Sunday, March 30, 2014

Joey Quintana

Some of the characters in Stones from the Creek are actual figures from history, however little known even in their own day.  Others, like Joey Quintana in the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly," are more composites.  Names popped up in my reading that caught my imagination, but -- in the absence of full-length biographies -- I was left to flesh them out in my imagination.  Then characters like Joey became stand-ins for one or more of those figures.

I think I first encountered the name Abrán Salcido in the late seventies when I first read Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.  Here was a young guy who was already a leader of the Mexican community in Clifton, Arizona when the copper miners struck in 1903.  He became a leader of the strike and served two years in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma.  As soon as he came out he went to the huge mines at Cananea, Sonora and soon was among the leaders of the 1906 strike there.  He was again imprisoned, this time at San Juan de Ulúa.  The conditions there were truly horrific and less than 100 of the 300 strikers who were incarcerated survived.

That's really all I know about Salcido.  When I read Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction his name popped up again.  That book is about class and race and religion and the border and what childhood and orphanhood meant at the turn of the twentieth century.  The Clifton strike was a year before the orphan abduction and in the same town.  Linda Gordon includes all the relevant events of that time in Clifton, including the presence of la santa de Cabora, Teresa Urrea.

Salcido seems to have been a member of the Partido Liberal and a Magonista.  Ricardo Flores Magón was an inmate of the Territorial Prison at Yuma around the same time as Salcido.  In my mind, stories like that of Salcido's are begging to be told.  But he is just one source of Joey Quintana.  And Joey has a different history, born on this side of the border.

Today I discovered the photo above.  It is from the archives at Yuma.  I don't know how to interpret Abrán's expression.  What I do know is that he looks across 110 years demanding to be seen.  I end up feeling that I am going to have to return to his story.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Fording the River

When I was a boy I discovered pretty early that the same word or phrase could have very different meanings depending on whether it was used at home or outside, in school or in Hebrew school, on TV or in the synagogue.  A favorite example, from when I was twelve, is "the golden age of Spain" or el siglo de oro.  

A little background here is in order.  At Hebrew school we got a weekly magazine, World Over, which had articles about Judaism and the world Jewish community.  Every issue had a comic strip about some important figure in Jewish history.  When I got interested in one, I could often find a biography, written for young readers, in the synagogue library.

I learned that Abraham ibn Ezra of Córdoba had been a great astronomer, grammarian and exegete and that his friend Yehuda ha-Levi was one of the greatest poets ever in the Hebrew language.  I learned that Hasdai ibn Shaprut had been the court physician and then vizier to the Caliph, Abd ar Rahman.  I learned about the poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol of Málaga.  And even the most indifferent students couldn't avoid hearing about the physician, rabbi and philosopher known as Maimonides.  All these figures and more added up -- we were told -- to a "golden age" which lasted roughly from the tenth to the twelfth century.

And so I was a little surprised to discover that there was also a public school "golden age of Spain" which lasted from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.  It was the ear of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, El Greco and Velazquez.  I say "a little" surprised because I knew that between those eras fell a major line of demarcation, 1492, the year when the Jews and Muslims were expelled by King Fernando and Queen Isabela.  So the earlier "golden age" was for Jews and Muslims and the later one was for Christians.  That dichotomy fit what I knew of the world when I was twelve.

A more complicated word was "frontier".  We all learned that word early, because "Davey, Davey Crockett" was the "king of the Wild Frontier."  I have no idea when I first learned that.  The Davey Crockett films started running on the Disneyland TV show when I was three years old.  I don't think my family had a TV yet.  But the song and the hats were ubiquitous.  I feel as if there was never a time when they weren't part of my life.  Disney opened "Frontierland" as part of the original Disneyland in California when I was three, too.  I guess I saw scenes of Disneyland on television a lot, because I know I dreamed of going, without really expecting it to happen.  I was, I think, twelve when we actually made it.

So the word "frontier" had more associations for me than an actual definition.  It was definitely associated with guns: six-shooters and lever-action carbines and muzzle-loading long rifles like Davey Crocket had.  And buckskin clothes.  And cowboy hats.  And saloons with swinging doors.  And paddle-wheel steamers.  Riding horses.  Plenty of fighting with guns and knives and fists.  And -- mostly in the background -- plenty of Native Americans.  Some like Tonto on "The Lone Ranger" and Mingo on "Daniel Boone" were friends of the hero.  Most were screaming, barely articulate enemies.

I was ten or eleven when I discovered that there was also a Jewish meaning for the word frontier.  I may have first encountered it in Sholem Aleichem's Motl the Cantor's Son.  Leaving Russia and heading for the United States he had to cross a frontier.  It took me a while to realize that this was a border, with gates and guards, much like the ones I had seen between the US and Canada.  I used the dictionary, which confirmed that as a meaning.  That just left me confused about the Davey Crockett frontier that I had know for my entire life (or the last five or six years, which was the same thing.)  I finally deciphered the idea of a "moving" frontier between American settlements and however we chose to mythically define what was on the other side.  I think I am still exploring that "frontier", which seems to be the entire domain of post-modern thought.

What connects all of this to Stones from the Creek?  The twin towns of San Miguel del Vado, New Mexico and Brod, Ukraine.  Let me get the names out in the open immediately.  San Miguel del Vado means St. Michael of the Ford, in this case the ford of the Pecos River.  Brod, or in Ukrainian "Brody" means "ford", too.  Brod is on the ford of the Styr River.

