4, 270 words

Vipiniguat-Ru

(Greatgrandmother, Deceased)

This is the story of an obsession. It is the story of looking for something which is probably not there, yet the urge to search persists, like an old song stuck in your head, or the memory of an amputated hand.

This is the story of my search for my grandmother’s story, and the story of her mother as well. It is the willing of the spirit to raise old bones, to connect old images, uncover rumors and histories that have been carefully covered up and forgotten.

My grandmother was the daughter of an Opata woman and an Irish father. As part of a novel, The Flower in the Skull, I wrote a story which I thought might be very much like hers. For lack of concrete information, I concocted her story as part of a larger historical fiction set along the border, real or imagined, between the United States and Mexico. It goes like this:

Rosa's Story

My mother brought me into the world when she was fourteen years old, barely a woman, in pain, in sorrow, and in deep humiliation.

I was born in Nogales, Arizona, where my mother and her mother's family had gone to live after the soldiers destroyed their home in the Sonoran desert, about one hundred miles farther south. My mother was an Opata Indian, and the policy of the Mexican government was to break up the Indian settlements, scatter the families, and obliterate their way of life. That way, there were fewer local governing councils to give trouble. The Mexican government has always found local government to be inconvenient.

The Opatas, on the other hand, had never been conquered. Long known for their bravery, even the women had slain conquistadors in hand-to-hand combat. If necessary, the women had allowed the Spaniards to take them into their quarters and undress them. When the men in turn undressed, the Opata women seized their discarded swords and rammed them into the soldiers' bellies. They were willing, as individuals, to die in order to save the culture.

But this did not work. Every twenty or thirty years, new soldiers returned, and more of them, until an Opata chief made a truce with them: the Opatas would fight with the Spanish, if the soldiers would help to fight against the Apaches, the plague from the north. The Opata chief was made a general of the nation by the comandant general of the Interior Provinces. This worked for awhile; the Spanish soldiers by now admired the Opata very much for their courage and ferocity, but in the end, over the generations, this would not bring peace.

In 1884 the soldiers came again and burned down my mother's village. They shot and killed many of the people, doing terrible things to all the young girls they could catch. The people knew that the governor of Sonora would do nothing, could do nothing, for he was as afraid of the soldiers as they were. Those who could escaped, and some came to live with relatives in Nogales, where many of the Pimas had already settled in order to escape the constant bloodshed.

We have known the Pimas for a long time, and many of our people have married them and lived in their villages. The soldiers have never liked them, either, because they too, are a proud people.

My mother Pastora came to Nogales and her family was very poor. They had nothing to eat. Pastora was tall and strong, like her father and her uncles, and she was sent to work in the house of a rich family in the city. They were happy to have her.

There was a family in town of red-headed people, from Ireland. They had a son who wanted my mother, Pastora, to go with him and let him have his way with her, but she refused. People thought that just because they were Indians, they would do anything.

And so, one Sunday afternoon, when no one else was at home, he came into the house where she worked. He must have watched the house to know that the people she worked for were gone. He came into the house, and against her will, he used her. He raped her. And then he left.

She was afraid to leave the house, since she lived there now, but she ran away and went to find her mother's family. She told her mother what happened. And she refused to go back to that house.

When the people returned, they did not know what had happened to my mother, Pastora. They waited for her to return, angry that she had left the house unlocked, then worried that she did not return. They liked my mother very much.

Finally, after several days had passed, the man of the house went to the Indian settlement, where my mother's family lived, and found my mother with them. My grandmother told him what had happened, and said that she could not allow her daughter to return. The man asked who had done it. When my mother told him, he could not believe that it was the son from the red-headed family. He thought she was lying. The man returned to town without my mother.

At home, the man told his wife, and the wife, who loved my mother and wanted her back to take care of her children, went to the red-headed Irish family and told them what Pastora had said. To everyone's surprise, the young man, who was hardly older than my mother, about eighteen, confessed. He said that he loved my mother, and wanted to marry her.

The man who employed my mother went back to the Indian settlement and told my mother that George Vaughn, for that was his name, wanted to marry her. She refused. She said that she never wanted to see him again in her life, or leave her family. The man returned to town with her answer.

George Vaughn was very unhappy, but his mother was even more so, for she was very religious, and her son had shamed them. The family where my mother Pastora had worked was very unhappy as well, for they had been friends with the red-headed family, which was how George Vaughn knew my mother. My mother was very unhappy, for she found that she could not bleed, because she was pregnant.

The white family who loved my mother found out that she was pregnant, and again, the wife sent her husband to the Indian settlement, which was by now getting used to seeing this man. The man came to my mother's family, and said that they would take care of my mother Pastora and her baby if she would only come back and live with them. She could take care of her own baby as well as theirs, and she didn't have to marry George Vaughn if she didn't want to.

