Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  I gazed up at the cross on the summit, the ragged boulders and cliffs and lesser peaks, the creosote bushes that alone seemed to thrive in this arid landscape, then spotted Rudy kneeling as if in prayer. He was helping two other men rebuild kneelers to be placed before small shrines lining the alarmingly narrow two-and-a-half-mile hanging road that snakes its way up the mountain in broad switchbacks alternating with hairpin turns. Such building and rebuilding never ceases at Cristo Rey, and not only of kneelers but of altars and grottoes, roads and walls and culverts, even the large statue of Jesus Christ that stands atop the peak, 4,675 feet above sea level. Rudy spotted me lurking nearby and delivered an enthusiastic greeting. Within minutes I was helping him load two blue portable toilets into the back of a small, well-used Mazda pickup. Rudy showed me how to lean my back against the heavy plastic sanitary receptacle as he and another helper tilted it way back so that they had only to lift a few inches before I was commanded to push and the load slid easily into the pickup’s bed. I could hear the antiseptic chemicals sloshing noisily inside. I dreaded leakage. We repeated the exercise, tied a rope around the two toilets, and climbed into our vehicle.

  Mount Cristo Rey

  Rudy Garcia was born in 1937 in a village called Smeltertown, on the banks of the Rio Grande, where the river, flowing south through its rift valley in New Mexico, bends east through the Paso del Norte and fuses with the U.S.-Mexico border. Smeltertown, a community of Mexican immigrants employed by the Guggenheim family’s American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO, no longer exists; nor does the smelter, though the company name lives on as a division of the Grupo México conglomerate. In the 1970s, Smeltertown was dismantled and its residents dispersed after medical tests revealed that a high proportion of the population there was contaminated with lead. Residents fought to keep their homes; some were unwilling to accept that they had been poisoned by the smelter. Rudy told me he thought the lead contamination had come from Mexican pottery. The ASARCO smelter was shut down in 1999, after 112 years of operation, amid lawsuits over the toxic by-products belched out by its stacks, the highest of which, at 828 feet, had been a local landmark since 1967. In 2009, ASARCO settled the largest environmental bankruptcy in U.S. history, agreeing to pay $1.79 billion in fines to clean up sites in twenty states. In 2011, residents of El Paso were arguing about whether the two remaining stacks should be demolished or restored as historic landmarks. Eventually, the demolition contingent won the argument, but Mount Cristo Rey endures as a monument to Smeltertown and its diaspora. Here, more than any other place I have traveled in the borderlands, I could feel the full weight of the region’s history.

  In 1933, Father Lourdes F. Costa looked out the window of his rectory at San Jose del Rio Grande, the parish church once located more or less on the spot where the ASARCO smokestack was built thirty-four years later, and envisioned a huge cross on the mountain then known as Cerro de Muleros, Mule Drivers’ Mountain. He spoke to the members of his congregation, among whom were Rudy’s parents, and eventually to the bishop of El Paso. Inquiries were made, and a search for the owners commenced, resulting in the purchase of two hundred acres. In March 1934, members of the congregation planted a simple twelve-foot wooden cross on the summit. Later, vocational students from ASARCO built a larger cross out of angle iron. Father Costa commissioned an old friend from his home in Catalonia, a sculptor named Urbici Soler, to build the permanent monument, which was dedicated in 1940 as an offering of thanksgiving to Christ the King and “a fortress against Communism.”