In the nineteenth century, San Miguel del Vado was the port of entry into Mexico.  There was a customshouse and contemporary travel writers, like Susan Shelby Magoffin, describe crossing the open plains, fording the Pecos, and arriving in New Mexico at San Miguel del Vado.  Similarly, Brod was the port of entry between Romanov Russia and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, the two great empires of Eastern Europe.  In Joseph Roth's novel of Austrian decline, Radetzkymarsch, the second Baron Trotta is sent to be an administrator on the edge of the empire, at Brody.

The population of San Miguel del Vado was what the New Mexicans called genízaros.  They were captives of the Comanches, by birth Pueblo or Apache or Navajo Indians, who spoke Spanish and were repatriated by the Mexicans in the capital of Santa Fe.  They were given land in great grants to protect the borders from Comanches and Americans.  Most spoke fluent Comanche and did a lot of business with them.  Brod was predominantly Jewish.  They did a lot of cross-border business with the Russians.

I have discussed in previous blog posts the reasons that have been offered for the decline in population of San Miguel del Vado.  For our purposes here, let's just say it is not even listed as a "place" in the US Census.  The tiny (but larger) unincorporated community of Ribera, just north of San Miguel on Rt. 3, has about 400 people.  New Mexico hasn't been another country since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Pecos River no longer marks one's entry into New Mexico.  Brody is now just a town in Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine.  Like San Miguel, Brod declined in significance with the construction of a railroad.  Like San Miguel, Brod declined in significance with the movement of the border.  Unlike San Miguel, Brod still has about 20,000 residents.  Few Jews, though, survived the Nazi Holocaust.

So both towns are on river fords.  Both were once important border crossings, and therefore "frontier" towns by definition, or what I used to think of as the Hebrew school meaning of the word.  Both could be rough places in the other meaning of "frontier."  Brody was a major crossing point for Jews fleeing the pogroms of Odessa between 1880 and 1906.  It was the line between the Austrians and the Russians in World War 1.  During the Second World War, Aktion Reinhardt, the operation to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, was initiated in Brod.  Later the Soviets encircled and killed all the German troops in Brod.  Regarding the extermination of the Native Americans of New Mexico I will just say here that Pecos Pueblo, a few miles north of San Miguel, was a thriving community of thousands until not that long ago.  Today it is an archeological site.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The "Brokenness" Controversy

Both of those words have been setting my teeth on edge for months.

"Broken" because any pundit or politician with a big megaphone can declare something (Obamacare, education, our foreign policy) to be "broken" and then, perhaps because it is such an extreme statement, it becomes a matter of common knowledge and any crackbrained scheme to replace that "broken" system is worthy of thoughtful consideration.  The only thing that doesn't seem to warrant study is whether the declaration itself is true!

"Controversy" because the news media, in its search for the two sides of everything, continually declares settled fact to be "controversial" as long as there is somebody to publicly question that fact.  The current heavy hitter in this usage is clearly climate change.  Anybody who has observed the blooming of flowers or the migration of birds for more than a few years knows that climate change is a fact.  But as long as there are paid shills for the energy industry questioning this fact, there will, apparently, be a "controversy."  We have seen such "controversies" before, such as the "controversy" over whether cigarettes are a health hazard.  Well-established science is confronted by people who say, "I don't believe that," without any supporting evidence whatsoever, and the news industry allows its public to consider a question unsettled.

Today I came across the name for these approaches, the concept of agnatology, or manufactured ignorance.  The PR people for corporations and politicians consider these to be well-established tools, with their own advantages and disadvantages.  I find it reprehensible.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Icy Slopes

Days after the last serious snow it is still icy on the paths and on the slopes in the park where Prophet and I usually walk in the morning.  The woods are still full of snow, but it has a hard crust that we can step on without sinking in (most of the time!)  There are a few bare spots, but with ten degree temperatures, it isn't from melting.  The snow and ice are slowly subliming (I love that word!) and so each day there is a little less, but without mud and run off.

Walking on that ice, especially down the slopes, frequently requires so much attention that it shuts down all the other thoughts.  And then I gain a flat spot, with a view of the river and the Palisades and a moment of complete silence and I am awestruck with wonder and appreciation of the moment and the place and my companion.

On a dry, relatively flat path I sometimes spin with wondering who we will run into or what path we should take.  I rehearse the exact wording for things I want to write.  I consider new approaches to things that have been bothering me.  I get stuck in those things that have been bothering me.  I usually wake up to where I am after a few minutes because Prophet wants me to tug on the other end of a stick or go bushwhacking through terrain that requires my attention.  Or, again, suddenly I see the light coming through the clouds in a single beam and on a single bush.  Or I overflow with thanks for the friendship of a dog who wants to go for epic adventures every single day.

I have heard a lot of discussion privileging one or more of these approaches.  Somebody is on the radio urging me to "mindfulness."  I shouldn't lose myself in what I am doing or in my worries.  I should just watch myself.  Or perhaps I should completely throw myself into what I am doing, without thinking about it or other things.  And these people are all so earnest and calm and fulfilled and they are all so patient with my blundering.

I think I will continue blundering.  I enjoy the moments of awe at being alive and breathing.  But I get a lot of thinking done when I am distracted from what I am doing.  And being lost in activity is its own reward... especially when the alternative is falling headlong down an icy slope.