A Garden of Lettuce

We live in El Paso, the Desert of Chihuahua, so all winter  long we eat fresh lettuce from Lee's lettuce garden. It's not a big space--maybe 4'x12'--half of which Lee uses for her lettuce. I double-dig beforehand. A manly chore. Then Lee plants seeds. A mixture of seeds from Cook's Gardens and Seed Savers heirloom seeds. The ritual begins sometimes late September. Maybe October. The seeds sprout. "My little babies," she calls them. Grandkids gather around to watch and help. She waters the garden, she tends the tiny plants, and in three or four weeks she's thinning and pulling leaves from the larger plants. She's putting little plants in our store-bought lettuce salads. The plants thrive in the cool desert air. If the weather promises a freeze, she's out there laying sheets over the bed. Soon we're eating salads with lettuce totally from the garden. Fresh lettuce during the Christmas holidays is exotic and delicious. Lee makes a wonderful salad--feta cheese, red onion, red bell peppers, salt and pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar. We feast on salads. November. December. January. This last January we went off to Boston for a conference. We figured the garden would be gone when we got back and Lee was already planning what seeds she would be planting to get us to April. But January was peculiar. A very wet month. We came home to a flourishing garden. Now the heat is coming, the hot winds of spring, and Lee has an abundance of lettuce. The lettuce won't last much longer. We've not bought lettuce from the store in months. She making gifts of lettuce to neighbors and friends. Our evening salads get larger and larger. Tonight again we feasted on a wonderful salad. Such a pleasure. Below is a poem I wrote several years ago about Lee's garden.

● ● 

This morning I made love with the lettuce picker

Every year the lettuce picker plants her lettuce in October.
Lettuce loves October in the Chihuahua Desert.
October passes and November comes.
The lettuce grows leafy and happy.
The lettuce picker slips out to the garden in the morning.
I will not tell you how old I am.
I will not tell you how old she is.
But her legs are white, her rear end
is clad in purple pajamas
and is raised like a flag planted
in the dirt
for the preservation of love.
Today is Sunday, the day of Sabbath.
A day to remember ourselves.
A day to worship all that is holy.
This is what we do when we make love.

● ●

Reading this poem after all of this time I think of Judson Crews. Just yesterday I saw a picture of him on Larry Goodell's Facebook page. Good old Judson. He's alive and still doing a little bit of kicking. Living up in Taos. Women around him, of course. An ancient man now. He certainly understands what wild and beautiful stuff can happen between a man and a woman when they are together harvesting lettuce from the garden.

SUSAN KLAHR, ARTIST

"I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on."

--Susan Klahr

Artist Susan Klahr died before dawn New Year’s morning. For the last several years, she had been struggling with cancer, and finally the disease asked her to cross to the other side. She is survived by her husband David and her two sons Sito and Arlo.

Susan has long been an important force within the intellectual and artistic community that makes El Paso/Juárez unique along the U.S./Mexico Border and in the United States. Her art spoke of the world she witnessed before her, especially the people that populated her imagination, people who in her paintings radiate a spiritual presence through Susan's imagination. A few years ago Lee and I asked Susan, because of her own Jewish immigrant heritage, to paint the cover image for the YA novel Double-Crossing by Eve Tal that Cinco Puntos was publishing. (Last year, during her illness, she painted the cover for its sequel, Cursing Columbus.) During our conversations about the novel, we expressed our admiration for the two paintings I’ve pasted above, Celia and Rose. [Excuse the poor snapshot quality of the images. I took the photographs this morning inside the office with my little Nikon.] One day she showed up with the paintings and asked us to hang them in our office. She wanted people to see them, she didn’t want to roll them up and put them in storage. They’ve been on loan to us ever since.

The paintings are really one piece--Celia is Susan’s grandmother, who died shortly before Susan was born, and Rose is her mother. Rose died when Susan was 14. Susan painted black and white death masks of her grandmother and mother from old snapshots, she then dressed herself in their clothes and was photographed holding the masks in front of her face. Then she painted portraits of herself as her grandmother Celia and her mother Rose. We’ve been lucky here in the offices at Cinco Puntos to see these paintings everyday and to tell admiring visitors about them. Her illness made these paintings even more poignant and powerful, revealing how our presence continues to live in our families and in the work that we do.

Below, beneath the close-ups of Celia and Rose, are the inscriptions that Susan wrapped in the blue border around each of the paintings. And below those is the story of her grandfather Max and grandmother Celia and mother Rose that Susan wrote for the display of the paintings.

●

CELIA

I never saw her.

The one of five sisters.

The one that Max picked.

The mother of Rose.

ROSE

It's a painting of my mother.

How I never saw her.

She's in my body

and I was in her body.

●

THE STORY OF MAX MY GRANDFATHER

AND CELIA AND ROSE

Whenever I think about telling a story, I think about Max. Max was my grandfather and he had one of the two bedrooms in our apartment and he had a big steamer trunk in there. When he opened the trunk for me it was like magic. It was like this… Once upon a time there was a strong young man named Max and he lived in Chernobyl, near Kiev, in the Ukraine. He called it Russia and he had brothers and sisters, and the youngest sister, in the photo he always showed me, so many years later, looked out at me across time, across the ocean with eyes so large, so luminous (like my son Arlo’s) and hair so black, I wished I could have known her but Max came by himself with his trunk; he braved the unknown alone. He was young, 17 or 18. He made his way across Europe to England or Scotland, speaking not a word but Yiddish, and got on a freighter or a steamer or something and his cousin Joe met him in Philadelphia and gave him a banana and he started eating it with the skin on and what a joke! You greenhorn! Laughed his cousin and Max loved to tell it over and over. He went all the way back a year or so after and came back to America and that was the very last he ever saw any of his family again.

In Chernobyl, Max’s father was the town butcher. I would see them in my mind wandering over hill and green fields, going to neighboring towns to do business. Back there was green and wintry snow and the old life and here (he loved America) was opportunity and no pogroms. Everything was Yiddish, he didn’t need English to make good--leave that to his children. And he was strong and handsome and tall. His shoes were size thirteen and he worked hard. He was young and he worked in a butcher store in New York and upstairs from the store lived a mother with five daughters and this mother came from the old country by herself with her five daughters and she was tough and she was strong and nobody seemed to know how many husbands she had and what happened to them. Her daughters all looked different and she lived to at least one hundred years old and she was my mother’s grandma and she was bubbe to me.

But Max was handsome and he visited upstairs and they would giggle and talk and there were five girls: Celia, Clara, Fanny, Esther and Becky. Clara was the oldest. When I knew her she was a big, square woman with legs that looked like tree stumps to me. Fanny I never knew. In the pictures, she looked thoughtful, exotic. Becky never married. She was fussy and critical, the corners of her mouth turned down. Esther looked like a shiksa. We thought she was pretty. Not dark and mysterious and beautiful like Celia but she was pretty and she put rouge on her cheeks and she was always smiling and kind and generous.

One day the Mother looked at robust Max and put her hands on her hips and said “enough! Which one do you mean?” And Max picked Celia, the most beautiful of her sisters. And she had deep eyes and dark hair and a delicate face and he courted her. So he married Celia and he worked hard and he opened his own butcher shop in the Bronx and he had his picture taken behind the counter and he’s big and strong and proud. In America. And Max and Celia had a daughter and they named her Rose. Rose, an American name for an American girl. Rochel was her Jewish name.

Rose was my mother and this story goes on and on and on. Celia died shortly before I was born and Rose died when I was fourteen years old. I lived with three men, my father, my brother, and my grandfather. It was amazing for me to put on the faces of Celia and Rose: to feel them in my very being. I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on.

