C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos – Page 25 – Texas, Mexico, rare books, literary travel memoir

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Photo by C.M. Mayo. Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site in Far West Texas. Confession: After I snapped this photo with my iPhone I checked my email, just to see if I could! Alas, I could.

The aim of literary travel writing was– and remains– to bring the reader to deeply notice, that is, get out of her head and into the world of specific sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors, ideas, histories, geographies, geologies… In the words of Kenneth Smith, “You have to open space, and deepen place.”

Start with escape velocity: from wherever you are, whoever you are in your known world, you rocket out, beyond the orbit of ordinary life. You float around out there– there being your own backyard or, for that matter, the island of Molokai– for a spell. Then, with a story to tell, you splash back to earth.

Next step: craft the narrative, rendering your experience in and understanding of that time and place as vividly, as lyrically, and engagingly as possible. I’ve had plenty to say about the craft of literary travel writing; what I want to touch on here are some of the steps in the process and how they have or have not changed with the lure of digital technologies and the tsunami of the Internet.

HEREWITH SOME NOTES,
FIRSTLY, ON TAKING NOTES:

Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico

THEN: In olden times of yore, I mean in the 1990s, when traveling in Baja California for my travel memoir Miraculous Air, I carried around a pen and bulky notebook, and a camera with so many lenses and dials that if I were to pick it up today I wouldn’t remember how to operate it. To get every raw thing down that I would need for my book, I had to scribble-scribble-scribble, and during interviews and/or at the end of a day’s driving and hiking or whatever, boy howdy, I felt like a squeezed-out sponge and my hand like an arthritic claw. Once home, I spent hours upon hours typing up my field notes. And neither film nor film processing was cheap. Such was the first step of the process.

Charlie Angell, expert guide, in the Solitario, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Far West Texas. Listen in anytime to my podcast interview with Angell here.

NOW:These days, for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I carry a pen and a slim Moleskine to jot down this-and-that, but my main tool is my iPhone. Rather than scribble my field notes and interview notes, I simply turn on my iPhone’s dictation app and press “record” — when finished, I have a digital file. I also take loads of photos and videos. Oh yes, this is infinitely easier on me as I am traveling, and as far as the pictures and video go, the cost is zip. Once home, however, transcribing the audio field notes takes me hours upon hours, and it is exhausting.[*]

[*]Yep, I have voice recognition software but it doesn’t work well enough– in the time it would take me to correct the gobbledygook I might as well transcribe from scratch. I expect this to change. For some of my podcasts I have used a transcription service, but field notes are another matter– too detailed, too personal. Furthermore, as tedious a job as it may be, transcribing my field notes helps me hyper-focus, recall more details, and gain further insight.

I am the first to admit, were I to do another literary travel memoir, while I would dictate my notes, I would need a better strategy for getting them transcribed. So I’m working on this mid-way. Ayyy.

ON UTILIZING / PROCESSING / PUBLISHING PHOTOS & VIDEO

THEN: Photos stayed in a box. A few ended up in the book. (Several years after the book on Baja California was published I uploaded a few to my website. You can view those here.)

NOW: Photos and videos can be amply shared on this blog, the website, Twitter, etc. A few will end up in the book, I expect.

Is this aspect of the process really that different because of the Internet? A few years ago I would have said so– I got very excited about the multimedia possibilities in ebooks. But I now believe that while our culture is increasingly oriented towards visual media, as far as books go, not much has changed, nor will it because what readers want is text.

I’ll grant that some literary travel memoirs might offer a few more images and color images than might have been economically feasible before. I’ll grant that ebooks can include video or links to video. And I’ll grant that a few people may find out about and read my book because of a photo or video they Google up on my websites. A few. Most people surfing around the Internet don’t read books, never mind literary travel memoir. And there is nothing new about that.

ON FINDING BOOKS

THEN: To find books on Baja California, I scoured the shelves at John Cole’s in La Jolla, El Tecolote in Todos Santos, and a very few other bookstores and libraries, including the Bancroft at UC Berkeley. I thought the bibliography on Baja California was enormous, and I ended up owning a wall of books.

NOW: Amazon!!!! Although the other day I bought a rare book about the town of Toyah on www.abebooks.com. Over the past few years I have also bought a few books from bricks-and-mortar shops including the Marfa Book Company and Front Street Books in Alpine, and more from the bookstores in various state and national parks. And I go to the always fabulosa Librería Madero in Mexico City for out-of-print Spanish language books. I have consulted a few archives and collections… But I get most of my books from amazon.*

*I hasten to add that for research purposes I am mainly buying paperbacks and used reading-quality books, the kind I’ll take a highlighter to, not rare books. Buying rare books from amazon is not the best idea for many reasons, one of them being that the multitudinous sellers of used books oftentimes describe a book as “new” when it is actually a stamped review copy, stained, or missing a dust jacket, and so on. For quality rare books from reputable sellers, I can recommend www.abebooks.com , www.abaa.com , and www.biblio.com.

(Why am I buying so many books? Because I need to read and consult them and, alas, I do not live anywhere near a good English language library. And I admit, I do have a thing for rare books, especially on the Mexican Revolution, Baja California, Mexico’s Second Empire, or Far West Texana. Uh oh, that’s a lot.)

Bottom line: Not only is it easier to find books now, but the bibliography on Far West Texas and Texas makes that on Baja California look puny. Um, I think I’m going to need a new house.

Is this aspect of the process of writing a literary travel memoir really that different because of the Internet? It would seem so, but I’m contrasting an apple and a Durian, as it were. Baja California is a very different subject than Far West Texas. Many of the books I found useful on Baja California are not easy to find online, even today, while, so it seems to me now, if I sneeze someone hands me a book on the Great State of Lonestarlandia.

I do miss ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I do not miss being unable to find what I was looking for.

Anyway, not every travel memoir requires such intensive reading.

And yet another consideration– and a topic for another blog post– is that it’s always easy to under- or over-research any given book.

ON THE INCONVENIENT LUXURY OF BEING INCOMMUNICADO

THEN: Traveling in remote places on the peninsula I more often than not found myself incommunicado. (Back then, many small towns in Baja California did not yet have telephones.)

NOW: Few stretches of any highway, anywhere, including the most offbeat corners Far West Texas, are without cell phone reception. Many campgrounds and all hotels, properly so-called, have wifi. Digital distractions are legion. Or, another way to put it: the digital leash stays on– unless one is willing to confront friends, colleagues, and family. That takes energy. Or, another way to put it: that takes training.

Deep Work by Cal Newport. Highly recommended.

While traveling, no, I do not text, no, I do not email (except when I fall into temptation!), and no, I do not answer my cell phone while I am driving or possibly fending off mountain lions! Sounds easy. Sounds curmudgeony. But for the kind of travel writing I do, trying to immerse my consciousness in an unfamiliar place, and come back with a vivid narrative, very necessary.

Is it really that different? Not so much as it might appear. It has always taken a strategy plus herculean effort against formidable economic, physical, psychological, and social pressures to protect uninterrupted stretches of time for deep work.

>> See Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Highly recommended.

ON FINDING (NONBOOK) RESEARCH MATERIALS

THEN: If it wasn’t in a book or a paper file, usually, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.

NOW: Whatever, Google.* And the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas is a fabulously rich– and free- resource.

*Don’t get me started about the Maoist Muddle, aka Wikipedia.

Is it really that different? Yes.

To take but one example, it is radically different to be able to look at all the real estate on the Internet. I can be sitting in Mexico City and with my iPad and surf around, looking at all these places for sale in Far West Texas– whether a luxury ranch or a humble hunt box / trailer— I can see the kitchen, the bedrooms, ayyy, the bathrooms… I hasten to add I am not looking for anything in the Texas real estate market, but those listings, the descriptions and photos, constitute a window onto a people and place– in the not-so-distant past, this sort of at-hand detail was available only to licensed local real estate agents.

ON ANONYMITY & KARMA

THEN: In the 90s in Baja California I talked to a lot of people who wouldn’t know me from a denizen of the fifth moon of Pluto and who would probably never learn about, never mind pick up and read my book. I found that very freeing.

Everyone will be famous for, like, 2 seconds, LOL

NOW: Still true in 2016 in Far West Texas, but almost everyone who feels moved to do so can whip out his or her smartphone and Google up my name for scads of links from my webpage to podcasts to this blog to academia.edu to LinkedIn, Twitter, blah blah blah, and all about my book on Baja California, my novel, my stories, and my book on the Mexican Revolution with the uber-crunchy title! I Google other people, too. I can follow the Twitter feed for the Food Shark in Marfa! I interview Lonn Taylor for my podcast! Lonn Taylor writes about me for the Big Bend Sentinel! Sometimes when I go out to Far West Texas I want to wear a wig and dark glasses a la Andy Warhol! But seriously, human nature hasn’t changed; most people respond very generously when asked sincere questions about their art, their business, their research, and/or their opinion, and I believe this will remain the case whether people know about my works and/or Google me or not. Moreover I expect that it will remain the case long into the future that the majority of Texans, and for that matter, denizens of the planet, will not be avidly reading literary travel memoir and couldn’t care a hula-whoop about the oeuvre of moi. (Oh well!)

Is it really that different because of the Internet? Having published several books, one thing I do appreciate, although my ego does not, is that books go out to a largely opaque response. You can talk about sales numbers, “big data,” reviews, and prizes, and it doesn’t change the fact that an author does not know when any given person is actually reading or talking about or feeling one way or the other about his or her book– and anyway, the readers of some books will be born long after their authors have passed to the Great Beyond.

Still, I think it best to assume that there is karma with a capital “K” — opaque as it may be. In other words, you might not have to, but be prepared to live with the consequences of what you have written. Translation: truth is beauty but cruelty is stupid.

ON DISTRACTIONS

THEN: The main distractions were the television and the telephone.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. Strange, wonderful, and kinda creepy.

NOW: It’s the magnetic rabbit holes-o-rama of the Internet. In some ways this is more difficult for me as a writer because I use the same machine, the laptop, for writing as for research, for email, and for social media and surfing. (Oh, so that’s the problem! Well, at least I don’t watch television anymore.)

Is it really that different? Yes, because technology really is taking us somewhere very strange, and in some ways, for many people, smartphones are beginning to serve as an actual appendage. But no, because since the dawn of written history we have ample evidence that people have been tempted continually by hyper-palatable distractions of one kind or another and have been taken advantage of by those with the wherewithal to take advantage. Hmmmm…. religion…. slavery…. alcohol… opiates…. cigarettes…. casinos…. spectator sports…. mindless shopping…. television… or even, as they did even back in the days of the atl-atl, lolling around the campfire and indulging in idle & malicious gossip…

>> See also Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle.

ON PUBLISHING EN ROUTE

THEN: As work progresses, I would publish an occasional article in a magazine or newspaper such as, say, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal— and I would actually get paid. I also published a number of longform essays in literary magazines. I got paid, a bit, and I treasure the beautiful copies.

NOW: Although I continue to publish in magazines, mainly I post digital media– articles on this blog, guest-blogs, and text, photos, videos and podcasts on my websites, plus I send out my emailed newsletter a few times a year. Downside: My short works make less money. Upside: publishing articles is quick, easy, and I retain control. Further upside: when people Google certain terms, they get me. For example, try “Sierra Madera Astrobleme.”

Is it really that different? Alas, yes. See Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

I would tell any young writer getting started today that if you want the freedom to write things you will be proud of, first find a reliable alternative income source and from there, always living below your means, build and diversify your sources of income away from the labor market. (Getting an MFA so you can teach in a creative writing program? That might have made a smidge of sense two decades ago. Now you’d be better off starting a dog grooming business, and I am not joking.) Yes, if you are brilliant, hard-working and lucky, you might one day make a good living from your creative writing. But why squander your creative energy for your best work worrying about generating income from, specifically, writing? Quality and market response only occasionally coincide. Jaw-dropping mysteries abound.

FURTHER NOTES: WHAT ELSE HASN’T CHANGED (MUCH)?

The Call to Dive Below the Surface

One might imagine that with all the firehoses of information available to the average traveler, literary travel writing now needs to offer something get-out-the-scuba-gear profound. But this has been true for decades– long before the blogosphere and Tripadvisor.com & etc. thundered upon us.

As V.S. Naipaul writes in A Turn in the South– waaay back in 1989:

“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago… Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, ‘This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys…’ This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer.”

Organizational Challenges

Another thing that has not changed is the need to keep things organized– whether digital or paper. When I sit down to bang out a draft and then polish (and polish & polish & polish) a literary travel narrative, I need to constantly refer to my field notes, books, photos and videos, so it is vital that I have these resources where I can easily find them– and when done for the day, or with that section, that I have a place to easily put them back (and from where I can easily retrieve them as need be). This might sound trivial. It is not.

Here’s what works for me:

BOOKS: Shelve by category, e.g., Texas history, geology; regional; rock art, etc, using big, easy-to-read labels on the shelves;

PAPERS: File in hanging folders in a cabinet, e.g., travels by date, editorial correspondence, other alphabetical correspondence, people (as subjects), places;

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

TRANSCRIBED FIELD NOTES AND INTERVIEWS: Store in three-ring binders;

DIGITAL FILES: Save in folders on the laptop, e.g., audio by date and place, photos and video by date and place;

WEBSITES, PODCASTS, VIDEOS: For websites and etc, I often use posts on this very searchable blog as a way of filing notes that I can easily retrieve (here’s an example and here’s another and another and another and another);

PRINT-OUT OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Shelve at eye-level in a box (along with a large manila envelope for miscellaneous scraps and Post-Its).

Sounds like I know what I’m doing! The truth is, no matter how often I declutter, books and papers tend to mushroom into unwieldy piles and ooze over any and all horizontal expanses. Piles make it easier to procrastinate. And procrastination is the Devil. I have been struggling mightily with getting my field notes transcribed. All that said, a book gets written as an elephant gets eaten– bit by bit. It’s happening. Stay tuned.

