Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

  So now the Indians sat under the Wallowa sky on a summer night, next to fires and tipis, and ate a fine meal of elk steak and salmon fillets, joined by hundreds of people from the valley. Among them were some folks who had lived their entire lives in the Wallowas, knowing all along they had built houses on stolen ground. The laws, whether passed in Congress or the town of Joseph, could not make loggers come back or ranchers rich again. Still, the lynch mob in cowboy hats and John Deere caps had a point. Bringing back the Old West might save them after all; they just had the wrong Old West.

  CHAPTER 13

  Nuevo West

  Sunnyside, Washington

  The asparagus fields had been picked for the day, the orchards pruned and sprayed, and now it was time for church or drink on Saturday night. Not yet twilight. Mount Adams still held the sun in the Cascades, far to the west. The Yakima River was higher than anyone had seen it in almost a century, It’s waters fat and fast through the canals and irrigation ditches of the valley. Rattlesnake Ridge and Horse Heaven Hills, brown and beige most of the year, were pool-table green. The Indians on the big reservation went out in the late light to see if any spring chinook salmon were fighting the high water, and the rodeo cowboys in Toppenish let their Appaloosas run until they were in a nice lather. The first call to the Yakima County Sheriff’s Department, on a night when you could expect some gunfire, a meth-head driving into a ditch, a domestic assault or two, came after six P.M. Just beyond the new Wal-Mart, at the throwaway fringe of Sunnyside, a crowd of people were stirring near the intersection. What had been only a few dozen people at first had grown to several hundred. Kids. Teenagers. Familes. They lit candles and played music and danced. Some kneeled in the gravel. Almost all of them spoke Spanish. The object of their attention was a Washington State Department of Transportation sign, green and white with directions on one side, silver and blank on the other.

  “Apparently people have seen, on the back of the street sign, the Virgin Mary,” said the Yakima sheriffs sergeant, calling in the report. I’m looking at the sign now. I don’t see anything.”

  The next day at dawn, people were still at the foot of the road sign, in temperatures barely above freezing. The valley came to life, people moving to harvest the stalks, backs still sore, hands with three levels of spring blisters. The asparagus-cutting machine did not stop for Sunday. Churches throughout the valley were abuzz with talk of the wonderful thing that had happened at the intersection of the Yakima Valley Highway and State Route 241. The new bishop, Carlos Sevilla, spiritual head of sixty-four thousand Roman Catholics, did not know what to make of the shrine in his midst. In the two-thousand-year history of the church, only seven sightings of the Virgin, Mother of Jesus, had received official validation. But in twelve hours in Sunnyside, Washington, many people had seen the apparition, and they wanted the bishop to say, yes, it was a miracle—a visit by Our Lady of Guadalupe, in the image of concentric lines of pink, blue, and yellow on the back of the highway sign. Here she is with us, Father, they said at church. Here she is, 466 years after the Virgin appeared to the Aztec convert Juan Diego in Mexico, almost four hundred years since the Spanish put their colony in the upper Rio Grande. She had never appeared this far north, a valley on the arid side of the Cascade Mountains that draws visitors with murals of bronc-riding cowboys and the slogan “Where the West Still Lives.”

  Sunday’s headline across the front page of the valley’s biggest newspaper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, was a banner six columns wide: “Miracle or Happenstance?”

  They came then in wheelchairs, on crutches, on motorcycles, on bikes, on horseback, in low-riders. From cherry orchards in Oregon, from hops fields near Hanford, from the vineyards along the Columbia River and apple farms near Lake Chelan, wherever food was grown and Spanish-speaking people were paid to tend it and pick it, from there came the believers. The Virgin was a blast of esperanza—hope. She was dark-skinned, as in Mexico. She held her hands together in repose. Look closer, the believers said, and you might see her crying. No, she was not in the valley to express sorrow, others said, but rather to say it was all right to live in this far-northern place. It was the Lady of Guadalupe, yes, the Virgin who had spoken to Juan Diego in his native Nahuatl language and later convinced the doubting bishop. The rebel Emiliano Zapata, whose picture was on the window in the new video outlet in Sunnyside, used to carry a little card of this Virgin tucked into his headband, as did his followers. She was a favorite of outlaws, liberators, and farmworkers.

