101-Year-Old Love Letter Tells Of Secret Cross-Border Romance

These days, people communicate their love to one another by exchanging texts, e-mails, or instant messages.

The El Paso Museum of History is hoping to inspire a more old-fashioned form of courtship: love letters. To that end, they’ve put on display an unusual family keepsake. On lend from Esperanza Lopez Almeida, 88, it is a 101-year-old love letter that her father wrote by twisting a thin wire into words. Written shortly before the start of the Mexican Revolution, it was his way of proposing marriage to her mother.

Because of their different backgrounds, Almeida said, her parents could not date. In fact, they could hardly speak to one another. Their relationship grew through passing letters. Almeida?s father, Jose Lopez, was born and raised in Samalayuca, Mexico, 30 miles south of Juarez. Her mother, Marana Ochoa Velarde, an American, grew up outside of El Paso. To ask for Velarde?s hand in marriage, Lopez used his profession as a telegrapher and crafted a letter using wire and wood.

They met because Velarde would frequently travel to Mexico with her grandfather, transporting crops.

?They just looked at each other far away,? said Almeida. There was some interest, and they started smiling at one another.

?One of those trips, he passed her a letter,? said Almeida.

That started up the correspondence.

Read the full Fox News Latino article here.