White wooden vending carts loaded with flowers, beads, votives, and candles were parked beside the iron bars of the entrance. Inside, a wide cobblestone road progressed up the hill; tombstones ascended with it like stadium seating. The quality of the cobbles was important to note because if devotees of Juan Soldado received the miracle they’d asked for, tradition required that they return to his shrine on their knees—a testament of their faith. This was expected to bloody the knees. Sure enough, we came upon a middle-aged woman assisted by family members who held her at the biceps—an attempt to lighten the weight on her kneecaps. Despite the aid, she grimaced as she set each nub before her. On both sides of this procession, the occasional grand mausoleum or sepulcher rose from the mud in buoyant color. There’d been no obvious plan for filling this hillside, but the fact that the family plots looked regularly visited, added to, and evolving suggested a kind of messy intimate care. Halfway to Soldado’s grave we approached another devotee, this time an attractive, manicured woman with big hair and hoop earrings. She absolutely strode on her knees. Her pilgrimage was slowed only by the two young men who picked up plush car floor mats from behind her, circled, and set them before her again—carpeting the path. This is when I first noticed our tour’s hostess amid the crowd, because she began to badger the young woman with a wagging forefinger. “You’re cheating, you’re cheating,” she said to the woman, in Spanish. For the benefit of the English speakers the hostess turned and repeated, “This woman is cheating. She will not receive her miracle.”
An amateur Tijuana historian and hometown psychic, our hostess, Martha Henke, wore black velour pants and a black vinyl jacket. She had straight dark hair with a strip of graying roots down the middle. Large-lensed sunglasses obscured a good portion of her face. Though dressed young, she appeared to be in her fifties, and she smacked her lips between thoughts like an abuela. After berating the elegant Soldado devotee aboard the floor mats, Henke took the helm of our mob with an upraised finger and led us in a group to the grave.
There, we lined up to enter a small house-like sepulcher. Inside an archway, both a bust and a small statue of Juan Soldado were crowded by candles, wreaths, bouquets, notes, and photos—tight quarters with the paste-up decoration of a child’s room. The bust looked like a smooth-faced caricature, a cartoon, something from Disneyland. The saint’s eyes were mere black pupils, the nose thin. He wore a green soldier’s cap and jacket. I could have easily taken him for a trolley conductor.
The personal notes pasted all about, however, were nothing if not heartfelt. They thanked Juan Soldado for help with immigration papers, the recovery of a loved one, or an unspecified milagro. On lined paper, a schoolkid had drawn an image of the saint in crayon with a coffee-colored face and a green bellman’s cap. The top of the page read, “Juanito el Soldado”—Little John the Soldier. If the letters came off as sweet, the abundant photos were unsettling. Mostly showing men, most of them young, the collection of images looked to be of the missing. The photo of a teenager cut from his California driver’s license was scotch-taped to Soldado’s bust, as was a black-and-white mug shot of a serious man in his early twenties, as well as an image of a father figure lost in the North. Engraved tiles thanking the folk saint for miracles plastered both the inside and outside of the little structure—the names of the appreciative family always given but, disappointingly, not the exact circumstances of the miracle. Each item in the mausoleum created an unfinished narrative. Underneath all of this was the supposed body of Juan Castillo Morales, but not his story. For this we traveled farther up the hill between offset graves, to a secondary shrine set against the uppermost cemetery wall marking the place where the twenty-four-year-old army private was executed by military fire in 1938.
“How many of you believe in spirits?” Henke asked the gathered. “How many of you have felt a presence?”
I struggled to remember or imagine some sensory wisp from a night in my past—a hovering light, maybe, or an unexplained chill. I failed to conjure anything. A few timid hands rose. A man standing in a graveyard with his hand in the air came off as an eerie admission, I thought. Most hands quickly lowered. In the back of the small crowd a woman I’d noticed earlier for her looks—strong cheekbones, straight nose, pale green eyes, raven hair, black leather jacket and blue scarf—now caught my eye with the confidence of her stance, her right hand held firmly aloft. Attractive, international, and dressed for a biker’s funeral—she evaded assessment. I then looked to Henke for a response to the show of hands. The hostess seemed to take in not the hands but the nature of this crowd, one that quite visually seemed to disappoint her. The sky was overcast, the air chilly, we stood in mud.