  Rudy put the pickup into gear, and we started up the narrow hanging road. The previous May, when I first met Rudy, his brother Art, and some of the other members of the committee, we drove up in a Jeep. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Today was even worse, because at least the Jeep held the promise of leaping to safety if Rudy miscalculated by a few inches. The pickup would be a misfortunate mausoleum. As he drove, Rudy kept up a steady patter of stories about the mountain, the history of the committee, his family, and mild tensions with a local Catholic church in Sunland Park, New Mexico, that had recently asserted control of the shrine. I sat still, my body tense, my foot pressed hard against the floor of the pickup as I silently willed the vehicle leftward toward the sheer rock wall and away from the jumble of sharp-edged scree that dropped precipitously down the talus slope just below my right elbow. I wondered aloud in what I hoped was a brave voice whether we were taking this load all the way to the top. “Sure!” said Rudy, who almost always speaks in exclamations. At one point he told a story about a visitor who panicked on the upper road. “We got to where the monsignor is,” a memorial to Mount Cristo’s founder, “and he said, Drop me off here, Rudy. I said, Why? and he said, I’m afraid of heights.” Rudy laughed loud and long at the memory. “Well, I’m going to make you a man!” and he kept driving, heedless of his passenger’s protests. Rudy has made that drive thousands of times, in daylight and in darkness. Only once has he gone over the edge.

  Hanging road, Mount Cristo Rey

  Soon we were standing about thirty feet below the peak, on the first of three terraces linked by a steep rock and concrete ramp that rises to the great cross. Like the road we had driven, the ramp is just wide enough for a Jeep or mini pickup. Unlike the road, the ramp now has guardrails, both for the Jeep and for the often elderly pilgrims who face that sharp incline at the end of a difficult climb. We had just unloaded two toilets and shifted them into place. Using a shovel and a rake, we made sure they stood on a level platform; it wouldn’t do to have one tip over with someone inside.

  I was looking down over the south face of the mountain toward Colonia Anapra, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Juárez. Tiny cinder-block houses crowded right up to the base of the mountain, within a few yards of the borderline, which was marked by nothing more imposing than a handful of white boundary markers spaced within eyesight of one another. Last time I was here, one of the markers had been stolen, leaving a gap in the imaginary line. Today, the small white pyramid was back in place.

  Trails leading up the mountain from Anapra were clearly visible. Off to the west the international boundary runs through a shallow dusty basin that drains toward the Rio Grande. An aging silvery chain-link border fence, its terminus at the foot of Cristo Rey, bisects the basin and meets up with the new, much taller border fence at the base of a sandy outcropping known to local geologists as the La Mesa formation. On the upper edge of La Mesa, on the Mexican side of the fence, I could see the top of Monument 3, one of 256 such white pyramids established by the International Boundary and Water Commission, stretching from Monument 1 at Madero Plaza, between the Rio Grande and the eastern base of the mountain, across the Sonoran Desert to the Pacific Ocean. Rudy could not understand why Homeland Security chose not to build a fence through this little stretch of the border, which local Border Patrol agents call no-man’s-land, or why the decades-old wire fence, about six feet high, was left standing, especially given the long history of robberies and assaults at Mount Cristo Rey.

  Rudy had told me stories of hikers and pilgrims being mugged and worse along the road to the summit, tales of women running naked and screaming down the trail, families held up at gunpoint, a bandit who sprang out of an arroyo and put a gun to a child’s head, demanding money and valuables from his family. Several members of the committee, including Rudy, have been made deputies by the local sheriff, and they all carried guns. Rudy wore a .38 Special strapped to his hip and often kept a high-powered rifle in his vehicle. Gunplay with the cholos from Anapra was once commonplace, and occasionally the rival gangs of the three nearby colonias, as the poorest neighborhoods are called—Anapra, Asarco, and Chihuahuita—would stage shoot-outs in the foothills along the border south of the mountain. Thieves from Anapra would steal anything that was not bolted, welded, or cemented down. The water, soft drinks, PA system, lights, and toilets we’d spend the day hauling up the mountain would vanish by tomorrow if someone didn’t stand guard all through the
cold desert night.

