Fort Apache, the Bronx

San Carlos artist Douglas Miles was here in the Bronx for the last few weeks doing workshops on mural painting in skateboard deck designs at The Point on Garrison Avenue.  He created a large piece on the front of the building, begun with the observation that he is Apache and that neighborhood had the appellation "Fort Apache."  It is a gorgeous work, exploring a theme and vernacular that he has been mining for a while.
But putting it here, in our borough, is a radical act of seizing and redefining what was, after all, a racist name.

Fort Apache, the geographical location, is an old US Army outpost on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona.  It is the scene for my story "The Giant Believed Her" in the collection Stones from the Creek.  The artist lives a hundred miles away on another Apache reservation.  He mentioned when we spoke, though, that his girlfriend lives near Fort Apache.  This represents both tribal and personal history.  Locations have meanings to the people who visit them regularly.  Certain places, though, have resonances far away, for people who have never set eyes on them.  The Bronx is a good example.  When we visited a village in Bavaria, in the Upper Palatinate, we attended a backyard barbecue with an extended family who had all heard of "the Bronx," including those who spoke no English.  They had very clear ideas of what this meant. They had seen the TV shows and movies.  (How "vérité" are any of them?  Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" had mountains in the background.)

The "Fort Apache" of the imagination, like the imagined "Bronx," inhabits a different geography.  The 1948 film "Fort Apache" starred John Wayne and Henry Fonda.  It is a complex story of race, class and conquest.  The plot takes the story of the "last stand" and moves it: the Indians are Apache instead of Lakota, the Colonel's name is Thursday instead of Custer.  In contrast to Errol Flynn's heroic 1941 colonel in "They Died With Their Boots On," Fonda's character is glory hungry and a bad listener.  But his needless sacrifice becomes legendary and his subordinate and antagonist, John Wayne, sadly and pragmatically endorses the legend.  This is just one of the things that makes this story more nuanced and less "rah-rah soldiers".

Certain things about the movie are much less complex.  The Apache leader Cochise is played by Mexican actor Miguel Inclán.  No other Apaches in the movie are listed in the cast.  There are 300 of them, all played by Navajos and the film was shot in Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation.  The entire drama is played out among the cavalry unit and its family members, which makes the film's "Apaches" a symbol of chaos and savagery outside the "civilized" confines of the fort.  So except for the fact that Cochise is "honorable" we get a view of culture and civilization that is entirely racist and without nuance.

This is the meaning that certain NYPD officers were applying in the 1960's when they began referring to the 41st Precinct on Simpson Street as "Fort Apache."  They were telling themselves and the world that their house was a solitary bulwark of civilization in a hostile landscape of savagery and chaos... the South Bronx.  This notion -- this meme -- of white men in Indian country goes back through Buffalo Bill's Wild West to James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.  It is present in the dramas and melodramas of British imperialism.  It denies the humanity of those outside the "fort."  It is an extremely pervasive idea and it underlies the walled-and-gated communities of contemporary suburbia, along with the religious cult of "Second-Amendment Rights" in our political culture.  I don't think it is possible to exaggerate the fear of the racial "other" it implies.

When the movie "Fort Apache -- the Bronx" was made in 1980 with Paul Newman and Ed Asner it conveyed that same theme.  The cops aren't all good but they are there to create order.  A title card informs us that there are hard-working people, but we never meet them.  We see gang members and prostitutes and Pam Grier as a crazed, drug-addicted cop-killer who doesn't speak.  It was a much worse movie than John Ford's "Fort Apache" and it is barely remembered even here in the Bronx.  But the title?  That conveyed what it was intended to.  People everywhere got the idea that the cops in the Bronx are embattled defenders of civilization against the barbaric hordes.

That is why Douglas Miles's mural is so subversive.  It says that the people of the neighborhood are Apaches: we have been authorized by an actual Apache.  It says we are resisting the encroachments of people who want to take our homes from us.  It says (literally, the words are in the mural!) that "the Bronx is not for sale."  It is anti-gentrification.  It is anti-racist.

Apparently Douglas Miles said at one discussion of the work in progress: "I can go from ironic to iconic in ten seconds."  The irony of an Apache in the neighborhood of "Fort Apache" may have initiated the idea for the work.  But the imagery grants iconic status to the resistance of the people of the Bronx.  People from the neighborhood are going to see it.  My friends who live and work nearby are bringing their kids.  I haven't yet heard what meaning they are constructing, but it is resonating strongly with something within.

Thanks, Douglas Miles.  This is what real art does.