BY C.M. MAYO — February 7, 2022 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. > For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here. P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.
Texas shares its southern border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, so of course “Texas Books” must include those about the US-Mexico border. Soldiers, spies, civilians, weapons, and supplies going back and forth across that border played a crucial role in many conflicts, most especially the Mexican Revolution. This Monday’s post is a review of Heribert von Feilitzsch’s In Plain Sight: Felix A Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico, a work I consider one of the most astonishing, original, and important contributions in recent years to the history of that Revolution— which first battle, the Battle of Juárez, was watched from the rooftops of El Paso, Texas.
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IN PLAIN SIGHT: FELIX A. SOMMERFELD, SPYMASTER IN MEXICO, 1908-1914 by Heribert von Feilitzsch Henselstone Verlag, 2012 Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal Magazine, October 2016
It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Like Gandhi, Francisco I. Madero was deeply influenced by the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad-Gita and its concern with the metaphysics of faith and duty. And like Gandhi, Madero altered the course of history of his nation. From 1908, with his call for effective suffrage and no reelection, until his assasination in 1913, Madero received the support of not all, certainly, but many millions of Mexicans from all classes of society and all regions of the republic. But the fact is, during the 1910 Revolution, during Madero’s successful campaign for the presidency, and during Madero’s presidency, one of the members of that “small body of determined spirits,” who worked most closely with him was not Mexican. His name was Felix A. Sommerfeld and he was a German spy.
We must thank the distinguished historian of Mexico, Friedrich Katz, author of The Secret War in Mexico, among other works, for shining a bright if tenuous light on Felix Sommerfeld. Other historians of the Mexican Revolution have mentioned the mysterious Sommerfeld, notably Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler in their 2009 The Secret War in El Paso. But it is Heribert von Feilitzsch, by his extensive archival detective work in Germany, Mexico, and Washington DC, who has contributed our most complete—albeit still incomplete—understanding of who Sommerfeld was; Sommerfeld’s relationship with Madero; and his role, a vital one, in the Mexican Revolution.
Writes von Feilitzsch:
“No other foreigner wielded more influence and amassed more power in the Mexican Revolution. From head of security, Sommerfeld took on the development and leadership of Mexico’s Secret Service. Under his auspices, the largest foreign secret service organization ever to operate on U.S. soil evolved into a weapon that terrorized and decimated Madero’s enemies…”
While Sommerfeld was unable to prevent General Victoriano Huerta’s coup d’etat, and his warning to Madero escape arrest came too late, he himself escaped the capital. Continues von Feilitzsch:
“Sommerfeld became the lynchpin in the revolutionary supply chain. His organization along the border smuggled arms and ammunition to the troops in amounts never before thought possible, while his contacts at the highest eschelons of the American and German governments shut off credit and supplies for Huerta.”
Von Feilitzsch reveals that Sommerfeld was reporting not only to the German ambassador in Mexico City, Paul von Hintze, but from 1911 to 1914 to Sherburne G. Hopkins, lawyer and lobbyist par excellence in Washington. Hopkins had initially been brought on board for the cause by Madero’s brother and right-hand man, Gustavo Madero. To quote von Feilitzsch again:
“As a lawyer and lobbyist for industrialist Charles Ranlett Flint and oil tycoon Henry Clay Pierce, Hopkins enabled Sommerfeld to hold the entire keys for American businessmen trying to gain access to the Madero, Carranza, and Villa administrations.”
Sommerfeld was operating at the highest level of sophistication. And perhaps most telling of that sophistication is something surprisingly simple. It is a photograph of him taken in El Paso, Texas during the Revolution, the one that appears on the cover of von Feilitzsch’s book.
In a light-colored suit and dark tie, Sommerfeld stands at Madero’s elbow, protecting his back. On Madero’s opposite side journalists Allie Martin and Chris Haggerty crowd close, seemingly mesmerized by the glamorous revolutionary. Haggerty holds the brim of his hat, pale circle, as if he had only just swept it from his head. But on the other side, just slightly behind Madero, Sommerfeld, bareheaded, craggy-faced, with eyes that belong to an eagle, looks out— a secret service man’s gaze. It is an iconic photograph; those who study the Mexican Revolution will have seen it.
The telling thing, though, is this: that in the archive which has the original, the Aultman Collection in the El Paso Public Library, Sommerfeld, the man with the eagle-gaze, that man who so often appears right by Madero’s side, and here and there in other iconic photographs of the time, including one of the guests at the dinner with Madero and family to celebrate the Battle of Juárez, is unidentified. Or at least he was unidentified there at the time von Feilitzsch wrote his book. In short, during the Revolution, and for over a century to follow, Felix Sommerfeld had been hiding in plain sight. In Plain Sight: the title of von Feilitzsch’s book.
AN ESOTERIC CONNECTION?
I am more grateful than I can say to have encountered In Plain Sight when I did, and I believe that anyone who studies the Mexican Revolution, after reading this book, will say the same. The Mexican Revolution has thousands of facets, of course, but for my own work, the key questions were, Who was Francisco I. Madero? How, in the nitty-gritty, did he pull it off, to lead a Revolution and win the presidency? And, in the face of inevitable and ferocious counter-revolution, how did Madero manage to hold the presidency for as long as he did?
My work, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, was prompted by my encounter with Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual). A blend of Kardecian Spiritism, Hindu and other esoteric philosophies, Manual espírita was published in 1911 under the pseudonym “Bhima.”
Never mind what was in Manual espírita, this slender volume with now yellowed pages: the fact that Francisco I. Madero, leader of the 1910 Revolution, had written it and moreoever, published it when he was president-elect in 1911— I could not but conclude that its contents must been exceedingly important to him, and hence, offer profound understanding into who he was and what he stood for.
But my intention here is not to talk about my book about Madero. I suffice to mention that, apart from benefitting so much from the information and insights in von Feilitzsch’s book, I took the liberty of emailing von Feilitzsch a question: What kind of person was this Sommerfeld—might he have been a Spiritist? For there was another German spy working closely with Madero, a Spiritist who turns out to have become a major figure in esoteric circles in the first half of the 20th century: Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller.
Von Feilitzsch was kind enough to permit me to include his answer in my book. He writes:
“With respect to Madero’s Spiritism, Sommerfeld not only knew all about it. I am convinced that he was a kindred soul. I have scoured the earth for a book Sommerfeld wrote around 1918, likely under a pen name. I cannot find it. This might be the only possible source for a glimpse into this man’s deepest convictions and emotional structure. Sommerfeld became so close to Madero at the exact time, when Madero must have been under the most emotional pressure. Madero hated bloodshed and violence and exactly that he set off when the revolution started. In his innermost circle were Sommerfeld, [Arnoldo] Krumm-Heller, his wife Sara, and Gustavo, which is documented. … (Sommerfeld was [Sara’s] bodyguard in Mexico City and the last address I have for Sommerfeld reads: c/o Sara Madero, Mexico City. This was in 1930). Just like…Madero, Sommerfeld did not drink, gamble or smoke. In that time and considering the background of Sommerfeld as a mining engineer in the “Wild West,” this is a very unlikely coincidence. In his interviews with the American authorities, he said that Madero was “the purest man I ever met in my life. When I spoke to him, he took my breath away—the child’s faith of this man in humanity.” (Justice 9-16-12) In his appearance before the Fall Committee [of the US Senate] in 1912 he testified: “President Madero is the best friend I have in this world…” Senator Smith “…you became interested in him?” Sommerfeld: “Yes, we became very close friends.” And so on. I definitely hear undertones of esoteric connection. Sommerfeld was very private, rarely allowed a picture taken, and certainly never talked about his faith or personal life to anyone. As someone very rational he kept his distance to others and never described any other relationship in these highly emotional terms. Until I can put my hands on his personal papers or his book, these are only indications but still worth thinking about.”
MORE THAN WE MIGHT HAVE DARED HOPE FOR
In many ways Felix Sommerfeld remains a mystery. Von Feilitzsch however, has given us much more than we might have dared hope for: That Felix Sommerfeld was born on May 28, 1879 near Schniedemühl, then in Prussia. As owners of a grain mill, his family was relatively wealthy. Like many Germans in the late 19th century, he had relatives, including brothers, who emmigrated to the United States. As a teenager Felix lived with his brothers for a time in New York. He joined the US Army and received training in Kentucky—then went AWOL, back to Germany. In the first years of the 20th century von Feilitzsch finds Felix Sommerfeld serving in the Prussian cavalry in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Then, he pops up as a mining engineer in Arizona and then northern Mexico—perhaps by then already reporting to the German consul in Chihuahua. Then he’s back to Germany, then, back again in Mexico as a journalist—and all of a sudden, in charge of revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero’s secret service.
One more of so many things von Feilitzsch brings to us about Felix Sommerfeld: He was Jewish. We do not know his fate, but if he lived into his sixties he may have perished in the Holocaust—or perhaps he disappeared, as secret agents know how to do.
In the Bhagavad Gita, which we know that Francisco Madero read and reread, penciling copious notes in the margins, Lord Kirshna, incarnation of cosmic power, advises the warrior Arjuna to have heart, to do his duty. For Madero, that meant putting aside material concerns and gathering around himself that “small body of determined spirits,” who would help him to alter the course of Mexico’s history. As Madero understood it, those “spirits” would have been both disincarnate and incarnate. Whether and to what degree his chief of secret service shared Madero’s esoteric inclinations remains an open question. But in revealing that, both during and beyond Madero’s lifetime, Felix Sommerfeld was an indispensible member of that “small body,” von Feilitzsch has made a contribution to the history of the Mexican Revolution that is at once disquieting and sensational.
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
BY C.M. MAYO — November 15, 2021 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
How wide is your Overton window? Some peoples’ seem to me to be pretty well squished. My writing assistant’s Mr. Duckie demonstrates the concept.