It Can Be Done! This Writer’s Distraction Free Smartphone
(Plus an App Evaluation Flowchart to Tailor-Make Your Own

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber, on
Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the NIneteenth Century

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Cymru & Comanche: Cyberflanerie

So “Cymru,” the name for Wales in the Welsh language, is pronounced kum-ree. (Whodathunk?)

I have finished reading the excellent albeit doorstop-esque The Last of the Celts by Marcus Tanner. If you have been following this blog, you know that I am at work on a book about Far West Texas, so you might be wondering, why the interest in the Celts? Of course, many Texans are descendants of Celts– Scottish, Welsh, and Irish, above all.

But it’s more than this.

Sometimes one’s thinking, stuck in a cultural rut, needs to unlimber. Reading into deep and/or lateral history gives one a freshly off-kilter look at what it means to be human, and it highlights forgotten or overlooked connections among now diverse peoples. Such as among, oh, say, Texians and Comanches.

(If you’re not familar with the term Texian, the Texas State Historical Association defines it thus: “[G]enerally used to apply to a citizen of the Anglo-American section of the province of Coahuila and Texas or of the Republic of Texas… As President of of the Republic, Mirabeau B. Lamar used the term to foster nationalism… In general usage after annexation [to the United States] Texan replaced Texian.” As you might guess, Texians and Comanches did not sit around the campfires together singing the 19th century equivalent of “Kumbaya.”)

I’ve been reading piles of books on Texas. So much of this literature tends to fall into broadly categorizing people– e.g., “Anglos” over here, “Spanish” or “Mexican” or “Tejano” or “Native American” or there. Or, for that matter, “white” or “black.” Such categorizations might be convenient, and I grant, at times necessary for some modicum of understanding, but in fact, many individuals’ ancestries and cultural identities are not so simple, nor is there anywhere near as much uniformity within such categories as many authors assume, or seem to imagine. (I was born in Texas but I did not grow up there. I still find peculiar the Texan notion of “Anglo” someone who might as easily be of English as of French, Czech, or, say, Irish extraction.)

Similarly, much of the literature on Mexico, whether in English or Spanish, discusses mestizaje as if the only mix were of Spanish and indigenous. But in fact, many Mexicans, like many Mexican Americans, for that matter, are part African, part Arab, Chinese, Russian, Swedish, Irish, you-name-it. (See also the preface to my anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.)

A Record of the Bodurtha Family. I trace my line back to Reice Bodhurtha via my great great great grandmother, Lucy Morris Pope.

My own ancestry is a mix of Irish, Scottish, English, German, plus a sprinkling of Welsh– in other words, plenty of Celt in there. (For those of you new to this blog, in case you were wondering, why my interest in Texas, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border? I have been married to a Mexican and living in Mexico City for nearly 30 years, and I was born on the border, in El Paso, Texas.)

As far as I know, my own bit of Cymru goes back to a great-great-great-etc-etc-etc-great grandfather, one Reice Bodurtha, a founder of the Agawam Plantation (now Springfield), a Puritan colony in Massachusetts in the 1600s. (Not the Mayflower, but close! Not that I put too much stock in this sort of thing. Going back that many generations, say, twelve, to get to Reice Bodhurtha, we’re talking about a few thousand direct ancestors. The numbers of ancestors double with each generation back. Do the math– and keep your sombrero on: just about everyone alive today of European descent may be descended from Charlemagne!)

Reading The Last of the Celts inspired me consider connections in unlikely directions. One example: The story of indigenous peoples in Texas is a tragedy of extinction by disease, extermination in some instances, and finally, in the wake of the US Civil War, U.S. Army-directed conquest and removal to reservations in Arizona or Oklahoma. Strange but true to say, there are some– I say only some– parallels in the ancient and not-so-ancient world of the Celts, for over the centuries, they were pushed out by the dominant cultures to the edges of the European Continent and the British isles– and beyond, to Iceland (yes, Icelanders have a lot of Celt in them) and the Americas— and you betcha, that includes the Great State of Texas.

Then, under the sway of another dominant culture, there comes the loss of languages. As Tanner recounts, on the Celtic fringe, as increasing numbers of younger people preferred to communicate in English, indigenous languages began to degrade and then disappear as a living language. As for the medley of Celtic languages once spoken in Europe– Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh– with the exception of the latter, all have disappeared or become for the most part relics, mainly used for a few phrases sung or recited for special occasions. Marcus Tanner’s The Last of the Celts recounts many a sad story.

And this is a story similar to that of the multitude of indigenous languages once spoken in Texas, including Comanche, or Numu Tekwapu, an Uto-Aztecan language. According to Omniglot.com, Numu Tekwapu is still spoken by several hundred mostly elderly Comanche.

Apropos of Comanche, or NɄMɄ TEKWAPɄ, a few links and videos:

> Comanchelanguage.org

> The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II by William C. Meadows

> The Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center in Lawton, Oklahoma

How to say “I love you” in Comanche:

Comanche National Museum Dance Demonstration:

Book review: The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen

Apropos of Cymru:

The Widders with the Druids– interestingly, this is a traditional Welsh border area dance with much in common with the Matachines, which I have seen in Mexico. (No Welsh spoken– or I didn’t catch it…) Things get interesting at about one minute in:

If you’re not familiar with Matachines, have a look:

> Bodacious 360 view of some Widders— looking like they’re ready for some Comanches!

What does the Welsh language sound like?

Diana, Princess of Wales, offers a token phrase of Welsh in her first public speech at 1:30:

The title of the following video is “Cymry enwog a phroffesiynol yn sôn am sut mae’r Gymraeg yn allweddol i lwyddiant eu gyrfa neu fusnes. Famous and professional Welsh speakers talk about how the Welsh language has been key to their career or business success.”

It is an uncanny experience to listen to people speak a language that my ancestors must have spoken, and yet I do not understand a word of it.

P.S. Wee synchronicity du jour: The Big White Guy of Agawam has a cousin: Texas’ Second Amendment Cowboy.

Looking at Mexico in New Ways: An Interview with Historian John Tutino

The Strangely Beautiful Sierra Madera Astrobleme

Global Migration: People and Their Stories (Transcript of Introduction to Panel at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference)

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Q & A: Shelley Armitage on “Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place”

Shelley Armitage, author of Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place

The week before last, I posted a brief but glowing note about Shelley Armitage’s Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place. This week I am delighted to share with you the author’s answers to my questions about her lyrical and illuminating memoir of growing up in and later returning to explore the area around Vega, Texas. Vega sits on the Llano Estacado about half way between the eastern New Mexico / Texas border and the Texas Panhandle city of Amarillo. [Click here to see Vega, Texas on the map.]

As you will see, some of my questions are with my students in mind (I teach literary travel writing and creative nonfiction), while others are apropos of my abiding interest in Texas (my own work-in-progress is on Far West Texas— next door, as it were, to the Llano Estacado). Whether you are interested in writing travel and personal memoir or learning about this unique yet little known place, I think you will find what Shelley Armitage has to say at once fascinating and informative.

C.M. MAYO: You have had a very distinguished career as an academic. What prompted you to switch to writing in this more literary and personal genre?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I haven’t really switched but shifted my focus. I’ve tried in all my previous books to write well and evocatively and they all required research and imagination as a foundation. I never believed that scholarly writing couldn’t be readable, even possess literary qualities. But it’s true that because I was an academic I was always steered away from personal/creative writing, something I wanted to do from a young age on.

As I mention in the book, an elementary school friend and I wrote a novel together, a kind of mystery using local characters. When I was young I also admired the writing in National Geographic though I had no idea how to prepare myself to write such. Now as a retiree, I have time (though shortened!!) to explore what I’ve always yearned to do, though I still struggle to write things that are personal; I am more comfortable as a participant/observer.

C.M. MAYO: In your acknowledgements you mention the Taos Writers Conference and the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico “where the book found a second life.” Can you talk about Taos and the book’s evolution?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Taos is a special place in terms of environment and history–and many other things. So being in Taos (high desert, mountains, verdant valley) combined with focus on writing was special. I was fortunate to study with BK Loren, a novelist and essayist, at the writers’ conference. She gave me permission, through her suggestions and assignments–though not related to the memoir– to work with narrative in fresh ways.

I came to think about time in terms of what memory does with it, not something chronological. I spent lots of time in the Taos area hiking, just exploring the art scene, talking with other artists (particularly at the Wurlitzer Foundation). I’ve always found hanging out with other creative people, not writers, to be very stimulating and fun. Ditto looking at art, attending musical events, etc.

At the Wurlitzer I was able to get a rough draft. A couple of years later when I studied with BK, I went home and started again.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers and works would you say have most influenced you in writing Walking the Llano? You mention Southwest poet Peggy Pond Church and Southwest writer Mary Austin, as well as contemporary writers, including Rudolfo Anaya, Patricia Hampl, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Barry Lopez’s writers retreat. Can you talk about some of these influences?

Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church, edited with essays by Shelley Armitage

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: As a scholar I worked with the writings of both Austin and Church. I was Church’s literary editor, worked with her until her death, and helped get her books published posthumously

Austin I knew from research I’ve done on women in the West, once (and maybe still) an incredibly under-researched and represented woman of Western writing and history.

Both women were extremely talented and independent but also faced assumptions about women’s “place” at the time and credibility as writers. Austin did claim the tag feminist, though Church denied it. I think I saw in their talent and their battles something of myself. After all, when I received my Ph.D in 1983, someone in the English Department actually asked me if I intended to get a job with it.

The same perhaps ironically is true for Silko and Anaya, both writers whom I’ve taught with great enthusiasm and deep appreciation, both ground-breaking writers in a time when writers of color had a difficult time getting published. I don’t mean to politicize their work but simply to point out their contribution to establishing a canon of work not available for my generation when we were students.

Rudy also writes about the llano and Leslie will forever be influential for writing Ceremony and most recently her memoir.

Patricia Hampl I’ve never met, unfortunately, but her memoirs are among the best in the genre, in my opinion. She is a seamless writer, moving among time periods, places, memories. A beautiful storyteller.

And Barry Lopez who led a writer’s retreat, the first I ever attended, is a well-known “nature” writer. I like best his short stories which I’ve also written about. Though I am writing creative nonfiction, each of these writers has impressed me through their use of so-called fictional elements. That can be the beauty of nonfiction. These elements can make a memoir sing.

C.M. MAYO: Do you have any favorite literary travel / creative nonfiction books / writers?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I really don’t have any favorites. I read lots of contemporary fiction (much of it immigrant writers or international writers in translation) and am drawn to books like Sally Mann’s recent autobiography in which she uses photographs.

I’ve written a lot on photography and find thinking about photos as connected to creating memorable but subtle images in writing. As a critic I’ve written some essays speculating on how photography connects with story, such as one on the photographs of Eudora Welty, called “The Eye and the Story.”

C.M. MAYO: Any favorite Texan books / writers?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I really haven’t kept up with “Texas” writers as such. I don’t think about writers in this category. Frankly, I tried to talk University of Oklahoma Press out of using the word Texas in my subtitle of Walking. For me, the book was about a geographic area, not a state.

I often don’t think of myself being in a state when I am in Texas but rather in a place which may or may not have commonalities with other places. That said, I did long ago admire the Texas book, Say Goodbye to a River, also the work of Elmer Kelton as a western writer who was a sage observer of the south plains, and occasionally the work of writers for Texas Monthly.

C.M. MAYO: Not many people outside of Texas have heard of the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, and yet it is an area bigger than New England and of considerable historical and ecological importance. Why do you think that is? (And how do the people who live there pronounce Llano Estacado?)

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Sad to say, many Texans neither know the area nor how to pronounce it!!! It is Spanish, so llano is yano, with a soft “a,” and estacado, just as it’s spelled. I think most contemporary folk do not know much about geography, either in the present or historically.

El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagiation on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536-1860 by John Miller Morris

I’ve found people who know most about the llano have spent time living within it (or on it?); cowboys, ranchers, local historians, wildlife biologists, etc. The llano suffers the same fate as most of the southwest except for the popularized places like Santa Fe: it’s rural, not sublime (except in some of our eyes), and appears boring unless one can get off the main highways.

That’s actually not true if you are a lover of big skies and boundless horizons. It can appear inconsequential if identifying everything according to urban human life is most important.

And yes, most pronounce it lano.

C.M. MAYO: West Texas, which includes the Llano Estacado and the Far West Texas city of El Paso, where you lived for some years, is very different from the rest of Texas. In a sentence or two, what in your experience are the most substantial differences?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: In one sense the areas are like ethnic and cultural islands, separated from so-called mainstream Texas both in economics and history. In another sense, in regard to El Paso, there is the everlasting influence of Mexico and Central America.

There’s also not the same commercial influences overall, that is, of the kind of characteristics Larry McMurtry might have spoofed. In the west of Texas we are mostly closer to other countries and state capitols than Austin.

To drive from El Paso to Austin would take 8 hours 29 minutes

To drive from Austin to Vega, Texas would take about 8 hours.

C.M. MAYO: For someone who knows nothing about Texas, but seeks understanding, which would be the top three books you would recommend?

A House of My Own: Stories from My Life by Sandra Cisneros

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I’d suggest T.S. Fehrenbach’s Comanches: The History of a People, Stephen Harrington’s The Gates of the Alamo, and works by Sandra Cisneros.

C.M. MAYO: Ditto, books about the Llano Estacado?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: In terms of the llano, I’d recommend John Miller Morris’s El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas; Fred Rathjen’s The Texas Panhandle Frontier; and Rick Dingus’s forthcoming Shifting Views and Changing Places (a photographic collection with focus on the llano). I have an essay in Dingus’s book called “On Being Redacted,” which addresses his depiction of space, place, etc.