--Susan Klahr

PLAYBOY does El Paso

Luis Alberto Urrea's article about El Paso is in the November issue of Playboy and it’s now on the newsstands. From what we hear, the issue is destined to be one of Playboy's most read issues because Marge Simpson is the cover girl. It's good PR for El Paso. Nationally, El Paso is usually dissed by the media. People wonder why we live here. How come Cinco Puntos is here? In the 1970s when Lee and I first moved from Albuquerque south in search of a job, we asked friends where we should live, El Paso or Las Cruces. “Oh,” they said, wrinkling up their noses like they caught the whiff of something spoiled, “Las Cruces. You don’t want to live in El Paso.” (Why that is / is a whole other subject.) Anyway, Luis’ piece will help people begin to think differently about El Paso. And people (yeah, yeah, 90% are men) do READ Playboy. There are things to do, places to go, people to see. Yes, Juárez is a few minutes away across the river, its suffering remains in our thoughts and prayers, we worry about friends and families, the narco-wars in the recesses of our dreams, but here in El Paso is great music, a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. It's the paradox that Luis was commissioned to write about.

Luis stayed with Lee and me during his visit. I drove him around some during the day, historian David Romo did the same and daughter Susie Byrd took him out for some nite-time excursions around downtown and the Central Side (as opposed to the East Side and the West Side and the North East--El Paso enjoys its multiplicities). I wrote two blognotes here and here about his visit.

Odd thing is that the piece has created a little political controversy in the parochial parts of the El Paso psyche. The reason: Susie is District 2 Representative on the City Council, and her good friend County Commissioner Veronica Escobar made a cameo appearance in the article because she joined Susie on a night-time excursion. Of course they had fun. Susie and Vero, both known for their progressive straightforward politics, are fun to be around. They joke and riff and laugh loudly and they dance. Their faces light up with happiness. Luis fit right in. No wonder, like the rest of us, he loves the fronterizo sounds of the band Radio La Chusma. He gave La Chusma big kudos in his piece. Indeed, he gave kudos to the vibrant rasquache energy of El Paso. In a letter to me he said the Playboy editors wanted him to make the piece meaner, they wanted him to put some diss into his language. But no, he wanted his writing to churn up some love for El Paso. [He was disappointed when the editors chopped his paean to Papa Burgers on Piedras Street.] So he was dumbfounded when a few of the city’s radiomouths started squabbling and bloviating and throwing mud at him and Susie and even Vero. Luckily for me I escaped the onslaught, probably because I’m only a poet and publisher, two occupations that are considered inconsequential among the blabbering class.

Oh, well. Playboy is making some El Paso bucks. I went to the Westside Barnes & Noble and bought three copies for our archives. The clerk told me he was selling them like hot cakes.

MAKE TACOS NOT WAR
Self-portrait with Luis at the Smeltertown Cemetary

George Carrizal, 1945-2009

El Paso artist George Carrizal is dead. David Fleet called me up last Wednesday to tell me. “He was my friend and once he was my lover who I talked to every night. He cared for me and worried about me until the very end.” Artist Cesar Ivan put together a wonderful blog of photographs and paintings to honor George and David wrote a moving tribute to his dead friend which he read at George’s funeral yesterday (Saturday, 10/11/09). This is an act of re-membering in the old sense--putting a life back together in one’s memory, in the collective memory.

Youtubing Lee & Me: Literary El Paso

Marcia Daudistel has edited LITERARY EL PASO for the TCU Press Series which features the literary traditions of Texas cities. I promise you: El Paso's literary history can stand up to that of any city in Texas. LITERARY EL PASO will include John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Dagoberto Gilb, Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez, Rick DeMarinis, Denise Chavez and many many others. It's a humongous book (600-pages plus)--at $30 cheap for its size--and will be available at the end of this month. Lee contributed a story, "When He Is 37" from her collection My Sister Disappear and I have two poems, "The Gavachos in the Photograph" (The Price of Doing Business in Mexico) and "One Way for Middle-Aged Persons to Meditate" (Get Some Fuses for the House). Marcia and El Paso Magazine asked us to make youtube short videos as part of the promotion. If you're in the neighborhood, Barnes & Noble on the Westside will be having an event on October 24th, 4pm, celebrating the arrival of the book. Below are the videos. Lee only reads the first section of her story, and I read "The Gavachos in the Photograph." If you're reading this on FACEBOOK, which doesn't download video from Blogger, click here for Lee's performance and here for mine.





By the way, the photograph at the top (also in the video) is by Pedro Rueles Alvarez. Here's the note in the back of the book about the protographs: "Pedro Ruelas Alvarez, a street photographer, took the photograph of Lee and me sitting in the corner booth by the front window of the famous Martino’s Restaurant on Avenida Juárez just on the other side of the 'free bridge.' We were living in Las Cruces at the time, and we had no idea that we would ever move to El Paso. Ruelas, who charged us three dollars for the photograph, is now dead, but many of the waiters--including my favorite, Moisés II, a dead–ringer for Peter Lorre--are still there. They all make exquisite martinis right at your table while you sit and watch." Now Moises II is no longer there, and with the insane violence of the drug wars keeping the paseños away from Juarez, Martino's is hanging on by the slenderest of threads.

Where was the Drug Czar? Where was the Border Czar?

Drug Czar: Gil Kerlikowske

Alan Bersin: Border Czar

Yeah, where were they? We know they weren't in El Paso Monday and Tuesday, September 21st and 22nd [See Footnote]. That's when the "Global Public Policy Forum" convened to discuss the U.S. War on Drugs 1969-2009. Yes, 2009 is not only the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, it's also the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs. If I didn't enjoy irony, life in the real world would be a lot more boring. The War on Drugs, of course, has failed miserably. In El Paso we only have to walk down the street and cross a concrete ditch of a river over into our sister city of Juárez to know this is a fact. 3200 people have been killed over there in the last 20 months as the El Paso/Juárez Cartel battles it out with el Chapo's Sinoloa Cartel. The forum was arranged in a unique collaboration between academia--led by Drs. Kathleen Staudt, Josiah Heyman, Howard Campell of UTEP and many others--and the city of El Paso led by City Councilperson Beto O'Rourke. The El Paso City Council, you might remember, created a national buzz earlier in the year when it unanimously resolved to ask for a national open and honest discussion about the drug war. Although vetoed by Mayor John Cook with a number of frivolous charges, that resolution and its veto was the stimulus for the El Paso Forum.

The speakers and panels, for the most part, were interesting and very well-informed, and they came from Mexico and the U.S., from the academic, media, political and legal communities. The gist of most of their talks were--as reformed drug warrior Terry Nelson kept hammering at--was that the huge problems caused by the sale, the use and addiction to illegal drugs (everything from the cartels and the costs of drug interdiction) was not the drugs themselves, but the prohibition of those drugs. Hello! The one naysayer to that point of view was Anthony Placido, the Chief of Intelligence of the Drug Enforcement Administration. His speech on Tuesday was compelling simply because it was full of fear-mongering (full of horrific show and tell of dead bodies and brains with holes in them) and faulty logic. The job of the "state," as he kept referring to the government, was security, and the state had to balance its perceived notion of security against civil rights. Very Cheneyesque.

Anthony Placido: Chief of Intelligence, DEA

Actually, I was not going to mention Placido's talk in this brief description, but Tuesday night I heard a chilling story from a high school teacher in the El Paso Independent School District. He was in class, getting ready to give out a test, when police officers arrived at the door of his classroom with drug-sniffing dogs. They ordered all of the students out of the class and into the hall way where they were lined up against the walls while the dogs searched the room for drugs. Like I say, I was horrified. This is Big Brother scary kind of stuff and it's certainly not the way to go about teaching kids to be open-minded and curious about their lives and the world in which they live. I do not understand why the EPISD, the school administrators, the teacher's union or a group of parents have not loudly protested this invasion of the high school. Meanwhile, as was pointed out during a number of the forum panels, it's easier for students to buy marijuana out on the streets than it is to buy alcohol.

Please, Mr. Placido, sit down, take a deep breath and smell the roses. We need to inform you that the drug war has been lost. Not to worry. The cartels have made enough money so they will not go away. There will be plenty for you to do.

Oh, well. I'm told that soon the whole forum will be on-line and I will put links up to the various panels and discussions. You'll be able to be the judge. In the meantime, I'll list several of the on-line resources that speak for some of the speakers, plus newspapertree.com's article linking to some of the many national and internation media articles arising from the forum--

The newspaper tree link. Also, there are a number of other articles there about the forum as well as other pieces about the drug war and life on the frontera in genera.