  The crowd on Sunday afternoon swelled beyond a thousand. Although the atmosphere was festive, it spooked the police. They did not know what to expect—a rumble, a riot, or just a fairly unusual traffic snag. A dance group, Las Matachinas, performed in front of the sign, on ground that used to be scrub-steppe like the rest of the eastern Washington desert, ground where an Anglo cattle king named Ben Snipes grazed his big herds more than a century ago, ground now given over to a Burger King with bilingual menus and a drive-through espresso booth and some of the most intensively irrigated farmland in the world. The sheriff was perplexed. He called the State Patrol, and they called the Washington State Department of Transportation. After an urgent round of meetings among bureaucrats, the order was passed: get this goddamn road sign out of here. An engineer from the state arrived. He waded among the crowd and stared. He saw nothing, except the directions to Sunnyside and Vernita Bridge.

  “Maybe I’m unenlightened,” the engineer said.

  The troopers decided to close the intersection, barring traffic from the corner. Still, people arrived on foot. Then an officer from the Sunnyside police, Chico Rodriquez, came to assist the sheriff’s deputies and state troopers. Rodriquez made his way through the worshippers and the curious to get a close view of the road sign. But, unlike the sheriff’s deputies or the engineer from the state, he had no trouble seeing what the others could not.

  “It’s the full figure of the Virgin Mary,” he said, explaining the outline to other cops. “The full figure.”

  The engineer was put on hold. A mumbled round of discussions followed, three different police agencies trying to figure out what to do now. No time for donuts. New plan: the road sign would stay put, for the time being. Why mess with a miracle? And down the road, in the village of Granger, poorest town in the state of Washington, the phone lines lit up at radio station KDNA, Radio Cadena for the Yakima Valley. Everyone wanted to talk about the Virgin. Most of them believed. The host and station manager, Ricardo Garcia, was somewhat skeptical, but the phenomenon delighted him. He came to the Yakima Valley in 1962, from the Tex-Mex region around El Paso. In the border country, the West that has been in American hands for barely 150 years, the Virgin had long made reprise visits. But not here, in a state the Spanish had sniffed at in the sixteenth century and briefly tried to colonize in the eighteenth century. Spanish sailors were the first Europeans to set foot in the Pacific Northwest, in 1775. Sixteen years later, a little fortress was built along the storm-lashed coast, but New Spain in the Far West lasted only four months. Now, in the final decade of the twentieth century, the language of conquistadors and vaqueros could be heard in nearly every Western valley with a crop.

  “This appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe was overdue,” said Garcia. “Long overdue. From now on, I expect you will see a lot of her in this valley.”

  IN THE FALL of 1847, American troops occupied Mexico City, having marched deep into the land that had been forcibly taken by Spain. The United States had conquered Mexico. Now what? President James K. Polk, an expansionist of the British Empire school, wanted to take over the entire nation and absorb it into the swelling Union. His plan brought reactions of horror; these people could never be Americans, it was said. Not quite a century and a half later, 112,000 people, the largest crowd ever to see a professional game of football, jammed into a stadium in the capital city of Mexico to see two American teams play a sport founded in the Ivy League. The border between the two countries moved even as the game was played, with th
e Colorado River shifting ever so slightly in the Mojave sands. On the American side, a presidential candidate raged that the brown tide north had to stop, and vowed to build an impenetrable curtain along the 1, 952-mile length of the border. Putting on a black cowboy hat and clutching a rifle in Tombstone, Arizona, Pat Buchanan pointed to the south and said, “No way, José!” On the Mexican side, letters from Sunnyside, Washington, arrived in the province of Michoacan, telling of jobs and miracles in a valley full of more apples than any place in the world. The funnels of humanity at El Paso and San Diego—two former Spanish mission towns—had been clogged by border guards, but it was nothing to squeeze under a torn fence at Nogales, Arizona, and follow a family map and word-of-mouth to the north. The first fifteen dollars earned, in Nogales, could be had by selling a pint of blood; it amounted to half a week’s wages for some.