Of course your Overton window can be tooooo wide open. Watch out, pterodactyls might fly up your nose and chomp your brains.
From the Archives:
On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises
Transcript of Centennial Lecture University of Texas El Paso El Paso, Texas, October 7, 2015 BY C.M. MAYO
Thank you, Diana Natalicio, President of University of Texas El Paso, and everyone at here who made my visit and this lecture possible. And thank you very much to Roberto Coronado and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, El Paso Branch. And thank you all for making the effort to attend this evening. Special thanks to my much-admired creative writing colleague and old friend, Lex Williford.
My husband, who is Mexican, likes to joke that I missed being born Mexican by five miles. You might guess that means that I was born right here in El Paso—this “City of Surprises,” as writer and editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel calls it. My dad was an artillery officer stationed at Fort Bliss—and I understand that he took some engineering classes here at UT El Paso. So it is a very special honor for me, as a native El Pasoan, to have been invited to speak to you today.
I can’t say it’s like coming home, because my parents are from Chicago and New York, and when I was still a baby, my dad decided on a career in business, and he took the family out to California—to the part of the San Francisco Bay Area now known as Silicon Valley. Culturally speaking, I’m a Californian.
But back to El Paso—to quote Marcia Hatfield Daudistel again— this “dark-eyed stranger abducted into Texas by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.”
For me, to be here in El Paso is like coming home in another, deeply meaningful sense. This is a border city. I am a border person. Where others might be… let’s say, a little nervous… we border people go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico with ease, we are oftentimes bilingual, bicultural— or at least we don’t blink at some of the more exotic juxtapositions, whether culinary or musical, and the mixed up lingo. I too, have been known to speak my gringa-chilanga version Spanglish—or, I might throw clumps of español— para que me entiendes bien— into my English.
I don’t live on the border geographically, but culturally. I mean to say, when I got married 29 years ago, my husband and I moved to Mexico City—his home town, Chilangolandia—and now I have lived in Mexico City for more years than I have lived anywhere else, including California. And I should mention, I don’t live in Mexico as a typical expat, coccooned among my fellow Americans and Canadian snowbirds. I am enconsed in a Mexican family, living in a Mexican neighborhood, and I have many very dear Mexican friends and colleagues.
Long story short, over the last three decades of my life, although I remain a U.S. citizen, Mexico has become my world. This is why my books are all about Mexico.
I hope my books might be both beautiful and useful—I write them with as much courtesy for the reader as I can muster. But the truth is, the reason I write them is because I want to delve in and explore the complexity around me, and then, having gained a new level of understanding, tell the story my way. Living in Mexico, very quickly, I learned to distrust the easy assumptions and much of the narrative about Mexico spooned out for us, whether on this side of the border or the other, whether in tourist guides, newspapers, television, paperback novels, movies. And sometimes… even in textbooks.
In Mexico, it is often said that nothing is as it seems. If you halt the show and question— sincerely and energetically question— read the bibliography, and read beyond the bibliography; take the time to interview people, really listen, with both an open mind and an open-heart; go to places and stand there and look around for yourself; roll up your sleeves and dig into the archives… it has consistently been my experience that you will uncover secrets and surprises.
Of course, that could be said about the whole world, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. And El Paso, Texas, itself. But Mexico is what my books are about. I won’t stretch your patience to go on about all the books. I’m going to give you but three examples.
The title comes from a quote from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. “The very air here is miraculous and the outlines of reality change with the moment.”
There were a multitude of surprises for me in writing this book, but here is one:
What I had been told as a child in the California public school system, that the California missions, founded by the Spanish padres, began in San Diego, was not only not true—it obscured one of the greatest, strangest, and most tragic stories of the Americas, that of the indigenous peoples’ encounter with the Jesuit missionaries, whose first permanent California mission was hundreds of miles south of San Diego, on the Sea of Cortez at Loreto.
Loreto: Yes, that is an Italian name. The Jesuits named it after after an important basilica in Italy which enshrines a brick house— as the Church asserts, this is house of the Virgin Mary, brought from Nazareth during the Crusades by angels who flew it over the Adriatic Sea.
Loreto was founded in the late 17th century— roughly the same time that in the province of Texas, we see the first Spanish settlement at San Francisco de los Tejas.
When the Jesuits arrived in California, as they called this nearly 1,000 mile-long peninsula, they believed it was an island. Today we call it Baja or Lower California and unlike Upper California, lost to the United States after the US-Mexican War, it remains part of Mexico.
Spanish padres all? Hardly.
The Jesuit missionary who founded Loreto was Giovanni Salvaterra, an Italian from Milan, who, on arriving in New Spain, hispanicized his name to Juan María Salvatierra. One of his right-hand men, and a founder of other missions in California, was Father Francesco Piccolo, a Sicilian. Among the Jesuit padres in California, or as we say today, Baja California, there were a Frenchman, a Czech, a Scotsman, a Bavarian, a Bohemian. Many Germans.
In 1767, for reasons known only to himself, the Spanish king decided to expell the Jesuits from his realm. The newly appointed governor of California, Don Gaspar de Portolá—who would, eventually, head north with the Franciscans who would found the so-called California missions that I learned about in school— arrived in Loreto later that year.
And this is what happened—the part of the story—and it is only a part—as I told it from the Jesuits’ point of view:
From all over the peninsula the missionaries began to arrive at Loreto: from the South, Ignác Tirsch and Johann Bischoff; from Dolores, Lambert Hostell; from San Luis Gonzaga, Johann Jakob Baegert; José Juan Díez from La Purísima, Franz Inama von Sternegg from San José de Comondú, Miguel del Barco from San Javier. Francisco Escalante came from Santa Rosalía de Mulegé, José Rothea from San Ignacio, and Victoriano Arnés from Santa María Cabujakaamung, leaving still-green his first crops of wheat and cotton. At Mission Santa Gertrudis, Georg Retz had broken his leg and could neither walk nor ride; his neophytes carried him on a litter the nearly two hundred miles through the canyons of the Sierra de San Francisco, the Vizcaíno Desert, and the Sierra de Guadalupe. Wenceslaus Linck arrived last, because he was delayed tending to the dying in an epidemic at his Mission San Francisco de Borja. When the missionaries reached Loreto, Governor Portolá embraced each of them and, as was the Spanish custom, he kissed their hands.
Portolá had read the Order of Expulsion and taken possession of the Jesuits’ treasury and storehouse: a meager supply of gold and silver coins, a few bolts of cloth, tools for the soldiers and other gente de razón, and some dried meat and grain. No one was arrested.
The Jesuits were to sail on February 3, 1768. Their ship, the poor two-masted Concepción, waited at anchor in the harbor. They would cross the Sea of Cortés, then travel overland to Veracruz; from there, they would be sent to exile with their fellow Jesuits in the Papal States and Germany.
Against the king’s explicit orders, Governor Portolá permitted the missionaries a final High Mass. Father Retz celebrated before the Virgin of Loreto, which was draped for the occasion with a black shroud. Father Ducrue gave the sermon. After supper, the missionaries returned to the church, to pray for California and ask God’s mercy and assistance. And then, as they walked towards the shore, wrote Father Ducrue,
“behold we were surrounded on all sides by the people, the Spanish soldiers among them. Some knelt on the sand to kiss our hands and feet, others knelt with arms outstretched in the form of a cross and publicly pleading for pardon. Others tenderly embraced the missionaries, bidding them farewell and wishing them a happy voyage through loud weeping and sobbing.”
The Indians carried the priests on their shoulders through the surf to the launch. There the priests recited the Litanies of the Virgin of Loreto, their voices carrying over the darkness of the water.
“We were sixteen Jesuits in all,” wrote Father Baegert. “Exactly the same number, that is, sixteen Jesuits, one brother and fifteen priests, we left behind, buried in California.”
The Jesuits had been on the peninsula for nearly seventy-one years.
Though fiction, this book is based on several years of original archival research. What empire? What prince?
Well, it turns out that Mexico’s first emperor, the Emperor Iturbide, had a grandson. Those of you know know your Mexican history will recall that the Emperor Iturbide was the final leader of Mexico’s Independence from Spain, he was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, he abdicated in 1823, and alas, he was executed in 1824. The Emperor Iturbide had two grandsons, actually, but I’m going to simplify and just talk about the one who was a two year old child in Mexico City when the second emperor—Maximilian von Habsburg—whose arrival in Mexico had been made possible by the armies of Louis Napoleon—made a secret contract with the Iturbide family to bring this child into his Casa Imperial. It’s wasn’t an adoption, exactly, but kind of sort of—there’s more to say about that, but the bottom line is—and here is the surprise: in 1865-1866, the “high noon” of Mexico’s Second Empire, the heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico was a two year old half-American.
And then came a tremendous drama, for his heart-broken mother tried to reclaim her child. The Emperor Maximilian arrested her and expelled her from Mexico—and she went straight to Paris, to her ambassador there, and got up such a scandal that the story made the front page of the New York Times: about “the kidnapping of an American child” by the “so-called Emperor of Mexico.”
This was the same time that the U.S. government was supporting Benito Juárez and his Republicans in their struggle to overthrow Maximilian and expel the French. Benito Juárez, as in Ciudad Juárez.
As I wrote elsewhere:
When The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire came out in 2009 and in Spanish in 2010, two reactions surprised me. First, that many readers, especially younger ones, were disturbed by the photograph, a formal carte-de-visite, of the little prince. Agustín de Iturbide y Green was a beautiful child, with a cupid’s mouth, and he looked more like, say, an English prince than a typical Mexican. Those readers would make a twisted face, asking, “Why is he in a girl’s dress?” (Well, folks, that’s how they dressed aristocratic little boys back then.)