Judge Jim Gray, a Republican judge from Orange County, gave one of the most compelling speeches. He didn't break any new ground. He simply stated his own history of realizing that the drug war wasn't working and his journey of research to write his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed. He could have been talking to the Chamber of Commerce or to a religious congregation and his speech would have been the same--full of common sense and honest.

Terry Nelson, a tall gangly ex-DEA agent, spoke with the grit and humor of a guy who has been in the trenches on the other side and realizes he's doing the wrong thing. He's on the board of LEAP, aka Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He's a fun guy to listen to. He came to El Paso earlier in the year to lobby the city council members to stand up to Mayor Cook's veto. Four did (one of whom was daughter Susie Byrd), four didn't. Oh well. Terry Nelson is the kind of guy you'd like to have over simply to listen to his stories.

Ethan Nadelmann founded and is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Ethan is a drug policy savant, the kind of guy you don't want to be on a panel with because he knows the answers to most all questions, and he answers them with wit and enthusiasm. The Drug Policy Alliance is hosting its annual International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Albuquerque, November 12-14. It should be a good event. The times, as Bobby D used to sing, are a changing.

Congratulations to UTEP and to the City of El Paso for hosting this event. It made us proud. Below is a trailer to the conference, but if you are on facebook reading this, then follow this youtube link.



Footnote. I should also note that a number of elected officials did not show their faces or send representatives. I saw six City Council members there sometime during the two days (Carl Robinson and Rachel Quintana were no shows). Mayor Cook spoke at the beginning and his assistant Robert Andrade was helping organize during both days, County Attorney Jose Rodriguez spoke on one of the panels and attended several discussion, Congressman Silvestre Reyes sent a representative, likewise State Senator Eliot Shapleigh. It would have been nice to see our District Attorney Jaime Esparza, somebody from the police administration, somebody from the Sherriff's office. The Governor and Texas Senators should not be expected to attend because...well, somehow El Paso is not really part of Texas. Why? I don't know.

Sunday Morning El Paso Texas

Sunday Morning in Sunset Heights,
A Discarded Rose

El Paso & Juárez Sunday Morning
from the little park at the top of Scenic drive

Sunday mornings, when I have the chance, I ride my bike from the Cinco Puntos Press National Headquarters (as John Byrd calls it) through downtown and up through Sunset Heights and Kern Place and across Scenic Drive which skirts around the southern edge of the Franklin Mountains. The mountains on the other side are the Sierra de Juárez. The Rio Grande (aka Rio Bravo) cuts through the two ranges of mountains. Hence, El Paso, the Pass. It's a beautiful ride. CPP is a few blocks from the tall buildings on the eastern edge of downtown. If you look closely between the clumps of buildings you can see one of the bridges that crosses into Juárez, but besides and a few other telltale signs recognizable only by folks who live here it seems to be one city. It is one city. A divided city. This side and that side. They say the same thing on the other side. But they say it Spanish.

And it's harder and harder to go back and forth.

Round 2: Juarez/EP versus Luis Urrea @ Monument Marker #1

Self-portrait with Luis Urrea at Monument Marker #1

Please visit Round 1, my August 18 blog note about Luis Urrea's visit to El Paso, so that this will make a bit more sense.

Yes, this is the U.S./Mexico Border. It's the first marker set down to delineate the U.S/Mexico Border as established by the 1854 Treaty of Mesilla.) Behind us is where Francisco Madero established La Casita Gris as the capital of the Revolutionary Govermnent. In 1911 he and his little army crossed the Rio Grande (aka el Rio Bravo) and established his revolutionary government to do battle with the armies of the dictator Porfirio Diaz. It was here Pancho Villa, the Italian Garibaldi, Pascual Orozco and others sat and smoked and made plans with the little Madero¹. In the clump of salt cedar trees, you can see a bust of Madero.

To get there, we drove past two Border Patrol vans. One on east side of the river, then crossed the brick company bridge and came along the levee road where another BP agent inside his van asked what we were doing and told us to be careful. We saw pickups pulled up to the banks of the river and Mexican families swimming, having picnics, a few men hovering near the dam that crosses the river, waiting for a chance to slip undetected into El Norte.



Mexican families swimming in the Rio Bravo.
Monument Marker #1 is truly a sacred spot. A contradiction of everything you read about in the newspapers or see on the TV about the U.S./Mexico Border. A few miles from the downtowns of El Paso and Juárez you can actually step across the border here. You can step into Mexico like 9/11 and the great immigration scare never happened. But very few people from El Norte visit it. Maybe they believe everything they read in those newspaper. And, oddly enough, fewer still write much about it. I think most of us want to protect it from the hideous border fence that the federal government put up. I am hesitant about bringing attention to this surreal place, but as the nation's maniacal fear about the border and Mexico continues to grow like kudzu, I'm starting to think it's best people know about it. We need to protect that small open piece of land between two cities, between two states and between two countries. There are no fences here. If a secular place can be holy, then this is a holy place.

And most importantly--geologically and historically--this is the place where the Rio Grande cuts through the mountains (hence, El Paso, or The Pass) and heads east toward the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know why the feds skipped the Monument Marker #1 Park and the Monte Cristo Rey which abuts it when they built their fence. Maybe they too recognized it's a special place in the local and national psyches of both nations. I doubt it.

The beast doesn't seem to have an imagination.

[¹The photograph of Orozco, Baniff, Villa and Garibaldi is found at the Library of Congress FLICKR site here.]

Dreaming a Flat Bridge between Juárez and El Paso

Since Luis Urrea's visit to El Paso, I got sidetracked and I find myself moving around the furniture in my imagination about El Paso and Juárez. That's how I found this postcard tucked into our digital files for David Romo's Ringside Seat to a Revolution. How charming and idyllic it is, so much so it drips with the real blood of irony in comparing to what we have now. It's true, back in the day, the bridge between El Paso and Juárez was flat [*see note], and the Rio Bravo (aka, Rio Grande) was a common resource, certainly not a fenced and heavily guarded dividing line between El Norte and El Sur. Then in the early 60s the Kennedy Administration brokered the Chamizal Treaty which diverted the river into a concrete ditch. It also moved the border at the downtown bridge a hundred yards or so north, over which some pendejo engineer designed, and the feds built, a three story tall bridge. It's meaning was simple--divide one city from the other. These decisions, made in DC and DF, radically altered not only the river, but also south downtown El Paso, especially around the Segundo Barrio and Chihuahuita Barrio. And over the years since the 60s the culture and the politics of the two cities has changed dramatically. It was slow change at first, but then in the mid-90s to now, the change became accelerated. The border on the U.S. side has become a military camp for a number of federal agencies, each elbowing more and more space for themselves, fewer and fewer people from the U.S. go back and forth to enjoy families and friends and entertainment to simply enjoy Mexico, and illegal drugs and immigration have become essential cash industries for the Mexican economy. And so how do we reverse this insanity? How do we make our bridge flat again?

First thought, best thought: Rewrite the U.S. drug laws; remove the capitalistic incentive from the sale of marijuana, heroin and cocaine; and treat addiction as a sickness, not as a crime. But you say this to the bureaucrats in D.C., they just talk gobbley-gook, then they turn around and show you their fat asses. I'm a poet and I should be able to say this better, but, damnit, as I write this, it's Friday afternoon, and I'm tired of the insanity I see.

Insanity like a three-story bridge that should be a flat bridge.

●●

[**NOTE: Thanks to Roberto Camp who a long time ago explained to me that the building of that monstrosity of a bridge was a tipping point in the history of these two sister cities.]

Round 1: Juárez / El Paso Riddle vs Luis Alberto Urrea

"Juárez No.1" A paper mache piñata by Abel Saucedo
In an exhibition of his work at the El Paso, Downtown Library
Juárez No.1 refers to ongoing drug war and murders.
For more information about Saucedo's work, see this article

Open up the El Paso Times most days--first section, page 6 or 7, you'll read an article like the one below about the on-going narco wars going on down the hill and across the river in Juárez from where Lee and I live.