  Twenty years ago, Rudy was maneuvering a Jeep on this terrace, pulling a trailer loaded with a large water tank, when his brakes failed. He remembers the sound of water sloshing in the tank and the edge rushing nearer. “I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop, and I saw myself going over the side, and that’s all I remember.” The trailer came loose and caught on the edge of the drop-off. The Jeep rolled down the mountain toward Juárez. Looking down a rocky incline that I would not have hazarded on foot, I had difficulty imagining how he had survived. I wondered aloud if the Jeep had bounced over him. “No, no, no,” said Rudy. “I must have jumped! I’m here!” he said, laughing. “But see, if I’m going to jump, how did I land on this side?” He showed me where he was lying when he came to, his feet dangling over the edge of a rock wall that dropped straight down into the tangle of boulders and scree. “The guardian angel took me and flipped me over here,” he said. “The guardian angel pulled me out!” Rudy’s radio did not survive the accident, so he had no choice but to start walking. Two hours later, when Rudy, Art, and some other members came back up the mountain to see about the wreckage, thieves had already climbed the mountain. “We got up here,” Art told me, “and the sons of bitches had already taken all the tires, the battery, and all that. And Rudy was so angry he took out his little Betsy and started shooting at them. He emptied that gun.” During the 1950s another member went over the edge, on the east side, about halfway up, near the memorial to Father Costa. He was backing up a Jeep and misjudged the distance. He survived but was paralyzed for the rest of his life. The guardian angel was off duty that day.

  On the edge of the third terrace, one level below the cross, there stands a permanent white altar, on two pillars of stone, used to celebrate Mass during the pilgrimage and on occasions such as Good Friday. “One day I came up here,” Rudy told me, “and St. Pius Church was coming up, and I got up here early.” Rudy gestured, his weathered and calloused hands spreading across the white surface of the altar, which was marred by some crude black graffiti scribblings. “It was beautifully painted.” He paused. “Two naked angels making love, on the altar. Honest to God.” Rudy turned and pointed up toward the cross, ringed by a concrete crown 126 feet in circumference. “Then inside: big dicks, big balls, about like that,” he held up his hands to show the size, “painted inside the crown.” Rudy quickly painted everything over before the visitors arrived. Mount Cristo Rey’s role as a fortress against communism may be history, but the struggle against vandalism never ceases. We walked up the ramp to the cross. Inside the crown, where the offending illustrations had been painted, were twelve plaques, each engraved with the name of an apostle as well as eleven donors. Around the base of the cross were commemorative tiles, purchased by supporters, now chipped and broken by vandals who threw rocks and smashed glass candles against them. Someone had tried very hard to destroy the tile of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which occupies a position of honor near the center of the battered mosaic. Rudy wasn’t sure whether the president had ever visited the mountain, but he had seen photographs of military escorts bringing dignitaries, clad in evening wear and silk top hats, to the summit in motorcycle sidecars.

  Rudy Garcia

  Urbici Soler’s limestone Jesus is the risen Christ, in white robes, standing before the site of execution, arms spread before the instrument of his torture in a triumphant gesture of resurrection. He is a figure of hope, meant to inspire a small community that has suffered many trials.

  Like the community of Smeltertown, the statue has endured many trials since it was carried up the mountain in pieces, on the backs of mules. Vandals paint vulgar slogans and scratch their initials into the stone. Someone named Lupe, or perhaps her boyfriend, has testified, in deep scratches, that a person by that name once walked this earth. Jesus’s feet have suffered the indignity of blue spray paint, and his toes, now broken, have been repaired more than once. During one assault on the graffiti with sandpaper, a well-meaning helper erased Soler’s signature. “History! History!” Rudy cried out, remembering the horror of that day. Lightning struck the statue and cracked it, letting water penetrate the stone, which cracked it further and caused the internal rebar to rust. In 1990 a strong wind knocked pieces loose, and Rudy had to shoot them off with his rifle. Engineers from ASARCO and the University of Texas at El Paso were consulted about a restoration; they declared that it was hopeless. The committee persevered. God would show them how. “The quarry is still in operation, near Austin, Texas,” Rudy recounted, “and we ordered the stone, and we put scaffolding up to the top, and we put beams on top, with chain blocks and come-alongs, and then we put foam and straps to protect the stone, and then we anchored everything with three-quarter-inch stainless steel rebar.” A special paste was devised, using epoxy, and whitewash was applied, and slowly the statue resumed its familiar shape.