She said, “Well, I’ll tell you, some of us see things. Some of us feel things, and it is real.”
Henke said her mother had actually known the Camachos—a respected Tijuana family raising a string of pretty little girls. The eldest, an eight-year-old, was named Olga. On a Sunday in February, thin light falling on dirt streets the color of cumin, this child was sent to the store for “a cut of meat.” The Camachos lived close to the La Corona market so her mother, Feliza, expected a quick return. As the light weakened further on that short winter day, Mrs. Camacho became alarmed at Olga’s absence. The mother hurried to the shop as it was closing and spoke to the owner, Señor Mendivil, who confirmed that he’d sold Olga the meat and that she’d skipped off with the package. Outside, Mrs. Camacho saw a soldier leaning against a wall. He’d not seen a little girl. Nonetheless, he said, “Maybe she went that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction of the Camacho home. As dark came on, the family’s distress caught the hearts of the neighbors. The police, a volunteer force of just five or six officers, enlisted help from the nearby military barracks. They managed to cordon off roads heading north to San Diego, south to Ensenada, and east to Tecate. Still, no sign of the girl appeared until, as Henke told it, the next day, when a couple of boys playing in a field found a bloody sack containing Olga’s remains.
The soldier leaning against the wall, Juan Castillo Morales, and another soldier were later detained by police. No one knows why. Some say it was because they stood watch earlier at the garrison, and so may have seen something. Three vagrants were also detained in the sweep. These strangers were quickly released and, eventually, the family of the second soldier provided an alibi. By this time a curious crowd had formed outside the military comandancia, a castle-like structure intended to dissuade Americans from encroaching on the empty Baja peninsula. Inside the comandancia, at a table within earshot of the growing rabble, Morales vigorously denied any part in the murder of Olga Camacho.
Here, our hostess stopped to tell an interesting and complicating side story. In her childhood barrio it was believed that a corpulent commanding officer of the federal garrison, a man known for making inappropriate advances toward young girls, had seen Morales loitering about in the street earlier that Sunday. He called Morales into his office. He said, “Morales, I’ve seen you admiring my gold-gilded pistol. I need a favor. I was out hunting rabbits today, and I cleaned them, but now I have this big sack of guts and bones. Take this sack and get rid of it in the desert, quick before it stinks, don’t even take the time to look inside. If you’re fast about it, when you return, I’ll loan you my pistol for the week.”
In the 1930s, Tijuana had fewer than twenty thousand residents while San Diego boasted more two hundred thousand. The point that Henke’s mother had known Mr. and Mrs. Camacho as neighbors, had from a distance shared in their horror and pain, brought much to the tale. It built a bridge from family history to graveyard legend. But Henke’s connection to the Camacho tragedy also brought that odd story of the gold-gilded gun, a Faustian trade with the devil, a nonsensical explanation for the only physical evidence discovered in the case—a blood-stained uniform, an item supposedly found in Morales’s home during a search conducted while he sat accused in the comandancia. Neighborhood myth has it that the uniform had been stained by rabbit blood during Mor
ales’s errand. The corpulent officer, of course, does not exist in the official record. And yet, there Morales was, confronted with the tainted uniform by his prosecutors. A clear confession was sought from the frightened young soldier.
At the time of Henke’s tour, I was unaware of a well-researched book exploring the rise of the Soldado myth: Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint. In a work backed by firsthand interviews, the late San Diego State University history professor Paul J. Vanderwood delivered a more nuanced set of facts and, importantly, he illustrated how it passed that a terrified and outraged town so quickly raised a lynch mob even as Morales and the others were questioned. In their fury, the mob barraged the comandancia with stones. Torches and pistols were not far behind. The small Tijuana police force dissolved into the streets. The comandancia itself held only a few hundred soldiers. And after business hours the crowd of Tijuana citizens outside grew into the thousands.