C.M. MAYO: One of the things I especially appreciated about Walking the Llano is your eye for the detail of the deep past– rock art, arrowheads, potsherds, some many thousands of years old, and how earlier peoples inhabited the landscape not as square feet measured off with a fence, but as a shape. And the Llano Estacado is shaped by draws– what people elsewhere would call a creek bed or an arroyo. The draw you focus on is the Middle Alamosa Creek. Having written this book, your eye for the shape of a landscape– any landscape– must be far sharper. Am I right? If so, can you give an example?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Thanks for mentioning this! I have always liked Mary Austin’s comment that to appreciate the desert, you needed “a noticing eye.” The draws that become the Middle Alamosa Creek are my so-called backyard and yet I was amazed to discover what had transpired there. Spending time, listening, looking, being open to discovery I think is important wherever we find ourselves.

Right now I am in the Chihuahuan desert and very interested in learning more and perhaps writing about it. In Poland, I spent lots of time walking and looking, going into the forests that bordered Warsaw.

In fact, I think being conscious of shapes, as you say, rather than man-made or distinguished borders can awaken us to a different kind of understanding of how we are part of these environments. It’s a kind of personal ecology.

I like to look without language, by which I mean a kind of openness before we name something and thus categorize it.

C.M. MAYO: Popular imagery of Texas often differs immensely from reality, and yet at the same time, in so many instances, stereotypes and reality intertwine, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes ironically, perhaps playfully. For example, the other day I happened to visit the website of the vast La Escalera Ranch and, as I recall, one of the videos was playing the theme song to the movie “Giant.” In Walking the Llano you mention that, a child growing up in Vega, you were “steeped in the cowboy films of my childhood…Dale Evans… Roy Rogers… Then there were Gene Autry and The Lone Ranger, which led to records, sheet music, and magic rings.” Later you write, “In elementary school, I kept writing about the other Wests, as if they were more important than my own.” In this regard, what do you see happening for children in Vega, Texas, and similar places, now?

SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I’d like to think the kids in Vega could revel in the mixture of fact and fantasy in a state and on a llano fairly amazing! And I was hopeful when I had the chance to speak to a 4th grade class at Vega schools about my book. I used a Power Point of some of the photos in the book, but of course in much more gorgeous color.

They responded with great questions about the flora and fauna mainly, but when I asked if any of them realized this canyon country existed just north of town, only one little boy said “Ma’am, I live out on one of those ranches.” Everyone else seemed clueless, happy to connect the area with something else they knew, but not familiar with it themselves.

I think their world is more daily defined as Stars Wars or Frozen and of course through that little object influencing us all, the cell phone. Viewing the world through frames, television, computer screens, cell phones is no doubt more defining than the big star their parents put on their houses.

Do they consider themselves “Texans”? I would guess yes, when the situation calls for it. Still when I was a kid I think I was more aware of being a westerner than a Texan.

> Visit Shelley Armitage’s website

Notes on Tom Lea and His Epic Masterpiece of a Western,
The Wonderful Country

Review of James McWilliams’ The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut

Blood Over Salt in Borderland Texas:
Q & A with Paul Cool, Author of Salt Warriors

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

The Strangely Beautiful Sierra Madera Astrobleme

The Sierra Madera Astrobleme. Photo: C.M. Mayo

As those of you who have been following this blog know, I am at work on a book about Far West Texas and, apropos of that, hosting the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project. So in addition to reading about Far West Texas and related subjects, and interviewing artists and many other interesting people, I’ve been doing a heap of driving all over the place out there.

Driving east or west on I-10 or I-20 or 90 is to barrel along with the steady flow of big rigs, pickup trucks, RVs and SUVs; driving north-south, on the other hand, it gets very lonely, very strange, very fast.

Here is a photo* I took with my iPhone through the windshield while heading south on US-385 from Fort Stockton to Marathon. That jumble of hills over to the left is the Sierra Madera, which sits on the vast La Escalera Ranch, one of the largest ranches in Texas. Although I did not know it at the time, the highway was about to blaze me right through the Sierra Madera Astrobleme.

[*Normally I would never fool around with my smartphone while driving, but I had been driving out here for sometime and not seen a single vehicle, in either direction. I daresay I could have taken got out of the car and taken a siesta in the middle of the road.]

The Sierra Madera Astrobleme in Far West Texas

The Sierra Madera Astrobleme, off US-385 between the towns of Fort Stockton and Marathon

The Sierra Madera is indeed on Google maps, but neither of the maps I carried with me that day, the AAA and the Geological Highway Map of Texas, noted it, so I was wholly unprepared for the sight, on the open plains, well before the Glass Mountains, of the strange-looking huddle of the Sierra Madera off to the east– and all bathed in the golden-orange glow of sunset. Alas, my photo does not do its stunning gorgeousness a shred of justice.

It turns out that the Sierra Madera is an extremely rare “cryptoexplosion structure,” in this case, a crater with a central mountain range raised not by volcanic or tectonic forces, but by the rebound from the impact of an unknown extraterrestrial object. The mountains and the approximately 6 mile-in-diameter crater, so eroded over some nearly 100 million years that I did not recognize it as I drove through it, are together known as the Sierra Madera Astrobleme.

An astrobleme is an eroded remnant of a large crater made by the impact of a meteorite or comet. The term, first used in the mid-20th century, is from the Greek astron, star, and blema, wound.

What was that object that slammed into the earth those nearly 100 million years ago? I searched the literature but could not find any description beyond “approximately spherical.” So I wrote to Dr. Robert Beaufort, who host the United States Meteorite Impact Craters website. He kindly answered:

“Identifying the class of meteorite that caused a particular impact crater is a genuinely difficult task… Because we are talking about gargantuan numbers of nuclear bombs worth of heat and shock energy, the impacting body itself, which is pretty tiny compared to the size of the crater, winds up distributed as parts per million or billion among the melted and/or redistributed target rocks remaining in and around the crater. Finding traces of the impactor is pretty straightforward if you have a mass spectrometer to play with (which I don’t), but actually telling which specific type of asteroid and associated meteorite you are dealing with is much more difficult. Scientists have looked at differences in bulk elemental ratios and at differences in isotope ratios in different classes of meteorites, and found cases where the same characteristic ratios could be discerned, even though they were diluted to parts per gazillion in the earth rock at an impact site. It is tricky work, and depends upon being able to clearly evaluate terrestrial background abundances, and so forth, but we are getting better at it with each passing decade. I don’t think it has been done for Sierra Madera. There is a very good chapter on the subject in Osinski and Pierazzo’s book, Impact Cratering: Processes and Products. Dr. Christian Koberl springs to mind as one of the world’s notable authorities on the subject of projectile identification at impact crater sites.”

What was going on 100 million years ago? This would have been the Late Cretaceous or Early Tertiary, when Tyrannosaurus roamed and Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a pterosaur the size of a small jet airplane, cast his shadow from overhead. (Seems the flora and fauna had a few more million years to go… 66 million years ago came Chicxulub and the great extinction.)

The literature I could Google up on the Sierra Madera Astrobleme has a great deal of detail on shatter cones and various types of rock, as well as gravitational and magnetic anomalies. But as for a description for the layman, or shall we say, the average Tyrannosaurus Rex, of what the impact might have sounded like and how it might have affected the atmosphere, or caused mega-tsunamis, no dice.

Would the Sierra Madera have appeared as an island? It seems that those many millions of years ago the area was then underneath the so-called Western Interior Seaway. The Davis Mountains— the Texas Alps– lying beyond the horizon to the northwest, would not emerge until the volcanic frenzy of (gosh, only) 35 million years ago.

Dear reader, if you have more information about the Sierra Madera Astrobleme, please do write.

Informative links:

> “When Texas Was at the Bottom of the Sea” by Olivia Judson, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2015.

> University of Texas of the Permian Basin webpage on the Sierra Madera Astrobleme

All the crunchy geology. Plus the hypothetical reconstruction of the event.

> “Hydrocone Modeling of the Sierra Madera Impact Structure” by Tamara J. Goldin et al. Meteoritics and Planetary Science, 2006.
Extra-crunchy.

> “Geology of the Sierra Madera Cryptoexplosion Structure, Pecos County, Texas” by H.G. Wilshire, et al. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper No. 599, 1972.
Extra-extra-crunchy with shatter cones.

> United States Meteorite Impact Craters: Page on the Sierra Madera Crater
Good variety of photographs and information by Robert Beauford, PhD. He writes:

“This is one of the largest impact craters in the United States, and even after having worked on 4 to 5 km craters for several years, I found it challenging to take in the scale of the structure. It defines the shape of the vast, open landscape in every direction.”

> Purdue University’s Impact Earth! Famous Craters page.
Alas, it does not include the Sierra Madera Astrobleme. But fascinating nonetheless.

> Astronaut’s Guide to Terrestrial Impact Cratersby R.A.F. Grieve, et al. LP Technical Report Number 88-03, Lunar and Planetary Institute, NASA, 1988
(See Sierra Madera, p. 13.)

P.S. Wiggy synchronicity du jour: Given that the Sierra Madera Astrobleme is near the Glass Mountains, it raised my eyebrows to come upon this webpage with the Ames Astrobleme Museum and the Gloss Mountains of Oklahoma:

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

Q & A: Amy Hale Auker, on Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos: José N. Iturriaga (and Yours Truly) in Cuernavaca’s Historic Jardín Borda

The two volume anthology by José N. Iturriaga, a collection of writings by foreigners in Morelia, from the 16th to the 21st century.

To see one’s own country through the scribbles of foreigners can be at once discomfiting and illuminating. Out of naiveté and presumption, foreigners get many things dead-wrong; they also get many things confoundingly right. Like the child who asked why the emperor was wearing no clothes, oftentimes they point to things we have been blind to: beauty and wonders, silliness, perchance a cobwebby corner exuding one skanky stink. And of course, there are things for foreigners to point at in all countries, from Albania to Zambia.

As an American I have to admit it’s rare that we pay a whit of attention to writing on the United States by, say, Mexicans, Canadians, the Germans or the French. True, we have the shining example of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which every reasonably well-educated American may not have waded through but has at least heard of (and if you haven’t, dear reader, now you have.) But de Tocqueville’s tome is a musty-dusty 181 years old (the first of its four volumes was published in 1835, the last in 1840– get the whole croquembouche in paperback here.)

José N. Iturriaga, signing copies of his anthology, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardin Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.

This past Friday, July 1, 2016, I participated in the launch of novelist and historian José N. Iturriaga’s anthology Otros cien forasteros en Morelos [Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], the companion volume to Cien forasteros en Morelos [One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], from the 16th to the 21st century.

(For those rusty on their Mexican geography, Morelos is a large state in central Mexico that includes Cuernavaca, “the city of eternal springtime,” which it actually is, and Tepoztlán, a farm town surrounded by spectacular reddish bluffs that, despite an influx of tourists from Mexico City and abroad, still has a strong indigenous presence, and has been designated by Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism as a “pueblo mágico.” The most famous resident of the state of Morelos was Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.)

The launch was held in the Centro Cultural Jardín Borda (Borda Gardens Cultural Center), an historic garden open to the public in downtown Cuernavaca– about an hour and a half’s drive from Mexico City.

As Iturriaga said in his talk, for almost forty years he has been studying the writings of foreigners on Mexico, precisely for the fresh, if not always kind nor necessarily accurate, perspective they offer on his own country.

I admire Iturriaga’s work, and his curiosity, open-mindedness, and open-heartedness more than I can say. It was a mammoth honor to have had an excerpt from my novel included in his anthology, and to have been invited to participate on the panel presenting his anthology. The other two panelists, whose work is also in the anthology, were poet, novelist and essayist Eliana Albala and journalist and poet María Gabriela Dumay, both of whom came to live in Cuernavaca in the early 1970s, political exiles from Pinochet’s Chile.

Mexican book presentations tend to be more formal affairs than those in US (the latter usually in a bookstore with, perhaps, a brief and informal introduction by the owner or a staff member. I have war stories.) In Mexico, in contrast, there is usually a felt-draped dais, always a microphone, and two to as many as five panelists who have prepared formal lectures about the book. The author speaks last, and briefly. Another difference is that the Mexican reporters, photographers, and oftentimes television cameras crowd the dais, lending the affair a glamor and gravitas rare for a US book presentation. Afterwards, there is a party with white-gloved waiters pouring “vino de honor”– in this case, for Iturriaga’s Otro cien forasteros en Morelos, whoa, mezcal.

C.M. Mayo, Eliana Albala, María Gabriela Dumay, José N. Iturriaga, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardín Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

>> Where to buy Otros Cien Forasteros en Morelos? I hope to be able to provide a link shortly.

Here is my talk for the panel, translated into English.

Dear José Iturriaga; fellow panelists, Eliana Albala and María Gabriela Dumay; everyone in this beautiful Centro Cultural Jardín Borda who made this event possible; Ladies and Gentlemen:

First of all, heart-felt congratulations to José Iturriaga on this extraordinary anthology in two volumes, a magnificent and opportune cultural contribution that, no doubt, required endless hours of reading, not to mention the tremendous labor of love that went into selecting and then translating so many writers.

Between the covers of this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, I find my fellow Americans Jack London, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Steinbeck– among the most outstanding figures in US literature. There is also the great novelist who arrived, so mysteriously, from Germany: B. Traven; and artists such as Pedro Friedeberg; and distinguished historians such as John Womack, author of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Michael K. Schuessler, biographer of the eccentric poetic genius Pita Amor; and the Austrian Konrad Ratz, whose meticulous research on Maximilian von Habsburg was essential, in fact a parting of the seas, in our understanding of the personality, education, and politics of the Archduke of Austria.

In three words, José Iturriaga’s anthology is eclectic, fascinating, and illuminating.

It is a great honor for me to participate in this presentation and an even greater honor that this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, includes excerpts from my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. [In the anthology, excerpts are taken from the Spanish translation by Mexican novelist and poet Agustín Cadena, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano.]

My novel is about the grandson of Agustín de Iturbide,* Agustín de Iturbide y Green (1863-1925) whom Maximilian “adopted” in 1865, making this half-American two-year old, briefly, Heir Presumptive to the Mexican throne.