This seemed to suit the family, although my mother did not wish to go back. She was afraid of George Vaughn. But her own family was very poor, and here she was about to bring another mouth into the world to feed. The family had no land of its own, no village, but lived with the Pimas who had escaped from Mexico.

So my mother Pastora went back to the house in town. The family was true to its word, and took my mother back to help them, and raise their babies, and clean their house. And so I was born in that house, in the city of Nogales, and was told that if a red-headed man ever tried to talk to me, to run away. For they were afraid that he would try to steal me. He never did.

My mother was very beautiful, and the family had many friends, and one of them was a doctor named Dr. Martinez. He loved my mother and asked her to marry him, even though she already had me. And my mother loved him, because he seemed to be kind, and she wanted a house of her own, and so she married him. Her family was very happy, for things were hard for them.

Dr. Martinez gave me his name, made me his daughter, and we were very happy in that house. He was kind to me. But something terrible happened.

My mother was unable to have other children after me. Although Dr. Martinez gave her medicines to make her fertile, and her own mother gave her medicines to make her fertile, my mother Pastora was unable to conceive again. Her mother felt that she may have suffered some damage from what George Vaughn did to her that Sunday afternoon, though no one really knew what had happened, only Pastora.

And so, something else terrible happened to my mother. Dr. Martinez left her for a woman he thought could give him children. He gave my mother some money, and found her a place to live, but he went to live with someone else, right there in town. I was about twelve years old. My mother was very sad, for she had loved Dr. Martinez, and I had thought he was my father. I did not understand the difference between a real father and a stepfather, I only knew that my mother had been happy, and so had I.

Now we were very poor. My mother's family could not take us back, but we had a place to live, and once in a while Dr. Martinez gave us some money. I went to work cleaning people's houses, for my mother was very sick. She missed her husband, and could think of nothing else, night and day; she could not sleep or eat. My mother, who had been beautiful and full of life, withered away before my eyes into an old woman.

When I was fourteen years old, I met a young minister who had come to Nogales to introduce people to his personal savior, Jesus Christ. I went with a friend to his church, and the people were very kind. They served food after the service, and talked about how much God loved us. They gave us pamphlets to take with us and read, and I took one, although I could only read a little bit.

I returned to the church whenever I could after that, because I liked the young minister. His name was Miguel Narro. After a few months, he asked to marry me. I told him he would have to obtain permission from my mother.

Miguel came to the house, and was kind to my mother. He seemed to be used to coming into poor people's homes. My mother liked him immediately, and gave us permission to marry. And so, on my fifteenth birthday, we did, and my mother was happy to see me married. But she was very sick, and died shortly afterwards. She never recovered from the way that Dr. Martinez had treated her, or, I guess, from George Vaughn. My mother, Pastora Curiel Martinez, was not yet thirty years old when she died.

As I wrote “Rosa’s Story,” I felt that I ought to take the time, eventually, to find out more about the Opata. The word haunted me, for although I had known we were part Indian, I was an adult and a mother before I learned the name of our tribe from an aunt in Chihuahua, Mexico. Much had been made of the Irish in our blood, but little of the Indian. So, spurred by my son’s interest in our Native American heritage, I set out to find what I could find.

My initial search has not been heartening. The Opata show up on older maps of the Southwest, one by the National Geographic published in 1976, one published in 1992 in Ms. Magazine, to my delight. But I wasn’t able to locate information on the tribe, and at first attributed it to the border which was laid like a scar across the Southwest: tribes north of the border have been studied and documented, tribes south were mostly ignored.

Franciscans swept through the area, imposing their own view of heaven on earth, followed by the Jesuits, who took copious notes on the people they encountered. Father Kino wrote about the Opata, that they were brave, that they treated their women well, that they grew cotton and wove material. The main interest the Spanish had in the Opata was that they hated the Apaches, and so became allies with the Spanish in defending the northern frontier. Of course, the Apaches wouldn’t have become a problem if the Spaniards had not disrupted their trade routes and supplied them with horses, but that’s another story.

The Opata numbered approximately 60,000 at the time of the conquest, and several dialects existed of their language. In other words, this tribe, whose name I did not know until 1990, numbered more than all the Pueblo peoples combined.

So what happened? There’s a big gap in information, followed by American anthropologists and exploreres taking their new religion, science, into the Opateria. In 1896, Carl Lumholtz led an expedition into Mexico in search of primitive people. His main goal was to contact and document the Tahuramara of the Sierra Occidental. This was post-Darwin, and people looked with fascination upon ‘primitives’ as living relics of how their, i.e., European ancestors might have lived before they became ‘civilized.’ Lumholtz made a career of finding such people, being the author of books such as Among Cannibals, about his experiences in New Guinea. His book Unknown Mexico is a study in dichotomy, where his documentation of highly complex cultures clashes with his own mindset that they were ‘primitive’ people. Anyway, Lumholtz got to Mexico and promptly fired most of his American help to hire native Mexicans, many of whom seem to have been of Opata descent.

