The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  As night crept up the mountains, the Passion ritual moved indoors for the climactic ceremony of tinieblas (darkness). It was the only time the public was invited into the morada. The elongated building had three rooms: on the left a chapel with a wooden altar; a central space where the brothers had their meals and socialized; and on the right a private room for rituals, the kiva, as it were, with a rounded fireplace in the corner. On this night the private room was locked; people took seats in the chapel and in the center room. A triangular-shaped candelabra provided the only light—six candles on each ascending leg of the triangle, to represent the twelve apostles, and two additional candles on the base, standing for the Holy Mother and Mary Magdalene. One by one, the candles were snuffed out to mark Christ’s drawn-out agony. The sound of the lashes and the crying of the albados were much louder when heard indoors.

  Los hermanos penitentes did not spring out of nowhere. Europe throughout the Middle Ages had roving societies of flagellants. A Portuguese traveler in Valladolid, Spain, in 1605 described a pageant of two thousand flagellants bleeding copiously as they paraded before the king. To whip yourself as Jesus was whipped represented an extreme trial of the flesh, the truest imitation of the Savior. The penitential societies were held at arm’s length by the Church, however. Catholic leaders recognized the risk of overdoing the pain for the holy pleasure of it. Saint John of the Cross called such practices spiritual gluttony. Saint Francis and Saint Teresa of Avila forbade their followers to mortify their bodies excessively. Occasional scourging was fine, but drawing blood gave asceticism a bad name. Fasting, mixing your food with ashes to dull the taste, exposing the body to cold and heat, feeling the rough wool habit or hair shirt (cilicio) against your skin—these ought to be sufficient daily reminders of the body’s sinfulness.

  Franciscan priests introduced corporal penance to New Mexico. The members of Juan de Oñate’s discovery party, marching north, are said to have flagellated themselves on Holy Thursday in 1598. But the organized lay brotherhoods didn’t appear on the landscape until the 1830s, after the withdrawal of the Spanish padres created a clerical vacuum in the villages. Unschooled and crude though they were, the penitentes performed a social service. They could be regarded as a normal extension of Hispano culture until the Americans came, and then, in the mirror held up by the gringos, they were turned into freaks. Prohibited by the bishop in Santa Fe from marching with their crosses or lashing themselves in public, the penitentes went underground. In private political protest, they seem to have stepped up their penances and also to have toughened the initiation rites for new members. It was rumored that they held secret crucifixions in the hills using real nails, not ropes.

  By the early twentieth century the New Mexico penitentes were part of the pulp fiction of the American West. Tourists came hoping to get a glimpse of their sensational rites. A 1936 B movie, The Lash of the Penitentes, showed a naked woman being whipped in a morada. Though it purported to be a documentary, the film exploited both racial and religious prejudices against Hispanos. “Wake up, America!” the scandalized narrator intoned. “Here in our own country we can see the very heart of Africa pounding against the ribs of the Rockies!”

  But after World War II, the melting pot of assimilation weakened the penitentes’ appeal. Hispano boys who had joined the army were embarrassed when they were asked to explain the scars on their backs. The Church made amends with the moradas, ending the sanctions, and women were allowed in as auxiliary members. Flagellation—the word itself went out of use, let alone the practice. From about three hundred brothers at its peak, the roll of the San Francisco morada shrank steadily, along with a decline in churchgoing everywhere. Thus tolerance, on the one hand, and an easing of devotion, on the other, normalized the penitentes and made them unexceptional figures in Culebra once again. Tepid Catholics such as Joe U. Medina became members, and his son Joseph, equally listless in his faith. As Maurice Fishberg might have said, the penitentes prospered best under the iron rule of isolation.

  In 2000, the San Francisco morada, in urgent need of repair, was added to the Colorado Register of Historic Properties. The State Historical Fund awarded a grant for interior and exterior restoration. An architect was hired, a new roof was put on, and the crumbling stucco was replaced by a mud-based plaster, such as would have been used in the nineteenth century. The restored building, painted brown, stands out from the hillside more than it ever used to. Things have really changed when you can ask a member of the brotherhood to show you into the morada and he cheerfully agrees to do it. With one or two exceptions—serious older guys who keep their mouths shut about their practices—the penitentes have been consigned to the specimen jars of history.