(*Agustin de Iturbide (1783-1824) led the final stage of Mexico’s war for independence from Spain, and supported by the Catholic Church, was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, deposed in 1823, and executed in 1824. )

In the winter of 1866, Maximilian brought his court here, to the Jardín Borda. And since we are within those very walls and surrounded by those very gardens, in celebration of José Iturriaga’s work, I would like to invoke those foreigners of the past, that is to say, I would like to read the few very brief excerpts from the novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, as they appear in this anthology.

This bit from the novel is the imagined point of view of José Luis Blasio, a Mexican who served as Maximilian’s secretary:

Depend on it: Maximilian is shepherding Mexico into the modern world— so José Luis Blasio, His Majesty’s secretary, has told his family and tells himself. And this is no small task when His Majesty must grapple not only with our backwardness and ingratitude, but that thorn in his side, General Bazaine. The rumor is that, abetted by his Mexican wife’s family, Bazaine schemes to push aside Maximilian; they aim to have Louis Napoleon make Mexico a French Protectorate with himself in charge— not that José Luis would give that a peso of credence. But José Luis does consider it an outrage, the latest of many, that he would wire a complaint that Maximilian has removed his court to Cuernavaca, rather than “attend to business in the capital.”

Yes, they are here in the Casa Borda amongst gardens and fountains, fruit trees, palm trees, parrots of every size and color— a world away from Mexico City. But does not Louis Napoleon go to Plombières and Biarritz? Queen Victoria, who has sterner blood, travels as far as Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands. Dom Pedro II of Brazil retires to his villa in Petropolis. And did not the empress’s late father, Leopold, absent himself from Brussels in the Château Royal at Laeken? It is natural that for the winter, His Majesty should hold court in a healthier clime.

But even here where he siestas in a hammock, drinks limeade from a coconut shell, and wears an ecru linen suit with an open-necked blouse, Maximilian’s work never ceases. It is a wide, rushing river that José Luis can only hope will not overspill its banks. In the past year, José Luis has come to appreciate the uncompromising necessity of working long hours; indeed, his eyesight, never strong, has deteriorated from so much reading in the dim of early mornings. Maximilian arises at four; his valet attends him, and though he might linger over breakfast, by no later than six, he is at “the bridge,” as he says, that is, his desk— or, as here in Casa Borda, a folding table on the veranda. His Majesty’s dispatch box is heavy, and growing ever heavier…

And now Pepa de Iturbide, daughter of the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, godmother to Agustin de Iturbide y Green, and member of Maximilian’s court:

It is a holy miracle that she got a wink of sleep at all! So appalled she is by Maximilian’s whim to uproot the court to this hamlet two bone-jarring days travel up and down the sierra— good gracious, this is no time to abandon the capital, and go gallivanting about with butterfly nets and beetle jars! Matamoros is under siege; the whole state of Guerrero, from Acapulco to Iguala, is in thrall to guerrillas. And Pepa got it from Frau von Kuhacsevich, who got it from Lieutenant Weissbrunn, that whilst the empress was in Yucatan, Maximilian fancied a visit to Acapulco, but General Bazaine nixed it because it would have been impossible to maintain security for his person. That is the sum of things!

Oh, but in Mexico City Maximilian felt cramped, “an oyster in a bucket of ice,” he said. Over the past two months, the few times Pepa chanced to see Maximilian, he had spoken of the empress’s dispatches from Yucatan proudly but with— Pepa recognized it when she saw it— a glint of green. If Maximilian could not have his expedition to Yucatan, by Jove, he was going to go some place tropical! And Maximilian could not be outshone by his consort, oh no. A mere visit to Cuernavaca would not do; he had to serve himself the whole enchilada with the big spoon: an Imperial Residence with landscaping, fountains, an ornamental pond stocked with exotic fish, and furnishings and flub dubs aplenty, comme ça and de rigueur. Whom did he imagine he was impressing with this caprice? Poor Charlotte, exhausted after Yucatan. And as if the von Kuhacseviches were not already foundering in their attempts to manage the Imperial Household in Mexico City! As if the Mexican Imperial Army could offer its officers anything approaching a living wage! Or keep its depots stocked with gunpowder! It is a monumental waste of time, of effort, of money, and to boot, Casa Borda is a-crawl with cockroaches, beetles, earwigs, and moths— a bonanza for Professor Bilimek!

And now the Austrian Frau von Kuhacsecvich, Mistress (chief administrador) of the Imperial Household:

On the steps to the next patio, Frau von Kuhacsevich must pause to fan herself. Cuernavaca is not the Turkish bath of the hot lands, more, as Maximilian put it, an Italian May. Pleasant for the men, and Prince Agustín, perhaps, but a trial for those who must encase themselves in corsets and crinolines. Oh, poor Charlotte that her father has died, but Blessed Jesus, what would Frau von Kuhacsevich have done had she been obliged to wear mourning black! The thought simply wilts her. She is afraid her face has gone red as a beet. Her back feels sticky, and under her bonnet, she can feel her scalp sweating. Taking the bonnet off is out of the question: her roots have grown in nearly an inch— in all the rushing to and fro, there has not been a snatch of time to touch up the color.

An Italian May: in that spirit, for luncheon, Tüdos has concocted an amuse-gueule of olives, basil, and requeson, a cheese too strong to pass for mozzarella, but toothsome. In addition to coffee, he will be making a big pot of canarino: simply, the zest of lemons steeped as tea. Well, here it has to be made of limes, ni modo, no matter, as the Mexicans say.

Finally, Maximilian himself:

Here, this moment in Cuernavaca, one is happy: perfumes in the air, colors from the palette of Heaven, birds, flowering trees and vines and oranges, the music of the orchestra and of the fountains, this bone-warming sunshine…

Thank you.

Daniel Chacón’s “Words on a Wire” Podcast Interview
with Yours Truly About Francisco I. Madero’s Secret Book

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: “The Apaches of Kiev”
by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly and Much More

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América
in Mexico City

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Peyote and the Perfect You: Some Notes (Basics, History, Links, Videos, a Hypothesis about the Heart Chakra, and an Embryonic Bibliography)

SOME NOTES & ETC ON PEYOTE FROM THE RESEARCH FOR MY BOOK IN-PROGRESS ON FAR WEST TEXAS
>> Read about my book in-progress
>> Listen in to the 20 “Marfa Mondays” podcasts (mainly interviews) posted to date
>> View my maps of Far West Texas

Far West Texas, an area approximately the size of West Virginia, includes a goodly patch of the territory that stretches deep into Mexico where peyote, or lophophora williamsii grows… oh so very… very… very… v-e-r-y… slowly. A runty, dull-gray spineless cactus with wispy white hairs, when found, peyote– an Anglicization of the original Nahautl name, peyotl— is usually growing in clusters. What certain indigenous peoples have done for an eon is slice off the tops– the “buttons”– and eat them. Calories and dietary fiber are not the point; apparently the taste is puckerlips nasty. But adepts claim that this humble-looking plant is no less than “the divine cactus,” and eaten as a sacrament, as “holy medicine,” it can bring one’s mind into a mystical realm where psychedelic visions can help one see across time and space and heal one’s thoughts about oneself and the cosmos. As one participant in a peyote ritual reported, echoing so many others, he found “profound gratitude for his life” as it was.

PEYOTE AND THE HUICHOLS
The Huichols, who live in Mexico’s Sierra Madre, are the indigenous group best known for their peyote ritual.

>> For more about the Huichol visit the website of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival.

PEYOTE IN FRAY BERNARDINO SAHAGUN’S GENERAL HISTORY OF THE THINGS OF NEW SPAIN
The first known written mention of peyote is in Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, or General History of the Things of New Spain. The original 16th century manuscript, which contains 2,468 colorful illustrations and text in both Spanish and Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs phonetically transcribed using Latin), is also known as the Florentine Codex because it is in the Medicea Laurencziana Library in Florence, Italy.

>> To view the digitized manuscript which contains many intriguing and colorful illustrations, but, alas, not one of peyote, click here.

Pages from the Florentine Codex. This does not show peyote, alas.

Of peyote, Sahagún reports (as quoted in Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History):

“On him who eats it or drinks it, it takes effect like mushrooms. Also he sees many things which frighten one, or make one laugh. It affects him perhaps one day, perhaps two days, but likewise it abates. However, it harms one, troubles one, makes one besotted, takes effect on one.”

Sahagún also reports that, according to his indigenous informants, the first to use peyote were the Chichimecas, a number of semi-nomadic northern tribes never completely subdued by the Mexica (or Aztecs). [See also Conflict and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Mexico: The Augustinian War on and Beyond the Chichimeca Frontier by Robert H. Jackson.]

(By the way, you may have noticed that I never link to wikipedia, aka The Maoist Muddle, unless there is absolutely, but absolutely, nothing else and a link really would be better than none. FYI: When I checked wikipedia for this post on the Florentine Codex, the images shown were from the wrong book.)

PEYOTE ALSO MENTIONED IN DR. FERNANDO HERNANDEZ’S
DE LA HISTORIA PLANTARUM NOVAE HISPANAE
In 1570 King Felipe II sent medical doctor Fernándo Hernández (1514-1587) to New Spain to survey and report on the natural resources of the colony, including plants that might be put to medical uses. In his seven years in the Valley of Mexico (Mexico City and environs), Dr. Fernández documented a multitude of plants and a long-standing and elaborate tradition of Aztec herbal medicine. Dr. Fernández’s report on 3,000 plants, in various editions and languages, did not appear in print until some decades after his death.

Amazingly, until 2002, with Simon Varey’s compilation The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr Francisco Hernández, almost nothing about this veritable magnum opus could be found in English. From the catalog copy for that book:

“Hernández died before he could publish his Natural History, and the materials were placed in the Escorial, where they were extensively consulted, copied, abstracted, and translated by generations of scientists, medical specialists, and natural philosophers before they were destroyed by fire in 1671. Hernández’s work was still regarded as authoritative on a number of New World botanical topics as late as the nineteenth century, and his writings remain in use in popular form in Mexico today.”

I have yet to get my hands on a copy of The Mexican Treasury, but as quoted in Stewart’s Peyote Religion, in turn quoting a translation from a 1916 article by William E. Safford in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, of peyote Dr. Fernández writes:

“Wonderful properties are attributed to this root… It causes those devouring it to be able to foresee and predict things; such, for instance, as whether the weather will remain favorable; or to discern who has stolen from them some utensils or anything else; and other things of like nature which the Chichimecs really believe them have found out. On which account this root scarcely issues forth but conceals itself in the ground, as if it did not wish to harm those who discover and eat it.”

FIRST IMAGE OF PEYOTE IN DR. HERNANDEZ’S MAGNUM OPUS, POSSIBLY… OR IN CURTIS’ BOTANICAL MAGAZINE — OR, POSSIBLY, IN THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT?
According to Stewart in Peyote Religion, the earliest known botanical illustration of peyote is from 1847, in Curtis’ Botanical Magazine. Hat tip to peyote and cactus blogger Lophophora, here is that very illustration, a lovely one, from the Botanicus Digital Library, Missouri Botanical Garden.

However, it is possible that an even earlier illustration is in the Voynich manuscript, which has been carbon dated as several centuries old, but has yet to be deciphered.

>> See the utterly fascinating 2013 paper by John D. Comegys, “The Voynich Manuscript: Aztec Herbal from New Spain.” Comegys also notes some possible influence from the work of Dr. Hernández. Comegy’s paper is fascinating read, and I highly recommended it for anyone interested in rare book history, botany and/or Mexico.

From the Voynich Manuscript. Peyote? Possibly…

PEYOTE IN THE LOWER PECOS CANYONLANDS
The archaeological record shows that peyote has been used many groups and many thousands of years into the past in what is today northern Mexico and remote areas along the Rio Grande on both sides of the US-Mexico border in Texas.

>>See the forthcoming book The White Shaman Mural by Carolyn Boyd.

>> For a novelist’s take on ancient peyote ritual in what is now the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas, see Mary S. Black’s Peyote Fire.

>>And for more about the Lower Pecos Canyonlands and the magnificent rock art there, see my guest-blog post for Mary S. Black here.

PEYOTE IN THE INQUISITION
It is often said that the Mexican Inquisition focused on heretics, in particular conversos secretly practicing Judaism, but not indigenous. But the Inquisition did prosecute some indigenous and their use of peyote was often the issue.

Quoted in Stewart’s Peyote Religion (p. 20), in New Spain, in 16th and 17th century Catholic priests asked their parishioners:

Hast thou eaten the flesh of man?
Hast thou eaten the peyote?
Do you suck the blood of others?
Do you adorn with flowers places where idols are kept?

(For those not familiar with Mexican history, the first and third questions might seem extreme. All I can say is, read the history.)

And, according to Stewart, in 1620 “the Inquisition was brought to bear against peyote.”

From American Anthropologist 44, 1942:
Irving A. Leonard, “Peyote and the Mexican Inquisition, 1620”
A quote from Leonard’s translation of a Spanish document:

“We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy in the City of Mexico, states and provinces of New Spain, New Galicia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Yucatan, Verapaz, Honduras, Philippine Islands, and their districts and jurisdictions, by virtue of apostolic authority, etc. Inasmuch as the use of the herb or root called Peyote has been introduced into these Provinces for the purpose of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings, and of foretelling future events, it is an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith.

“This is certain because neither the said herb or any other can possess the virtue or inherent quality of producing the effects claimed, nor can any cause the mental images, fantasies and hallucinations on which the above stated divinations are based. In these latter are plainly perceived the suggestion and intervention of the Devil, the real author of this vice, who first avails himself of the natural credulity of the Indians and their tendency to idolatry, and later strikes down many other persons too little disposed to fear God and of very little faith.

