The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  Shannon deeply missed her cousin, that was obvious. She had learned of Shonnie’s disease one day when the two were studying together, when matter-of-factly Shonnie spoke about a lump. Yeah, they told me it was breast cancer, Shonnie said. A year and a half later Shannon went to visit Shonnie in the hospital. Marianne had told her on the phone that everything was OK, and not to bother coming, but then Shonnie called her cousin back and said it wasn’t OK, that she was probably going to die.

  So I just drove to California and showed up at the hospital, Shannon said. Her hair and nails were beautiful, I remember that. She put me at ease and she was cracking jokes. She said, You ought to see my legs, ooh they’re so white. ’Cause Shonnie always had the perfect tan. We started to joke about it. Get some sun, girl, I said.

  She asked if I could smell her. I did smell something funny but I said no. Now that I’m a nurse, I know that’s the smell of people with cancer. The tumor when it breaks through the skin. They can’t smell it anymore themselves.

  Shannon’s broad face clouded over the tablecloth, like a dark cloud swelling above the checkered fields of Culebra. The katsinas in her sky started to cry. Shonnie would be here today, I can’t help but think, if she hadn’t, if she . . . Shannon gestured weakly, not at her grandmother’s potions specifically but at the dramatic decision, beyond any potion, that her cousin had made. I’m still angry about it, Shannon concluded, dabbing her eyes and pulling herself together, as Dorothy looked on quietly.

  But what was ironic, since small ironies reside in every sad situation, was that Shannon herself had used alternative medicine before having an operation a few years earlier. I had cervical cancer, I wanted it out, she said sheepishly, but just to cover my bases I used my mother’s BEFEU [antitoxin] machine, and I went on a Noni [a tropical fruit said to have healing properties] diet. So that was the Native American in her, floating over the rocks of the haunted universe, keeping more than one catechism. Impassive, Dorothy didn’t say anything.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  FROM THE MORADA TO THE KINGDOM HALL

  All that blue sky to fill, and still the clouds line up like pilgrims and process to the tops of the mountains. Narrowly they gather on the Sangre de Cristo range, fold upon fold, white upon white.

  You are sitting above the circle of the earth. You are looking down on little Culebra, at the edge of the San Luis Valley. From south to north, the settlements are San Francisco (La Valley), Los Fuertes, San Pablo, Chama, San Pedro, San Luis, and San Acacio. The segmentary landscape is the same as it was when the Hispanos broke ground here, in the 1850s. Long, narrow, parallel lots, called extensiones, were set at right angles to the northwesterly flows of the creeks and acequias (canals). Every settler’s fields lay across the path of the water, and the job of the mayordomos, the community-appointed overseers, was to keep the irrigation fair. Mayordomos still maintain the acequias, but Culebra Creek, after passing through the community, no longer reaches the Rio Grande because of water mining for agriculture in the southern part of the Valley.

  Thanks to Google Earth, you can swoop down from the sky on the wintry terrain and can vicariously travel the road between the morada in San Francisco and the Kingdom Hall in San Pedro. Golden willow trees, glowing at the branch ends where the new growth is hibernating, make halos of color in the fields. Shrubby red willows line the waterways, their swollen red fingers ready to burst into leaf. Occasionally you pass a decomposing building whose peeling skin reveals adobe bricks. Here’s T-ana’s Restaurant on the right, pink and brave, and always Mount Blanca dead ahead.

  There are about seven miles to cover between the stronghold of the penitentes in San Francisco and the meeting hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in San Pedro. Shonnie grew up between these two buildings. Like bookends, these two slim structures, the morada and the Kingdom Hall, enclosed Shonnie’s spiritual life, just as her DNA and her suffering body (genotype and phenotype) bracketed the course of her mortal life. Science makes pretty good descriptions of genes and bodies, the biological bookends, when they are looked at in isolation, but to cover all of the contingencies lying between the DNA and a particular outcome in the body—contingencies as crosshatched as Culebra’s canals—well, that’s another matter altogether.