Bodies of five men found in Juárez
By Daniel Borunda / El Paso Times
Posted: 08/05/2009 04:08:36 PM MDT

The bodies of five men, one of whom was decapitated, were found in a parked sport utility vehicle Wednesday morning in Juárez, Chihuahua state police said.

The man's severed head was in a plastic bag left atop the hood of a red Jeep Patriot found about 5:40 a.m. near Avenida Tecnologico and Avenida Vicente Guerrero. The men had not been identified and appeared to have been beaten.

There had been three additional homicides by Wednesday afternoon, adding to the nearly 1,200 people killed in Juárez this year due in part by a war among drug traffickers.

Here's the rub. El Paso is ranked the third safest in the country and Men's Health magazine ranked El Paso the second "happiest city" in the country. Weird shit. I haven't studied the statistics, and, in fact, they bore me. I leave that sort of stuff to my daughter Susie Byrd who sits on the El Paso Council. She loves the nuts and bolts of running a city. I'm a poet. I like thinking and writing about El Paso and Juárez, cities that I've come to love, two cities divided by a river and an international border but which made out of the same cloth, the same place, the same roots. All sorts of paradoxes and contradictions and, as Blake called them, contraries.

So I was delighted and curious when the editor at Playboy Magazine (yeah, yeah, that Playboy Magazine) hired Luis Alberto Urrea to come down here to write an article about El Paso. Writers usually parachute into El Paso, they talk to the usual suspects of reporters and so-called experts of various persuasions (politics, academia, etcetera) from both sides of the river and then they send back blood and guts dispatches. But the Playboy editor wanted a different look at a city that occupies such a contradictory and peculiarly romantic place in the American psyche. He chose Luis for obvious reasons. Luis is un fronterizo puro carrying all the appropriate baggage. He grew up in Tijuana and San Diego, his father is Mexican, his mother is from Boston, for God's sake, and he's recognized for his non-fiction about the border, more recently The Devil's Highway. Besides, he writes like a novelist because he is a novelist, eg the epic Hummingbird's Daughter about Teresa Urrea (yeah, a distant cousin whom all the Urreas call tia), aka Teresita, la Santa de Cabora. It's a long story. Read his books.

Luis was in town for a week talking with people and driving around and taking notes. He's been here a bunch of times before--to visit, to speak at the Border Book Festival or UTEP or NMSU, to do research in the archives at the downtown library and at UTEP re: his tia Teresita. This time he stayed at our house on Louisville in the Five Points neighborhood of El Paso. It was fun for Lee and me to have him around. We talked about our common obsessions--El Paso and writing and books and writer gossip and poetry. Benjamin Alire Saenz had us over to dinner one night, I drove him around, historian David Romo (Ringside Seat to a Revolution) drove him around, Susie drove him around and introduced him to all sorts of folks, he met with Border Patrol section chief Paul Wells, he ate at Papa Burgers and Chico's Tacos and Ardovino's Desert Crossing, he listened to and hung out with Ernie Tinajero and the band Radio la Chusma, etcetera. He certainly didn't get the Cook's Tour. He got the down-home tour. Which, as you'll see, included the Concordia and Smelter Town cemeteries. We got interesting ghosts wandering around.


"The Good & the Bad" A Found Poem in Concordia Cemetery.
Who knows if the rocks are the same rocks.
Concordia Cemetery is across the street from the L&J Restaurant, one of the great Mexican restaurants and watering holes in El Paso. I had taken Luis here years before and he wanted to go back to visit John Wesley Hardin's grave. Concordia is an old west graveyard--nameless and forgotten graves for the poor and not so poor; a barren Chinese graveyard enclosed by a stone fence with rectangular blocks of concrete sitting atop the bones; lots of tombs for the richer Catholic dead; a well manicured grassy section for the Jewish dead; a similar section for the Methodist. The dead are always dead no matter who they are. The dust and rocks and burrowing owls tell us this truth. Likewise the volunteer cactus and desert trees and weeds. We are all spectators of the dead. A very strange place on a hot day. Very strange thoughts.

The Concordia's main claim to fame is that John Wesley Hardin is buried there. A jail surrounds his grave--not for any symbolic reason, but because several years ago citizens of his birthplace tried to steal his bones. They wanted to transport the murderer back to East Texas for purely monetary reasons. JWH is a tourist draw. Such is the weird El Paso news.


John Wesley Hardin's Gravesite

Chinese Grave, Concordia Cemetery

Child's Grave, Concordia Cemetery>


Luis and Johnny Byrd in the shade of a big mesquite.
It was at least 104 that day.

Before you check out, make sure you watch Radio la Chusma playing "Cruising"--it's pure El Paso sound, all those Mexican vibes mixed in oldie radio and very hip chicanismo. You get to ride around in a two-tone Chevy through El Chuco. Watchalo!

Round 2 will be Monument Marker 1 and the Smelter Town Cemetery. It'll be up in a few days.

Death Rider on Texas Avenue

Death Rider on Texas Avenue.
He needed 70-cents to catch a bus.
He told me I wouldn’t believe him why.
I didn’t. It’s the luck of the draw.
I wish it made sense but it doesn’t make sense.
August and we can almost taste the cooler weather.
Bright tomatoes. A cantaloupe.
I gave him $5.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man El Paso Blues

I love this photograph and have wanted an excuse to put it on this blog. My excuse is I re-discovered this piece of mine that I am pasting below--“Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues” that originally appeared five years ago at newspapertree.com. The photograph and the cutouts in the window are by my friend Cesar Ivan. The display window decorated the now-dead Bridge Center of Contemporary Arts on San Antonio Avenue in downtown El Paso. My essay, with all its dreamy imaginary wanderings, is a eulogy for the Bridge. May it rest in Peace. It was a vibrant although very fragile organization, like so many non-profit arts organizations, and it died a slow and tortured death. Cesar Ivan must have taken the photograph in 2001, perhaps just before 9/11/01. His cutouts are meant to give form to the El Paso arts scene back then. David Romo, who was at that time the director of the Bridge, hired Cesar to do the work and probably collaborated with him in the design. For me, because I was involved with the Bridge Center for much of its history (and honored to be included in the window), it’s an eerie and sad photograph, creating a surreal kind of sadness that you get when you look at an Edward Hopper painting for too long. Things are lost in the constant flux—institutions, people, ideas—but the ghosts hang around and make you remember.

Gloria Osuna Perez is the beautiful woman in the window on the right, her hair gone from radiation treatments in her battle against ovarian cancer. Long an important artist in El Paso and the Southwest, she died in 1999. Gloria was known especially for her soulful portraits of Chicanas and Mexicanas who were important to her personal history. She concocted a special palate of colors to create the signature cinnamon skin tones that radiate warmth and sensuality and beauty. Cinco Puntos had contracted with her to illustrate Joe Hayes’s book Little Gold Star / Estrellita de Oro, and she had completed five of the paintings when her cancer recurred. As she lay dying, she collaborated with her daughter Lucia Angela Perez to complete the work. Because she died in 1999, a few years before the internet became omnipresent in our consciousness, very little of her work is available on the internet. Hopefully, in the next few months we can collect some images and post them on our Cinco Puntos blogspot. In the meantime, I’m posting this lovely photograph of Gloria and Lucia.

The two chess players are, of course, Teresa Urrea, aka la Santa de Caborca, squared off against Pancho Villa. Both wandered the streets of downtown El Paso in the very early 1900s when El Paso was the political and intellectual center of the Mexican Revolution. If you want to know more about Teresita and Pancho Villa in El Paso, read David Romo’s The Ringside Seat to the Revolution. For a great biographical novel about la Teresita read Hummingbird’s Daughter by our good friend Luis Urrea (a blood descendent of the Caborca Urreas). The novel follows her magical life from her birth until her entry into El Paso. Luis is working on the sequel that will complete her life story. I guess Pancho Villa is still playing la Teresita chess somewhere in our communal psyche. I’m hoping she wins.