“Because of these efforts the said abuse has increased in strength and is indulged in with the frequency observed. As our duty imposes upon us the obligation to put a stop to this vice and to repair the harm and grave offense to God our Lord resulting from this practice, we, after consultation and conference with learned and right-minded persons, have decreed the issuing of the present edict to each of you, one and all, by which we admonish you and summon you to obedience by virtue of your holy submission [to the Church] and under penalty of anathema… and other pecuniary and corporal penalties within our discretion. We order that henceforth no person of whatever rank or social condition can or may make use of the said herb, Peyote, nor of any other kind under any name or appearance for the same or similar purposes, nor shall he make the Indians or any other person take them, with the further warning that disobedience to these decrees shall cause us, in addition to the penalties and condemnation above stated, to take action against such disobedient and recalcitrant persons as we would against those suspected of heresy to our Holy Catholic Faith.”

In Peyote Religion, Stewart also includes a map (p.23) of the Inquisition hearings that specifically involved peyote, which were concentrated in Mexico City and surroundings, as well as scattered around what is now the main trunk of the Mexican republic (excluding the Baja California and Yucatan peninsulas). There were two cases in Manila (Philippines) in 1617 and 1639, as well as a case in 1632 as far north as Santa Fe. The case in Santa Fe involved someone who took peyote in order to divine who had stolen some of his clothing.

(For those wondering, why Manila? The answer is the China trade, wherein Spanish merchants brought the Manila Galleon or Nao de China, across the ocean to Acapulco on the Pacific Coast, and from there, by burro train and tameme, brought the goods inland to Mexico City, parts elsewhere, and via Veracruz on the Gulf, across the Caribbean and Atlantic to Spain.)

Mexico City’s Palacio de la Inquisition is now the Museo de la Escuela de Medicina (part of Mexico’s National University). You can visit that museum, see the original building, and also an exhibition on cells used by the Inquisition.

The Inquisition on Youtube — who needs The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when you can surf around for all that infinitely more creative and toe-curlingly wicked gross-out stuff about Inquisition torture now on the Internet? For those with blood pressure issues, may I suggest Monty Python instead:

The Inquisition in Mexico City:
>> Museo de la Medicina Mexicana (in the Palacio de la Inquisición)

The Bancroft Library’s Collection on the Mexican Inquisition
>> Rare Documents Shed Light on Grisly Mexican Inquisition
>> News from the Bancroft Library: Inquiring About the Inquisition?
>> Guide to the Mexican Inquisition Original Documents Organized by Collection and Bancroft Manuscript Classification

Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación also has a large collection on the Inquisition. Alas, at the time of this writing the website was down.

PEYOTE IN THE NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH
North of the US-Mexico border– into Texas and beyond– peyote is used as a sacrament in the ritual of the Native American Church (NAC). Is this legal? Yes, for members of the NAC, and only after a century of bitter struggle, with the 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects the use of peyote in religious ceremonies. (Not that you, dear presumably non-Native American reader, can commence cultivating, selling, and scarfing down peyote as you please. For details, check out the current DEA status.)

Omer C. Stewart’s Peyote Religion: A History and Edward F. Anderson’s Peyote: The Divine Cactus both provide a a history of the founding of the “peyote church” on Plains Indian and other Indian reservations in the United States.

THE PEYOTE RITUAL ARRIVES FROM MEXICO IN TEXAS AND OKLAHOMA

Chevato was a Lipan Apache born in northern Mexico who, long story short, became a member of the Mescalero Apaches roaming both Mexico and Texas, and later, of the Comanches on that tribe’s reservation in Oklahoma, thanks to his friendship with chief Quanah Parker.

His 2007 biography by his grandson, William Chebahtah, and Nancy McGown Minor, Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Hermann Lehman is both a major contribution to Comanche, Lipan Apache and Mescalero Apache history, and a gem-packed fascinating read– a must for any collection on the history of Northern Mexico and the Southwest.

Apropos of peyote, Minor writes (p.73) that the Lipans stayed near Zaragosa (in Coahuila, northern Mexico) because of its proximity to a hill where peyote grew in abundance. “The Western Lipans had been using peyote in their ceremonies since at least the 1780s, and as the Lipans were dispered out of Coahuila and into New Mexico, they brought with them their special peyote rituals.”

Apart from doing all the Wild West things Apache warriors did in those days, Chevato was a shaman and a “peyote singer,” singing special songs during the all-night ritual. Chevato’s great-grandfather was the first Lipan to make use of peyote in Mexico. Minor:

“Although the Mescaleros had used peyote in their religious ceremonies… it was the Lipan Apaches who created the form of ceremony practised by the Mescaleros by 1870 and the Comanches after 1875.”

Why 1875? The year prior to that the Quahada and other bands of Comanches had been defeated in a contest over “Anglos” taking the buffalo hunting grounds at The Second Battle of Adobe Walls, which was in the Texas Panhandle, prime buffalo hunting country. This defeat was the end of the end for the Comanches, and I believe that Quanah Parker’s adoption of the peyote ritual needs to be seen in this context.

UPDATE: Lonn Taylor’s Big Bend Sentinel column of August 20, 2015
“Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and His Quest for Peyote in Far West Texas”

So who was Quanah Parker? One cannot write about Far West Texas without writing about Comanches, and one cannot write about Comanches without writing about Quanah Parker, and one cannot write about Quanah Parker without writing about the Native American Church and peyote. So you can be sure, in my book I will be writing about them.

It seems that everyone in Texas and Oklahoma already knows about Quanah Parker, the son of Comanche Chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been kidnapped as a child from her family’s farm in Texas and raised as a Comanche.

(The John Wayne / Natalie Wood movie The Searchers is loosely based on the novel that was, in turn, loosely based on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker.)

Although it has little to say about peyote, one of the best books on the Comanches and Quanah Parker and an all-star crunchy fun read is S.C. Gywnne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. Humongously recommended.

>> Comanche Nation website
>> NYT article about Quanah Parker’s Star House
>> More about the Comanches in the paradigm-smasher by Pekka Hamalainen, Comanche Empire.
>> The Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker by Bill Neeley
>> Johnny D. Boggs interview with S.C. Gywnne about Quanah Parker.

Quanah Parker in the first two-reel western ever filmed (in 1907): “The Bank Robbery”
(zip about peyote as far as I can tell)

Screenshot of Quanah Parker from “The Bank Robbery,” 1908

UPDATE September 2, 2016
Thanks to Gene Fowler, none other, who very kindly sent me the link, I have added to that blog post this link (embed rather) to “Amada of the Gardens” a fascinating documentary on peyotera Amada Cardenas (1904-2005).

[VIDEO CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE]

https://archives.lib.utrgv.edu/repositories/2/resources/210

THE PEYOTE WAY CHURCH OF GOD
An offshoot of the NAC, with Mormon roots, based in Arizona.
>> Peyote Way Church of God
>> Peyote Way Church of God testimonials
Quote from a “Marine Corps Vet”: “forgiveness and acceptance of the past, and a firm commitment to a better future” and “Peyote doesn’t care about your past. What Peyote does care about is allowing you to see the perfect you; free from irrational fear, shame and hang-ups.”
>> See also “A Remote Arizona Church Offers Followers Peyote-Induced Psychedelic Trips” by Eric Tsetsi, Village Voice, January 8, 2014

ON THE SPREAD OF PEYOTE RELIGION
From the article “The Native American Church” in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, hosted by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“While the exact origins of the Native American Church and its incorporation of peyote as a sacrament of communion are shrouded in oral history, Native believers generally agree that it began in the Southwest and worked its way up from Mexico. Among the Plains Indians, the Omahas, Poncas, Winnebagos, and Sioux readily accepted the belief system of the Native American Church.”

As I understand it, the NAC is now pan-Indian.

George Morgan had much to say about peyote and the NAC:
>>George Morgan, “The Native American Church: Recollections of the Peyote Road”

MORE MISCELLANEOUS NOTES ON PEYOTE:

>> The basics according to Texas Beyond History.

>>“With the Peyoteros” by Karen Olsson for The Texas Observer, March 2, 2001.
Strong demand, plus fences and ranches plowed over for deer hunting, make finding peyote in the wild increasingly challenging.

>>Bob Prue, “Protecting the Peyote for Future Generations: Building on a Legacy of Perseverance”
(Excerpt from the anthology Peyote: History, Tradition, Politics and Conservation)

>> ‘The Heart of the Great Spirit: The Peyote Cactus”
By Stephen Gray, Reality Sandwich

>> Lophophora Blog
A blog all about peyote.

“AN ORDINARY ROCK COULD CURE YOU”:
PEYOTE MENTIONED IN JEWEL BABB’S MEMOIR

A quote from one of my very favorite books about anyone or anything or anywhere in Far West Texas, Border Healing Woman: The Story of Jewel Babb as Told to Pat Little Dog (p. 95-96):

“Indians from Mexico would come across hunting medicine plants and, above all, the cactus peyote. Six or seven of these men would walk up to the house wanting something to eat or water. The Indians were great beggars and always wanted you to give them anything that they could carry off. Sometimes they’d show me the different medicine plants they’d gathered and what each plant was for in curing. I learned lots from them and also from the old men and women that were my neighbors living in Mexico that came to see me at different times. One bunch of Indians came to see me from Oklahoma. They were looking for the cactus peyote. And as we talked, one said, ‘If you have faith, an ordinary rock could cure you.'”

PEYOTE TESTIMONY: YOUTUBERIE AND MORE

“Sacred Peyote”: a short documentary film about peyote and the Native American Church.

GERMAN-MEXICAN AMIGO GIVES TESTIMONY
My friend Hans Lens’ memoir. More about this anon.

GRINGOS GIVE TESTIMONYTara from “40BelowFruity” on her experience ingesting peyote
“Not as easy experience… I was feeling a lot of nausea… deep-seated, buried issues… I was resisting it… I started to become overwhelmed… peyote brought [memories] to the surface…I felt like I had been completely ripped apart and put together again… like a new person, reborn… It has the power to heal people.”

“The Mind Divided” shares his reflections on his peyote experience
and what he believes was the beautiful lesson: “Lighten up… embrace and enjoy life.”

Blogger Sara Brooke shares her experience with peyote in this post. A quote:

“It is conscious medicine, a consciousness that is far more intelligent than our own. It needs to be treated with respect and care and it honestly is something that isn’t for everyone. Psychologically, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually you have to be ready for it. It gives you an opportunity to face ALL parts of yourself, especially the shadow aspects. It is one of the most confronting, yet profound and worthwhile experiences I have ever had. I am eternally changed.”

>> “Through the Lens of Perception” by Hal Zena Bennett in Shaman’s Drum: A Journal of Experimental Shamanism, Fall 1987. Adventure in a Mexican cave with peyote.

>> Related: Amber Lyon, “How Psychedelics Saved My Life”
(Ayahuasca and mushrooms)
>> But aura reader Rose Rosetree offers a stark warning about ayahuasca.

(WHAT ABOUT CARLOS CASTANEDA? He did write about peyote in his several best-sellers. Alas, dude, not on my wavelength.)

AN ESOTERIC HYPOTHESIS ABOUT PEYOTE WHICH I DO NOT INTEND TO TEST
My drug is coffee! My own ventures into the esoteric have not been psychedelic but literary– primarily by way of the Himalayas of reading I did for my most recent book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. Indeed I read so much esoterica that my sense of cognitive dissonance went from geyser to sputter, then a little puddle, then, well… that dried up. So now, no problemo, I could read about oh, say, aliens tokin’ peyote. That doesn’t mean I am saying anything about aliens tokin’ peyote. I am unaware of any such report.

Scion of a wealthy family in Coahuila, Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911-1913. I am often asked what he knew about indigenous shamanistic traditions. I did not find any evidence that Madero had any interest in or experience with peyote nor, indeed, with indigenous healing traditions other than an association, late in his short life, with his Masonic brother and fellow Spiritist and doctor, the Mexican-German spy Dr Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, aka “Maestro Huiracocha,” author of a number of works, including El zodiaco de los incas en comparación con los aztecas, 1910.
Madero’s personal library contained mainly French and Ango-American (some in the original, some in Spanish translation) literature on Spiritualism, Spiritism, Theosophy, hypnotherapy, French occultism, the Bhagavad-Gita, adventures into Tibet, and the like. His work that I translated, Manual espirita of 1911, references many of these works.

Educated in France, where he discovered Spiritism and other esoteric ideas then in vogue, Madero would have been familiar with the Hindu concept, as conveyed to the West through the writings of various Theosophists, of the human body as having interpenetrating “energy bodies” and specific energy vortices known as “chakras.” Under this paradigm, my hypothesis– and take this with a truckload of salt, I am not sure I have a clue what I am talking about– is that ingesting peyote removes certain neuro-filters in the pineal gland and actives a chakra so that one can clearly perceive blockages and other auric debris, and one’s own emotional body. Which chakra might that be? Heart– I guess. Just a guess.

Continuing to follow my understanding of what could have been Madero’s hypothetical paradigm for understanding peyote, there may also be one or more conscious and intelligent astral entities / spirit guides associated with the plant. This concept is eloquently articulated in Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine.

Most modern doctors and scientists would focus on peyote’s botanical, chemical, medicinal pharmacological aspects, and specifically, their measurable effect on the brain and body. Several chapters are devoted to these topics in Anderson’s Peyote: The Divine Cactus.

AN EMBRYONIC PEYOTE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Edward F. Peyote: The Divine Cactus.

Chebahtah, William, and Nancy McGown Minor. Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Hermann Lehman.

Cobb, Russell, “Texas’ Peyote Hunters Struggle to Find a Vanishing, Holy Crop”Dallas Observer, February 14, 2008.

Cowan, Eliot. Plant Spirit Medicine.

Furst, Peter T. Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams: Explorations in the Huichol Universe.

Lens, Hans. Una visita a los huicholes.

Michaux, Henri. Miserable Miracle.

Melville, Michael J. Peyote Ceremony (thesis).

Morgan, George. “The Native American Church: Recollections of the Peyote Road”

Myerhoff, Barbara G. Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians.

Shaefer, Stacy B. and Peter T. Furst, eds. People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion and Survival.

Shaefer, Stacy B. Amada’s Blessings from the Peyote Gardens of South Texas.

Stewart, Orner Call. Peyote Religion: A History.