“This territory (south of Nogales) was once in the possession of the large tribe of Opata Indians, who are now civilised. They have lost their language, religion and traditions, dress like the Mexicans, and in appearance are in no way distinguishable from the labouring class of Mexico with which they are thoroughly merged through frequent intermarriages.”

And yet, he adds a note at the end of his preface to the book:

“Dr. Aleš Hrdlicka, who has just returned from the Hyde expedition, informs me that in visiting the western part of Sonora he found pure Opata spoken west of Rio de Sonora and north of Ures, e.g., in Tuape.”

Nothing for several decades, then a series on anthropology published by the University of New Mexico in 1950 covering several Southwest tribes. Number six is The Opata: An Inland Tribe of Sonora, by Jean B. Johnson. The paper was published posthumously by the widow, Mrs. Irmgard Weitlauer Johnson, who accompanied Mr. Johnson to Tónichi, Sonora, in 1940. The editor expresses some reservations about Mr. Johnson’s linguistic findings, and the paper feels abbreviated, as though the author intended to say more at some points.

“The Opata,” Johnson begins, “a group numbering some 60,000 at the time of the Conquest, have completely disappeared today as a cultural and ethnic identity. It is doubtful whether five persons could now be found who can recall even fragments of the language.”

So what was Johnson doing in Sonora? He read the same stuff everybody else had read, almost all of it written in the 1700’s, then went to Sonora to document the Opata by inference from tribes that were not yet extinct, including the Cáhita (modern Yaqui-Mayo) the Yaqui, and the Lower Pima. It’s a scant book, about fifty pages long, including long lists of vocabulary words taken, again, from earlier sources. It’s the only publication I have found so far devoted exclusively to the Opata.

So why am I bothering? Why learn about a people who no longer exist, and who seem to have willingly given up their separate identity to become, simply, Mexican?

In part it has to do with visiting the Anasazi ruins of the Four Corners region. My son, first as an infant, then three, then four, would stand next to the crumbling walls, or view exquisite pottery, and say, “but where did they go?”

When I lived in Colorado from 1979 - 1983, the stock answer was: ‘Nobody knows. They vanished mysteriously around 1100 B.C.’ I went so far as to write a science fiction story portraying the Anasazi as space-travellers who moved on with the action.

Now, the Pueblo people will tell you, ‘They were our ancestors. We are the Anasazi.’

And so I tell my son, ‘they moved into houses with air-conditioning. They became modern people, like us. And they live in the pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona.”

Like us. And who are we? Well, we’re part Opata. Are we extinct? Not exactly. I’ve never made a big deal about being part Native American because I’ve never known much about it. After all, my parents are from Mexico, and almost all Mexicans are part Indian. Our culture and language is a blend of Indian and Spanish, one laid over the other. I guess the Opata culture is extinct, although I’m not entirely convinced of that. As little as I know about her, my greatgrandmother, Pastora, identified herself as an Opata at the end of the nineteenth century in Nogales, Arizona. That implies that a context existed in which that would mean something.

But it also raises some questions that might be of broader interest.

1. The Mexican government had a specific policy, beginning with its independence from Spain in 1840, of not recognizing Indian tribes. The official line was that ‘we are all Mexican, and so will be treated equally.’ This was, in part, to erase class distinctions and property rights that favored those born in Spain. The reality was that Indian rights were systematically violated, with deeds to land inevitably ending up in the hands of non-Indians. Strong local governments, especially Indian, were viewed with paranoia by the fledgling national government, and tribes that persisted in showing local strength and organization were attacked by federal troops. The Yaquis, for example, were killed, driven north, or sold into slavery to work on the hennequin plantations in the Yucatán.

2) As a result of their conflict with the Mexican government, the Yaqui maintained a strong tribal identity. It served to strengthen their traditions, ceremonies and lines of power, which had evolved after contact with the Jesuits into a unique culture of war and religion. Charles Spicer and others have documented the Yaqui, who are still a living, vibrant people.

The Opata, on the other hand, were consistently praised for their bravery and compliance with the Spanish, then Mexican government. In early encounters, the Opata resisted the Spanish invaders, the women going so far as to seduce the soldiers, then waiting until they set aside their arms before killing them with their own swords. Once it was clear, however, that the soldiers were willing to kill Apaches, an alliance was quickly formed. The Opata were also quick to adopt clothes, Christianity, and town-centered life, since they were primarily an agricultural society, anyway. All of these things led to more rapid acculturation than with other tribes.