The sax player is the legendary Art Lewis, long a fixture in the El Paso culture scene. A truly wonderful musician and a very wise man. My notebooks are filled with things he’s said to me or friends. He stars in the piece below. And of course the dude reading book of poems is me. My friend Steve Yellen bought the cutout in an fund-raising auction a few years back and it now haunts the Yellen home where the food and wine are very good.

By the way, I wrote this essay while I was working on my book of poems White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love, so many of the ideas and themes here you will find in the poems and vice versa. I’ve edited it just a little bit. Re-reading the piece after these five years, I'm so glad George Bush is no longer president. His was a most dangerous presidency. Maggie Herrera, by the way, has disappeared into the dream which is Los Angeles. She's fine, I hear. So is Art Lewis. He comes back to El Paso for his famous birthday parties where the musicians all line up to jam with him. He blows his heart out and leaves us in peace.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues
April 2003

It’s been a very sad and sorrowful year, and I got the blues bad. Very bad. Sort of lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues. A friend, the godfather of my children, is up in Albuquerque dying a slow death inside a coma. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the ship has sunk, Ahab that bastard is dead and Ishmael is riding his handmade coffin on the wide green sea. But, unlike Ishmael, my friend cannot tell his story; nor can he let go and simply sink deep into the ocean. He lies in the hospital bed, breathing and sweating and gasping for breath, and his wife and the rest of us rub his body and wonder if he’s inside.

Then George Bush’s war came along and sucked buckets of hope out of my heart. Like a martinet with a tin badge, George strutted out naked onto the stage everyday thinking he was wearing a brand new wardrobe. He had to do his strutting. So every evening I get down on my knees like Marlon Brando in the Godfather and I whisper into my grandchildren’s ears that the President is really wearing nothing. He is wearing no clothes at all. I tell them to ignore the flag he has draped around his nakedness, I tell them to be careful of the heavy Bible that the President carries like a loaded gun, and I tell them that one day they will come to understand that he is not wearing any clothes. He is naked. He is a fool. But he is extremely well-armed and should be considered very dangerous.

This is the stuff that lies at the heart of my lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues.

Used to be when I got to feeling depressed like this I could go hang out at the Café at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Arts and watch the people walking back and forth outside the door. The Mexicans and the abuelitos and the penguins and the high-heeled ladies and the Mennonites and the niños. Inside I’d always find weird and interesting people from all over the world. I could read books and look at the art on the walls.

And the best part was that red-headed Maggie Herrera would console me. She’d smile her wonderful freckle-face smile and say, Hi, Mr. Byrd, the silver post punched into her lower lip bobbing up and down like a cork. She never called me Bobby. She’d fix me a double café breve. She’d give me a big glass of water with ice.

Maggie always wore her jeans so lowdown that I could watch her bellybutton riding the magic of her thin and beautiful body. Her bellybutton was a cave that opened up into the beginning and into the end. When I was in college, the allegory of Plato’s cave bored and confused me with its shadows and darkness and absence of meaning, but the cave of Maggie’s belly button has real meaning about the sacred world in which we live. A few minutes of drinking my coffee and contemplating the metaphysical implications of Maggie’s bellybutton always refreshed me. I would be ready to return to the world. But the Bridge Café is closed. So I got no place to drain myself of these old man El Paso blues.

Art Lewis said a white man can’t know the blues like a black man knows the blues. I don’t know if Art is right or wrong, but I wish I could talk to Art and tell him about these goddamn blues I got right now. Art is a wise man and he would know how to give me some relief. But Art took his sax and went back to Houston. He’s sick. He got diabetes and a double-hernia, the hernia from blowing on that horn without a mike all these years. Besides, Art’s momma is fragile and old. Rumor says she has Alzheimer’s. So Art needs to be taking care of his mother, but I bet he wishes he could blow his horn because he’s got some real bad troubling blues.

Once over a year ago, a few months after 9/11 and I was feeling just like I am right now, I walked over to the Bridge Café to drink coffee and to talk to Maggie. But Maggie was busy with paperwork and she was sad because her boyfriend had left her. Every one of us had some kind of lousy blues back then after 9/11. Remember? Maggie quickly concocted me my double-shot café breve, gave me a glass of water with no ice and told me straight out that she didn’t have time to talk. She told me to go downstairs in the basement. Art Lewis was preaching to an assembly about the gospel of music. I went downstairs. Art was sermonizing and playing at the same time. He tooted his horn and said, “Bobby, sit down. Take a load off.” He had poured his lanky black body into a black suit and a black shirt and shiny black shoes and a very nice black porkpie hat. The man was black. Always black. Maybe he was 60, maybe 70. I didn’t care.

Every day Art Lewis stepped into the river of his life and prayed into his saxophone. He prayed jazz. Improvisation was his devout way of life. His sacred horn was always blowing away the stifling air of fundamentalism. As far as Art was concerned, right and wrong, innocence and guilt--they were all notes in the same piece of music. Playing the sax was Art Lewis’ religious practice, and he had become a wise teacherman by following the path the saxophone had shown him.

“Music,” he announced, “holds many of the answers to the riddles about life and death.”

“Why doesn’t it hold all the answers?” I asked.

Art got that big wide smile on his face and said, “Because we don’t know all the questions.” He played a riff and added. “Besides, there aint no answers in the boogie-woogie. No answers anywhere in the be-bop. The jingle-jangle is so empty of answers you’d go hungry if you got lost inside. The only answer we got is just us doing what we are doing. Like the dogs and the fishes. Like the homeless blowing down San Antonio Street like afternoon trash. That’s why I play my horn. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Art was wearing a long necklace of wide golden links. A cheap necklace really, not real gold, but it was handsome hanging around Art’s black neck.

“Art,” I asked, “where did you get that handsome necklace?”

“Oh,” he said, “a wino in the alley outside the Cincinnati Street Bar gave it to me. He wanted me to play him some blues. So I played him some wino alley blues. He liked those wino alley blues. Said those blue made him feel sad and happy at the same time. Said he didn’t have any money, so he gave me this golden necklace. It’s fake gold, you understand. But it sure makes me feel good.”

Art smiled again. He didn’t have many teeth.

That night I had this strange dream.

National Public Radio announced that Osama Bin Laden’s soul, tainted and crippled by fundamentalism, had escaped her master’s body. The soul of Osama Bin Laden had witnessed airplanes disappearing into glass buildings. And dead souls floating off toward the moon. In despair she had fled the body of Osama Bin Laden. Art Lewis was in the alley next to the Cincinnati Club playing saxophone to the wino, and the soul of Osama Bin Laden appeared like a moth attracted to a candle’s flame. She hid behind garbage cans and listened to Art play his horn. She realized that she had never known such generosity and compassion. She began to weep while Art played the many riffs from his golden horn.

And she fell asleep.

In her sleep, the soul of Osama Bin Laden dreamed. Like I was dreaming the soul of Bin Laden. A dream within a dream. And in her dream the soul of Bin Laden was giving birth to a child. When she opened her legs, she found a dead baby boy. Art Lewis sighed and with his horn he collected up the grief and blood and afterbirth like a priest who is preparing to give the holy sacrament. While Art Lewis blew this sorrow into his horn, the soul of Osama Bin Laden and the wino buried the dead baby in a dumpster behind Geo Geske’s. The lid clanged shut. The alleyway smelled like urine.

Art Lewis was weeping, the big tears dripping down his black face. He continued to blow on his horn about the sorrows in his heart. He said his piece was called “The Soul of Osama Bin Laden and her Dead Baby’s Blues,” a song so sad it made the wino weep too. The wino’s name was John, and John wandered away looking for some sort of God. He left behind the golden necklace as a gift for Art.

The necklace was stolen merchandise. Art didn’t care. He put it around his neck and played to the dark alleyway.

And the soul of Osama Bin Laden disappeared forever.

That was the end of my dream, and for what it’s worth, the Bridge Center and Art Lewis made that dream possible. Now the Bridge has locked up its doors, I haven’t seen Maggie Herrera in a couple of months, and I feel this deep emptiness in my imagination. George Bush, meanwhile, continues to strut around on the stage in his imaginary suit of clothes--the American flag draped around his nakedness, the Bible dangling from his manly hand like a smoking AK-47. My lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues just won’t go away.