The True Identity of B. Traven Revealed by Timothy Heyman in Letras Libres

Q & A: Mary S. Black on Her New Book, From the Frio to Del Rio

The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut by James McWilliams

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Top 13 Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness

Extra-Astral Texiness. First, what do I mean by “astral”? I don’t mean “of the stars,” but the old-fashioned esoteric concept of the imaginal realm. Yes, I am a mite old-fashioned, and apropos of my most recent book, about the secret book by the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, I plowed through a sizable library of antique tomes on various aspects of the astral. So that’s a word I like to sling around!

Whether you believe in the astral or not, I think you will agree that (1) everyone has an imagination and (2) the imaginal realm, aka the astral– or whatever you have a notion to call it– includes works of fiction and movies. Imagine those works, if you will, floating like little bubbles through the ether. (Well, porquoi pas?) Or big baggy-wobbly monsters– (duck, here comes War and Peace...)

Speaking of Texas-sized astral bubblies, apropos of my book in-progress about Far West Texas, of course my horse (as they say in Mexico) I have a long list of “to dos” that includes grokking Giant, the Rock Hudson-Elizabeth Taylor-James Dean mashup filmed in Marfa and parts thereabouts. I have watched it and read the Edna Ferber novel it was based on, too. And now I’ve finished reading Don Graham’s Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas, in which I first came across the term “Texiness.” Writes Graham:

“The Texas Chic-urban cowboy version of the old Western legend offered a sexier version of Texas. Call it Texiness. Frontier values, however romanticized they might have been in Red River or Giant, were supplanted by fashion value, by hype.” (p.6)

I hereby redefine “Texiness”:

I say all that hyper-appealing high-heeled cowboy boot clickin’ movie fah-shun goes back to Giant’s Rock Hudson and James Dean, and indeed, decades yonder: the Founding Pope of that Whole Hamburger-Helper Enchilada was John Wayne. And a big tip of the sombrero (along with a shake of the pepper flakes), to Italian director Sergio Leone for corralling Clint Eastwood. (Maestro of the concept, Leone himself was definitely not Texi.)

(Film historians: sorry, Tom Mix looks pasty-faced and nerdy, and antiques including Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers don’t count. Nope, movies based on Karl May and Louis L’Amour novels and Buffalo Bill shows neither.)

In The Air-conditioned House of Mirrors

If you’re at all familiar with my work on Mexico, you know that I like to take cliches, stuff them in a cannon, and light the fuse. That this “Texiness” stuff exemplifies the real world of Texas…. let’s just say I am preparing to launch that idea, along with its ostrich-leather Luccheses, into orbit around, say, one of the moons of Neptune.

Says Graham, and rightly: “Texans have two pasts: the one they lived in and the one Hollywood created.”

What I’m saying is, Astral Texas isn’t Texas, exactly; it’s a bunch of fancies about “Texas” concocted by a jostling Chinese puzzle of a crowd of screenwriters, novelists, costume designers, executives, and bean-counters of all stripes, many of them New Yorkers, or Danes or Germans or Italians or whatever, who aimed to put butts in seats from Rome to Tokyo and all parts in between, or, to put it in more elegant terms, sell their product, which was international entertainment. The Alice-in-Wonderland thing about it is that Texans watched those movies too, with consequences for their ideas about themselves– or at least concepts of fashion.

(Yes, the house of mirrors goes back to Zane Gray dime novels. Who was Zane Grey? Never mind. He’s hanging out with Mr Mix & Co. in the astral.)

Ten Tropes in Pictures Drippin’ with Astral Texiness

1. The leading character is a man of apparent western European descent who wears dusty boots, a hat, and more often than not a pistol and holster on a second belt slung around the hips;

2. He has a languid gait;

3. He squints a lot and says little;

4. With counted exceptions he and other leading characters are of reproductive age, and any leading female characters are of prime reproductive age;

5. Frequent sudden loud noises (mainly from gunshots but also oil gushers, cars exploding, cannon blasts, dynamite, galloping, train whistles, and miscellaneous ferocious banging);

6. There may be guitar music, preferably languid but with some loud banging;

7. Multitudinous scenes of extreme physical peril (enhanced by frequent and sudden loud noises);

8. Ditto extreme emotional peril;

9. Ditto super fast motion (on horses, in cars, on planes and/or trains);

10. Characters not of apparent western European descent may or may not be played by Jewish or Italian actors and with counted exceptions, said characters are helpless victims, cyphers, comic relief, or else very bad.

(My actual experience of non-astral Texas is that it involves highways where drivers generally stay within the speed limits and there are lots of exits to lots of shopping malls. On the Texas highways, even in Far West Texas, it is always possible within about an hour to find either a gas station with hot coffee and Snickers bars and/or a Dairy Queen and/or a McDonald’s. As for all them guns, I’ve spent a lot of time in Far West Texas over the past few years and the one and only occasion anyone took out their gun was when, on a private ranch, after touring some rock art, a lawyer and a professor of medieval history commenced popping targets from the back porch. The BBQ expert I interviewed in Pecos carried a pistol in a holster, but that was because he was also the sheriff. Last I checked, among sheriffs that practice is not exclusive to those of the great state of Texas.)

Herewith, in chronological order, my top bakers dozen of trailers for movies with Extra-Astral Texiness. (I’m not necessarily recommending these; just pointing out a characteristic.)

1. Giant (1956)

James Dean steals the show. Based on Edna Ferber’s novel, Giant. Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and was a long-time resident of New York City’s Park Avenue.

2. The Searchers (1956)

John Wayne versus the Comanches with the incongruous albeit magnificent scenery of Arizona, California, Canada, and Utah. Loosely based on a novel by Indiana native Alan LeMay which was in turn loosely based on the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by Comanches in Texas.

3. The Alamo (1960)

John Wayne as Davy Crockett. Do not have a mouthful of popcorn in process when he tells his Mexican sweetheart, “There’s right and there’s wrong, you got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you’re walking around but you’re dead as a beaver hat.” Filmed in Brackettville, Texas.

4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Another shoot ’em up directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne (very Extra-Astral Texi), James Stewart (not Texi) and Lee Marvin (eww).

5. Hud (1963)

An actor’s actor Paul Newman was, though Millennials know him better as that old gent who, though passed away, still lends his name and handsome visage to the Newman’s Own brand of salad dressings and dog food. As the bully Adonis Hud, Newman exudes Extra-Astral Texiness in the extreme. Based on Larry McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By.

6. The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)

“Four brothers who met gunfire with gunfire!” More John Waynerie.

7. A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

“The man with no name: Danger fits him like tight black glove.” Not lacking for firearms! The first Sergio Leone “spaghetti western” starring Clint Eastwood in that poncho was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai flick Yojimbo.

8. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

The ultimate Spaghetti western. Pow, boom, whack, crack, pow! The ne plus ultra in Extra-Extra-Uber-Astral Texiness! Californian Clint Eastwood does the hat-poncho-gun-cigar thing in Spain. Watch out, the music by Italian composer Ennio Morricone — a masterpiece–can turn into an earworm. (Listen to the score here.)

9. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

There was a Judge Roy Bean but his biography was more than a bit different from that of the movie character played by Paul Newman. If you can get past Jacqueline Bissette shouting that she is a Bean (oof), you’ll hear Anthony Perkins, his hair ablowin’ in the wind, assert that “This land abounds in ruffians and varmints.”

10. Lone Star (1996)

A deft and complex film by writer-director John Sayles, starring Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, and Matthew McConaughey, the then Prince Imperial of Extra-Astral Texiness.

11. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

This is by a section the best of all the films about and filmed in Texas– a much longer list than this one. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga. Filmed in the Big Bend.

12. No Country for Old Men (2007)

Shooting, more shooting, even more shooting and loud crashes plus some more shooting with Texan Tommy Lee Jones, and Spanish actor Javier Bardem with creepazoid hair. Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel.

13. There Will Be Blood (2007)

Once again, radiating super human intensity, English actor Daniel Day Lewis nails the accent. Gushers o’ the black stuff! And the red stuff!

So where are The Wild Bunch (William Holden, too old) and Urban Cowboy (John Travolta, too silly)? Alas, they lack Extra-Astral Texiness.

UPDATE: I debated about The Magnificent Seven, which was filmed in Mexico. Steve McQueen, yes.

UPDATE: Texan friends recommend Lonesome Dove. I didn’t count it because it was a TV series about taking cattle north and the leads, Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall, struck me as a couple of very un-astral-Texi granpaws. But my opinion isn’t the only one. You can check out the trailer for Lonesome Dove here.

UPDATE: I might have included The Wonderful Country starring Robert Mitchum. But having read the novel by Tom Lea, which I greatly admire, I found the movie jarringly small and the lead miscast.

A Visit to El Paso’s “The Equestrian”

Marfa Mondays Podcast #16:
Tremendous Forms: Paul Chaplo on Finding Composition in the Landscape

Notes on Tom Lea and His Epic Masterpiece of a Western,
The Wonderful Country

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C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Notes on Artist Xavier González (1898-1993), “Moonlight Over the Chisos,” and a Visit to Mexico City’s Antigua Academia de San Carlos

It was in 2012, when I started on my still in-progress book about Far West Texas, that I first encountered the paintings of Xavier González in the Museum of the Big Bend on the Sul Ross University Campus in Alpine, Texas. I was there to see “The Lost Colony,” an exhibition of works by painters associated with the summer Art Colony of the Sul Ross College (now Sul Ross State University). The works were from 1921-1950; the Art Colony, formally so-called, spanned the years 1932-1950.

Curator Mary Bones gave me a fascinating interview about “The Lost Colony,” which you can listen to here.)

“MOONLIGHT OVER THE CHISOS,” 1934

The artwork by Xavier González that most enchanted me was his magnificent “Moonlight Over the Chisos” of 1934. It was not in the show itself, however, but tucked into the top of the stairwell leading down to the museum’s map collection– not an ideal location, but no doubt one of the few available walls large enough to accommodate the massive 6 x 14 feet canvas.

“Moonlight Over the Chisos” is in the tradition of Mexican murals of the 1930s, although technically not a mural, as it is painted on canvas. (In no way do these two photos, snapped with my iPhone and pasted together with a screenshot, do this masterpiece justice. Alas, the painting is so large, I couldn’t back up far enough to fit the whole of it into one shot.)

(Dear reader, if you haven’t hiked the Chisos, you have yet to live.)

XAVIER GONZÁLEZ IN MEXICO CITY
(RESEARCH UNDERWAY…)

What also caught my attention was that González had studied art in Mexico City and precisely during the time of great muralists, among them, Diego Rivera. Mary Bones told me: “Xavier González spent many summers down in Mexico and Mexico City looking at the muralists.”

Born in Almería, Spain in 1898, as a child Xavier González immigrated with his family to Mexico.

An important influence on his development as an artist was his maternal uncle, the academic painter José Arpa (1858-1952), a native of Spain who later divided his time between Mexico City and San Antonio– and became a leading figure in the art community of the latter, running an art school out of the Witte Museum. According to the notes for “The Three Worlds of Jose Arpa y Perea” exhibition of 2015 from the website of the San Antonio Museum of Art, Arpa won the Rome Prize three times and had been offered the directorship of the Academia de San Carlos, but instead worked independently. In my notes from a visit to González’s archive in the Smithsonian (box 4, unattributed article):

“[José Arpa] received his early art training at the School of Fine Arts in Seville… His first success was in 1891, when his painting of Don Miguel de Manarra won first prize in the Madrid exhibition. Travels in Africa and Europe followed… the Spanish government sent for of his paintings to the first World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893 as representative of the best of Spain…. shortly after that time the Mexican government sent a man-of-war to Spain and brought him to Mexico to assume charge of the academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City. He later declined the appointment, but remained for many years becoming enthralled with the light and color and movement of the country…”

At age thirteen (circa 1911) Xavier González was studying at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City. This was the same time that 15 year old David Siquieros, who was to became one of Mexico’s greatest muralists, was also beginning his studies at San Carlos. (Did they take the same classes?)

In 1913 the violent stage Revolution intervened… I’m still a little foggy on the details of González’s early life…

The Lost Colony catalog notes that González studied and worked as a mechanical engineer. In 1922 he was working in Iowa for a railroad. Later he studied at night and graduated from the Chicago Art Institute. In 1925, he was assisting his uncle José Arpa in his art school in San Antonio’s Witte Museum and from 1927-29 he was teaching classes himself.
González became a US citizen in 1930 and the following year took a faculty position at Sophie Newcomb, the women’s college now folded into Tulane University in New Orleans.

From “The Lost Colony” catalog:

“…much of the work was to be done en plein air with frequent trips to the Davis and Chisos Mountains”

> 1932 González conducted the first summer Art Colony at Sul Ross (along with Julius Woeltz and Aline Rather)
> 1933 González in Paris, and also Mexico City (on a leave of absence from Sophie Newcomb College.)
> 1934-1939 González conducted sessions of the summer Art Colony.
> 1935 González married his student Ethel Edwards.

More about Xavier González:
> New York Times obituary;
> Texas State Historical Association;
> David Dike Gallery;
> Archives of American Art Xavier González papers –and also the papers of his wife, artist Ethel Edwards 1935-1999).

I hope to be able to dig into the archives at the Academia de San Carlos to find out when exactly González attended and with whom he studied. I am also curious to learn why his uncle José Arpa, after coming all the way from Spain, did not take the helm at the Academia de San Carlos.

A VISIT TO THE ANTIGUA ACADEMIA DE SAN CARLOS
(Not to be confused with the Museo San Carlos, different building, different neighborhood. Uyy, Mexico City is endlessly endless.)

Herewith a batch of notes, GIFs, photos and brief videos from my recent visit to the Antigua Academia de San Carlos which now serves as the National University (UNAM) campus for masters and doctoral degrees in the fine arts. Art history professor Dante Díaz Mendieta leads tours on the last Wednesday of each month. (For details scroll down to the end of this post.)