Second, that so many marveled at my having spun a novel out of “a little footnote.” Except for misinterpreted snippets, the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green in the court of Maximilian may have been forgotten in the archives until I dug it out, but it was no mere footnote. In a monarchy, the heir presumptive, though he be in a dress and diapers, is the living guarantee of the regime’s future, and more: he is the living symbol of his future people—his subjects.
Would Mexicans be subjects, creatures born to obey—or citizens, men and women who with their full rights participate in creating their own polity? This had been Mexico’s bitter and bloody question for the whole of the nineteenth century.
In telling the prince’s story, from the high-noon of the Second Empire in 1865 to its collapse, and his return to his parents in Washington in 1867, I was telling the story of the fall of Mexican monarchism, a powerful idea up until that time, which asserted the mystical embodiment of all Mexicans in the person of a hereditary sovereign.
To be honest, in sorting out Mexico’s most convoluted and transnational episode, it took me more time than I would like to admit to boil my aim down to so few words. And so, in fairness, I should not have been surprised by the reaction of those readers, for whom (as it was for me) monarchism is just a quaintly ridiculous thing preserved in the formaldehyde of textbooks or the syrup of entertainment, and where still living, as in Spain and the U.K., its royal families harmless fodder for the sorts of magazines one reads at the hairdressers.
But back to the last prince, Agustín de Iturbide y Green.
The child’s father, the second son of the Emperor Iturbide, was a Mexican diplomat, and his mother, née Alice Green, was a Washington belle, descended from the Platers—a very prominent Tidewater Maryland family—and she was a granddaughter of General Uriah Forrest, who had been an aide to General George Washington in the American Revolution.
So if you can believe it, I was able to find items of interest about the last prince of the Mexican empire in the libraries of the Society of the Cinncinati and the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington DC.
And much more in Washington DC: Agustín de Iturbide y Green’s personal papers are at Catholic University; there is also a small archive at Georgetown University; and many documents, including the record of his parents’ marriage and much about the family estate at Rosedale, in Washington DC, is in the Historical Society of Washington DC.
Most crucially, the archive of the Emperor Iturbide and the archive of the Iturbide Family are not in Mexico but in the Library of Congress.
Yes, there certainly are archives of interest in Mexico and in Texas and New York and Vienna and elsewhere, but the most pertinent ones for the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green are in Washington DC. Why Washington DC?
Upon the execution of the Emperor Iturbide in 1824 his widow and children had fled to Washington DC, under the protection of the Jesuits in Georgetown, where they had their college overlooking the Potomac. Flash foward to the early 20th century: Agustín de Iturbide y Green was living in Washington DC, teaching Spanish and French at Georgetown, when he sold the Emperor Iturbide and Iturbide Family papers to the Library of Congress. I’m sure he needed the space and the money, but given the turmoil in Mexico at the time, this was probably the wisest decision he could have made to preserve the papers. And I for one am immensely grateful that he did.
Ah, archives, they are full to the brim with secrets and surprises. Which leads me to my latest book, which was prompted by a visit to an archive in Mexico City’s National Palace where I found… a secret book. And on a whim, because I am a translator, I offered to translate it. And it was such a strange little book that I then felt compelled to write a book about that book.
Well, here we are at the US-Mexico border, so I am sure that most of you know perfectly well who Francisco I. Madero was— after all, he prepared for the famous Battle of Juárez from here in El Paso. And in the thick of that 1910 Revolution he came over here to El Paso to have dinner a few times, as well, as I recall. But if you’re rusty on your Mexican history, these are the barebones basics:
Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was overthrown in a coup d’etat and, with shocking casualness, executed. The Mexican Revolution then exploded into a new and more violent phase, churning on until 1920 with Alvaro Obregón’s presidency or, as some historians argue, the end of the Cristero Rebellion in 1929.
Here is a little bit more about Madero from my book, to quote:
Popular imagery of the Mexican Revolution usually features rustic characters in bandoliers and washtub-sized sombreros, such as smoldering-eyed Emiliano Zapata, with his handlebar mustache and skin-tight trousers, or Pancho Villa, who always seems to wear the smirk of having just quaffed a beer (though he was a teetotaler; more likely it was a strawberry soda).
Less often are we shown Don Francisco, handsomely-dressed scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families—usually bareheaded, occasionally in a top hat—for he was and remains a confounding figure. He was a Spiritist, and what the devil is that? I had no idea. And until 2008, it had not occurred to me to wonder.
2008 was when I first encountered his Spiritist Manual. Any student of the Mexican Revolution learns about Madero’s first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, which was published in 1909. This spelled out Madero’s political platform, and it worked like a magnet to bring together his political party and the nation-wide support for his candidacy and presential campaigns.
Less known is that in 1911, when Madero was president-elect, under another name—Bhima, after a warrior in the Hindu sacred text known as the Bhagavad Gita— he published his Manual espírita or Spiritist Manual.
Madero was in fact not only an ardent Spiritist but a Spiritist medium who left a substantial archive of his mediumnistic notebooks. In other words, Madero practised what is called automatic writing, or channeling written messages from what he believed were disembodied consciousnesses. These spirits urged him to write La sucesión presidencial en México—and to write the Manual espírita.
What exactly is Spiritism? In essense, to quote from my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, it is the belief that:
We are not our physical bodies; we are spirits, and as such we are immortal and we are destined, lifetime by lifetime, not by any ritual intermediated by clerics, but by freely chosen good works, to evolve into ever higher levels of consciousness and so return to God.
To quote Madero himself in my translation of his book, Spiritist Manual:
Spiritism is the science concerned with investigating the powers of the human spirit, its past before ariving in this world, and its fortune on abandoning it.
I hasten to mention, I am not the first to write about Madero’s Spiritism.
Enrique Krauze, probably Mexico’s best-known historian, publishedFrancisco I. Madero, místico de la libertad, which introduced the topic to a broad public, back in the late 1980s.
Yolia Tortolero, who wrote her deeply researched thesis at El Colegio de México under the highly regarded historian of the Revolution, Javier Garciadiego, published that as El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero. Dr. Tortolero’s is a both vital and superb work— and by the way, you can now download that in Kindle.
Others to mention are Mexican historians Manuel Guerra de Luna and Alejandro Rosas Robles, and the novelist Ignacio Solares who wrote the now classic novel Madero, el otro.
That said, few of the histories of the Revolution give Madero’s Spiritism more than a passing— toe-curlingly brief!— mention. His main biographer, Stanley Ross, relegates the Spiritist Manual to a footnote! And one otherwise excellent university press textbook on Mexico says that Madero was an atheist—which is rather like calling the Pope Protestant.
My contribution was to have translated the Spiritist Manual and to have given Madero’s metaphysics more of an historical and North American context in a narrative that you might call “creative nonfiction”—in other words, it’s not a novel, but I hope it reads like one.
I also had the prividege of being able to go through Madero’s personal library which is the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México in Mexico City—walking distance from my house, happily for me, because I had to visit multiple times to get through what is, very probably, one of the most important collections of esoteric literature in the Americas. Many, many secrets and surprises in there… Books on reincarnation, Williams James’ favorite medium, Madame Piper, books by Madam Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Papus, Swami Vivekenanda, Dr. Peebles, Dr. Krumm-Heller, aka Maestro Huiracocha. … But I am racing the clock.
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To conclude. The Jesuit missions in California, a half-American heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico, a revolutionary hero and president who was a Spiritist medium: each is a story that has interests who would prefer that it not be told.
As for the Jesuit missions of California, my guess is that those setting the teaching agenda for the California public school system of my time—this would have been in the early 1970s—felt constrained by the available number of teaching hours and the state border, and if a major limb of the story didn’t fit in their box, well, whack! Amputate as needed.
As noted, until I drew it out, the story of the little prince, Agustin de Iturbide y Green, was languishing in archives outside Mexico and, in the days before the Internet, these were very time-consuming to track down and consult. Furthermore, until relatively recently, say, the past two decades, in Mexican academic circles, Mexican monarchism has been a hot potato of a subject—better not to touch. And in some ways it still is a hot potato of a subject.
Another complicating factor, perhaps the most important, however, was that for the Mexican monarchists, the Emperor Maximilian’s entanglement with the Iturbide family was embarrassing. It underscored the fact that after eight years of marriage Maximilian and his wife Carlota had been unable to produce an heir. And, alas, Maximilian and Carlota’s treatment of the child’s very young and heartbroken mother was hamfistedly cruel. Many things about the arrangement with the Iturbides were mystifying even to those close to the imperial couple, and especially for those unfamiliar, as most Mexicans were, with the rarified traditions of the House of the Habsburgs and of other European royal families.
On their journey from Europe to Mexico in 1864, Maximilian and Carlota wrote a book of court protocol, Reglamento y ceremonial de la corte, which was published in 1865. Almost unknown is the fact that in 1866, a second edition was published with an all-new first chapter on The Iturbide Princes. It explained that the Iturbide princes were not imperial princes—for they were not children of the sovereigns. However, they had the status of the Murat princes.
The Murat princes! Then, as now, for most they would be, shall we say, pretty obscure. The Murat princes were descendants of the King of Naples, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. So the Murat princes were descendants of a sovereign and cousins to Louis Napoleon and so considered part of his Imperial Household.
So we see that the eyewitness memoirs that were sympathetic to Maximilian are all strangely vague on the Iturbides or, as in the case of José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo, serve up slanderous stories about the Iturbides that are flatly contradicted by official birth, marriage and death certificates.
But as an aside, I must mention that one of the biggest surprises for me was to have encountered José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo. Yes, I have my quibbles with it, and it is politically very incorrect: Blasio was Maximilian’s loyal and admiring secretary. But it so sparkles with heart and with life that I would put Maximiliano íntimo on par with Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain as one of the greatest literary treasures of Mexico. And for the period—Mexico’s Second Empire or “French Intervention”— Maximiliano íntimo is a gem beyond compare.
