How a Forgotten Bomb Shook a Town Two Decades Later

The first time I heard about the bomb, it was nestled in a story shared over coffee in a small kitchen in Eagle Pass, Texas. The storyteller? My Aunt Oralia, a spry woman with a mouth as lively as her memory. Sitting across from her, she sipped her steaming Folgers with a kind of reverence, preparing, as if she knew her words would go down in family lore. “You know?” she said, in that way she does before something big. “One day, I was walking home from school when the bomb exploded.”

Now, I’ll admit, that got my attention. In our family, when someone starts talking about a bomb, you listen. I leaned in, trying not to look too eager. “What bomb?” I asked, fully expecting her to dismiss it as an exaggeration. But she didn’t. Her eyes took on this faraway look, as if she were looking straight through me and back to that day when the world rattled on its axis.

“It was a tremendous, horrible noise,” she continued, “everything rumbled.” Then, she paused, a glint of nostalgia brightening her expression as she added with quiet reverence, “In Guerrero, things don’t shake. But that day, they did.”

For a moment, I tried to picture it—a peaceful little town, suddenly jolted by a blast that cracked the earth and rippled through its residents. But what really captured my imagination was this peculiar, almost poetic way she described it, like it was something sacred. "It was like in the hymn," she said, her voice almost whispering, as if any louder would break the spell of memory. “The earth trembled in its core.”

Now, if you're picturing some kind of Hollywood explosion, dust clouds and fireballs, let me stop you right there. This wasn’t some blockbuster explosion orchestrated by special effects teams. This was a quiet, dusty town in Coahuila, Mexico. A place where life was slow, uncomplicated, and bombs belonged in history books, not backyards.

Aunt Oralia’s tale had me so captivated that I decided to dig deeper. I headed back to my family’s old ranch, El Centeno, and sought out my Uncle Lubín—a man in his seventies and sharp as a tack, with stories to tell and a mind that refused to let details fade. Uncle Lubín had lived through enough that a bomb in Guerrero didn’t sound far-fetched to him. If anything, he seemed bemused by my ignorance. But Uncle Lubín wasn’t one to just dish out information freely. No, this was a man you had to win over with patience and the right amount of silence.

Eventually, after what felt like a lifetime of me tiptoeing around the subject, he invited me to sit with him one warm afternoon under the shade of a pecan tree. We sat in the kind of silence that city folk would find oppressive, but out there, it felt comforting. And finally, he started to speak. “It all began,” he said, as if setting up an epic, “in October 1913, during the first battle of Monterrey.”

Now, this wasn’t the story I expected. Bombs exploding in peaceful towns and soldiers in epic battles? The two didn't seem to connect. But Uncle Lubín was determined to start from the beginning, so I just sat back and let him weave his tale. He spoke of how men from Guerrero, like his grandfather José, joined the Carrancista army, fighting for the revolution under the command of generals Pablo González and Francisco Munguía.

He described the chaos of that October day, as thousands of Carrancista soldiers took on federal forces, each man braving bullets, bombs, and the cruel hand of fate. “The battle was a carnage,” he told me solemnly. Bodies scattered, lives lost like chaff in the wind. And in the middle of this maelstrom was his grandfather José, dodging explosions, leaping over fallen comrades, and somehow surviving the chaos. And that’s when it happened. Amidst the horror, he spotted something on the ground: a bomb, cold and silent, its deadly potential masked by its innocent, inert form.

In an act that would seem unthinkable today, José picked it up and took it home. He thought it would make a fine souvenir, a trophy of sorts, a way to remember the battle he’d survived. Now, if you think bringing home an unexploded bomb sounds mad, remember that life back then was an odd mixture of practicality and utter recklessness. José didn’t intend to blow up his family; he just thought it was a handy bit of metal. So he used it as an anvil.

For years—fifteen, in fact—that bomb sat in his workshop, its lethal insides patiently biding their time. Kids played around it, the family used it as a sort of tool, a fixture in their lives. They’d slam metal against it, beat tools back into shape on its hard surface, oblivious to the ticking time bomb they so casually leaned on.

Until that fateful day. By this time, José was no longer the spry young man who’d brought the bomb back from Monterrey. He was older, slower, less inclined to think twice about slamming down a hammer just that little bit harder than usual. And as fate would have it, he hit exactly where he shouldn’t have. The bomb, dormant for so long, suddenly woke up with a vengeance.

The explosion was brutal. Pieces of metal and wood splintered through the air, and Uncle Lubín described the scene with a quiet horror that made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. The blast threw José, his wife Serapia, and a granddaughter named Socorrito into the air, scattering them in fragments that landed on trees, roofs, the ground. It was a scene ripped straight from Dante’s Inferno, a horror that went beyond words. And that wasn’t all: the blast reverberated through the whole town. People miles away felt the ground shudder, just as Aunt Oralia remembered. The date was October 27, 1935—over two decades since José had plucked that silent, lethal souvenir from a battlefield and lugged it home.

As Uncle Lubín wrapped up his story, he looked off into the distance, his gaze fixed on the clear, cloud-speckled sky. He spoke softly, his voice thick with a solemn respect for those names etched on the family gravestones: José Pérez Pérez, Serapia Flores, and little Socorrito, who had been playing innocently nearby when the bomb fulfilled its fatal mission—not in Monterrey where it was meant to, but in Guerrero, Coahuila, two decades later.

For a while, I couldn’t bring myself to speak. It was one of those stories that hit you like a punch to the gut. A tale of war, family, and a strange twist of fate that left a town shaken and a family grieving. And somehow, amid the sorrow, I couldn’t shake the irony of it all—a bomb, long forgotten, finally finding its purpose in the most unexpected of places.

As I sat there under the shade of the pecan tree, I found myself wondering how many more untold stories, silent and dormant like that bomb, lay buried in the memories of old men like Uncle Lubín. And, God help me, I was already looking forward to the next tale.

In-text Citation: (Laborde y Pérez Treviño, 2021, pp. 34-37)