Unfortunately, this was not an unexpected response for the period. California’s final lynching was still a number of years off. The intent and implications of that angry comandancia gathering were understood by everyone. Chants for justice rang up into the interrogation room. Confronted with the uniform and the noise outside, Morales reversed his denials and made a full confession. It might have been a calculated decision to buy time. A trial might have afforded him the opportunity to recant and spare himself a lynching. The mob set the comandancia aflame anyway. The authorities weren’t waiting around. Within less than three days of Olga’s discovery, Soldado was put on trial behind closed doors. He was quickly convicted and sentenced to death—to a rare ley fuga, a military execution in which the convict is commanded to run for his life before being gunned down.
The singular piece of evidence—the uniform bloodied either by a messy sack of rabbit skins or by murder—never entered the transcripts of the closed court martial, nor was it saved for posterity, if it ever existed. Further evidence implicating Soldado was never unearthed. Over time, in the minds of the people, that deficit of facts—as well as the speed of the trial, the weak position of the outpost government, the civil unrest, and the strength of the crowd—never fully exonerated Morales, but helped to build a different kind of case for a handsome young man with no one but God in his corner. All of the elements worked toward a confluence of narrative and belief that would have led to conspiracy theory in the United States but, in Mexico, led to sainthood. As Vanderwood wrote, “Some believed (as many do today) that those who die unjustly sit closest to God. Therefore, they have the ear of the Lord and are especially effective as intercessors.”
Henke said she’d returned to Tijuana from New York City in the 1980s—her shot at something bigger had detoured into single motherhood and a situation tipping toward destitution—when she first came to Juan Soldado’s grave with a request for a miracle. She needed rent money. And kneeling in his mausoleum she spoke to Soldado, as many do, as though she just couldn’t be sure if the heinous charges of rape and murder set against him were true or not, and that if he could see his way clear to granting her miracle, surely she would believe he’d been framed those seventy-odd years ago, framed and shot as he ran, his body then dragged to a shallow grave on that spot. As she kneeled in the sepulcher, Henke said, at the very outer rim of her right earlobe she felt the warm breath and grazing lips of the young soldier—a presence just beyond view. A man’s voice said, “I will grant your wish, and then you will believe I am innocent.”
As she offered this point, Henke’s lips smacked—a period on a statement of fact. We were all free to believe or not. Atop the shrine’s steps, behind her the cave-like edifice holding more images of Soldado, Henke conjured a time from her youth when she’d been in dire need, she’d made a petition to the spirit of a disgraced soldier, and then there, days later in the bathroom of a San Diego nightclub, she nearly stumbled over a wad of dollars lying on the floor, the exact sum she’d required.
As we made our way back down through the graveyard, the clouds breaking up and sunlight sputtering through, Henke pointed toward a cleft in a hillock near the rust-brown US border fence. She said that a number of years after Soldado’s burial, a group of migrants had huddled there waiting to cross into the United States. On the advice of a local, they hiked up to the gravesite to petition Soldado for success in their crossing, and for a blessing of their travels. Ever since, the intercessor’s legend had grown among migrant communities far and wide.
It was often repeated, however, that for one who petitioned by the grave and was granted a miracle but did not make the return pilgrimage to the shrine on his knees, Soldado himself would knock ever so late at night on the petitioner’s door—wherever it might be. I imagined that Soldado must make a lot of trips into the United States, himself. Maybe we had crossed paths, at a Waffle House in Alabama possibly, or a Church’s Chicken in Kentucky. A member of our party, a man in a red beanie, asked Henke directly: “You received a miracle. Did you return on your knees?”
“No, no,” she said with a flip of the wrist. “I will maybe do it sometime.”