  Modest on the outside but rebellious on the inside, the morada and the Kingdom Hall are like Shonnie herself when, to her doctors’ surprise, the young woman rejected conventional medical treatment. She was well aware of the risk to her life. What goes on inside a person making that choice? Years before, crying and holding her mother’s hand, Shonnie had walked out of the morada and into the cloister of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The historical and psychological distance between those two buildings can bring you close to understanding her identity, after which you have to let her free will take over. Even with so decisive a gene as 185delAG, it wasn’t predestined that Shonnie would die.

  Two events occurred in the mid-1840s that would lead to the morada and the Kingdom Hall, respectively. The first was the Mexican-American War. It transformed Hispanos from the masters of their Spanish Catholic realm into a racial and religious minority of the United States. As a consequence, the fraternity of penitentes became defensive and the moradas of New Mexico became fiercely clandestine sanctuaries of Catholic ritual. The second event was the Great Disappointment of 1844, which was a national event, or rather a nonevent. Evangelical Protestants were convinced that Jesus would return to earth on October 22 of that year, amid rising tribulation. When the Second Coming or Advent failed to take place, the Adventist movement in America splintered. Some of its branches petered out while others increased in energy, until the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect emerged in the twentieth century.

  The Mexican-American War (1846–48) was basically a landgrab by the stronger country, an exercise of Manifest Destiny. In the early 1800s, the Americans had arrived at the east front of the Sangre de Cristo range, first mountain men seeking furs, followed by traders who laid the Santa Fe Trail. In 1806, the first Anglo to penetrate the San Luis Valley, Zebulon Pike, he of Pike’s Peak fame, had been arrested and jailed by the Spaniards. But the Mexican government was accommodating to the foreigners, too accommodating, it would seem. The trigger for war was a dispute over Texas, which doesn’t bear recounting here.

  As is useful when conducting a war of expansion, the Americans felt morally and racially superior to their enemy. Even before the conflict, the Anglo traders on the Santa Fe Trail were dismayed and sometimes disgusted by the people they encountered. Bad biology appeared to have engendered bad behavior. The Hispanos, one trader wrote, were a “mongrel race . . . miserable in condition . . . despicable in morals.” Santa Fe, their squalid capital, was full of beggars and idlers. Even the nobility was dirty and didn’t seem to care. Hispano women merited kinder descriptions than the men, but their low virtue was hazardous in another respect. An American in 1850 observed: “Though smoking is repugnant to many ladies, it certainly does enhance the charms of the Mexican senoritas, who, with neatly rolled up shucks [corn-husk cigarettes] between coral lips, perpetrate winning smiles, their magically brilliant eyes the meanwhile searching one’s very soul. How dulcet-toned are their voices, which, siren-like, irresistibly draw the willing victim within the giddy vortex of dissipation!”

  The blending of races, the spectrum of skin color seething on the streets, excited both horror and fascination on the part of the Americans. W. H. H. Davis, the U.S. attorney for the new territory, noted: “The intermixture between the peasantry and the native tribes of Indians is yet carried on, and there is no present hope of the people improving in color. The system of Indian slavery which exists in the country conduces to this state of things . . . and thus a new stream of dark blood is constantly added to the current.” Davis reported that he met light-skinned Castilians, “as light and pure as the sons and daughters of the Anglo-Saxon race.” But when the “upper crust” of Taos society was pointed out to
him at a dance, he gibed that they were “well baked for upper crust, as a large majority of them were done very brown.”

  New Mexico became a living laboratory for working out nineteenth-century ideas about the human animal. Anthropologists believed that Europeans and Native Americans represented two of mankind’s aboriginal types, the latter having degenerated further from the ideal than the former. When two races so obviously discrepant in physical and mental capacity were merged, their offspring would have to be unstable. According to Types of Mankind, an 1854 treatise on race by Dr. J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, “Mexican soldiers present the most unequal characters that can be met with anywhere in the world. If some are brave, others are quite the reverse—possessing the basest and most barbarous qualities. This, doubtless, is a result, in part, of the crossings of the races.” Also, the Mexican skulls were said to be measurably smaller, a sign of inferiority. Wherever an intermediate race arose, the characteristics of the lower race usually dragged down those of the superior.