  Shonnie and Iona squeezed themselves next to Marianne in the crude chapel. When the last candle went out and the room was black, a voice said, All living and dead come forth to join us for the love of God. Men stamped their feet, pounded the walls, and dragged chains across the floor, invoking the earthquake and the chaos that broke out in Jerusalem when Jesus gave up the ghost. A demon materialized, spinning his matraca in the beam of a flashlight. That noise, a grinding thing—it was horrible, said Marianne. My girls were screaming.

  When it was over, someone lit the candles again. Filing out of the morada, people smiled as they do after a good performance, and readied their spirits for Easter, but Marianne and her kids had had enough of Catholic ritual. Without knowing it yet, they were headed for the Kingdom Hall.

  Protestant missionaries first came to New Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist, they went door-to-door distributing Spanish Bibles to families who had never owned one, dodging gunfire from Catholics on a couple of occasions. The Presbyterians were the most active in seeking Hispano converts, and they counted some success even among the penitentes. Anglo missionaries in the Southwest spoke scornfully of Catholicism and its gilt-edged twisting of scripture. Bishop Lamy in Santa Fe countered that the Catholic Church had never barred its people from owning Bibles, but that indeed it was forbidden to interpret the Old and New Testaments without proper guidance.

  Protestantism made small, tenacious inroads in the Valley and along Culebra Creek. In the 1890s, a few families in the hamlet of San Pablo flipped to Presbyterianism and were ostracized by the Catholic families in San Pedro, on the other side of the creek. The cemetery shared by San Pedro and San Pablo was fenced down the middle in order to keep the deceased of the two churches apart. The same split occurred at the cemetery in Los Fuertes, a few miles down the road. Other Protestant groups came and roosted on the dry prairie west of Culebra. The Mormons established farming towns at Manassa, Sanford, and Eastdale. A colony of Adventists built the town of Jarosa nearby.

  The Protestants were by nature schismatic. Where Saint Teresa and the Catholic reformers took their disagreements with the Church inside themselves, retreating to the personal moradas of their faith, Protestant reformers moved in the opposite direction, wrenching free of the gravity of Rome and subdividing again and again. Paradoxically, each far-out faction claimed to have reverted to the elemental core of Christianity. No high priests were necessary for understanding the Bible, no intermediating saints—on that all Protestants were united—but the Bible had so many facets that every side could find verses supporting its own particular doctrine.

  On the question of the end times or last days, Protestants could be sorted between progressives and conservatives. The Presbyterian missionaries who were saving Hispano souls in San Luis Valley believed in human progress in anticipation of the Millennium. They believed that the world could and should be improved before the predicted Second Coming of Christ. Indeed, America was the very place on earth, God’s chosen place, for making society right. This optimistic vision of human regeneration did not worry very much about time or deadlines. A thousand years might see the job done, after which Christ would descend as icing on the cake.

  T
he Adventists and other fundamentalist Protestants were pessimistic about the human species. They thought that the human races were immutable and that striving for social progress was pointless. When Jesus came, which would be soon, there would be Armageddon; the battle and fire would take care of the improvement that was needed. Believers of this stripe had gotten over their disappointment that Christ had not returned in 1844. After consulting the Bible and finding errors in the previous calculations, the Adventists pinned their hopes on 1874. Let down a second time, they made a technical fix: Christ had returned, only invisibly. Now they needed to know, When would Armageddon begin?

  A self-taught preacher named Charles Taze Russell split from the Adventists. He and his adherents called themselves Bible Students. Parsing the Books of Daniel, Revelation, and others, Russell figured a date of 1914 for the end of the present world and the inauguration of the next. World War I made a good start on his prediction, but then things on earth stalled. Russell died, part of his following peeled off, and the remaining Bible Students reorganized themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses assigned Christ’s invisible return to 1914. Avoiding further forecasts, they have been on hold for the main events of Armageddon ever since. Certainly the twentieth century provided plenty of rumblings.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for knocking on your door unexpectedly, and the fact that they are dressed formally and outnumber you two to one puts you on notice immediately, as if a pair of IRS agents had announced a surprise spiritual audit. Scrubbed and self-assured, they seek to engage you, and if necessary debate you, on urgent matters of the Bible. They don’t get mad if you demur but will back off politely with the intention to try you again on another day. Well, a look might pass across one of their faces, suggesting, Don’t say I didn’t warn you. As the Gospel advises, they shake the dust off their feet and walk on to the next house.