Her velour pants looked a bit thin in the knees for such a feat. The woman she’d harassed earlier was long gone, luckily, for the sight of her floor mats would have broken the spell of the martyr’s tale completely.
Graves set at such random intervals created a Pachinko-like effect as the group funneled down the hill; somehow we were bumping into people we thought we’d just passed. I’d later learn that the existing graves were likewise askew when Soldado was ordered to run for his life before a firing squad composed of, possibly, soldiers he’d worked alongside. Capital punishment didn’t exist in this Catholic country—theoretically. The element of running was a go-round. It suggested that the convict was in fact trying to escape the law, and thus stopping him with bullets was justified. There were newspapermen from Los Angeles and San Diego and a crowd in the hundreds. Morales, dressed in a uniform stripped of insignia, understood what was to follow, but he nevertheless bolted when the signal was given. The United States border was within his view, the graves provided cover; an escape looked remotely possible. A witness claimed that as Morales jumped over and around the gravestones, the soldier spotted a small boy paralyzed in his path. The boy had been hiding behind a granite block, having stolen away to watch the pomp of the event. Children were not welcome at the execution, but the festivities proved irresistible. Juan stopped his flight to wave the stunned boy back, out of the line of fire. He then regained some distance through the maze of tombs before the first volley of gunfire sounded. A bullet nicked his skin. He continued to run. Maybe the large sepulchers provided too much cover; maybe his comrades fired into the sky on last impulse. Two more rounds were ordered before Morales finally fell.
Saving the boy was his final act. Although recorded in newspaper accounts, this detail of selfless grace has somehow been edited from the traditional myth. One can only wonder why.
The scattered arrangement of the graves also put me, as we neared the cobblestone road, arm’s length from the raven-haired woman with the green eyes. Talking with a girlfriend in Spanish, she paused and turned slightly back and said in English, “We have a lot of ghosts in Tijuana, for a city that is so young.”
“What others?” I asked.
“Well, I went to high school at Agua Caliente, the technical school. There was a woman in white called La Faraona. She appeared as a light. Kids saw her all the time, even I saw her,” she said.
Agua Caliente sat two miles up the riverbed. It once held a lavish Mexican-colonial-style casino, hotel, and racetrack that attracted Hollywood starlets like Rita Hayworth. La Faraona—the Pharaoh—had supposedly been an entertainer who dressed in white robes. She was murdered somewhere in the resort at the height of its renown. After gambling was outlawed by Mexico’s president Lázaro Cárdenas in the late thirties, part of the tourist complex was turned into a school. Much of the rest fell to ruin.
“But I’ve never been here,” she continued with a sweep of t
he hand. “We lived on the other side of the city. And at that time it was too dangerous to travel about.”
The woman and her friend picked up their conversation and continued onto the cobblestone road. I heard her mention that she’d attended a California State University campus, and now lived in San Diego. Here was an elegant, educated woman who no longer lived in Tijuana, but nevertheless adhered to its social codes and superstitions, to mores necessary in the accretion of myths and legends—no matter how dubious.
There were many reasons I began my search for the source of the Tijuana bicycles at the Puerta Blanca cemetery. Among them was the spiritual aspect. The shrine of Juan Soldado had lorded over the history of Mexican migration to the United States—from those invited to work California’s fields during World War II to those who crossed just yesterday. Prospective migrants from all over Mexico continued to pay homage to Soldado and their stories were scrawled upon his tomb. I liked to believe there had been migrants who, between 2006 and 2009, trekked up the cobblestones, petitioned the saint, and later mounted a bike and pedaled into new lives and grand futures.
But the geography of the area, to my mind, was also elemental, because the United States lay downhill from Tijuana, and gravity, as both a metaphor and a physical force, defined the entire region. The hemisphere seemed bent along this axis. And everything came tumbling down: flash floods and killer bees and wild parrots and car tires and mountain lions and pollution and people and cultures and languages.
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