  The dilution of a singular culture and the creation of something altogether new, a process that has been under way since a Moorish slave, Estavanico, and a Franciscan priest, Fray Marco de Niza, went searching for what the Spanish called the Northern Mystery, continues, as ceaseless as the Sonoran winds. Political lines on the map have come and gone in the West. What has remained in place has always defied official cartographers. It has also proven to be some of the most elusive of moral high ground.

  The Latino West, born in conquest and subdued by later defeat, was nearly erased for a time. It has come back, changed, and now is poised to dominate even the most remote reaches of It’s long-ago domain. Perhaps the reason it never died or was blended to the point of invisibility is because it belongs. It is as much a human element of the West as Monument Valley is a physical feature. New Mexico, once a six-month journey from It’s sovereign headquarters in Mexico City, seems a more natural fit with the American West than it does with It’s old colonial masters. But many people think the West is not big enough for two cultures with equal holsters of shame and glory. A lot of Westerners fear the epic morph. They don’t recognize their main streets, their menus, the schools where mariachi bands have replaced marching tubas. The Cinco de Mayo parade draws bigger crowds than pioneer days.

  “We get these calls, ‘They’re in the swimming pool at the racquet club, they’re in the city park, they’re shopping where we shop,’ ”a police detective from Park City, Utah, Rod Ludlow, told High Country News. This ski town, in a state that used to belong to Spain and Mexico, was supposed to be one of those Anglo refuges, full of people who feared what was happening in Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix. The new arrivals from Mexico, cholos, are lumped with longtime Latino residents as wetbacks, foreigners, spicks in the eyes of others. They are also vaqueros, campesinos, padrones—archetypal Westerners.

  For those who think that the West is becoming Mexico North, it is worth remembering that Mexico was nearly America South, a state that would be bigger than Alaska, and certainly as intriguing. The war with Mexico had, for the Americans, been swift and almost casualty-free. On a pretext that Mexicans were not paying back debts to American interests— and then after a skirmish on the disputed border—the Army of the West had moved into New Mexico. With nary a shot being fired, they took over Santa Fe on August 18, 1846. The New Mexican militia did not even fight. Instead, under Governor Armijo, they gave up the territory to the Americans in a few days of flag-adjusting and low-grumbling sycophancy. El Paso, downriver a few hundred miles, fell to an even smaller contingent. The governor was bribed, it was said, otherwise why would he have caved so quickly? The upper Rio Grande, imprinted with the footprints of Coronado, Oñate’s misguided colonists, and generations of Franciscans, was now under the control of a general with the first name of Stephen and some volunteers from New England.

  But the New Mexicans had been trading with the Yankees for some time; they had socialized at fandangos, intermarried, and for the most part did not fear the Americans. They had long-standing grievances against the central government in Mexico City, nearly two thousand miles to the south. The territory was Hispanic and Pueblo Indian. The colors would nor change, it was said at the time, only the flag.

  In California, the war followed the same pattern. The American Navy, which sent ships to the coast, met little opposition. Meanwhile, John Charles Fremont—the Pathfinder, as he called himself, in the wake of his best-selling maps—went after settlements in the Sacramento Valley. A Swiss-German polygamist, John Sutter, was trying to build a fiefdom at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. Fleeing legal, marital, and monetary entanglements that stretched from Europe to Hawaii, Sutter had been welcomed in California. He obtained a fifty-thousand-acre land grant from the Mexican government, carved from a neighbor’s empire, the nearly 500,000 acres of one of the richest men in the West, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. But Sutter had no sooner started sleeping with thirteen-year-olds and laying the foundation for New Helvetia than Fremont’s land-hungry army marched into the valley and tossed him in jail. Then they tramped onto the grand Sonoma rancho of Senor Vallejo, and he was arrested. From there, it was on to San Francisco. Ten cannons guarding the harbor were no match. Fremont took the village merely by walking in. He renamed the sheltered salt water the Golden Gate. Monterey fell two weeks later. “Henceforth, California will be a part of the United States,” American naval commanders announced from the Pacific shore.