You’ll find the Antigua Academia de San Carlos a short walk behind the National Palace, at the corner of Moneda and Academia Streets (Calle Moneda y Calle Academia). This GIF shows my approach from Moneda, the National Palace along the right, then the terracotta-colored neoclassic Italianate façade of the Academia de San Carlos.

APPROACHING THE ANTIGUA ACADEMIA SAN CARLOS FROM CALLE MONEDA

The site of the Academia de San Carlos has been continually occupied for almost 500 years. The land once backed the Aztec emperor Moctezuma’s palace, Casas Nuevas. After the Conquest the parcel became the property of the Church; the original building arose as a hospital specializing in syphilis patients.

In the late 18th century King Carlos III sent his chief engraver to New Spain– Mexico wasn’t yet Mexico– to establish an academy and so improve the production of coins– hence the Academia de San Carlos’ location, only steps from the Casa de Moneda, the mint for the colony which was founded in 1535.

Classes began in 1781 and the Academia de las Nobles Artes de San Carlos de la Nueva España, offering instruction in architecture, engraving, painting, and sculpture, was officially inaugurated in 1785.

The oldest fine arts academy in the Americas, San Carlos has been in almost continuous operation for 235 years. It closed in 1822, during the cash-strapped years of the First Empire, and not until 1843 did it reopen, when Santa Anna, in a moment of inspiration, joined it to the lottery which became known as the Lotería de San Carlos. According to the Mexican Lottery website (my translation):

“The San Carlos Lottery utilized its income to acquire important artworks, provide scholarships for the Academia de San Carlos, and to bring important teachers to Mexico among them, the painter Pelegrín Clave, sculptor Manuel Vilar, landscape painter Eugenio Landesio and architect Javier Cavallari… Thanks to this lottery’s economic success it was possible to address other large and urgent needs of the general population in a time of foreign invasions and civil wars that left in the country in circumstances of chronic poverty.”

My 49 second video below shows the entrance, then the central patio before “Winged Victory” and brief look at glass dome which was installed by Antonio Rivas Mercado in 1913. According to Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo in I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (high recommended):

“Antonio Rivas Mercado was one of the few Mexican architects favored with contracts for major national construction projects. But he was a French-trained architect, a follower of the Paris beaux-arts style, who had lived in London and Paris for many years.” (p. 22)

The dome was manufactured in France. Note the Art Nouveau ojos de buey or oval windows, also designed by Rivas Mercado for the section added to help support the dome’s weight. Part of the tour included a jazz concert by Los Cuatro Saxofones (The Four Saxophones).

Here is a much better video made by the university (about 7 minutes, in Spanish):

Winged Victory represents the goddess Nike. Most Mexicans, familiar with the American sports shoe brand, pronounce Nike to rhyme with bike. Professor Díaz Mendieta set his audience straight. In Spanish Nike is pronounced Nee-keh. She is the symbol of the Academia de San Carlos. The other 19th century plaster casts of iconic Greek and Renaissance sculptures, including Michelangelo’s Moses and head of David, are not for decoration but for the students to copy.

This handsome gallery of walnut wood and gold leaf features a ceiling decorated with portraits of artists and scientists including Copernicus and Raphael. A few of the heads fell off during the 1985 earthquake. There was little light by this time, alas; the colors in this room are actually rich and brilliant.

And this is the Centennial Gallery, decorated in the then fashionable Frenchified festoonerie for the academy’s 100th anniversary:

Voilà, Weltschmerzerie and sparkly donuts:

Finally, here is a GIF of Professor Díaz Mendieta wrapping up the tour in the torreo or bullring, an original classroom. The torreo was used not for making art but teaching theory and history of art. No doubt Diego Rivera addressed students here, as did his professor, Santiago Rebull, and many more in a long list of Mexico’s greatest artists.

PROFESSOR DANTE DIAZ MENDIETA IN EL TORREO, OR THE BULLRING, THE CLASSROOM AT THE ANTIGUA ACADEMIA DE SAN CARLOS

The desks are notably narrower than in classrooms today. The room (was it windowless?) felt a smidge creepy.

SIDEBAR (FROM ONE VERY MACHO MUNDO):
A FEW OF THE NOTABLE ARTISTS OF THE ACADEMIA DE SAN CARLOS, BY DATE OF BIRTH

MANUEL TOLSA, AN ARCHITECT AND SCULPTOR WHO MERITS AT LEAST 378 BLOG POSTS

Manuel Tolsá (1757-1816)

SANTIAGO REBULL, MAXIMILIAN’S COURT PAINTER; LATER ONE OF DIEGO RIVERA’S PROFESSORS AT THE ACADEMIA DE SAN CARLOS

Santiago Rebull (1829-1902)

José María Velasco (1840-1912)

Antonio Rivas Mercado (1853-1927)

Jesús Fructuoso Contreras (1866-1902)

Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) (1875-1964)

José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Saturnino Herrán (1887-1918)

David Siquieros (1896-1974)

Xavier González (1898-1993)

Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

Luis Nishizawa (1918-2014)

¿FANTASMAS? POR SUPUESTO, AMIGOS

The great glass dome had gone dark when Professor Díaz Mendieta concluded on the wicked note that of course there are ghosts in here: a little girl who laughs; loud knocks; and, as the nightwatchman swears, on occasion in the wee hours of the night, moving from one side of the entrance foyer and disappearing into the opposite wall, a procession of monks holding torchlights.

Recently the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) conducted an excavation that turned up 17 bodies. Presumably these were not of art students but syphilis patients of the 18th, 17th, or even 16th century.

¿Y LA FRIDA?

It’s impossible to talk about Mexican artists without mentioning Frida Kahlo. No, Professor Díaz Mendieta answered the question, Frida did not take classes at the Academia de San Carlos; at that time it was for men only, but Frida hung out here (andaba aquí) with her sweetheart, Diego Rivera.

In a future blog post I will talking about González’s wife Ethel Edwards; also about noted Texas regionalist painter Julius Woeltz (1911-1956), a student of González’s who taught at the summer art colony at Sul Ross and who accompanied González on some of his trips to paint in Mexico City in 1934 and 1935. (Woeltz also served as best man at González’s wedding.) I hope to also unearth more about Woeltz in the archives of the Academia de San Carlos. Stay tuned. Curator Mary Bones also talks about these and many other artists of the “Lost Colony” in my “Marfa Mondays” podcast interview. Again, that recording and transcript are available free here.

HOW TO GET THE TOUR

On the last Wednesday of every month, at 7 PM, UNAM art history professor Dante Díaz Mendieta offers a free tour, no reservations required. (In Spanish, of course.) Check for updates on the Facebook pages “Difusión San Carlos” or “GestionCulturalSanCarlos” or call tel. 5522-0630 ext 228.

A tour of the Academia de San Carlos is also included in the annual Festival del Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México. The 2016 Festival concluded in March; look for it again in 2017.

An Interview with Alan Rojas Orzechowski
about Maximilian’s Court Painter, Santiago Rebull

Biographers International Interview with C.M. Mayo:
Strange Spark of the Mexican Revolution

The Marfa Mondays Podcast is Back! No. 21:
“Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson”

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Global Migration: People and Their Stories (Introduction to the Panel with Elizabeth Hay, Lisa See, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Juan Villoro at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference)

I wasn’t planning to post this since it’s not a complete essay, only an introduction to a panel at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference, but it has come up in so many conversations since the panel was held this past February that I thought I’d offer it here— and with links in case you’d like to learn more about these extraordinary writers.

PANELISTS: ELIZABETH HAY, LISA SEE, LUIS ALBERTO URREA, AND JUAN VILLORO

TRANSCRIPT OF INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY MODERATOR C.M. MAYO

Good morning, Buenos días! Bienvenido! Welcome! What an joy of a conference this is. If my memory serves me, I participated in what was the very first of these conferences. I know it was more than 10 years ago. And that was an outstanding conference, but wow, it has gotten not only bigger but better and better. What we have here in this conference is unique: A gathering in the heart of Mexico, of writers from Mexico, writers who may or may not be Mexican living in Mexico, writers visiting Mexico, writers from so many different cultures.

The day before yesterday, here, over there by one of those big white tents, I ran into one of my favorite Mexican writers, who happens to be a native of San Miguel de Allende, and baptized in the Parroquía, that otherwordly gothic church that is impossible to miss. Araceli Ardón. She was on the faculty last year, and some other years. So I mentioned to Araceli that I was going to moderate this panel today on Global Migration: People and their Stories.

Well, why do we write?

And Araceli told me that in his writing workshop, years ago, Carlos Fuentes—who was, without a doubt, one of Mexico’s greatest writers— Carlos Fuentes said something that, like a beacon in the night, had guided her as as writer. In Spanish, Fuentes said: “La literatura tiene que dar voz a los silencios de la historia.”

Literature must give voice to history’s silences.

As we go on with this panel, I would like to invite you to keep those words of Carlos Fuentes present in your mind.

Global Migration: it’s in the news. We see it, we hear it, we read about it every day. Those of us who are from the US and Canada are keenly aware , on many levels, of our histories with migration, and this includes, in most cases, our own family histories.

For those who are new to Mexico— and I know that quite a few if you are—an extra special welcome to you.

I’d like to underline something that could be… shall we say… fruitful to keep in mind as we proceed, and that is that Mexico, too, has had and continues to accept important numbers of immigrants. For example, Mexico’s literary figures include many who were immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Spain, of course, but also from Germany— and that includes Carlos Fuentes—from France, Italy, Ireland, Japan, China, Africa, Central America, Cuba, Argentina, Poland (Elena Poniatowska!) and Russia— it’s a long list.

And it also includes immigrants from the Middle East– that flow of immigrants, from the Middle East, by the way, goes back many, many decades.

Rose Mary Salum, a Mexican writer of Lebanese descent, recently published a visionary anthology entitled, in Spanish, Delta de las arenas, cuentos árabes, cuentos judíos, a title I would translate as Delta of Sands: Arab and Jewish Short Fiction from Latin America. It is a large and splendid and very interesting book, by the way.

There are also notable flows of migration within Mexico itself. Just to give one example, many people have come from small towns and farms to live in large cities, and in so doing making them larger: Mexico City, Querétaro, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana… Farm workers, migrant workers, who might go north to Oregon or Florida, also go to the Mexican states of Baja California or Sinaloa.

Another example: Many Mexican artists, professionals and retirees have come from Mexico City have come to live here in San Miguel de Allende—there is quite a bit less traffic, among other attractions.

And Mexico has indigenous groups from Mayas to Nahuas to Zapotecs, and members of these communities have moved all over the map of the Mexican Republic, and beyond. Of course, thousands of years ago, the ancestors of these peoples immigrated to what is now Mexico by way of the bridge under what is now the Bering Straight. And they too have important and rich storytelling, poetic, and literary traditions.

I myself am an immigrant to Mexico. I came from the US to live in Mexico City 30 years ago. So that’s why all my books are about Mexico. And I also translate Mexican writers, which brings me to a Mexican writer I am very proud to say I have translated: Juan Villoro. It was his short story about Mexican punk rockers that appears in my collection, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.

Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s most outstanding writers, and it is truly a privilege, a stellar privilege, to have him here with us.

So now I am going to formally introduce him, as our first speaker. And then, in turn, I will introduce each one of our panel. And then, after each has had the opportunity to speak, for about 10 to 12 minutes, we will take your questions and comments.

The questions at hand are: Why are stories of migration, or stories in some way inspired by migration, so vital? And what is it that elevates them to the level of “literary”? What are the challenges for writers who may be far removed from the culture in respecting their subjects, respecting their own creative process, and, ultimately, respecting their readers? And how is literature itself changing with such infusions?

If you would like to buy an MP3 recording of the entire panel, that is available from the San Miguel Writers Conference here.

John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal by Thomas M. Settles

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber on Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

A Glimpse of the New Literary Puzzlescape

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

My new book is Meteor

Q & A: Carolina Castillo Crimm, Author of “De León: A Tejano Family History”

De León: A Tejano Family History by Carlina Castillo Crimm

As those of you following this blog well know, I’m at work on a book about Far West Texas (that’s Texas west of the Pecos) and so reading deep into the history of the wider region that is now Texas and northern Mexico– for it all connects. I’m not reporting on each and every book I come across, but now and then I read one that, in taking both my understanding and my curiosity to a fresh level, prompts me to order my thoughts with a review and/or interview the author, should he or she be alive and willing. (See for example, Q & As with Raymond Caballero, Paul Cool, and John Tutino). Carolina Castillo Crimm’s deeply researched De León: A Tejano Family History is one of those.

We often hear about the Tejanos (Mexican Texans or, as you please, Texan Mexicans) in Mexican and Texas history, but who were they? Crimm’s De León provides an intimate glimpse of one of the first and most influential Tejano families though several generations, beginning with Don Martín de Léon and his wife Doña Patricia de la Garza, the founders of the de Léon colony and the town of Victoria on the coastal plains of Texas in the early 19th century. They and their descendants weathered Mexican civil wars; Comanche attacks; cattle rustlers; cholera; the Texas Revolution of 1835-36; the massive influx of “Anglo” immigrants; exile and legal battles to reclaim their land; the US Civil War and Reconstruction; and, into the late 19th century, the rise of the railroads and the cattle ranching industry.

C.M. MAYO: As historian Arnoldo de León commented, your study of a Tejano family “confirms what other historians have said (but not buttressed with this kind of detail) about Mexican Americans in history: that they are resilient in the face of adversity, that they adjusted to an Anglo American political environment after 1836 with a degree of success, and that their absence in Texas history books is explained by a neglect of the primary sources.”

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the De León family of Victoria, Texas, one of the early founding families of Texas. As far as I know, Arnoldo de León is not related to the De León family of Victoria although you never know. He has been influential in encouraging many students to study the Hispanic world both past and present.