  “Now Jesus, as you know, we cannot paint this, ’cause if we do it will break. It’s got to breathe. What we do, we get that beige color, real nice, we go to bars in El Paso, and over here in New Mexico, and we ask them to save the cigarette butts. We soak them, and then we take sponges and dab it like when you stain wood. From down there,” he said, pointing toward downtown El Paso, “on a nice moonlit night, you can see it shine. Like there’s a light inside. Honest to God.”

  As the afternoon progressed, we carried load after load of blue plastic toilets to strategic points along the pilgrimage route and down to the old silica mine, in the overflow parking area near the dinosaur footprints. Rudy said that the museum was planning to charge for parking on its property next year. As we made our rounds, we passed pilgrims who were already walking the way of Christ, some of them without shoes. “There go the barefooted ladies,” Rudy said. “I need to do that.” Barefooted? “Yes. I remember one time the road was messed up. It was rough! Right there before I got to Saint Anthony, I started bleeding. But I made it all the way to the top. I attempted to come down. Made it to the Virgin of Guadalupe,” about a third of the way. “I couldn’t go further. The pain was terrible.” I asked Rudy to explain the significance of such a sacrifice. “It’s just something in return for favors granted. I ask God or the Virgin, or a saint for that matter. A lot of people pray to the saints. I pray to God and the Virgin, also the saints. When I ask favors and they’re granted, and even if not, I still do it. I promise to come up here, walk it barefoot, and light two candles on top.”

  Down below, I met other members of the committee: Tore, a master mechanic with spiky gray hair and a face like a stone Aztec deity; Debbie, who from what I could tell was largely responsible for the smooth functioning of the base camp; George and Ruben, both dressed in tight Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, wide-brimmed cowboy hats, and bandannas. When Ruben saw that I had gone up the mountain with Rudy in the Mazda, he asked me whether I’d checked my shorts. He wasn’t kidding. All the while Rudy told me stories about his friends on the mountain, many of whom had passed away; about his wife, Alicia, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease; about his nine children and sixteen grandkids and eight great-grandkids (“The flower of the plant is still giving!”). We were sitting in the pickup, near a shrine to Our Lady of Fatima, so that Rudy could rest his left leg, which was atrophied from an old accident and tired from working the clutch. We were on our way down, and I was happy we were well past the more perilous turns. Rudy pointed out a biodiesel plant off in the distance where he had worked as a young man, when it was a cottonseed oil mill.

  “We used to fill the railroad cars with oil, and I would go and draw it up there on top and drop this thing down in there and draw out a sample. And then close the lid, and those lids screwed on like so, and they had a four-piece cross made out of pipe. And you would stick a pipe in there to tighten it. As I was tightening it, that thing came out—I guess I didn’t put it in far enough, and I went down, but I pushed myself so I wouldn’t go on my head. I landed on my butt, on the railroad tracks, and I broke my back. At the time I had three little kids.” It was a desperate situation,
but at least he had insurance, so he didn’t lose his house. “I had some hunting rifles, a British .303 rifle. Oh, I loved that big gun. I sold it so I could buy food for the kids.” It was eleven days before he woke up, and he was in the hospital for about two weeks. When he was finally released, his family had planned to move him to his parents’ house, but Rudy insisted on going home. “Roger, I’m not lying. We went home and I got me a piece of ass that night!”

  No one would ever cast doubt on Rudy’s virility or his devotion to his wife. He had planned on staying up at the summit all night, but eventually he admitted that he needed to go home, because he was taking his wife to church in the morning. He put me in the care of his brother Art, known since childhood as Tata. Rudy wanted me to take his pistol, his little Betsy, which he was waving around as he spoke to his friends at the base in rapid Spanish phrases. Ruben kept telling him to put the gun down, to which Rudy replied, “Don’t worry! The safety is on!” I was tempted by Rudy’s offer of the gun until he said something about a friend who somehow managed to jam two shells into the chamber, so in the end I chose to rely on Tata for protection.