  Not yet. In the south, the Californios took a toll. They lived on large ranchos, grants from the government, and golden farms that grew from the missions established by the Spanish in the late 1700s. Life was good for the Californios, though they also had considerable problems with the central government in Mexico City. At one point, in 1836, they had declared their independence. What they wanted now was the same thing the New Mexicans desired: property rights, keeping the deeds to the land grants, a degree of self-governance. Into Southern California came American troops in full war cry. There was no talk of an easy transfer of sovereignty. The Californios struck back. Led by the brother of Pio Pico, Mexico’s last governor of California, they took over the garrison of Los Angeles, a murderous cow town that had been held by a few American mercenaries. Then they defeated soldiers under the command of Stephen Kearny, whose Army of the West had waltzed into Santa Fe. That was it, though. Kearny regained his footing, and California fell to the Americans. It was surrendered in January 1847.

  Now, from a base in Mexico City (after American soldiers had marched into the heart of the country), all of Mexico was essentially under U.S. control. A question raged in the Congress: should this enormous territory become a part of the United States? Even in a country that had consumed unimaginable pieces of North American real estate from decaying European monarchs, such a question seemed preposterous. Should Mexico, a land of eight million people, of Indians, Spanish, and mixed-bloods, of Catholics and miracles, of arroyos and jalapenos, be folded into the former British colony? Certainly, much of the land looked worthwhile. But the people— “degraded, mongrel races,” in the words of one editorial in Ohio—could never be Americans, according to the consensus view. So the United States settled on taking a very large piece of Mexico instead of absorbing the whole country. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848, Mexico gave up one-third of It’s land; with the loss of Texas, a decade earlier, it shrank by half. For the territory that would become the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, the price the Americans paid at treaty time was $15 million. Together with the Louisiana Purchase, virtually the entire American West was bought for $30 million.

  The Americans had much to offer. They would honor Spanish and Mexican land grants, they vowed. Anyone (except Indians) living in the old Spanish colony could become an American citizen. And they brought a different approach to property ownership. The Spanish, in a legacy of feudal Europe, tended to give out huge sections of land to titled men, veteran soldiers, or well-connected opportunists. The grants led to a landed aristocracy, wealthy padrones whose serfs, usually Indians and mixed-blood Mexicans, worked the ranchos. In C
alifornia, just after the war, Mexican land grants covered fourteen million acres. The Americans also gave away state-size pieces of turf, mostly to railroads in the 1860s. But for individuals, there was the prospect of a small homestead to anyone who wanted to prove up the land—the Jeffersonian ideal in the brown squares of the newly American West. Also, rather than rely on the benevolence of a wealthy landowner, income for public schools was to come from a parcel of every township set aside for public revenue. The two great dreams of every Mexican migrant who shows up in the asparagus fields of Sunnyside today were within reach just after the Mexican-American war: property ownership and education.

  But the larger goal of the Americans, seldom stated in official government policy, was to lay an Anglo blanket over the Latino West. The odds against bleaching the demographic landscape looked considerable. In 1850, the census counted just over a thousand Anglos and fifty thousand Latinos in New Mexico. Only a few decades earlier, the assimilative imperative had gone the other way, as Anglos tried to become more Latino. Thus, Jonathan Temple arrived in the semidesert town of Los Angeles in 1827, fresh off the boat from Reading, Massachusetts. He liked the climate and the Mediterranean setting. There was plenty of opportunity. Temple set up shop in town, and within a few years became a Mexican citizen and changed his name to Don Juan Temple. Then he married Señorita Rafaela Cota. In what is now the area around City Hall, in downtown L.A., Temple built his large home. After the war, in 1850, the census of Los Angeles counted a town that was 80 percent Latino. But over the next two decades, Don Juan may have wanted to change his name back to Jon. By 1880, the Hispanic population of the city was down to I percent. Across the West, the ranchos and Spanish land-grant holdings fell to swindle, purchase, or coercion. Rancho Rodeo de las Aquas was bought for five hundred dollars; it became the city of Beverly Hills, and courted Iowa immigrants. Rancho Cerritos was transformed into Long Beach. Our of the southern end of Rancho Malibu was carved the city of Santa Monica. In nearby El Segundo, the new civic leaders boasted that their town, despite It’s name, was a place with “no negroes or Mexicans.” A century later came places like Rancho del Oro, a new exurb in Southern California, billing itself as “a completely walled community.”