Finally, Francisco I. Madero. For not all, certainly, but for many Mexicans, and indeed many members of Mexico’s intellectual and political elite, Francisco I. Madero, Mexico’s “Apostle of Democracy” as a Spiritist medium is a disturbing image. They regard the idea of communicating with spirits as a species of supersition, or pura locura, craziness, beneath the dignity of serious consideration. Moreover, if you didn’t know already, I am sure you guessed, the Catholic Church prohibits Spiritism and its main ritual, the séance.
The poet Alan Ginsburg, perhaps channeling Gertrude Stein, said, “Notice what you notice.” As I understand it: that means, remove the filters—the filters other people want you to wear to distort your clear vision.
Notice. Notice what you notice! Next step: really look. And look again. Keep looking. Delve in. Whether your concern is Mexico, or the border, or El Paso, or the world itself, all manner of secrets and surprises await you.
THANK YOU.
PS The transcript of this lecture is also available in German on my German-language website, www.cmmayoschriftstellerin.com
*
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
Sergio Troncoso is a writer and literary activist whom I greatly admire. It so happens that we were born the same year in the same city: El Paso, Texas. And both of us lived our adult lives in cultural environments vastly different from El Paso: I went to Mexico City; Sergio to Harvard, Yale, and many years in New York City. Sergio’s works offer a wise, deeply considered, and highly original perspective on American culture. I’ve reviewed some of his work here and here; back in 2012 I interviewed him at length about his life and work for my occasional podcast series, Conversations With Other Writers, which you can listen in to anytime here. In the years since he has since published an impressive number of highly accomplished works, both fiction and nonfiction, his latest a collection of short stories, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son.
C.M. MAYO: What inspires you to write short fiction, as opposed to a novel or nonfiction?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: In this particular collection, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, I wanted to focus on short fiction because it allowed me to play with perspectivism and the fragmentation of characters in a way that a longer work (like a novel) would not. These thirteen stories on immigration and Mexican-American diaspora are linked together: a character appears in a group of stories, only to reappear in the next story from a different angle or perspective. The individual stories also build on each other to ask the reader to question herself as to how she brings certain biases and prejudices to certain characters, how the reader herself contributes to this perspectival and temporal truth, which philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche focused on and writers like Virgina Woolf also explored. So the book is this fragmented whole, in a way, in which the fragments are visible in the form of stories (and the whole is understood only by the reader).
C.M. MAYO: Of all the stories in this collection which is the one you feel most proud of? And why?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I conceived this book as a whole of stories, as a puzzle in thirteen pieces. So it’s difficult to single out one story. But I am fond of “Eternal Return,” the final story, because it stands alone to bring together many of the themes in the other stories, this playing with perspectivism and time, the presence of ancestors and geographies long gone, the shifting self trying to come together in many selves, all with the existential tick-tock of the clock that reminds us every day that our time on earth is limited. Even if time is always short, we must come together as a self, even if so many forces pull us apart.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to only read one story, which would you recommend?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I would recommend the first story, “Rosary on the Border.” This story begins with a death (as does “Eternal Return,” but death in another form, so to speak), and it takes you into the realism of David Calderon’s life. He tries to makes sense of his father’s death, of his life in relation to the finality that David sees before him. So David sees and appreciates, in bittersweet moments, what his father and mother taught him, even as he has separated himself from them. So it’s an easily accessible (realistic) story that begins a journey for the reader that ends with the more magical-realist “Eternal Return” and another concept of ‘death’ and ‘ancestor.’
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to take away one sentence (or two or three) from this story, which would you suggest, and why?“
SERGIO TRONCOSO: “I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant’s son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me.”These sentences from “Rosary on the Border” encapsulate David’s effort to search through his past to find out what belongs with him still, and to rid himself of ideas and superstitions that through experience lost their meaning, and yet to go back to who he was, an immigrant’s son, what’s left of this sense of self, to move forward in his life.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for you?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: Different writers have been influential at different times in my life. When I was a teenager, I loved S.E. Hinton, because her young-adult novels reflected much of my life in Ysleta, with gangs and poverty and being ‘outsiders.’ In college, I started reading the great Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Ruben Dario, Gabriela Mistral, and later I kept going with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. The list of Latin American writers I read is too long! It’s a treasure trove of great writing in Latin America. In the subway, for many years, I would read and reread Emily Dickinson’s collected works, because I loved her lines and the rhythms of her sentences, and because I was taken in by her unique, deeply curious perspective that had little to do with commercial publishing or becoming a celebrity. I love that kind of fiercely independent, insular writing into the soul.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I’ve read many of the works of Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican writer who is such an innovator with narrative form. I’m enjoying works by Francisco Cantu and Octavio Solis, as well as poetry by Sasha Pimentel and Megan Peak. I’m not a poet, but I love reading poetry. Also, I’m a fan of George Saunders: he is just a master of the short story, and his novel Lincoln in the Bardo introduced me to a new (or unusual) narrative form in a longer work.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I think you have to be relentless about getting the word out about your books and appearances on social media, you have to accept this ‘fast world’ as our world now, even though sometimes I hate it, and you have to do your best not to lose yourself in the posting and re-posting and stupid arguments that too often occur digitally. I do it, then I go back to my work. So I feel a bit schizophrenic sometimes, but I do relish the moment when I turn everything off and lose myself in my work or on a particularly thorny issue of craft. I think you almost have to have a ‘segmented mind,’ that is, learn to function in the realms of social media effectively. But then also learn to take all of this digital frenzy somewhat skeptically. The most basic way it’s affected my writing is that now I write about it, in dystopian stories about where I think our country might be headed, with people too quick to judge superficially, so enamored with images, so lost in our digital world that the real world becomes an aside.
C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I still work on paper, after I edit on my computer. I always print any story or novel several times and edit it line-by-line on sheets of paper. I write notes in the white space in the back, as I edit, to add or subtract or plan ahead, as I discard, change, add. I like the going back and forth, between words on paper and words on a computer: this back and forth always gives me a new perspective on what I have on the page, and I need that as an editor.
C.M. MAYO: What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another writer who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: Read as if your life depended on it. Read critically in the area you are thinking of writing. Don’t be an idiot: seek out and appreciate the help of others who are trying to help you by pointing out your errors, your lapses in creating your literary aesthetic. Get a good night’s sleep: if you do, you’ll be ready to write new work the next day. And if you fail, you won’t destroy yourself because you did. You’ll be ready to sit in your chair the next day.
“Read as if your life depended on it. Read critically in the area you are thinking of writing.”
C.M. MAYO: In recent years you have been a very active member of the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL). Can you talk a little about your vision for and the value of this organization?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I’m the current vice president of the TIL. I’m also the webmaster. I’ve actually had a lot of roles in the TIL, official and unofficial. I’m just trying to help. I believe we can nurture a great community of writers in Texas that honors the independence and excellence of past members, while reaching out to communities within our state who are producing great writers but have often been ignored. Mexican-American writers, for example. So not only have we modernized the TIL by taking much of our work and ability to pay dues online, but we have also inducted more women and people of color. We have also held our annual meeting in places we’ve never been, like El Paso and McAllen, so that we represent the entire state of Texas, and not just the orbit around Austin. With our lifetime achievement award, we have honored more women than ever before (Sarah Bird, Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros, Naomi Shihab Nye). And just a few days ago, we announced that John Rechy has won our 2020 Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award. So we are recognizing the excellence that was always there, while also being inclusive. As my grandmother often said, “Quien adelante no ve atras se queda.” One who doesn’t look forward is left behind.
“As my grandmother often said, ‘Quien adelante no ve atras se queda.’ One who doesn’t look forward is left behind.“
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?
SERGIO TRONCOSO: I just signed a contract with Cinco Puntos Press for a new novel, tentatively entitled as Nobody’s Pilgrims, which I have already written. I’ll be working on editing it. Also, I’m the editor of a new anthology, Nepantla Familias: A Mexican-American Anthology of Literature on Families in between Worlds. What family values from Mexican-American heritage have helped the writer (or the protagonist or narrator) become who she is, and what family values did she discard or adapt or change to become who she wanted to be? This is the ‘in between moment’ that is the focus of this literary anthology. I am always busy, but that’s how I like it. The more I do, the more I can do.
This year I’ve been posting a Q & A with a
fellow writer on the fourth Monday of the month, and while I have every
intention of continuing to do so, this Monday instead herewith some notes on
the epic novel by the artist who, back in 2001, passed over to the Great
Beyond: Tom Lea.
“It is part and parcel of your culture and I
think you should cherish it,” says Italian art historian
Luciano Cheles of the surprisingly little-known works of El Paso, Texas painter
and writer Tom Lea. And encouraging that is precisely what Adair Margo has been
doing with great verve for the past many years with the website and educational
programs of the Tom Lea
Institute. I had the immense privilege of attending Margo’s talk
about Tom Lea at the Bullock Museum in Austin back on October 15, 2015. (And by
felicitous happenstance, I sat next to Luciano Cheles.) More about that anon.
Here is the must-see 5 minute video with what
Cheles has to say about Lea’s artwork:
For more on Lea’s and The
Wonderful Country’s place in the canon, see Marcia Hatfield Daudistel’s
majestic anthology, Literary El Paso
(TCU Press, 2009).
WILDEST WEST EL PASO
This post is prompted by my work-in-progress about Far West Texas (…stay tuned for more podcasts…) At long, belated last I have tackled Tom Lea’s epic historical novel of El Paso.
I am happy to report that The Wonderful Country is wonderful indeed, a masterpiece not only of works set in El Paso, but in the genre of the Western, and indeed in all of American fiction.