  Though sometimes lumped with them, Jehovah’s Witnesses disapprove of charismatic or Pentecostal Protestants because of their sweaty emotion and born-again spectacles, their prostrate crying to Jesus for forgiveness and succor. No, for a Jehovah’s Witness the correct course of religious experience is to coolly, closely study the Bible and then live by its lessons. They study with the aid of their monthly magazine, The Watchtower. The topics of the articles in The Watchtower—Jesus, global warming, the Internet, personal problem-solving, the ancient Israelites, Satan, health, “Marriage and Parenthood in This Time of the End,” maintaining one’s integrity, the fate of the dead after they die, the current Witness ministry in South Korea, etc.—have a timeless, almost dreamy variety to them. A quaint jumble is made of the past, present, and apocalyptic future. In the illustrations, King David, Paul the Apostle, and other well-muscled, kindly figures of antiquity rub shoulders with everyday moderns like you and me and also with denizens of the coming Paradise, all looking pretty much the same except for their dress.

  The information and advice given in The Watchtower are meant to be so comprehensive that you do not need to read anything else, other than the Bible itself, of which the Witnesses have made their own translation. Adding to the sense of anachronism, their Bible is divided between the Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures and the Christian Greek Scriptures rather than the Old and New Testaments. The Watchtower treats the Bible not as a Judeo-Christian narrative but as a grab bag of quotations retrodictively confirming the Witnesses’ views of the universe. Learning at the meetings isn’t about sifting and weighing ideas but rather the memorization of talking points, led by an elder.

  The whirling souls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses arrived in Culebra during the mid-1970s. Parking on the side of the road and walking systematically from house to house, they stuck out like sore thumbs in the community. Joseph Medina didn’t like to see them; he chased them away from his door. He was downright mean to them, recalled Marianne. The young couple had returned to Culebra following Joseph’s stint of playing rock music in Denver. With their two little girls, the Medinas expected to resume their lives as Catholics. It’s a tradition, said Joseph. I figured, I was raised in it, my kids will be raised in it. I was content with being a Catholic.

  Marianne didn’t care for the Witnesses because most of them were white. As a rule she wouldn’t permit Anglos inside her house. On the other hand, she considered Catholicism a religion that had been forced on the Native Americans. We lived the name but didn’t believe strongly, she said of her Catholic Indian relatives. We went along because we didn’t want to be put down. Since they had been back in Culebra, Joseph’s father had been after the family to show up at the San Francisco morada on Good Friday. To keep the peace, we went, said Marianne, grimacing at the memory. That was the only time.

  About then, a Hispano family that had moved to another state and converted to the Witnesses decided to return home. The family befriended Chavela Medina, Marianne’s sister-in-law. Chavela started studying the Bible with them. And then I started studying, said Marianne. I knew the penitentes weren’t right, and I knew the Catholics weren’t right. But I was not easily convinced.

  Marianne fact-checked the Witnesses’ Bible against the standard versions she found in the library. She was happy to discover that God indeed had a name, Yahweh aka Jehovah. She was able to show her skeptical husband that the passages highlighted in The Watchtower were also in the Catholics’ Bible—yet the priests ignored these verses. Joseph began to investigate the Bible on his own accord. I found that hellfire isn’t in it, he said. I found that the saints aren’t in it. Here we are calling priests Father—that’s not in it either. Joseph went to the priest in San Luis and got him to admit that God’s name was Jehovah.