I am grateful to be part of a growing field of historians focusing on early Hispanic settlement in Texas. These so-called Borderlanders were originally inspired by Arnoldo de León and David Weber. Since then, there have been many more scholars who have delved into this area and produced excellent studies on this period. Among them are Dr. Frank de la Teja, Dr. Andrés Tijerina, Dr. Armando Alonso, Dr. Francis X. Galan, among many others.

There are also dozens of new, up-and-coming young historians working in the field of the Borderlands. It is thrilling to see so many people searching through primary sources to discover the histories of these early settlers.

C.M. MAYO: And a related question: You mention in your acknowledgements that Nettie Lee Benson had been one of your mentors. She was such a towering figure among historians of Latin America that the University of Texas Library’s Latin American collection is named after her. Can you share a memory or two about Nettie Lee Benson, how you met her, what you remember of her?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: I was fortunate enough to arrive at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989 while Dr. Benson, or Miss Nettie as one of my fellow students called her, was still teaching her course on Mexican History and the Borderlands. I had mistakenly assumed that the Latin American Collection at UT had been named for her because she was the wife of some oilman who had donated millions to the University. I was wrong.

As it turned out, she had been a librarian at UT during the 1940s. She made it her mission to take the funds she was given by the university and invest the money in books and materials from Mexico and Latin America. Each summer, she would take what, in reality, was a pittance and travel throughout Mexico. She bought, traded or salvaged materials everywhere she could. On one occasion she found a stack of old dissertations from the UNAM at a pawn shop. They were about to be destroyed but she bought them for fifty cents each, thereby rescuing a precious heritage. Each evening, she would go back to her room and wrap up her finds in brown paper and string and send them back to the library at UT. She did this every summer for years.

At last, Eugene C. Barker (for whom the Texas collection was named) encouraged her to begin work on a Ph.D. in Mexican History. Working part-time, she completed her degree and became a professor in the History Department. She continued to work at the library and to add to the collection which eventually was renamed in her honor. Students still remember her falsetto voice echoing through the stacks as she asked what each of us was working on then led us directly to some seminal book on our particular topic. She spent her life helping students explore the stacks that she created.

Dr. Benson was awarded the Aguila Azteca by the Mexican government, the highest honor that can be given to a foreigner, for her work on the Provincial Deputations of the 1820s. Her on-going encouragement of students working in the field has led to the production of hundreds of works on Mexican and Borderlands History.

There have been some Mexican scholars who have resented the removal of so much material from Mexico. They maintain that the books should be in Mexican libraries, not in the United States. As I have seen, however, Mexican libraries often do not have the funding to protect these priceless treasures. I have been in archives in Matamoros where there are bugs eating away at the paper, or in Saltillo where burned archives were only rescued by accident when a historian/diner at an out-door restaurant noticed the bits of burning paper sifting down from next door. The material at the University of Texas has been preserved and protected and is accessible to scholars from all over the world. Admittedly, Mexicans do have to travel to Austin to find the materials, but at least it is available.

C.M. MAYO: You also write that Nettie Lee Benson set you on your path. Can you talk more about that, and what inspired you to write De León?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: I started on my Ph.D. at the University of Texas without any sure direction or goal in mind. As a Mexican, I wanted very much to focus on the early Hispanics of Texas. Miss Nettie Lee suggested I work on Martín de León, the only successful Hispanic Empresario in early Texas. The problem then, and now, was the lack of sources. There were no diaries or letters, but with Nettie Lee’s help, I began to discover court records, county records, land records, and the last will and testament of Doña Patricia de León. I was also fortunate to find many of the descendants of the De León family who provided invaluable assistance in writing the book.

C.M. MAYO: You tell the story of the matriarch of the de León clan, Doña Patricia, who lived a long life filled with success but also struggle and heartbreak. And one of the key contributions of De León is to underline the role of Hispanic women settlers in Texas and, by their example, their influence on Texas laws pertaining to women. Can you talk about that a bit?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: I had not originally focused on Doña Patricia or the women of the De León clan. As with many studies of Texas history, the women were often relegated to background roles. As I explored the sources, however, I began to see that the Victoria settlement would not have existed without the efforts of Doña Patricia and her daughters and daughters-in-law.

Patricia, evidently from a very good family at Soto la Marina, had received an immense dowry of $9,000 pesos. This was at a time when most dowries in Monterrey averaged less than $5,000. Some might say she gave up the money to her husband, Martín, to fund the ranches in Texas. Considering her later careful use of money, I prefer to think she invested the money in the future of her family. And it paid off handsomely. She was able to recoup the money when she needed it most by selling the Texas family ranch in 1836 to a New Orleans real estate broker for a handsome profit. But Patricia also donated land. The lovely St. Mary’s Catholic Church sits on land donated by Doña Patricia to the Catholic Church.

Doña Patricia taught her daughters to fight for their rights when they returned to Texas in 1845. Not only did she enter the American courts to regain family land, but she encouraged her offspring to regain land that had been usurped by unscrupulous settlers. She held mortgages on land and taught her daughters to do the same. Luz Escalera, wife of eldest-son Fernando, and Matiana Benavides, a grand-daughter, held a mortgage on land owned by an uncle. When he didn’t pay up, family or no, they foreclosed on him, leaving him only the 20 acres around his ranch house.

At a time when Hispanics could not borrow from Anglo banks, Hispanic women were often the money-lenders within the Mexican community. They learned to be tough business women. It will remain a mystery why she turned on her eldest son, Fernando. In her will, she forgives all the debts owed to her by her descendants, except for the money owed her by Fernando. That money was to be collected by his brothers and sisters.

C.M. MAYO: What comes through clearly to me in De León is that the early Tejano settlers, such as Martín de León, were neither wealthy nor campesinos (peasants), but part of an emerging and literate middle class. Yet throughout many decades of the 19th century the Tejanos had to fight both the Comanches and, depending on where they placed their loyalties, various factions for or against Spain, Mexico City, the Texians, and then the Confederacy. What stands out is that these decisions were not unanimous in the Tejano community, and they were fraught with terrible risk.

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Yes, as Dr. de la Teja has pointed out, the Texas ranchers were not wealthy but they were not poverty-stricken either. The de León family employed a teacher on the ranch to educate their children. And not all the children agreed on which side to choose. I suspect Patricia’s Christmas gatherings were a trifle tense during the years of Mexican Independence when some of her offspring sided with the Liberals while others chose the Conservatives. Things got even worse during the Texas Revolution.

C.M. MAYO: Until recent times the story of the fall of the Alamo came across as a simple story of brave Texians vs dastardly Santa Anna. Do you see your book as part of the impetus to enrich that particular narrative?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Yes, certainly. During the Texas Revolution, half the De León family sided with the Texians while others supported the legally constituted Mexican government, even if it was Santa Anna.

The decades from 1800 through the Civil War, were a time during which there were dangerous decisions to be made. The wrong decision could result in being shot by one side or the other. Many of the Mexican ranchers learned from bitter experience to keep their heads down and their mouths shut or get out of the way. General Joaquín de Arredondo’s 1813 attack at the Battle of Medina and the later executions of Liberals, or Revolutionaries, in San Antonio was a difficult time for everyone in Texas. Doña Patricia had good reason to insist on removing her family to Soto la Marina for safety during these years, and again in 1836 to escape to New Orleans during the lawlessness of the Republic of Texas. But she always came back.

C.M. MAYO: You mention that during the US Civil War many Tejanos, including members of the de León family, engaged in the cotton and transport trades to benefit the Confederacy. I note that Evaristo Madero, grandfather of the subject of my recent book, also made his first fortune in this trade. My question is, do you see the de Leóns as part of the broader fabric of a culture of entrepreneurship found throughout the north of Mexico?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: The Spanish and then the Mexican government had restricted trade for generations (1713 to 1821) thereby preventing much in the way of entrepreneurship for the ranchers of Texas. They could sell hides and lard but there was little else of value in Texas that could be transported and sold. The Anglo settlers, in particular the Irish from the Refugio area, learned to profit from the sale of cattle from their Mexican rancher neighbors.

Once the borders were opened to trade after 1836, the Mexicans improved on their cattle trade and profited by selling corn and vegetables to the incoming colonists. They also made a profit by carrying goods in carts to the coast. As soon as the Texians saw there was a profit to be made, however, the Cart Wars of the 1850s broke out, and the Tejanos were cut out of the trade. They continued to profit wherever they could, and wherever the Texians would permit.

C.M. MAYO: It is impossible to read Texas history without the mention of the strains and struggles between the so-called Anglos and Tejanos, as if the two communities were sealed off from one another under two bell jars. Yet of course they were not. You mention the tensions and the struggles the de León family faced in defending their dignity and their land titles against Anglo newcomers at various points in the 19th century, but you also mention their long-time friendship with the Linn family.

Can you talk a little more about the Linns?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Martín de León needed settlers to establish his Empresario grant. He brought some from Mexico, but there were some settlers already squatting on the land he had been granted. Rather than get rid of them, he simply incorporated them into his colony. Although some said he was a “cranky old man” as an Empresario (he was, after all, in his 60s), he accepted people of all nationalities into his colony. Fernando, his eldest son, became very close to the Linn family. Just as the De León family helped the Linns during the Mexican period (Edward Linn became their surveryor), they returned the favor when Texas became a State. Fernando was able to count on the Linns (John Linn became a Texas Senator) for help with legal problems.

I found that the early settlers, both Texian and Tejano, who had helped each other survive Indian raids and droughts and hard times in the years from 1821 to 1836 became loyal friends, regardless of nationality. The arrival of new settlers after 1836, however, who had not had those close relationships, created an atmosphere of antipathy and racial hatred against the Mexicans. Fortunately, there were still a few of the supportive old Texian families who protected their Tejano friends and called them the “Old Spanish Families.” This didn’t prevent the killings of the Mexican families by mobs during the 1870s or the mass murders by the Texas Rangers during the 1920s.

C.M. MAYO: At various points you mention a slave owned by Fernando de León and later inherited by his adopted son Frank, and that Frank tried to manumit him but the laws of Texas at that time would not permit it. Do you know his name and what became of him?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Unhappily, I do not know what happened to the slave. It is possible that Frank’s will, if one were able to find it, might indicate a name or what happened to him. Most Mexicans were opposed to slavery which made the years of the Civil War difficult for them. Unlike the Germans, however, they kept their opinions to themselves and avoided getting hung. They created guard units to protect the coast from Union troops, but only one of the de León grandsons actually fought with the Confederate troops.

C.M. MAYO: You managed to keep straight several generations of a sprawling family. I can only begin to imagine how much work it must have been just to keep your research in order! For readers who may be working on their own opus, can you offer your best organizational tip?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: Any genealogical study that covers several generations is challenging. Rather than just tracing one line, where one can safely ignore all but one of the children of each generation, I created a large wall chart with all of the various children, each of their spouses, and their descendants. Where it gets complicated is with the families of the in-laws who are equally important as brothers- or sisters-in-laws. More charts, more wall space.

As anyone in South Texas will tell you: “Todos somos primos.”* And it is true. Once you connect in-laws and godparents, the network of relations is truly a Gordian knot. I found out, to my surprise, that my Castillo family who lived in the Refugio area from the 1790s to the 1870s, were distantly related to the de León family as well.

*We’re all cousins.

C.M. MAYO: Your book came out in 2003. What are the reactions that surprised you, and what are the ones that gratified you?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: I was very pleased to receive several awards from the Sons of the Republic of Texas, from the San Antonio Conservancy, and from the Catholic scholars. To have Arnoldo de León say such kind things about the book was a real honor.

I should probably not have been surprised to find that some Tejano scholars were opposed to my book. They felt that a blonde Gringa should not be writing books about Mexican land loss. I don’t “pass” since I don’t look Hispanic. I had a rather heated altercation with one of my colleagues at a conference about whether I understood how difficult it had been for Mexicans in Texas at the time. They were certain I was just another do-gooder Anglo trying to put a better light on the challenges facing Tejanos during the 1800s and their survival in spite of the difficulties. I was glad to be able to prove them wrong.

In the course of my research, I had learned that my Castillo family had lost their Refugio land in an 1870s court case to a (now) wealthy Texan family. A gunfight resulted in which one of the Anglos was shot. A lynch mob was formed and the Castillo brothers had to make a run for the border to avoid the noose. The Castillo family left Texas and lost their land. Some say it was sold, others that it was stolen. They reestablished a large ranch outside Reynosa at Charco Escondido on the Mexican side and continued to prosper as ranchers until the Mexican Revolution when they returned to the United States. So, yes, I may not look Mexican, but my family does understand land loss.

C.M. MAYO: What are you working on now?

CAROLINA CASTILLO CRIMM: As you can imagine, my interest is still focused on writing about Hispanics on the border and in Texas. I have started to write the story of the Castillo land loss and have already gotten several chapters into it. However, inspired by Americo Paredes, I wanted to go back and look at what formed the early Tejanos. Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter has certainly helped.

Scandalizing though it is for a historian, now that I am retired, I have kicked over the traces and turned to fiction. I am working on a series of three novels on the 1770s in New Spain and the impact of the Bourbon Reforms. I’ve based my characters in large part on the social gulf that existed between the criollos or mestizos, like Martín who may have been a low class muleteer who made good, and Patricia, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish family. Since the story (in the third book) carries us into 1777, Bernardo de Gálvez and his defense of the American Revolution plays a part as well. The first two novels are finished and are in the editing stages. The third should be done soon. Now, I just need to find an agent and publisher. My usual publishers–the university presses–don’t do fiction.

Thanks for the opportunity to share the story of the De León saga with your readers. My website is at www.carolinacastillocrimm.com and De León is available through my web site or through amazon.

C.M. MAYO: Immense thanks to you, Carolina, and mucha suerte with your novels.

P.S. Check out Carolina Castillo Crimm’s website, and be sure to watch the video of her fascinating talk about Bernardo de Gálvez.

Blood Over Salt in Borderlands Texas:
Q & A with Paul Cool, Author of Salt Wars

Q & A with David A. Taylor, Author of Cork Wars:
Intrigue and Industry in World War II

Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.