These days most literary readers, and especially those out on the coasts, tend to turn their noses up at Westerns. Dear curious and adventurous reader, if that describes you, be assured that to overlook reading The Wonderful Country is to miss out on something very fine in U.S. literary heritage. The Wonderful Country was popular in its day, back in the 1950s, but it is not a typical commercial novel; it has a high order of literary quality; morever, its treatment of Mexicans and Mexico is unusually knowing and sensitive. (What would I know about that? Start here and here; my books are all here).
Set in post-Civil War El Paso, that is, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the first days of the railroad and the
last of the free-roaming Apache, and published in the pre-Civil Rights era,
Lea’s The Wonderful Country forthrightly portrays many of the still
painful tensions in the border region. While he writes with an unusually open
heart and mind, Lea is scrupulous in rendering accurate period detail. The
“N” word appears! (In the mouth of a character.) There is no lack of
roastin’ ‘n stabbin’ n’ shootin’ n’ scalpin’ and our hero is the son of a
Confederate from Missouri. Vegetarians and those with flea-trigger hot-buttons,
be forewarned.
From the catalog copy, TCU Press, 2002:
“Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier– shortly after the end of the Civil War–when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.
“Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man.
“When Brady / Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.
“The Wonderful Country is marvelous in its depiction of life along the Texas/Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago. Lea brings to life a time that was wild, a time when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed. Lea knows the desert region of his birth as well as anyone who has ever written about El Paso and the great nation that borders it to the south.”
NOTES ON THE TCU PRESS EDITION WITH AN AFTERWORD
BY JOHN O. WEST
You should be able to scare up a first edition
over on www.abebooks.com,
and power to you if you want to shell out the clams for a fine first with
intact dustjacket and an autograph. The copy I read is the paperback
reprint of 2002 available from TCU Press (and most online
booksellers) which includes afterword by John O. West, a noted US-Mexico border
scholar. For West’s afterword I would recommend the TCU Press paperback as your
best buy (unless your main goal, buck for buck, is to beat the stock market).
As far as I know, all editions include the
elegant and evocative drawings Lea made to head each chapter.
John O. West argues, and I concur:
“The story of Martin Brady is that of Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again, of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; the setting in the desert Southwest gives it particular realism, but the theme makes it speak beyond the region where it grew.”
West also provides some illuminating background
on the inspirations for the novel. My additional notes below.
NOTES ON THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, AND THE EVENTS
THAT INSPIRED THE NOVEL, PLUS SOME RELATED RECENT WORKS & WEBSITES
Tom Lea’s “El Puerto” is based on El Paso; Fort Jefflin, clearly inspired by Fort Bliss.
El Paso pioneer W.W. Mill’s memoir Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898 was Tom Lea’s major inspiration. A first edition is pricey! But it is out-of-copyright now so you can read a digitalized edition for free online.
W. H. Timmons’ El Paso: A
Borderlands History (Texas Western Press, 1990). Back in the
1960s, Timmons served as Chairman of the History Department at the University
of Texas El Paso.
Fort Bliss actually moved around the El Paso region
quite a bit in the 19th century, but you can visit the current Fort Bliss,
which has an adobe museum and a modern museum– the latter perhaps of most
interest for WWII aficionados. The historic parade grounds, surrounded by
stately houses for senior officers, are well worth a visit.
Some of the characters in The Wonderful
Country are inspired by (or mighty similar to) some real people, among
them:
Both the U.S. Army and the Mexican Army went after the Apaches, and in some instances, U.S. forces chased Apaches into Mexico. In general such US Army forays seem to have been welcomed by the Mexicans, but communications in these remote areas were dicey and resentments still very raw after the US-Mexican War. Many historians writing in English about border history have not had the wherewithall to research Spanish language sources, and vice versa, so there is some low-hanging fruit here for those historians with cross-border cultural and language skills. The Apaches also have something to say about it. One recent biography of note is Kathleen P. Chamberlain’s Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
The hero of The Wonderful Country becomes
a Texas Ranger. A crucial source for Lea, writing back in the 1950s, was James
B. Gillett’s 1921 memoir, Six Years with
the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881, from which Lea takes the epigraph and
his title:
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe
the wonderful country as I saw it then.”
> Check out Gilett’s page at
the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas. Gillett
ranched south of Alpine and upon moving to Marfa helped found the West Texas
Historical Association. He died in 1937 and is buried in Marfa.
(The Texas Rangers made up a more heterogeneous
group than some too easily conclude. See also the 2014 book by historian
Cynthia Leal Massey, Death of a Texas
Ranger. An interview with Massey is here.)
TENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Marcos Kinevan’s superb (of partial) biography of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in Texas
The Wonderful Country has
a number of characters who serve in the Tenth U.S.
Cavalry. The Tenth was famed for its African American
“Buffalo” soldiers, and its exploits in fighting Indians, especially in
Texas and then Arizona.
Less famous, but undeservedly so, is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., who is the subject of a forthcoming paper I presented at last year’s Center for Big Bend Studies Conference. His younger brother, Poultney Bigelow, who published his series of articles on trailing the Apaches, was a great friend of artist Frederic Remington who illustrated many of the articles. Their father, John Bigelow, was an accomplished editor (at one point editing the New York Times), he served as President Lincoln’s ambassador to France, and had much to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the New York Public Library, the Panama Canal, and promoting Swedenborgianism. Bigelow, Sr also entertained literary celebrities including Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. My paper explores some of the family’s rich and varied social and political connections, John Bigelow Jr’s reports for Poultney’s magazine, his role as a nexus between the Eastern establishment and the West, and his importance as a military intellectual who anticipated the profound changes to come in 20th century warfare.
NOTES ON THE 1959 MOVIE “THE WONDERFUL
COUNTRY” BASED ON THE NOVEL
… Reminds me of that old
joke about the goats out browsing on a hill in Hollywood. They find the can
with the reel of film, they kick it open, and they start munching… The one
goat says to other, well, whaddya think? The other goat chews some more.
“Eh,” the goat says, “I liked the novel better.”
One of the African American “Buffalo
soldiers” is played by baseball star Satchel Paige. Tom Lea himself has a
cameo as the barber, Peebles.
“Writing is a kind of burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight painting, but I am not overwhelmed… by problems like I was with writing. I taught myself to write and never had any kind of a mentor or formal course… I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff.”
On The Wonderful Country:
“…I wanted to do something that ad been on my mind since I was a kid: Write about this borderland and the people on both sides of the river.”
“When traveling down in Mexico I never carried anything more than a little notebook because I was trying to train myself to hear rather than to see. I was trying so hard to be a good writer, you know… The hardest chapter in that book was where Martin goes with Joe Wakefield across the river in the springtime. I was trying to tell how much this fellow felt about both sides of the river. I remember I struggled and struggled for some way to express springtime and I settled it by saying, ‘A mockingbird sang on a budded cottonwood’ or something like that. I had to watch myself about using the big word. I always chose the shortest way if it could say exactly what I wanted.”
“A gust of wind sished sand against the one small windowpane.” (p.16)
“They ate in the light of tallow dips, a dozen men in soggy leather, laughing and chewing, with the rain sounding on the roof, and cold drops leaking through.” (p.250)
“Slowly, under the winking high stars, they came to where they saw beyond the paleness of the sand the darkness of the brush that lined the river, and they rode toward it. They worked across a dry flat of alkali white in the starlight, with the hooves scuffling the crust in the windless silence. ” (p.306)
FURTHER MISC NOTES
From Tom Lea Month 2012, Nick Houser on Lea’s Cabeza de Vaca picture:
In my opinion, Lea’s masterwork is his 1938 mural
“The Pass
of the North” which is in El Paso Historic Federal Courthouse
Building.
NOTES ON HIS FAMILY
Lea’s father was Tom Lea
(1877-1945), who served as mayor of El Paso during the Mexican
Revolution. (Alas, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not remember Mayor
Lea fondly; this is
one reason why.)
My amiga Cecilia Autrique at the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas, November 2017. Her paper is “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930”
Earlier this month I traveled the loooooooong way out from Mexico City via Houston and then via El Paso to Alpine, TX– (that latter stretch through the Far West Texas desert, spectacular though it be, not for the caffeine-deprived)– to participate in the annual Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS) conference at Sul Ross State University.
I’ve been working on this book about Far West Texas, which includes the Big Bend, for an age & an eon, so last year, when I was invited to present at the 2016 CBBS conference, I was honored but flummoxed. My book hadn’t– and still hasn’t– been published and, anyway, it’s not a scholarly work but, as I have begun describing it, a lyrical and personal portrait of place. No, no, what they wanted was for me to talk about my book published in 2014, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I was flummoxed again, for that book about the book by the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution has zip to do with the Big Bend!
Well, it turned out that anything and everything about the Mexican Revolution is game for the CBBS conference, which is multidisciplinary and covers subjects relevant not only to the Big Bend but the surrounding regions, which include the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and northern Mexico’s states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.
So last year at CBBS I presented Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, andI came away mightily impressed– so much so that I decided to present again this year and I recruited my amiga, Mexican historian Cecilia Autrique, to present her outstanding paper, “American Protestants, Civil Society Organizations, and Temperance on the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1930.” (This paper stems from her PhD thesis at the UNAM in Mexico City, which I hope will be published as a book in both Spanish and English, for it provides vital historical context for any discussion of the current US-Mexico border and narcotrafficking issues.)
Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., U.S. Tenth Cavalry
This year I presented my paper on “John Bigelow, Jr: Officer in the Tenth Cavalry, Military Intellectual, and Nexus Between West and East”– much of which material will appear in my book in-progress, World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas.
Look for the paper on my website shortly; in the meantime, for those interested, my blog posts about Bigelow are here and here, and the post about his brother, author, world-traveler, life-long friend to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and pioneer magazine publisher Poultney Bigelow, is here. And the selected bibliography on John Bigelow, Jr. and the Bigelow family, and related subjects, which I handed out at the conference, is here.