But this I have learned--Art Lewis has put his saxophone next to his bed in Houston where it generates a warm glow inside his room. His mother is with him. She is ancient. She has found memory to be of no further use. A hopeless tool. She does not know Art’s name but she knows that he resided in her belly. And that was a long time ago. Now she is waiting to unlock the door that opens into the void. She wants to step outside. Art watches her from his bed, learning some more about the questions that have no answers, and he meditates upon the meaning of music without any sound. “It’s a perfect music, exquisitely improvised,” he mumbles to anyone who will listen. “It’s a high pitched sound that resides inside the holiness of our brains. We all first heard that music inside our mother’s belly. Down in that magnificent slime where I first saw my father’s face. This is a strange secret.”

Airports & Horses: Jimenez & Hauser

Every time I drive to the El Paso airport I am startled by John Hauser's don Juan Oñate rearing up on an oversized Spanish mustang—“the world’s largest equestrian statue.” Hauser was into exact realism, so driving almost under the hooves of the thing, it’s impossible to ignore the mustang’s gargantuan package hanging like a wet dream gone terribly bad. What is that thing doing there? That’s a good question too. Public art, especially a piece of this enormity and expense, speaks about a city’s cultural vibes. El Paso has endured a 10-year-plus name-calling debate about this bronzed humongous conqueror. For a number of years the thing couldn’t find a home--nobody wanted it downtown, nobody wanted it on the river, nobody wanted it at City Hall--so the airport became the home of last resort. The debate teams had the usual suspects. On one side have been the conservatives (a buttoned-down assortment of Republicans, traditional Catholics, old-school and well-heeled Mexican-Americans, etcetera) and the other side is populated by the progressive community (a more vociferous hodgepodge that includes artists and intellectuals, the left side of Democratic Party, political activists, old-school Chicano activists, etcetera). This political and divisive history of Hauser’s statue has been documented in a number of places, including a long piece in the New York Times that as usual denigrates El Paso and a POV PBS documentary, The Last Conquistador. More important to the history of arts funding in El Paso and a critique of Hauser as an artist are Richard Baron’s articles, one of which is archived here at newspapertree.com (others are buried in archived pre-online fishwraps like The Bridge Review and Stanton Street).

And of course by now you can guess which side I’m on.

Sometimes when I see the Hauser I get angry. But when I’m lucky I laugh. El Paso got suckered again. Tom Diamond wiggled his finger and wagged his tongue and John Hauser patted the ricos on the back and smoothed their tail feathers and sweet green money slimed into their coffers by the millions. Why not? Oñate was a good Catholic boy, even if in 1599 he earned the nickname of “the Butcher at Acoma” for ordering the masacre at the pueblo, killing 800, enslaving 500 women and children, and cutting off the right foot of every remaining able-bodied man in the pueblo. Not to worry. He boasted pure Spanish blood.

Not like that Benito Juárez indio guy.

Not like that meztizo vato Pancho Villa.

I grew up in Memphis where huge statues of Confederate generals on horseback (Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest and others) dominated a number of public parks. Those pieces of public art left a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn’t have to be told what the underlying message of those statues of men on horseback meant—those guys were heroes because they fought to preserve slavery. So from the beginning I didn’t like the politics of the Oñate thing and I didn’t like how its funding was rammed through city council back in the 90s. Now that it’s done I don’t like it as a piece of art and I certainly don’t like the symbolism of having this huge statue of the Butcher at Acoma becoming part of our cultural landscape. I have a friend, poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo, who talks about how the dark shadow of Oñate and his butchery still reverberates through the oral history of his people’s language and stories.

In Denver a few weeks ago with Lee on business, I made sure I saw that city’s public art at their airport: the Blue Mustang by paseño Luis Jimenez (1940-2006) that has finally been installed. It had consumed much of the last years of Luis’ life and, with a final bit of irony, as he was working to finish the project the almost-finished head toppled over and killed him. As I approached the airport, I saw it from a half a mile away. Before the airport itself comes into view, the mustang rears up grandly on its hind legs out in the prairie, its mysterious red-orange eyes glowing in the cloudy dusk.

Luis grew up in El Paso in the 1940s and 50s. As a young man he left El Paso burdened with that rage that so many young Chicanos of his generation—especially the artists, the writers, the intellectuals—grew up with in their hearts and minds. El Paso is a Mexican city, a Mexican-American city, but the übercultur of his growing up was Anglo-American topped with a boring salsa of conservative Mexicano. The political structure, the banks, the big businesses—all were in the hands of the Anglo-Americans and a handful of rico Mexican-Americans. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the public school systems in the 40s and 50s. Spanish was not allowed. And kids in high school didn’t hear the Mexican history of El Paso, especially the stories of El Paso as the political and intellectual center for the early stages of the Mexican Revolution, they didn’t take field trips down to Monument Marker #1 to see where Francisco Madero crossed over the river to launch the historic revolution, and they didn’t learn about Pancho Villa living over in Sunset Heights, waiting for his return to Mexico. Instead, they learned about the Anglo-American history of the city and the state of Texas (the gun fighters, the Texas Rangers, the Alamo, etcetera). Artists and writers like Luis, Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez and others realized early on that they had been deprived of their heritage and they learned to express their anger and resentment through their work.

Sometime in the early 80s I heard Luis speak at UTEP as a guest of the art department. Lee and I had moved to El Paso in 1978, but I knew Luis’ work from traveling from our home in Albuquerque to Santa Fe to see his cutouts, drawings and prints at the now defunct Hills Gallery. It was the first time since leaving El Paso (he was then over 40 and had received national acclaim) that he had been asked to speak in El Paso. His speech was hesitant at first, uncomfortable to be in El Paso, but, feeling the good reception of the standing-room only crowd, he warmed to the task as he showed slides of his work. Somewhere in the middle of the speech he started talking about his anger, and he spoke about how in the first part of the century the city government had outlawed the use of adobe as a building materials for homes. Adobe, of course, is the indigenous building material of the American Southwest. It’s a cheap material (you can make it yourself with the dirt in your backyard if you have the right dirt), and the result is buildings that, if properly maintained, can last forever. Indeed, the ambience of cultural boomtowns Taos and Santa Fe is rooted in adobe buildings. But the local power-brokers here made their anti-adobe law, and of course one of those helping to make the law was the local brick-maker. The story of bricks and adobe in El Paso was symbolic to Luis of his hometown, much like the stories of his and Hauser’s sculptures have become to me.

To take a picture of the Blue Mustang, I had to park the car illegally on the muddy shoulder of the road and run across the half-frozen ground to get close enough for a decent photo. I was happy to do it. Luis’ Blue Mustang is an incredibly potent piece of work, married perfectly into the landscape of the prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. It represents the power of the Western mythos in our national psyche. Horses, of course, were introduced on this continent by the Spanish, but it wasn’t long before they became the symbol of the indigenous horse cultures of the prairie Indians. By staying away from historical particulars, the Blue Mustang synthesizes many disparate parts of our history to give us a symbol of the American West.

So I get back home and go to the El Paso airport. There is don Juan Oñate riding through the parking lot on his over-sized Spanish mustang. Even in its enormous presence it seems inconsequential. I can’t help it—I remember myself five-years-old playing with toys and realize this thing is like a blow-up of those little pot metal Indians and cowboys I used to play with. The Indians were on one side, the cowboys on the other. The cowboys were always rearing up and shooting their guns, the Indians were slinking down behind their little horses, they were running away. That hokey scene. Except that hokey scene speaks about one people’s conquering and domination of another people. It’s a complicated history that should contemplated and discussed, especially in classrooms, but it’s certainly not a history that should be romanticized with a monstrous and well-hung macho statue.

Oh well. Hauser’s Oñate has become a fact of life for us here in El Paso. It’s not going to come down. Still, I have a secret wish.