  Take the example of the mule, a familiar animal in New Mexico, a cross between a male donkey and a female horse. Mules were strong but sterile, which is what you would expect of an intermediate race. The mule’s sterility was backhanded proof of the integrity of the parental species, according to scientists of the day. The secondary race of people in New Mexico did not suffer from sterility, far from it, but there were indications that the hybrids were unhealthy. The genízaro Indians and mixed breeds at the bottom of the social ladder—the darkest people—seemed to be in the worst shape. The issue for race scientists was not nature versus nurture but the different natures of race, as if culture had nothing to do with a fallen state.

  When Anglos added their blood to New Mexico’s mixture, the result was not any nicer. J. Ross Browne, in his Adventures in the Apache Country: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora (1869), commented: “The worst of the whole combination of races is that which has the infusion of rascality in it from American sources. Mexican, Indian, and American blood concentrated in one individual makes the very finest specimen of a murderer, thief, or gambler ever seen on the face of the earth. Nothing in human form so utterly depraved can be found elsewhere.” Ironically, in accounts of this period, the Pueblo Indians come off as superior to the Mexicans and other half-breeds, since their blood was assumed to be pure (after centuries of cohabitation it could not have been).

  So the Americans did to the Hispanos what the Spaniards had done to the Indians—not to equate forms of oppression but to suggest that the Hispanos were put on the receiving end of history and experienced the sting of second-class citizenship. The casta system of Old New Mexico surely was racist, yet all members of the society bought into the hierarchy. Along comes a powerful foreign culture holding up its own mirror of racial ranking, and this mirror reveals ridiculous cracks in the Hispano class system. The españoles at the top, their threadbare honor mocked, made cringing shows of compliance to the new order, so the Americans in Santa Fe reported. The genízaros who were still at the bottom, Marianne Medina’s ancestors among them, retreated to the moradas.

  As Anglos saw it, the biological degeneration of New Mexicans was paralleled by a degeneration in religious practice. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather’s novel about the period, a character observes, “The old mission churches are in ruins. The few priests are without guidance or discipline. They are lax in religious observance, and some of them live in open concubinage.” Another character complains that the people are “full of devotion and faith, and it has nothing to feed upon but the most mistaken superstitions. They remember their prayers all wrong. They cannot read, and since there is no one to instruct them, how can they get it right?” U.S. Attorney Davis, a firsthand observer, was more blunt: “They have an abiding faith in saints and images, and with the mass of the inhabitants their worship appears no more than a blind adoration of these insensible objects.” Davis had to inform a local magistrate that citizens no longer could be prosecuted for witchcraft.

  But the contrary process, regeneration, might be effected in Hispanos as long as their blood held steady, i.e., by avoiding further miscegenation. Thus Davis concluded his 1857 book about New Mexico with the hope that this benighted people could be raised up by education and by exposure to the American system of justice and democratic principles. Independence, individualism, egalitarianism—all these traits might be taught to them. However patronizing, Davis held the progressive view, allowing a role for nurture alongside nature in human affairs.

  Cather’s 1927 novel about New Mexico was based on the true-life adventures of a cleric named Jean Baptiste Lamy. A French-born Jesuit, Lamy had been sent by Catholic authorities to reform the Church in Santa Fe. The primitive, hybrid faith created by the Franciscans and Indians would have to go. Lamy arrived in 1851 and got to work, and perhaps it was not coincidental that the San Luis Valley, 130 miles to the north, was settled at this time. As Cather noted, “In lonely sombre villages in the mountains the church decorations were more sombre, the martyrdoms bloodier, the grief of the Virgin more agonized, the figure of Death more terrifying.”