Bigelow’s relevance to the Big Bend is direct: he was stationed there more than once, scouted all around the region, and indeed, he is an officer already well known to any and all who would study the Indian Wars and the Buffalo Soldiers. I trust I have been able to add new dimensions and insights to his importance for this region, and the West as a whole.
HIGHLIGHTS
One of the downsides of a bustling conference (indeed, a downside to just about everything nifty in the human experience) is that it is impossible to be in two places at the same time! It can also be a challenge to fit fascinating and vital conversations, such as they pop up, into the precise times allotted for coffee breaks and lunch. Alas, there were talks I am tremendously sorry to have missed or to have had to slink into half way through.
Just a few– a very few– of the highlights for me:
Felix Almaraz channeling a Franciscan missionary (and in costume!)
Once again, Al González of Chiricuahua Books busted my shoe budget for the year. I took home a biography of Jack Hays and two very rare books by cowboys about Marfa, Texas.
Steve Black, who gave a super crunchy keynote about Eagle Nest Canyon
A keynote speech by lead archaeologist Steve Black about Eagle Nest Canyon at Langtry, Texas > One of the most jaw-dropping canyons in Texas. Check out my mini-video of the entrance of Eagle Nest Canyon from a visit a couple of years ago here.
(Perchance you wonder, did we see the Marfa Lights? Not this time. But I have indeed seen them and on four different occasions.)
AND A NOTE ON EL PASO’S ELROY BODE
As you might imagine, flying from Mexico City to El Paso via Houston, and back, apart from being a sardine-y experience, was the perfect opportunity to get some reading done.
I have belatedly discovered Elroy Bode! (pronounced Bo-dee). Doubly belatedly, for Bode passed away only months ago. (See his obituary in the El Paso Times.)
I devoured Bode’s El Paso Days and got started on In a Special Light. As the blurbs on his books attest, Bode is much-admired and even beloved by many Texan writers and readers of a literary bent, but he remains obscure, not only outside the region but, as my visit to El Paso’s Barnes & Noble attests, even in his home town. (Nope, the Barnes & Noble did not have in-store even one copy of Elroy Bode’s — “who? Brady?”– several books. But for, like, totally sure, they did have, for the man in front of me in the customer service line, Exploding Kittens.)
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says: “Elroy Bode is one of the most essential writers the state of Texas has ever been lucky enough to call its own. In a voice that is at once deeply descriptive and eloquently minimalist, he illuminates our corners, dim memories, streets, fields, prairies, hills, hours, and the hardest of days. His no-frills frankness and steady attentiveness have always had a radiant, carifying power.”
As I read I tagged so many of Bode’s lines but perhaps the best, most representative of all is this one, from “Earth-Life” in the collection of his poetic essays, In a Special Light:
“I need the El Paso countryside. I need to hear the call of redwing blackbirds from salt cedars along an Upper Valley canal. I need to stand in a pecan grove and feel the breeze that moves through it– a breeze that reminds me of other breezes in other trees in other, almost forgotten times. I need to see stretched of plowed land where, in the distance, humans are reduced in scale and become of no greater importance to the eye than a rooster in a yard, a tractor in a field.” — Elmer Bode, In a Special Light
After the CBBS conference I spent an afternoon in the El Paso Public Library’s Border Heritage archive where I looked up Elroy Bode and Amado Duro. More about those two caballeros literarios anon.
It’s a hazard in rare book nerderie: the ephemera bug bit me! I’m just back from the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference at Sul Ross State University in Alpine (Far West Texas), where I presented on “John Bigelow, Jr.,” about which a longer post is forthcoming, but in the meantime, fresh from that book fair with its bodacious selection of ephemera, herewith, thanks to Galvan Creek Postcards, a few additions to my burgeoning collection of Texas postcards from the era of WWI and the Mexican Revolution:
“ARMY MANEUVERS ON THE MEXICAN BORDER”
Postmark:
MARFA, TEX
OCT 10
2PM
1916
TEXT:
hellow Jack
how are you I am fine & dandy.
Well I rec your letter
OK but I am still in the war
Well regards to all Your friend LB [?]
Jack Hendrix
Medicine Mound
Tex
“BORDER DUTY ON THE RIO GRANDE” (REVERSE BLANK)
“MOUNTED SCOUTS; THE WAGON TRAIN”
Postmark:
EL PASO, TEX
AUG 30
1916
TEXT:
Will write a latter lato
[? ? ?]
El Paso Texas
August 29, 1916
Dear Burt:
Rec you letter
and was glad to hear
from you they have everything
in the stores down here that
they have have in Mass but they have a
lot of Mexican things here that they
dont have in Mass we had Gov inspection
this morning but i passed alright the
[?] R F D got excellent love to all
Albert
Mrs Elmer Loving
Palmer Road
Halifax
Mass
“BOYS IN KAKHI GUARDING THE RIO GRANDE”
“W.H. HORNE CO. EL PASO, TEX. U.S. CAVALRY DRILL”
“FORT BLISS, TEXAS”
POSTMARK:
PHARR, TEX
SEPT 20
1916
Sept 19 ’16
Dear Mother:
Am feeling fine
and as hard as a
rock and brown
as an Indian. Just
3 months ago tonight
we were called out
Remember? How
is every thing and
every one? L.A.B.
P.S. My favorite rare book dealer blog is Greg Gibson’s Bookman’s Log. Watch out, these rare book and emphemera guys are dangerous. If he ever scares up a Manhattan clipper ship card…
About a century ago, after the fall of Francisco I. Madero’s government in 1913, with the ensuing struggle between the Huertistas and Carrancistas, and the chaos along the US-Mexico border (in part fomented by German agents, hoping to keep the U.S. Army otherwise occupied during WWI), the U.S. Army set up a number of camps there. On ebay, my sister found these postcards, probably sent by a soldier stationed near El Paso, dated October 26, 1916.
One of the postcards shows an address in Alliance, Ohio, a town noted for its Feline Historical Museum. Thank you, Google.
Here is another GIF, this one of some cartridges I picked up– by invitation, I hasten to emphasize– on private property right by the Rio Grande about 20 minutes’ drive down a dirt road from Presidio, Texas. Seriously, these are cartridges from the time of the Mexican Revolution (probably from target practice); they were just lying on the ground. That is how isolated a place it still is.
Cartridge circa 1916, from near Presidio, TX
One last GIF: An overcast day on the otherwise spectacular Hot Springs Historic Trail in the Big Bend National Park. The river is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico. At sunset the mountains turn the most otherwordly sherbet-pink. Imagine this scene with a wall through it– your tax dollars down the hole for a perfectly pointless aesthetic and ecological atrocity. (I shall now take a deep breath.)
Hot Springs Historic Trail, Big Bend National Park, Far West Texas. (Don’t watch this GIF unless you are part Viking, it will make you seasick).
Not shown in my video: the guy hiking a few minutes ahead of me on this trail wore a T-shirt that said TEXAS GUN SAFETY TIP #1: GET ONE. Well, it ain’t California. Excuse me, I need to go crunch my granola.
This finds me working
on the
book on Far West Texas, and about to resume the Marfa Mondays podcasts (20
podcasts posted so far, 4 more to go, listen in anytime). I just
posted a brief video of my visit last November to see, among other wonders and
curiosities, a most extraordinary and controversial statue at the El Paso
International Airport.
Because of the way it is placed, directly behind a grove of extra-fluffy trees,
and at the entrance where most drivers, speeding in, are on the lookout for
signs, such as rental car return, departures, arrivals or parking, I
daresay few passersby would even notice the statue. I myself drove by it more
times that I would like to admit before I realized it was there.
Here’s my 3 minute video:
My video mentions “The Last Conquistador,” a magnificent documentary about this statue and the controversy. Watch the trailer:
POV Interactive offers the first clip of “The Last Conquistador” documentary:
For “Behind the Lens POV PBS”
Cristina Ibarra and John Valadez Talk about the Juan de Oñate Sculpture:
I’ll give the sculptor, John Sherrill Houser, the last word, quoting him from the documentary:
“Here it is, look at this and think about it, good and bad, the whole thing. The history.”
I am still turtling along in writing my book about Far West Texas, which has involved not only extensive travel in the Trans-Pecos and some podcasting but reading– towers of books!– and what a joy it was to encounter one so fascinating as Paul Cool’sSalt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande.
A meticulously researched and expertly told history of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, Salt Warriors is essential reading for anyone interested in US-Mexico border and Texas history, and indeed, anyone interested in US history per se.
The El Paso Salt War of 1877 was sparked by
“Anglo” businessmen staking claim to the massive salt
bed that lies just west of what is now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Local
Mexican-Americans, known as Paseños, considered the salt deposits community
property, in accord with Spanish Law.
While the salt may have been free to anyone who
would shovel it up, that required an arduous journey across the desert with
carts pulled by oxen, and under constant threat of Indian attack. For
Paseño farmers who eked out a living in this drought-prone region, the salt
they could harvest was vital for curing food, pelts, for livestock licks, and
above all, as a cash commodity– much of it sold to mines in Mexico, where it
was used for refining silver. The Paseños were outraged when Judge Charles H.
Howard, a recent arrival from Virginia, informed them that they would have to
start paying his father-in-law, a German businessman based in Austin, for the
salt.
From behind the windshield, approaching Guadalupe Mountains National Park from US 62, which goes through the salt lake. Photo by C.M. Mayo
In the wake of the El Paso Salt War, several people on both sides of the conflict had been killed, some horribly (Judge Howard was murdered, and his body mutilated and thrown down a well), the town of San Elizario sacked, several reputations ruined– some fairly and others unfairly, as Cool argues– and a wedge of suspicion and resentment driven between communities that is still, more than a century later, not entirely healed.