I wish we could cut off Oñate’s right foot. Not in the dead of night. No, I want to have a huge ceremony and invite the Governor of Acoma to El Paso. I want to invite Simon Ortiz to write and read a poem for the occasion. A poem that will honor the dead of Acoma, a poem that will honor the history of the pueblo peoples, a poem that will honor the land we live on, a poem that will honor our common future. After Simon has read his poem and we all have tears in our eyes, I want the mayor of El Paso to give the Governor of Acoma a large blowtorch and I want him to cut off the statue’s right foot. I want it to fall thud to the ground amid cheers and sadness and prayers. Then I want a powwow to begin. Maybe we can call it “Cutting Off the Butcher’s Foot Powwow.” Or maybe we can call it the “Asking for Forgiveness Powwow.” We’ll figure out something. The important thing is that we invite all the Fancy Dancers, the Traditional Dancers, the Grass Dancers, the drummers and the singers—the drums will pound and the songs will wail at the moon and the beating of feet will pound into the desert night. Vendors will be selling snow cones and churros and elotes, tacos and hamburgers and sodas and Oñate piñatas. No booze, no dope. Those are the rules. That’s because all of the Kachinas and the holy clowns will be there, watching us. Our Lady of Guadalupe too. She’ll be wearing cowboy boots and a big smile. We’ll invite Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed. They'll be hanging out in the shadows, mumbling about the uselessness of words. At midnight, holding hands and dancing around the circle, the big drums still pounding, we will melt the Spaniard’s foot. The molten bronze will seep steaming into a cauldron.

Hauser, like Sisyphus doing his existential but very sacred chore of pushing the rock up the hill, will recast and re-attach the foot so that the next year we can re-enact the ceremony. He will be well-paid and he will have a studio to work on other projects. The festival will become a huge annual fair. El Paso will become known as the City of Forgiveness. The federal government will tear down its ugly fence, the drug war will become history and peace will be declared in Juárez.

I wish.

JUDY ACKERMAN & THE STANDOFF AL RIO BOSQUE

"The river is life, the wall is death."

“I am going to stay here until they leave me alone or they arrest me because I believe that the consgtruction of this wall should stop completely." --Judy Ackerman as she is arrested by the Texas Rangers. This quote and the photograph is from an article from El Diario El Paso which ran a front page feature on the protest. (El Diario's website has more photographs and commentary in Spanish here). The El Paso Times stuck a small article on page six of the morning edition.

Yesterday (12/17/08) I got a call from my daughter Susie Byrd. The construction of the infamous border fence was approaching El Paso's Rio Bosque Wetlands Park, 372 acres of reclaimed natural habitat that sits downriver from El Paso in Soccorro. Judy Ackerman, a member of Friends of Rio Bosque and the Sierra Club, decided to put a stop to the construction. A 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army, Judy knew how to prepare for the occasion. She wore a hard hat and a reflecting jacket, she packed in food and water, she parked at the park's visitor center and walked through the bosque and crossed the irrigation ditch to find the construction site. She arrived at the site in the early morning darkness before the workers and she sat down in the path of the day's construction. She wasn't going to move. The workers scratched their heads and called the authorities. But who were the appropriate authorities? It didn't seem anybody knew for sure. The construction is following the Rio Grande along the levee, and that land belongs to the Water Commission. So the Texas Rangers came, the Border Patrol came, the Sheriff's Department came, the El Paso police came, the El Paso Fire Department came. But what were they going to do? Who was going to arrest her? Surely they called the mayor, surely they called the governor's office, surely they called somebody in DC.



My friend Ben Saenz and I arrived about noon. Judy had been in front of the equipment for five hours. She seemed to be enjoying herself, chatting with the suits and uniforms, sometimes laughing. But she was not budging. She was on the levee that runs between the Rio Grande and the irrigation ditch that borders the Rio Bosque Park. About 15 people were gathered there in on the park side of the ditch in support of Judy and her action. More were to come later, including City Council representative Eddie Holguin. El Diario El Paso had a photographer stationed there for the event, and the Associated Press had a writer. No other media. About an equal number of federal, state and city police officials were there. Likewise a group of hardhatted workers (KIWI Construction out of red-state Nebraska of all places) twiddling their thumbs and making jokes among themselves.

Among the people you'll see on the video are Maria Saldana, the woman in white and a good friend of Judy, who happily busied herself heckling the gaggle of uniforms. The first person interviewed in my video is Billy Addington of the Sierra Club. Billy is a veteran of local and regional environmental activism. He was one of the leaders of the successful effort to stop the creation of a nuclear waste dump in his hometown of Sierra Blanca, Texas. The second interviewee is John Sproul, the director of the Rio Bosque Park. John is an acclaimed environmentalist and naturalist for our region. Years ago I went to the bosque with the Audubon Association and John had us crawling on hands and knees in search of the yellow-breasted chat. Sure enough we found the chat! A great occasion.

Ben and I both had appointments to make. We waited as long as we could to see what would happen, but we left about 130. On our way out the gate into the park had been locked. Luckily Miguel, a young man who works with John Sproul, was right behind us with a key. It had to be KIWI Construction who had locked the gates (only them and park personnel have keys), denying entry or exit to a public park. Surely an arrogant, in not illegal, act. But our little bit of inconvenience was minor to what happened to others.

At 2pm the Texas Rangers handcuffed and arrested Judy Ackerman. She sat handcuffed in the back of a car for an hour while the uniforms tried to figure out what to do. Eventually they took her downtown where she was released at about 5pm. Her supporters were leaving in John Sproul's truck after her arrest. On the way back to the Visitor's Center they met the Texas Ranger (the man in the suit and cowboy hat in the photograph) in charge. They stopped to talk, but in the discussion he recognized Maria Saldana, the woman who had been heckling him. He handcuffed her for questioning, but she refused to be moved. Billy Addington has a cell phone video of this scene which I hope makes it to youtube soon.

Other places to refer to this ongoing saga is newspapertree.com and Jim Tolbert's blog. Jim, an El Paso environmental activist, is starting a new blog entitled "El Paso Naturally" which he describes as "Ecological, environmental, food, farm and community-building for a sustainable El Paso Southwest." In his first entry Jim talks about the ecological damage that the fence is doing to our way of life here, and he was wise enough to link to a flickr site which gives some wonderful archival photographs of the fauna and flora of the Rio Bosque Park.



Please note: I am not a journalist. If I've made mistakes in my narrative, please contact me.

Cesar Ivan: Dreaming Downtown El Paso, #2

My big brother told me once to live in the city or to live in the country. "Bobby," he said, "don’t go living in the in-between."

For several years Cesar Ivan’s series of three paintings--“El Carnaval Social,” “El Hombre Fuerte” and “Mujer de Dos Cebezas,” what he calls “sideshow banners”--hung on the walls of the Lumenbrite (now the Percolator) Café on Stanton Street in downtown El Paso. I loved those paintings from the first time I saw them. They were haunting in their wrinkled medieval ambiance with an odd sense of prophesy and cultural comment. Like allegory even. So un-20th Century. But still so peculiarly contemporary and hip. When art and poet friends from out of town came to visit us, I’d send them first to see Cesar’s paintings, then I’d tell them to walk by to see Luis Jimenez’ “Los Lagartos” in the Plazita and then go to the museum. They would always come back talking about Cesar’s work, especially El Carnaval Social. But for those of us who were involved in the downtown cultural life of the 90s and the first few years of this century, the paintings had an added dimension--the people in the paintings were people we know! I for one wanted to have the names of everybody in those paintings. So I started talking to Cesar.

I’ve known Cesar Ivan since the 1990s. He was a regular at the Bridge Center Café for Contemporary Arts on San Antonio Avenue. That was the heyday of that particular incarnation of the Bridge Center. Architect Fred Dalbin was President of the Board and he kept the thing afloat by practicing magic tricks; a romantic and even idealistic David Romo (before the shit hit his fan) was its improvisational and rarely-paid director; and sweetness herself, the red-headed and freckled Maggie Herrera was La Barrista of the espresso machine. Characters came in and out of the Bridge. Every one connected to the Bridge Center had visions of what Downtown El Paso could become and the Bridge Center was to be at least one of the seeds from which those visions sprouted. I happily watched and participated. It was a dreamy passionate time.