So here we get a picture of ‘good’ Indians and ‘bad’ Indians, from the point of view of the Mexican government (obviously, as my Yakima friend pointed out, it would be the reverse from the Indian point of view). Bad Indians resist acculturation and spend a lot of time fighting, but maintain a distinct cultural identity and way of life; good Indians get absorbed, leaving merely a faded grease spot on the historical annals of the Southwest. When we look at current events in Chiapas, we can see that Mexico’s policy towards her indigenous people has not altered much in the hundred and fifty years since independence from Spain.

3. So my great-grandmother was an Opata. Does that mean I am?

I wasn’t raised with any of the culture of the Opata. I was raised as a middle class Mexican American in Southern California. I now live in Seattle. The first and greatest loss of culture occurs when a people are separated from the land that sustains them. That land, with its plants, its soil, its water sources, sacred places and the details of its climate and landmarks, is a notebook, a talking stick, that documents the stories of indigenous cultures. It is the frame upon which a culture is hung. Separated from that land, the details fall apart, become confused and blurry, and eventually lost.

In our case, this separation was due to the Mexican Revolution, but the Revolution was the culmination of hundreds of years of imbalance, of uprooting, of separating millions of people from their land.

When we look at this question from an American point of view, we get into this blood quantum issue that has both saved and defeated people. Assuming Pastora was full-blood, I’m 1/8 Opata. I don’t recall if that’s enough for membership in most tribes within the boundaries of the United States, but since my tribe doesn’t seem to exist, and there isn’t any economic incentive to being a member, it hasn’t been a pressing issue. But there might be cultural reasons, if by chance, there are others like me, and just enough of a knowledge base left to preserve and at least aggregate the remnants of our culture.

Why? Maybe it’s like tree frogs in the Amazon: It’s just one culture, but maybe the knowledge of the Sonoran Desert, of weaving and singing, of fighting and kinship patterns, contains some element that is crucial to the development of the human race as a whole. People come and go, you say. Languages develop and die out. It’s natural selection, and the future goes to the strong. Maybe so.

As for me and my fiction, I intend to keep reading the old scholarly texts, as well as a few newer ones that interpret old data with a modern sensibility. Ramon A. Gutierrez has written a brilliant book on the coming together of the Pueblo people and the Spanish in New Mexico. Gary Paul Nabham is on the desert gathering seeds and stories. Somewhere out there are Campbell W. Pennington’s notes on the Opata, which have not yet been published (is this a fatal subject?).

I suspect that whatever I write about the Opata will become somewhat definitive, since there’s so little on them, so I feel a certain obligation to get things right. In reading all of this history, I find that each text is heavily colored by the background and expectations of the historian. In other words, history is an act of the imagination. Maybe this is why I write fiction. If there are larger truths to be known, perhaps they can only be discovered, delineated, if freed from the context of empiricism, another nineteenth century idea that has shaped modern scholarship.

I’m not particularly interested in ‘the truth’ about my great-grandmother, any more than the specifics of my grandfather’s parents served as more than a catalyst for the writing of Casas Grandes. What’s to know? She was born, she lived a hard life, and she died. I’m much more interested in discovering the forces of history that placed her in that time and place, and how an individual’s world view evolved as society changed from a traditional one to a ‘modern’ one. In other words, my goal is to create situations that can only be inferred from historical information. And I want my readers to connect with these situations on a level beyond that of shared history or bloodlines, to say ‘yes, I understand that, I feel what that woman felt.’ Admittedly, I read this history with feelings of poignancy, a certain sadness and nostalgia, that must come from my personal connection to it. But when I turn to my writing, I know that original characters will spring from the page, ready to live out their lives regardless of what my ancestors may have done. Fiction is the act of rearranging history so that it has a narrative line, a story, a beginning, a middle, and sometimes, a resolution. It seek to capture truths that cannot be contained within the parameters of unadorned facts.

The paradox is that these universal truths, which is probably what Joseph Campbell would call them, can only be conveyed through specifics. In other words, the larger, the more inclusive, the more profound a truth is, the smaller the event we must use to convey that truth. And to find these specific moments in time - a young Opata catching a girl by the left nipple and leading her into the village to be his wife; keeping vigil with a comadre struck by lightening, lest her soul be unable to find its way back - we must study history. And so fiction writers must rely on historians, scientists, journalists, cooks and dressmakers, preachers and nurses, newspapermen, dreamers and people up to no good to supply us with the endless minutiae it takes to compose a story. The fabric of history provides us with our narrative threads.

Sooner or later, as I try to re-imagine cultures and people, give them names and lives, I realize that I am going to have to spend some time in the Sonoran Desert, the Opateria. Books won’t be enough. Maps won’t do it. Even talking to people who know a lot will not be the same. I must see for myself what the Opata must have seen, even if I can never know or imagine a fraction of what they must have known.