Paul Cool is a former Army Reserve officer and resident of Arizona with an avid interest in the US-Mexico borderlands. He kindly agreed to answer my questions via email.
C.M. MAYO: When and why did you develop your avid interest in the US-Mexico border?
PAUL COOL: It came late in life, but traces back to growing up in Southern California and marrying a young lady whose paternal grandparents came to El Paso during the Mexican Revolution. Unfortunately, I spent nearly two decades trying to write a book about the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic era, and only recently turned to the borderlands for material.
C.M. MAYO: What prompted your interest in the Salt War?
PAUL COOL: I have always been drawn to historical eras marked by the collapse or relative absence of order, justice, and social restraint, periods when ambitious or unscrupulous individuals are more able to give free rein to their personal desires and vices at the expense of the larger community. The late Roman Republic. Revolutionary France. The frontier West.
In 1999, I drove from Seattle to
Baltimore via El Paso, where I happened to purchase Walter Prescott Webb’s
history of the Texas Rangers. His book contains a chapter on the Salt War. It
was obvious there was an interesting story here, but it was buried beneath the
ethnic bigotry running through Webb’s take. I then read C. L. Sonnichsen’s
little book on the Salt War. The writing was vivid, and his account grabbed me
in a way Webb’s had not. I felt closer to what happened, but the characters
were still archetypes and stereotypes.
C.M. MAYO: Outside the region this conflict is almost unknown. Why do you think this is?
PAUL COOL: Several reasons. The Spanish-speaking losers in the conflict disappeared into Mexico, and were in no position to write the history. As for the Anglos, many of the protagonists died, and they were soon replaced as by others who came to El Paso with the railroad, lacking any concern for the past. The story was buried because it was about a world that no longer existed, and no one cared about.
Second, the story did survive as a
chapter in Texas Ranger history, but since the Rangers surrendered to an enemy
repeatedly characterized as a “howling mob,” Texans generally considered the
Ranger performance a thing of shame and no one made any effort to expand our
knowledge of the episode for that reason.
Third, from the perspective of
Anglo sources, no iconic Anglo figure arose to grab our attention and turn the
story into the stuff of legend north of the border. I think the 1916-1918 Arab
Revolt illustrates what can happen with a hero. Think of Lawrence of Arabia’s
impact on Western understanding of the Arab Revolt. Without Lawrence, no
newspaper coverage by Lowell Thomas, no Seven Pillars of Wisdom, no
David Lean film, no Omar Sharif as Ali or Zhivago! Lawrence’s story, and
all that followed, is a misreading, to be sure, but corrective history is now
available. It is possible that Mexican sources will reveal the existence of a
hero, possibly Barela, possibly someone who we don’t yet know, and the
information needed to provide the foundation of a heroic narrative. The
romantic in me hopes that further research uncovers such a figure who can raise
awareness of this popular yet tragic rebellion, south of the border first, then
migrating up here.
Latino historians are and have long
been aware of the Salt War and its place in Mexican American history. When I
asked Dr. Arnoldo De
Leon, a preeminent authority on Tejano history, why Latino scholars
had never tackled the subject, he explained that they are playing catch-up,
that there are so many stories still in need of telling, so many that continue
to wait their chance.
C.M. MAYO: Of the results of the war, you write (p. 4) “In the long term, the distrust and marginalization of Paseño citizens by Anglos was deepened.” Your book does an excellent job of showing why this was but at the same time, you show that the insurgency was not “a bloody riot by a howling mob but in reality a complex political, social, and military struggle.” After your book came out, did your argument meet any notable resistance?
PAUL COOL: The academic community has generally applauded the appearance of Salt Warriors, although some reservations about my approach have been expressed. For example, one reviewer justly criticized the book for its reliance on north-of-the-border sources, to the exclusion of any archival material inside Mexico. I do not speak or read Spanish, and did not have the resources to hire others to dig through material that might or might not tell the story I wanted to tell. I had a choice: I could leave the story untold because I could not do a so-called “definitive” version (which is always elusive anyway), or I could tell this story to the best of my ability and hope that others would follow up to provide new perspectives.
One other criticism I will mention
is that I gave my opinion of the key participants, of their individual
responsibility for the chaos and destruction that took place, and even of their
moral failings. Some said that is not the historian’s job. It is best to just
state the facts and let the reader decide. That may be true, but in this case,
I felt that the story of the Salt War had been so repeatedly twisted over time
that a clear statement of who was responsible was in order. One can never
really know the hearts and minds of people who died more than a century before,
but I feel confident in my opinion of who was most responsible for the tragedy.
C.M. MAYO: What lessons does the Salt War offer us today? I am thinking of some of the dynamics we see played out with other insurgencies and their repression, and the dynamics that ensure. On p. 235 you write “‘Throughout history,’ today’s U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers learn, many defeated insurgent movements ‘have degenerated into criminality.'” My understanding is that this would apply both to some of the defeated Mexican-American and allied Mexican insurgents, as well as to many ex-Confederates who were then coming into the Southwest and taking up careers as rustlers, and bank and train robbers.
PAUL COOL: Any population is always going to include “hustling individualists” who are most interested in getting what they want, whether it is inordinate power or wealth at the expense of the larger population, or the satisfaction of some baser need, including taking something from someone else in a violent or disturbing manner.
The question is, does the presence
of an equally applied law and a just order prevent or at least put a damper on
that?
In the first instance, one group,
whether it’s Gilded Age entrepreneurs and their political allies, or their 21st century heirs on Wall Street and
in government, uses “law” to corral wealth and power at the expense of the
general population.
In the second, violent criminals
trade on the lack of “order” to achieve much the same ends, perhaps more
bloodily, but not necessarily on a smaller scale.
What transpired in post-Salt War El
Paso, in terms of increases in criminal activity by gangs and individuals, was
probably not much different in nature than what happens any place the authority
structure collapses, whether in Iraq, Revolutionary France between Louis XVI
and Napoleon, or the Soviet Union after Gorbachev.
But something additional happened
in El Paso, new to the American West but not uncommon in world history. There,
the sheriff hired mercenaries to enforce order against perceived enemies, in
this case the Mexican American population. Those mercenaries included career
criminals led by John Kinney. What happened in El Paso became, for a few years,
the way sheriffs did business in the American borderlands, and was repeated
during the Lincoln County War (again with Kinney leading a band of criminals)
and in Cochise County, Arizona during the final stage of the so-called
Earp-Cowboy troubles.
C.M. MAYO: You were a former Army Reserve officer. How did this inform and color how you saw some of the individuals in this story?
PAUL COOL: The event had largely been treated as an ugly civil disturbance requiring military policing. I decided to approach it as a “war” brought on by clashing cultures, economic drivers, and untrammeled ambition.
My own military career was slender,
but my first thirty years were spent as the son of a decorated combat hero and,
as a Reserve officer, in close association with officers and men who also met
that definition. The military is made up of people from the general population.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen are, in that sense, much like the rest of us. But
in addition to military knowledge, i.e., how to fight and win, the military honestly
attempts to inculcate certain ideal qualities, including honor, integrity,
reliability. People, whether the population you’re sworn to protect or your
buddy in the next foxhole, suffer and die unnecessarily when these qualities
are forgotten or ignored. The military I knew does try to adhere to them.
There is, of course, so much more
to the military ethos, but I mention these factors because they influenced the
course of the Salt War. There were army officers, such as Lieutenant Rucker and
Colonel Hatch, who attempted to use their influence and authority to prevent
violence and to quickly, peacefully put a lid on it. But it just so happened
that, at the critical point, the officer on the scene, Captain Thomas Blair,
possessed probably less integrity than any other officer in the U.S. Army. He
was a smooth charmer, and no one realized his lack of character. Had Rucker not
been replaced by Blair, or had Blair possessed ordinary integrity, it seems to
me likely that some of the violence might have been short-circuited. Who knows?
It was only later, through Blair’s bigamy, that the value of his word was
revealed to all.
The military also attempts to
instill discipline, to convince young soldiers to follow the rules, something
that goes against the grain for many, from teenagers to independent-minded
middle-age men. Discipline enables a unit to carry out its missions and
prevents the naked exercise of power in service to personal wants. The Salt War
illustrates the importance of discipline and leadership. We read that the
various companies of the Ninth Cavalry occupying the Mexicano towns
carried out their pacifying mission without any complaints, whereas soldiers
from the company of the Tenth Cavalry engaged in a variety of violent personal
and property crimes. The difference was the discipline instilled by the leaders
of the Ninth Cavalry, but not the Tenth, both prior to and during the military
action.
C.M. MAYO: A modern recounting of the Salt Wars usually makes Judge Charles H. Howard into a simple character, an arrogant, stubborn and greedy villain, the outsider who swiped the community’s salt and then, even to the point of endangering both himself and others, insisted on pressing his client’s claim. One of the things I appreciated about your book is that you explained in more depth some of Howard’s probable motivations and, in particular, the mid-19th century Virginian concepts of honor to which he would have ascribed. The fact that he was bereaved after the death of his wife and deeply indebted to his father-in-law, the purported owner of the salt lakes, was another crucial factor you point out.
It seems to me that you have made a powerful effort to objectively present the different points of view in the conflict. Was this something that came easily or did it take a while?
Were there any individuals whose motivations were particularly obscure to you, or even now remain so?
PAUL COOL: While I don’t subscribe to the “great man” theory of history, I do believe that individuals make a difference, whether it’s Jean-Paul Marat steering the French Revolution along a more violent course or young Charlotte Corday who feels bound to save France from Marat. I believe that the Salt War was filled with such characters, whose personalities and behaviors were instrumental in leading the county into a downward spiral. That was not fully evident from the published record, because Salt War history was for decades largely a matter of historians regurgitating the same tale: largely nameless, faceless, hapless Texas Rangers surrender to a Mexican mob led by the evil Chico Barela. Nothing worth investigating further. But once I dug into sources not previously used, such as the federal government’s records, or personal correspondence that popped up in newspapers or located in the governor’s records, a different story emerged. At some point, for some reason, I decided to investigate the lives of key players before and after the Salt War. And that’s where I found the keys to their actions in 1877, most notably in the cases of Blair and Kerber.