Cesar Ivan, never an artist who hung out with the university crowd, was at home downtown. He enjoyed mixing with the menagerie of artists, musicians, street performers, grassroots capitalists, everyday street people and the regular folk that make up the downtown scene. He had grown up in the Lower Valley of El Paso (he graduated from Ysleta High School) dreaming about the circus and about traveling carnivals. Like so many kids, especially kids who become artists, the different and the weird attracted him--the freaks and the clowns and the barkers and the high wire trapeze artists. Blinking pink neon lights. Tinny make-believe organ music. The merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel. In junior high school he and a friend decided school was not for them. They decided to run away to join the circus. They were going to catch the freight train going east or west, they didn’t care which way. Surely they’d be able to find a circus or a carnival. All their lives they had watched the hobos jumping the freight train as it slowed down lumbering through Ysleta. So Cesar and his buddy sat there in a park waiting for a train. They waited and waited until they fell asleep waiting, and the next morning the sun woke them up. They went back home. They were hungry. Cesar Ivan never joined the circus. He became an artist instead and moved into downtown El Paso.

Downtown he began cobbling together a living from his art, his music (he plays electric base—back then with Fronteras No Más and now with Sangre Gitana), making funky calaca puppets and cutouts of Frida, welding steel furniture and hiring out his multiple talents for a number of projects. Then the Bridge Center went belly-up when Dalbin got tired and packed up his magic show, leaving behind him a wired-together contraption with a board that soon became dysfunctional trying to reshape it into something it would never be. Downtown was not happening like we had all hoped. 9/11 had slapped the country up aside the head, the federal government began its ponderous Kafkian business of nailing the border shut forever and the great Art Lewis packed up his saxophone and went home to Houston to be close to his dying mother.

Shit, I said.

Ni modo, that’s life, Cesar Ivan mumbled. He always mumbles. You need to listen close.

He was now settled into the seventh floor of the Abdou Building on Mesa and Texas (a Trost Building, no parallel sides, almost a hundred years old), a perfect fit for Sr. Ivan, his studio and his home. He was wandering the streets with his camera and meeting the street people. He became their friend. He remembered the circus and the sideshow banners. He he started painting his Sideshow Banners. His style was puro Cesar Ivan. Old-fashioned painterly darkness. And he would make of the people wandering through downtown an allegory.

The sideshow banner was his model, his archetype. And he made three paintings. In the forefront of each are characters become allegory. In first two the primary characters are men off the streets, and in the third is a two-headed lady. But unlike sideshow banners the primary figures are surrounded by an audience of recognizable downtowners.

"We are all performers on the stage," Cesar Ivan says. That is his dictum.

The paintings are very reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s "Sueno de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central" (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park). In the center are the artist Posada arm and arm with La Calavera Catrina, the Great Mother of Death, Frida is there and likewise Diego himself as a little boy. And they are surrounded by with prominent figures from Mexican history.

The series of three paintings hung in the Lumenbrite for years. Nobody was buying them, and Cesar needed to make a living. He went on to other things. I’ll say it again: the El Paso Museum of Art should find an angel to buy these important paintings for their collection. Cesar needs the support, we need the paintings.

EL CARNAVAL SOCIAL



This, the first painting in the series, appears to be the core of Cesar’s dream. It documents and celebrates one of the unending drumming sessions that sprang up around downtown in those days, many times incited at the Bridge and then spilling out into the streets. At the center of the action, is “Ron the Dreamer” (sometimes called “Ron the Dancer”) and Natalie “the French Gypsy”—the Yang and the Yin of the street life in downtown El Paso.

“Quit your jobs and go live in the woods.” This was Ron the Dreamer's dictum.

Ron was a homeless citizen but in Cesar’s painting he is a prophet holding a flare to light the drummers and the dance. Around them all Cesar paints night thickly into the canvas. Cesar had met Ron on the streets and in his quiet way he would nod at him and say hello. After a while Ron would return the greeting and the two became friends even though Ron worried that Cesar was a communist spy. Ron was always worried about the communists infiltrating into his downtown space. And he was a street artist, a minimalist who would leave little paper constructions dangling from trees for people to find. Like messages to the hungry ghosts. Cesar, of course, went looking for the little pieces of sculpture. Rumor had it that Ron had once been a teacher but that he had lost a son in a fire and so he disappeared into the street life. Last time Cesar saw him he was in the Opportunity Center on Myrtle Street. He had gained weight and he looked well.

The yin to Ron’s yang was Natalie, aka “the French Gypsy” She was a French citizen who wandered into the Bridge somehow and somewhere in the 90s. She loved to dance and she would dance at the drop of a hat—dancing with men, with women or most often just alone, feeling the music. She had an aura about her, a charisma that inspired the young people around her. Cesar says you could always find Natalie dancing somewhere downtown, if not at the Bridge, then in the dives. Some people thought she was just crazy. She told Cesar that she was the daughter of Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadaism. That made sense to him. Then one day she went over to Juárez and on the way home she was stopped by Customs. Her visa had expired and she was soon afterwards deported. Cesar said he heard that she was now in India.

Now I’m going to the list the others in the painting, and I will do the same for the other two. Forgive the scant information. Cesar told me bits and pieces about them, but he didn’t know last names and he’d forgotten relevant information. If you want to add anything, please send along comments for this blog. Importantly for Cesar Ivan they were all regulars at the drumming sessions. They are, from left to right:

(My thanks to Cesar for labeling all of the 20 characters. It was a mess trying to get them all straight.)

Most easily visible on the left (and in real life) is red-headed Maggie Herrera, already mentioned above. She was one of the cornerstones of the Bridge back in the day, popular not only for her upbeat presence but because she became the organizer of an open mike series and hip-hop shows. The rule was not to miss one of Maggie’s birthdays. They were wild with a bizarre assortment of people. Maggie now lives in LA. On either side of Maggie are los hermanos Saldivar. To the left is Mando, an aspiring musician and to her right is Juan, a surrealist painter.

Others between Maggie and Ron the Dreamer are Reggie (kneeling, with the knitted cap), another young painter who hung at the Bridge; Sergio in the horn-rimmed glasses, a downtown skater; Daniel in his baseball cap who has since moved to Austin; bearded Rick on the drums, a “Fewel Project” musician and live snake performer; and finally Mundo. Mundo is one of my favorite people downtown. A quiet man, he seems so steady and sure. He worked first at the Bridge, then at the Lumenbrite and now at the Percolator, all the time going to school. Although born in Mexico City, he's lived in Juarez for 20 years now with his mother. He's a musician, un puro fronterizo, one of those folks that make downtown so rich with soulfulness.

Between Ron the Dreamer and Natalie the French Gypsy are: Julio (standing), a young street musician who played on both sides of the border. He told Cesar once that he had better luck in Juaréz. Playing the bongos in the center of the painting is the the crowned drummer, the painter and Cesar’s good friend David Fleet. David is a very quiet and serious man, so quiet he almost cannot be googled. Cesar put the crown on his head because at the time he called him “the King of the Bongo” after a song made famous by Manu Chao. Above David to the right is Astrid who worked at the Bridge. Cesar says she always happily greeted him with cup of hot coffee during those mornings at the café.

Folks to the right of Natalie the French Gypsy are Jericho in the darkness, a musician who played in the Fewel Project; then below is the lady BB with her blue hair and her boyfriend Rafa (aka “Rafa Pistola”) who likewise played in the Fewel Project and is a founding member of Mexicans at Night; kneeling is Mike, aka “Miker,” an aerosol graffiti artist who was always changing the color of his hair; then, in the tradition of El Greco and others, a self-portrait of the artist Cesar Ivan stylized to look like an Egyptian prince and who, like Ron the Dreamer, is holding a light in his hand (an old-fashioned sense of the artist as prophet); next is the painter Tim Razo painter who used to live in the Abdou Building, left town and has returned, his art appearing in 12 different shows in the last two years; and finally Fran Santelli, a painter and a teller of fortune who from the look on her face must be reading the sad fortune of us all.

That’s about it for me right now. I’ll add the other two paintings in the Sideshow Series in the next few days.