  Although long claimed by Spain and Mexico, the San Luis Valley had always been too dangerous for permanent settlement. It was, instead, a place for hunting, grazing, and trading with the Indians. The Valley was not safely inhabited until the U.S. Army neutralized the Utes and Jica-rilla Apaches.

  Just before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican government had made large grants of land in the southern part of the Valley to big developers. These were wealthy individuals who had pledged to recruit settlers and colonize the frontier. One such property was the Sangre de Cristo Grant, a million acres of mountain and prairie held by Charles (Carlos) Beaubien. The United States, on taking over the territory, agreed to honor the Mexican grants and prodded the owners to go ahead with their plans.

  In 1851, Hispano pobladores from Taos moved north of Costilla Creek and went over the divide into the drainage of Culebra Creek. (The 185delAG mutation went with them.) They scratched out their village plazas near the creek banks and dug acequias to catch the water meandering from la sierra. Their patron, Beaubien, had staked the settlers to livestock and supplies; they were promised they would earn deeds to their lots eventually. They also were given unfettered rights to hunt game and cut timber on the mountain. The terms of the development must have been attractive, because within ten years seventeen hundred people were living on the Sangre de Cristo Grant.

  Meanwhile, gold and silver strikes in the mountains around San Luis Valley brought an influx of Anglos from the East. They were miners, loggers, sheep and cattle ranchers, railroad builders, farmers—the restless resource-extraction team of the American West—but they concentrated their activities in the northern part of the Valley, not affecting Culebra or the Hispanos at first. Alamosa was founded and became a railway hub. Colorado Territory was carved out of the New Mexico and Utah Territories, its southern border hewing to the thirty-seventh parallel. The new border passed directly through the Hispano plazas of Costilla, New Mexico, and relegated the Culebra settlements to Colorado.

  Each village in Culebra had a holy guardian. La Plaza de San Francisco, established on the eponymous creek in 1853, took Saint Francis for its protector. The settlers built a low, flat-roofed, mud-and-wicker church, and soon afterward they built a morada. The original church of San Francisco is long gone, replaced by the spindly white structure described earlier. The first morada is gone too, but its replacement still stands and is older than the present church. Every church in the remote villages in the late nineteenth century had a morada attached to it. The morada watched over the church and its people, not in plain sight but partly cloaked on the outskirts of the village.

  Morada is, of course, synonymous with the penitentes. Who were these men? No feature of New Mexico history is more controversial than los hermanos penitentes. Their formal name, La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno,
means The Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene. In one sense they were no different from nineteenth century contemporaries like the Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Columbus. They were an all-male club that did charitable work in the community while keeping their internal operations secret. They settled disputes, looked after the sick, organized funerals, and raised money for the poor. But more than that, the penitentes sustained the religious life of the villages in the absence of priests. Their most prominent duty—which they never yielded to the Catholic reformers in Santa Fe—was to lead the annual Passion procession.

  On Good Friday in Holy Week, two groups of penitentes, called the Brothers of Blood and the Brothers of Light, would emerge from the shuttered morada of San Francisco. They would head down the road toward the church. The Brothers of Blood, who were the young initiates of the society, bare-chested and wearing black hoods, walked at the front of the procession. Several dragged crosses . . . one pulled a cart with the mannequin of Lady Death . . . the rest scourged their backs with rhythmic lashes, first over one shoulder, then the other, a score of whips cracking as one. The whips (disciplinas) were made from boiled yucca leaves, an Indian technique that made the leaves flexible but kept the edges sharp. Some of the young hermanos might have cholla cactus strapped to their backs, the spines digging in with each step. Next came the Brothers of Light, wearing white, the older men and officers of the society. Holding torches, they sang the albados, the slogging hymns of regret and penance. The whole village attended the pageant, falling into line as the brothers passed and then turning back from the church to the calvario, the hill above the morada, where a mock crucifixion would take place.