Howard is a figure out of Greek
tragedy. He wore his arrogance on his sleeve, but arrogance is a trait, not a
motive. What was his motive? What impelled him to send a county over a cliff?
It had to be something deep and personal. Howard himself spoke and wrote of his
debasement by the Paseños, of his overriding debt to his father in law, of his
depression after the loss of his wife. Losing his honor, he wanted only to
regain it, and it did not matter who he harmed in the process. He was raised in
a society that educated him to believe that personal honor trumped all. I
don’t believe that he saw that he had any choice. He could only act as he
did.
I am afraid that, despite the best
efforts of New Mexico historian, Dr. Rick Hendricks, I never quite got a handle
on Father Antonio Severo Borrajo, the man most demonized by contemporary Anglo
sources. Toward the end of my work, I did add a paragraph that attempted to
make sense of Father Borrajo, based on Dr. Hendrick’s guidance, but then in the
final flurry of chopping and editing the manuscript, the passage got deleted
from one spot and not replaced in another. I didn’t notice until the book was
published. I tell myself that these things happen, but it’s a mistake I’d
rather sweep under the rug. I’d love to revise Salt Warriors after Dr.
Hendricks publishes his Borrajo biography. I think that would fill a large gap
in the story I’ve told.
The Paseños were a tough nut to
crack. They did not write the histories, their thoughts are largely absent from
the written record, and the victors universally denigrated their motives and
characters. I got past that in two ways. First, I decided to make the Paseño
community a character. Who were these people at the Pass of the North?
Faced with a century-long relative isolation from Spanish, Mexican, and
American authorities and support systems, what kind of community did they
establish and build? How did it function? What did that maintenance and
development of a community say about its leadership? Guesswork on my part was
necessary, but traits did present themselves and a portrait I trust did emerge.
Second, in the case of the Paseno’s
leaders, I was able to draw conclusions about their leadership skills based on
their military actions, which were quite elaborate. One thing that the evidence
revealed is that the Paseños had a long history of self-defense, whether
against Apache raiders or the demoralized Confederates who retreated from New
Mexico. It was obvious that the Paseño community had a core of leaders they
turned to, men who had previously considered how best to respond to threats,
and had put their lives on the line to lead those efforts. I had no direct
evidence enabling me to get inside the minds of Chico Barela (or “Varela”),
Sisto Salcido, or other leaders, but the reports of what actions they took was
very revealing. For example, the traditional Anglo account is that Barela was a
man not given to keeping his word. A different reading is that he was a master
of using deception to misdirect his enemy’s attentions and actions. He could
spot an opponent of weak resolve and then guide his actions by telling that
opponent what he wanted to hear. He played his opponents no less than Napoleon,
Robert E. Lee, or Rommel. That’s something you do in war, if you can.
Ultimately, Barela and his little army bit off more than they could chew, but
they conducted a skillful military operation that achieved short-term results
no one among the Anglos expected.
C.M. MAYO: About Father Antonio Severo Borrajo, who as you say was “most demonized by contemporary Anglo sources,” would you like to share the lost paragraph?
PAUL COOL: Unfortunately, whatever paragraph I had on Borrajo was in some unknown spot in some unknown draft that never got indexed. However, whatever I put in was influenced by this 2002 corrective view by Dr. Hendricks, who, since 2010, has been New Mexico’s State Historian. I do think Borrajo’s intolerance of the Protestants and the French-based Catholic teachings of the then current parish priest, Father Pierre Bourgade (later archbishop of Tucson), helped to keep the population stirred up, even if he was not the greedy demon falsely portrayed by his enemies. Unfortunately, Borrajo’s appearances during 1877, the climax of the crisis, are few and references to him at that point are probably less reliable than usual.
C.M. MAYO: Louis Cardis, the Italian-born businessman and stagecoach owner is a most intriguing character. Was it possible to find out more about his origins other than that he was from Piedmont and might have served as a captain in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army?
PAUL COOL: There was more about his life story and others that just had to come out to get the book down to size. Anything I found that explains his actions did stay in the book. He is another character who, where the written record is concerned, is largely seen through the eyes of others. I detect no bigotry toward his constituents, none, but he did not do all he could to protect them from the power structure that was moving to seize their grandfathered rights in the salt lakes. For example, he signed his name to the 1876 Texas Constitution that enabled private citizens to own saline deposits, but never after, as far as I can tell, spurred his constituents to take legal action to forestall Anglo ownership.
C.M. MAYO: As you proceeded with your research, what most surprised you?
PAUL COOL: This project started as a planned 2-3 chapters in another book. I was surprised by the complexity and the epic sweep of the story, and by the characters who could leap off the page in the hands of writers much better than me. (If there were a viable market, this story deserves a ten-hour TV miniseries starring Russell Crowe and Edward James Olmos, among others.) If I could have made Salt Warriors twice as long, I would have. Pity the poor reader had I owned my own publishing house.
C.M. MAYO: You were able to talk to several of the descendants on both sides of the conflict. Were you surprised by how they saw it?
PAUL COOL: The families that remain in San Elizario knew they had reason to be proud of their ancestors, but over the years, exposed only to increasingly vague oral tradition and the Anglo-centric writings of later historians, they had largely lost the details of what really happened. In some cases, I had to reject the tradition, but in other instances, I thought tradition held up and explained what the records obscured. It was the first time I had to make sense of oral tradition, to treat it as evidence that deserved to be weighed rather than ignored.
On an early visit to San Elizario,
a leader of the local historical and genealogical society showed me where
tradition said certain key events happened. My research often showed otherwise,
and a few years later I was happy to return the favor, incorporating the
written evidence. We still had doubts about this and that event and had a great
time trying to make sense of the surviving evidence, including tradition.
C.M. MAYO: In reading about the organized crime in El Paso in the wake of the Salt War– in particular of cattle rustler John Kinney and his alliance with Sheriff Kerber– it’s tempting to make modern day comparisons with modern day drug trafficking, etc. Would you? Or was it something very different?
PAUL COOL: Well, it was much, much, less organized, and the crimes much more impromptu than we see with modern drug traffickers. My subsequent research has led me to believe that a better analogy would be the Bahamian pirates of the early 18th century, those who established a base of operations on Nassau temporarily free of British authority. (El Paso had a government, but totally ineffective keeping order.) There were criminal leaders (Blackbeard, for example), but individual pirates were more or less free to sign on to this piratical raid or that. They had to strictly follow orders during any voyage—at sea, everyone’s life depends on it—but otherwise were independent contractors who, between “jobs,” had no duty to follow anyone. Likewise, men might follow Kinney or not. That they raided with Kinney today did not prevent them from riding off to commit their own crimes tomorrow, or just sit around playing cards and drinking rot-gut till they went broke.
C.M. MAYO: One of the most astonishing things to me about the entire episode is that nearing the end of the book (p.280) we learn that the government never granted Zimpleman ownership of the salt lakes! So what happened after that? Who took possession of them? Who owns them now?
PAUL COOL: I too was astonished by that. I did learn that some business did extract salt into the 20th century, but more than that could not tell you. I simply had to move on.
C.M. MAYO: Anyone who drives east out of El Paso en route to Carlsbad NM passes right through the salt lakes. But to really see them, what is the best place to view them?
PAUL COOL: If one is simply traveling east or west, on the way to or from El Paso, one can get a good view at several points along Highway 62/180. My book’s cover painting, by artist Bob Boze Bell, is based on a photograph (found inside on the page facing the Introduction) that I took from this highway. A more immersive experience can be gained at the Gypsum Salt Dunes inside Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The lakes stretch for 100 miles, so I imagine there are any number of good sites for viewing.
C.M. MAYO: One of the stops on one of the routes from the Rio Grande out to the salt lakes is Hueco Tanks, an oasis with some important rock art that is now a State Park and Historic Site. For anyone interested in the history of the Salt War, is there any place there that would be especially relevant to see?
PAUL COOL: Among the signatures carved into the rocks of Hueco Tanks is that of Santiago Cooper, one of the Texas Rangers who survived the siege and battle of San Elizario.
A walking tour of San Elizario is essential. Many of the buildings date from 1877 and before.
With the benefit of the bird’s eye view painting in my book, it is possible to
follow the course of the actual fighting, as well as place other events that
took place in town. A walking tour guide is also available at the museum,
giving historic and architectural details on surviving structures.
In the city of El Paso, a very few
buildings survive, most notably the Magoffin House. One should also visit
nearby Mesilla, New Mexico, near Las Cruces, where A. J. Fountain published the
newspaper that gave the fullest, if one-sided, reporting of the events inside
El Paso County. The town square dates from before the salt war.
C.M. MAYO: Anything else you think I should have asked?
PAUL COOL: There was one other sound criticism of my book that deserves comment. In part because I did not use Mexican sources, I did not link the Paseños to Mexican national thinking and traditions regarding liberty, property, justice, and the right to rise in defense of one’s rights. Instead, I quite clearly linked them to traditions of New England’s minute men and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
I did that for two reasons. First, I know more
about U.S. traditions, and can stand on more solid ground. Second, I
intentionally attempted to make a point to an American audience. The
political philosophy driving the Paseños was of a universal nature but could be
and was expressed at the time by them (page 141) in terms that New Englanders
of 1775, Continental Congress delegates of 1789, and the Anglos who moved to El
Paso could understand, had their minds been open. However much the Paseños
acted within the traditions of the long Mexican quest for justice within the
law, they certainly acted within the U.S. tradition.
