating plate with holes. The holes automatically distributed the seeds at even intervals.

The corn harvest in those years was very different from today. When the corn plant matured, they would cut the head of the plant down to the first few leaves with a machete and gather it into small bundles. To tie the bundles, they used strips from yucca leaves that they made by cutting and heating the leaf until it became soft. They cut and tied the thin yucca strips together using a special knot that increasingly tightened when pulled, then gathered the bundles into a small pile, leaving them in the field for a few days to dry out. Afterwards, they used a mule-drawn wagon to pick up the bundles to move to an area where they piled them into miniature haystacks. They kept the bundles separate from the rest of the hay and fed them to the harness horses and mules used in field work.

As the workers made their next trip around the field, they cut the ears of corn from the plants and loaded them into sacks. The strongest workers carried the sacks to the mule wagon and emptied them into the wagon to be hauled to the corncrib, or chapil. Next, they cut the cornstalks with a machete, and someone gathered the stalks and tied them into a bundle called a manojo. They gathered the manojos and placed them into a conical circle, standing the bundles against each other where they were left to dry for a few days. The workers later hauled the bundles of cornstalks to make something like a haystack, an arcina. The arcinas were protected by log fences, or corrales de leña, or by barbed-wire fences so the animals did not eat the cornstalks or hay. These different kinds of dry feed were fed to the animals during the winter months.

The harvesting and planting of cotton required more work than other crops. After the cotton sprouted and grew about four inches high, the family members thinned it in a process called desahijarlo. They used a hoe to thin out the plants and to measure the space between them. They spaced the plants two-head-widths of the hoe from one another to allow room for the cotton to grow. They left one plant one time, and then two plants, and so on row after row. Later, after the rains, the rows were cleared of weeds so the cotton could grow. Clearing the rows with the hoe was called despaje. All the members of the family worked in the fields doing the cleaning and thinning. Only Mamá Maríaand Lupe, who were responsible for cooking, stayed at home.

All of the members of the family also worked during the cotton-picking season. After harvesting their own cotton, they would pick cotton at Tía Plácida's Rancho de Agua Dulce, at El Mesquite with Tío Anastacio, at Tía Benigna's Rancho San Vicente, and at Tío Amado's. All these aunts and uncles were the sisters and brothers of Papá Andrés.

In the early 1920s, Anastacia remembers picking cotton at La Gloria Ranch near Santa Cruz. Mamá Maríahad inherited sixty-six acres of land there. No house stood on that piece of land, so they had to build a shade structure called a portal of mesquite logs. The vertical logs had a fork at the top to hold beams across the top for a roof. The family left early in the morning in a mule wagon loaded with cooking utensils and food. Mamá María came with them to cook the meals. During the day, they used the mule-drawn wagon for shade. At night the wagon provided a bed for them as well. Some of the family members slept on the pile of cotton, using the cotton sacks as pillows. Anastacia, who was the youngest of the family, enjoyed the trips to La Gloria, especially during cotton-picking season.