  One of the knocks on the penitentes in the nineteenth century was that New Mexicans earned the right to do whatever they pleased for eleven months of the year in exchange for whipping themselves during Lent. When Joseph examined his own behavior, he saw something similar. For Catholics it’s OK to do bad things and then confess to priests, he said. I was trying to get away with what I could. I didn’t care. It’s OK to cheat a little, lie a little. It’s all right to take things if you have to. It’s all right because God will forgive you. You can get drunk once in a while. . . .

  On October 18, 1980, Joseph and Marianne Medina and a dozen other converts from around the state were baptized in a high school swimming pool in Pueblo, Colorado. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had rented the pool for the afternoon. Shonnie, who was ten, and Iona, seven, peeked through the slats of the fence and giggled at their father’s skinny white calves. The two girls had never seen Joseph’s bare legs before. It was a modest, earnest ceremony, the men as well as the women wearing T-shirts over their bathing suits as they were dunked in the water.

  Before long, Joseph’s sisters Chavela, Lupita, Louisa, and Wanda also were baptized, along with their mother, Dorothy, and two of the brothers. One of us learned and we tried to teach the others, said Lupita. When I saw it was true, I thought it would help all of us. I could see the difference right away, she continued. You read it and you applied it. The Witnesses are family-oriented. You feel part of a family. Lupita contrasted the warmth of belonging to the Witnesses with the hypocrisy of her childhood Catholic worship. I remember what it was like, sitting in church, she said. The empty words, the requests for money. We can’t afford shoes, how can we give to the church? In the pews you hear, Look at who’s here! And, Look at what they’re wearing! It gives me chills to think of it.

  But Culebra’s reaction to the Medinas’ conversion was hostile, a reprise of the reaction to the Anglo missionaries. A buddy of Joseph and Marianne’s, a former bandmate who lived close by, blasted music at their house, taunting them with songs the band used to play. When Iona’s horse died, apparently poisoned, and Joseph’s dog was shot, Marianne was certain it was because of their conversion. The priest took it badly too, and publicly washed his hands of the family. It didn’t help that Joseph and Marianne turned around and attempted to convert their neighbors. Going door-to-do
or with copies of The Watchtower, they half-exulted as the doors were slammed in their faces. We were zealots when we worked La Valley, Marianne admitted. We needed to calm down.

  By the mid-1980s, there were enough Jehovah’s Witnesses in and around Culebra to warrant the construction of a Kingdom Hall. A site was found in San Pedro, near San Luis. The men of the congregation poured a concrete slab foundation, and then, with the help of dozens of Witnesses summoned from outside the Valley, they built the Kingdom Hall all at once, as in a barn raising. It’s done fast to show unity, Marianne explained. Everyone has to help. The frame was up in twenty-four hours, the crews working around the clock in spite of snow. Teams of volunteers were organized for drywall, painting, carpet-laying, cooking, errands, etc. Shonnie and Iona helped by passing out snacks. The Medina household was full of people. The visitors slept in campers or RVs parked in the local Witnesses’ yards. When the priest came by the site to look, he shook his head ruefully, according to Marianne, saying, Our members should be this united.

  At intervals as the Kingdom Hall materialized, someone would snap a photo of a boy standing in front of the project. He held the large wooden hands of a clock, as if to warn people that the end was near. It was, in a benign sense, because the building was completed in just three days, inside and out. The stop-action timekeeper was Michael, Shonnie’s future husband. The two would marry here seven years later. The first wedding was that of Shonnie’s aunt Wanda to Bill Kramer, in the summer of 1985.

  The San Luis Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses sits back from the road, tucked behind a gas station and liquor store, seven miles from the morada. You might pass it a hundred times without seeing it. The Kingdom Hall does the morada one better on the question of windows. Where the morada’s are heavily shuttered, never opened, suggesting somber and mysterious rites, the whitewashed Kingdom Hall has no windows at all, owing to concerns about vandalism. Yet inside there is plenty of illumination, and cheerful pink walls, and rows of comfortable seating. In place of an altar or cross is a soaring mural of alpine scenery, set off by vases of silk flowers. There are no images of Christ or holy personages. The Witnesses shun religious icons because the Bible bans idolatry. Even the Cross they deny because they maintain that Jesus was sacrificed on a pole or stake.